i was thinking that people don’t appreciate how overwhelmingly funny the death star getting blown up is; i mean, you know, on some level, this is just some teenager from space alabama who grew up shooting cans with a shotgun going, “yeah, you want me to attack the biggest military base in space history with absolutely no piloting-in-space experience? i can do that.” like back in space alabama luke flew the equivalent of a crop duster, maybe, but then the rebellion’s like this kid we met two hours ago, we need to put him in a fighter. luke has absolutely no hours piloting a fighter in space before this, and then he succeeds because he’s got magic powers, and the voices told him to. what is probably the most overwhelmingly enormous military base ever built in space with the most extreme firepower ever amassed in space loses in a fight to a guy who had less flight time than a fresh soviet pilot in WWII, this is already the funniest military victory in pop fiction, bar none.
but then you go to how luke wins, aside from the magic powers and the voices in his head; he convinces the local weed guy to get into armed conflict with the military, and the local weed guy shows up in the space equivalent of a VW bus that has a gun duct taped to it, and this is the rig that manages to shoot down darth vader. i should say that by this point in star wars, darth vader has been fighting in war since he was nineteen, and the first time he flew a fighter was when he was nine, he’s widely renowned not only as one of the best pilots in the galaxy, but also as one of the most dangerous people in the galaxy period, like if you let him loose on a battlefield everyone probably just sort of hangs back and lets him massacre everyone. because honestly they’re really just accessories in this. things like “air support” or “artillery” or even “other people with guns” aren’t super necessary because vader’s got the magic powers, the voices in his head, and also a sword that kills people, you know? definitely a couple imperial victories boil down to, “we just told vader to go to work, and then we found a mountain of bodies afterwards.” and this is the guy who gets creamed by a VW bus plus gun. han and chewie fucking scooby and shaggy his ass, and in legends vader ate shit so hard he spiraled out of control, crashed on a planet in the middle of nowhere, and promptly went kind of crazy and decided to slum it with - and i shit you not - a pack of literal space hyenas, who adopted him as their king. he then became the only fucking survivor of the entire ordeal. we really don’t appreciate how fucking funny this is.
