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Old 12-21-2017, 02:36 AM
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blackshire blackshire is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by astronwolf
I concede that "far, far away" could be 180 million light years away. I'll just have to be content with speculating that Lucas didn't exhaust just how much he wanted to emphasize just how far away that galaxy was. Lucas could have said, "...in a galaxy really, really, super-far away..." or something like that. No, merely "far, far away," sufficed, but apparently "Far away" wasn't quite far away enough. Note though, that Lucas did not say, "...in a galaxy far, far away that resembles the Milky Way..." There is no reason that the Star Wars galaxy would have to be anything like the Milky Way galaxy in form and size.

Then there is the "long ago" part.
I thank you, but there's nothing to concede here, because how such introductions sound--and the imagery they connote--are more important than hard factual accuracy, because those things make them memorable and heart-stirring, as in poetry. Also:

Robert Heinlein suggested the very thing that George Lucas did regarding the galaxy and the era--"In science fiction stories, don't give too many details." I can see how the practice of doing the opposite (giving too much detail) can--at least partly--"spoil" such stories. In one of the later "Star Wars" movies (Lucas might not have been involved with it, or at least not as closely as with his earliest films in the franchise), the Force was explained in scientific terms, which many film critics and fans weren't pleased with, because it took away some of the mystery, magic, and wonder of the Force. In addition:

You're quite right regarding the recently-discovered "twin" of the Milky Way, as there is no hint in the "Star Wars" films about what type of galaxy the stories occur (occurred, from our temporal vantage point) in. A large spiral galaxy--or a barred spiral galaxy, like ours (I had long wished that we lived in one, after seeing pictures of them; they look majestic to me, and sure enough, a few years ago it was discovered that our galaxy *does* have a central bar [see: http://www.google.com/search?source...1.0.uAlSfowJrkk ])--just "looks and feels right" as an appropriately grand setting for such an epic interstellar saga, and:

A small galaxy, like a dwarf elliptical or an irregular galaxy, just wouldn't do, and while the largest galaxies of all are giant ellipticals, they have little or no structure or internal variations (such as dust lanes), and they are extremely bright, which--aesthetically--doesn't seem quite right for stories that involve both moral darkness and light. Physically as well, the skies in elliptical galaxies (of all sizes) might look quite alien to human eyes, like how they would appear from a planet near the heart of a globular cluster in our own galaxy. With virtually no dust to absorb starlight, one could see clear across an elliptical galaxy, so that the skies of planets inside them would be crammed with stars and would likely be abnormally (to us) bright, perhaps even to the point that "night" would have little meaning.
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