So when R2 launched Luke’s light saber in RotJ, it was just Yoda farting?
Both of them still had organics. As I established, the question remains if it’s naturally alive, or purely artifice. Grievous was mostly a head and some internal organs, right? Vader still had an intact torso, at least. Anyway, even the Iron Knights were naturally alive creatures who became cyborgs. It’s not even limited to carbon based life.
40Lom was a droid, and in the short story (which might not even be cannon anymore, but I’m not sure either way) he thought he might be able to come to know the force, but the author intentionally left it ambiguous whether he was sensing the force, or just developing some aptitude for predicting the future (which could simply be a self-deluding prgnostication program for all we know).
AFAIK there is no cannonical instance of a droid being able to use the force. My bringing up Nichos Marr was to illustrate how a soul of a living being could be bound to an artificial form, and it still wouldn’t be enough to grant force-use.
F***! Missed the edit window.
That first line should read: “Both of them still had organics, and were thus cyborgs.”
Add the following to the end of my first paragraph:
But it has to be a living thing, not something that’s made, in other words, Star Wars is reinforcing the notion of life as something special, something unique. It would be interesting if a Frankenstein monster in the SW universe would qualify or not.
Add this right after my mention of Nichos Marr: “(a soul in a true machine, rather than a cyborg)”
And lastly, I’d like to add this:
R2 didn’t have the Force, and there is no Force Ex Machina. R2 was just preternaturally intelligent and perceptive because he managed to avoid getting memory wipes for who knows how long. Someone else in this thread said they thought droids became fully sentient if they didn’t get their memories wiped after a long enough period; I think I remember that being explicitly stated somewhere (in cannon). If so, then we can say that R2 is no mere droid, but he is still a machine, and thus without the ability to control the Force. Again, Zahn’s trilogy states it explicitly when Joruus C’Baoth forbids Luke to bring R2 with him to their training, because they are blind to the Force. Luke has to leave him behind with the X-Wing*.
*Honestly, this is probably better in the long run; would you leave your only guaranteed way off-planet unwatched? Especially an X-Wing.
That seems rather silly from a storyline point of view unless they did view R2 as a sentient being. Otherwise he is nothing more than a clever toaster on wheels. It’d be like saying leave your wristwatch behind because it is blind to the force.
It’s serving three purposes:
1.) It’s the set-up for Zahn to have Luke think about how he views droids.
2.) Zahn’s playing around with the grey area droids occupy in people’s perspective in Star Wars. As commented elsewhere in the thread, even in the movies it’s apparent that different people view droids differently; like pets, beloved cars, simple objects, or people. Some people treat them differently at different times. It’s one of the more interesting things about the SW universe imho that there isn’t some universally held standard attitude about droids. I think it’s pretty realistic.
3.) It’s story-telling short-hand for C’Baoth being a bad dude. Just like when Luke enters the Cantina and the bartender yells at him that “their kind” aren’t allowed. It let you know the bar was a bad place. An alternative would’ve been to show C’Baoth kicking a puppy, or kicking R2 for that matter.
Hey, didn’t C-3P0 kick R2 at one point?
Come to think of it, C-3P0 was built by Darth Vader, and was (however tangentially) instrumental in his downfall.
Does that mean that C-3P0 is the next Sith Lord?
He’s already been worshipped as a god by the Ewoks, so that’s not too great a leap of the imagination, esp. for Lucas.
::shudder::
“Goodness gracious me! I’m dreadfully sorry, but I’m afraid the deflector shield will be quite operational when your Rebel friends arrive. And-- if I may say so, Master Jedi-- give in to your anger! The odds that you will strike me down with all of your hate are 3,725 to 1!”
Just kidding, of course. I like C-3P0. It wasn’t his fault that Lucas decided to amp up the Komedy Antics.
I think this is the key. R2D2, as a non-living droid, cannot have mitochlorians or generate the Force. But he can be the focus of the Force. He and C3P0 were closely associated with some of the most powerful users of the Force in the galaxy. Guys like Vader and Yoda and Obi-Wan and Luke and Leia were just dripping with the Force - so much so that they were sometimes using it without even being aware. So when they said something simple like “R2D2, go scout that corridor” they also gave a little push with the Force to their command. The droids were on site and they were the minds that saw what the situation was. But it was the Force from other people that was altering reality. Over the decades this connection built up and became more solid and more powerful.
IIRC, that was C’Baoth’s point. Droids can think and reason, but can’t use the force, which makes them an abomination. It doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense, but then, C’Baoth was crazy.
Of course, most of Zahn’s books are no longer canon, thanks to the prequel trilogy.
I found this set of observations via reddit. Relevant commentary:
I’ve seen comments like this made about the EU being discounted by the prequels a few times, but I don’t really recall much that gets changed, so…
How so? I’d like to see it elaborated on.
The biggest thing I’d see is the Jedi being portrayed as not having marriage/families in the prequels, but often having long lines of Jedi in the EU. But there’s a lot of room for fans to weasel around that.
Also, some cannon books tended to portray Imperialists as coming from a well-established culture of pro-imperial sentiment, but I always disregarded that stuff anyway because it clashes with the original trilogy. Right there in the old stuff we knew that the current emperor created the empire, and that Darth Vader, a student of Obi-Wan, personally executed the Jedi thereby bringing an end to the Old Republic. So just based on dialogue from SW/Episode IV/ANH you can infer that at most there’s 40 years history to the Empire?
So what exactly doesn’t work now?
Zahn invented a lot of backstory about the Clone Wars for his trilogy, most of which is flatly incompatible with the prequels. For example, in his books, the Clone Wars were started by someone called the Clone Masters. Or possibly Clone Lords? At any rate, they fought against the Republic and lost. As the prequels show us, it was the Republic itself that employed a clone army, and they used it to successfully prosecute a war against the separtists.
Thrawn discovers an intact cloning facility on the Emperor’s secret treasure planet, which is a shock, as cloning was supposed to have been outlawed in the wake of the Clone War. Which doesn’t make sense anymore, because the clones were the heroic victors of the Clone War, protecting the Republic from the seditious Trade Federation and the treacherous Jedi. Why would the Emperor outlaw his own victorious army like that?
When Luke and the others discover that Thrawn has been cloning Stormtroopers, they’re shocked. But the Imperial army was originally entirely cloned, so this shouldn’t be particularly shocking, even if the service had been opened up to non-clones after the war ended.
Also central to the plot of Zahn’s novel was the concept of clone madness. Cloning a sentient being created a sort of confusion in the Force that would eventually drive the clone mad. Admiral Thrawn was able to circumvent this by growing his clones under the influence of the Force-resistent ysalamiri worms. Again, not something that happens in the prequel trilogy.
Lastly, the Clone War, as described in hints and offhand references by Timothy Zahn, sounded really cool. We know from the prequel trilogy that it was, in fact, stupid and boring. So that’s another major discrepency.
The Emperor outlawed cloning to prevent anyone from possibly raising an army to defeat him. It was probably one of the “benevolent” things he did towards the beginning of his reign to keep people in line.
The standard rate of clone growth was twice normal aging. The Ysalamiri made it much faster than that. 10x or something.
We’re getting off topic.
I remember that now, but wasn’t that tied into the insanity thing? Something like, the faster you grew a clone, the crazier it would be? You could get a perfectly sane clone if you grew it at exactly the same speed as a normal human, but that sort of cancelled out the whole point of making a clone in the first place. The more time you shaved off the growing process, the more unstable the result. With the ysalamiri isolating the growing clones from the Force, they could crank the growth speed all the way up.
Man, I haven’t read those books since high school. I wonder if they hold up?
Nah. R2 just lobbed it out there. Luke pulls it outta the sky with his force powers. Yoda was on Dagoba looking at muppet porn.
“A naughty fraggle, you are! Punished, you must be!”
Heh. We can go on for days, making funny porn comments in Yoda-speak. 
“Mmmm. Difficult to predict, the money-shot is. So full of emotions.”
“Porn leads to excitement. Excitement leads to turgidity. Turgidity leads to… stimulation.”
Or simply quoting out of context.
“Judge me by my size, do you? And well you should not.”