An alternate view upon the Ewoks

[recon20011]

So, where's your proof that any language has these "divine terms"? It appears to me as though you are making an equally bold assertion that the Ewok language does contain such a divine tense.

No you retard, the specific claim of a possible divine tense is actually an explanation of the general conclusion that C3P0 does not understand the language enough to make his requests properly. It is so much simpler of a claim than the claim that the Ewoks are faking the entire fucking thing for no good reason. Again Occam's razor tells us that it is retarded to believe that the ewoks do something complicated like that for no reason when a simpler reason is given and is as obvious as 3P0 telling us it is so.

So let me get this straight... you're making up the claim that there is a "divine tense" to explain a conclusion that, according to you, needs no explanation: That C3PO simply does not fully understand the Ewoks language. Instead of just accepting that at face value like you want everyone else to, you claim the possible existence of a "divine tense" which you have no proof for. You're telling me its a specific claim that "is actually an explanation of the general conclusion", but for which you have no proof. Just sum it up as C3PO doesn't know the entire language instead of making things up.
And why couldn't the Ewoks have been faking the entire cannibalistic feast as a means of simply intimidating their captives?

[Agent Sorchus]

So let me get this straight... you're making up the claim that there is a "divine tense" to explain a conclusion that, according to you, needs no explanation: That C3PO simply does not fully understand the Ewoks language. Instead of just accepting that at face value like you want everyone else to, you claim the possible existence of a "divine tense" which you have no proof for. You're telling me its a specific claim that "is actually an explanation of the general conclusion", but for which you have no proof. Just sum it up as C3PO doesn't know the entire language instead of making things up.

Yes I know that it is a stupid claim to make and one that doesn't move forward the rest of my argument, so consider it basically retracted. The statement that 3P0 didn't understand the language enough to really communicate effectively still stands.

And why couldn't the Ewoks have been faking the entire cannibalistic feast as a means of simply intimidating their captives?

Because there is no out. If the goal was intimidation they would have pulled back when it became obvious that their captives were afraid of them. They don't, until their captives make them afraid of the great magics of 3P0. They are the ones who are cowed, even though at first our heroes really were afraid of them. IF your goal is to make someone afraid of you you do not go straight to a final option of killing them outright. You show pain and suffering on an individual scale and show that there is nothing they can do to stop you if they wish to do it to you. Medieval torture 101.

[Wyrm]

A god can order you any way he wants.

If my War God was telling me not to cook his friends, twice, and the latter one in a quite clear belligerent tone, hell, yeah, I'd release the captives no matter what tense he uses. Therefore, they still ignored a direct order from thier supposed god (twice).

Only because your religion prepares you to automatically accept divine proclamation. If on the other hand your god is Coyote the great Liar you would question every one of his claims. Or if your tradition taught that gods should be automatically respected, but not followed for fear of angering a different patron deity. All of this is as likely as not.

Gods are invented to explain away the fact that nature is often arbitrary and seemingly cruel. The purpose of paying respect to them is precisely because they can and will fuck your shit up if you disrespect them. I don't know a god of any culture that cannot cast curses or otherwise fuck your shit up if truly angered.

Even in Greek Myth gods do not get everything they ask for, many times Zues is forced to resort to trickery to get his way with maidens. Zues, who is as powerful and respected a god as can be, has to resort to divine tricks to get it on.

But Zeus never actually threatened maidens to sleep with him, did he? The extramarital affairs of Zeus is irrelevant to his conduct as the God of lightning. Because, you know, unfaithfulness is not actually related to atmospheric phenomena — the Zeus the Unfaitful might as well be unrelated to the Zeus the Bolt-Thrower.

Also, if Threepio was not using divine tense when he should have, why do the Ewoks not think, "The Golden One isn't using the proper Divine Mood as he should. Maybe he's a fake!" A god of the Ewoks should know the culture of the Ewoks they have authority over as well as the Ewoks themselves, and should know the divine mood if it exists, and when they should use it.

Who knows. Oh wait not even 3P0:

THREEPIO
Hello, I think... I could be mistaken. They're using a very primitive
dialect. But I do believe they think I am some sort of god.

Perhaps the god they believe 3P0 is speaks in riddles or is usually incomprehensible. Honestly 3P0 being unable to communicate to them means jack shit.

Funny that, later on, Threepio didn't blame his inability to make his point to the Ewoks on his inability to be understood:

3PO: You see, Master Luke, they didn't believe me!

As if his great enunciation of "BOOOM!" wasn't enough to communicate hostile intent.

It doesn't matter if the Ewoks were hunters only, they were hunting. They baited a trap with fresh kill, the one they caught the Rebels in. The points stands.

You totally fucking misunderstand the point: yes they hunt, no they are not restricted to hunting alone. Rather the point is that they actually have a village and are tied to a specific local, unlike hunter gatherers are. That is his claim and what you do not understand. Hunting alone doesn't prove that.

Of course hunting doesn't prove that the villiage is tied to a specific locale. The shape of the villiage itself is proof enough of that. Constructing such a structure is a significant investment in time and energy, and would require non-trivial upkeep. What's the point of building such a villiage if they are going to up and move a little later, and when you return it may be a delapitated mess?

Plus your baited trap is baited with meat, despite the fact that predators are so damn much rarer than prey. The only societies that trap predators preferentially are those that have livestock and those are tied somewhat to a local. So once again fuck off.

There's a reason why meat is considered a luxury treat in ancient times: it requires a large investment in time and energy. A flock of livestock capable of supplying a village that large with meat to be worth the trouble would quickly strip the surrounding forest of all grazable vegitation, if indeed such livestock is able to find enough suitable vegitation to sustain itself in a forest like that — it's likely not to be native to that part of Endor. The only way you can sustain that kind of livestock is with an area of small, fast-growing plants —a "grass" as it were— and as such would require a lot of light, light it won't be able to get under a forest canopy.

A villiage is different from a base. The Ewoks recognized the entire base as an integrated structure with a common purpose, rather than an interconnected series of dwellings and shops. Large scale bases is not something a primitive culture would have any conception of.

Aqueducts and irrigation require even larger construction than that base. The Norte Chico civilization in early South American history was incredibly interconnected and yet showed almost none of the Ewoks feats of engineering. Besides, the Ewoks need little more than understanding of how an ant travels into one ant hole and if it becomes blocked comes out of another to understand how tunnels work.

Do they have this understanding, though? Why do you assume that a primitive culture would know that an ant colony is a single integrated unit, rather than being a collection of underground ant houses?

Plus you require that the Ewoks actually know that it is a way in rather than something similar to what 3P0 described them attacking. Every thing here requires that assumption, and that assumption doesn't necessarily work, namely because Wicket only tells them about the back entrance after Han points to the front entrance. Wicket would have realized that they were looking at entrances only after that and suddenly your presumption falls apart. Hell it falls apart because of the timing, instead of telling the rebels about the back entrance before they head out they tell them after looking on to the base. If the fucking Ewoks actually had a plan they would have given the Rebels the information before they left the village.

Who cares why Wicket only told them of the back entrance only then? The point is that Wicket and the Ewoks still recognized the base as a single integrated structure, which requires them to imagine a large complex, which requires some conception of architecture and integrated function.

A kid can hold a fucking gun the correct way with no understanding as to why, so long as they have viewed someone holding it once before. They still don't know how to fire it or how to use it effectively anyway, and yet they still will try to hold it.

Conceeded.

Furthermore, the Ewoks knew that to work the tin folk's machinery, you need to push levers and articulate controls. This is not obvious, especially if all your experience with animate things is animals.

Either way, it indicates a leap of imagination that indicates that the Ewoks are damn geniuses, or they have been carefully surveying the Imperial troops for quite a long time.

Or they only pulled on what Chewbacca pointed at.

The Ewok who stole the speederbike seemed to need no such instruction. And the Ewoks got the AT-ST to move, if jerkily, before Chewie even entered the cockpit! Your hypothesis is inconsistent with the facts.

It takes a while to move through a dense forest without the benefit of roads or mechanized transport. If the villiage/base was that close, the Imperials would have known about it already, and would've known the source of the teddy bears that were bearing down on them.

But since it is not but a bunch of silly primitives laying defenses around their own village there would be no cause for alarm. Ewoks actually killing of your patrols would be and is required for this theory to make sense. Who said that the empire didn't know where the Ewoks came from? Not I. And the stormtroopers didn't even call for reinforcement when the ewoks showed up, which showes exactly how unimportant the ewoks were thought to be.

Then the Empire is run by idiots, becuase the Ewoks completely discombobulated the Empire's attempt to capture the Rebels. Extermination of the nearby village would seem to be a prudent move to give the Ewok primitives enough to worry about and to defuse further annoyances short-term.

Little villages that are often armed to the teeth if they are in societies that have tribal wars, who says that a village can't be quite heavily armed? Certainly not the Small Amazon tribes that are almost constantly at war.

So, you admit that the Ewoks were able to prosecute a war with the Empire as-is, and as such, running all the way back to the villiage to get a posse was unnecesasry.

Fact #6 only requires the Ewoks to be hunting, which they clearly do. It does not in any way require them to support themselves completely through hunting.

Also, agriculture requires a large amount of clear, fertile, tilled land, which you are not going to find in a dense forest. To all appearances, the forests around the villiage is undisturbed, which means that if they are doing agriculture, they are doing it very far away from the villiage, which farming villiages do not do. In other words, the villiage has outside support.

You do not understand his claim in fact 6. He specifically claims that what we see is not a village, because a hunting society cannot sustain such a large population. A HUNTING ONLY SOCIETY, that is his claim, and yet we see no real hunting. And no argiculture does not require tilled land alone, the Native (north) Americans made do in the east coast with swamps and rather dense forests without having to till the fuck out of the land.

Name such a society that can maintain a large population of a few hundred individuals on swamp agriculture alone, let alone a flock of livestock for meat supply, too. There's a reason why civilization is dependent on large scale agriculture.

WHY the fuck should natives that do not have large permanent structures (as is claimed in "Fact" #6) ever develop the mentality of siege warfare? Because they can't have anything to siege so they would never even think of it as a valid strategy, and would also never develop special siege weapons (like the catapult, which they showed much aptitude for in hitting a moving target). He making the very extraordinary claim that a bunch of hunter gatherers (as is best according to his claim) develop warfare that is totally unnecessary for their cultural needs.

That's precisely the point, you idiot. A culture without the ability to build permanent settlements has no conception of seiges and sees no use for seige engines. Nor do such cultures have any conception of millitary bases as the OP claimed, so this is obviously implicit in the theory you argue against.

[Night_stalker]

The Ewoks only own because the Empire didn't consider them a threat. If they were considered a threat, then I'm sure that a ISD could've been doing some scorched earth against the Ewoks while they waited for the Rebels. In addition on the gorund, we don't see how badly the Ewok forces were mauled, save for a few short clips showing that despite the Eowks being the good guys, they must suffer minor casulties. It could said that they suffered 9% caulties or 90% casulties, and regarding the Ewoks cartoon, it was made for kids, so keeping it very close to early Earth life was key: IE no hunting or fishing, just farming and raising cattle or Endor's equivilent.