Force Awakens Complaining.

[APlayerHater]

Luke repeatedly listens and responds to R2D2 during the trip to Dagobah, unless I am sorely mistaken.

There's a translation on the cockpit screen of his xwing.

[Khaat]

Luke repeatedly listens and responds to R2D2 during the trip to Dagobah, unless I am sorely mistaken.

There's a translation on the cockpit screen of his xwing.

And on Dagobah: "If you're saying coming here was a bad idea, I'm beginning to agree with you."

[Simon_Jester]

Fine, fine.

That said, what was the original objection, that nobody in the original series spoke both Droid and Wookiee? That seems a bit frivolous in any event.

[Elheru Aran]

Fine, fine.

That said, what was the original objection, that nobody in the original series spoke both Droid and Wookiee? That seems a bit frivolous in any event.

In ANH all these characters were meeting each other for the first time, of course they're not necessarily going to understand each other very well. Humans have that problem often enough as it is, even when we speak the same language.

It's fairly clear that Luke was probably at least semi-familiar with 'reading' droid talk at least by the events of ESB; he may not have been able to understand specifics, but he could pick up on the tone of Artoo's beepings and take a guess at what was being asked. Sort of like running into someone who speaks a language you don't understand, but you can still gather an inkling of what they're getting at.

And I think it's fairly safe to say that while nobody else was at the same level of comprehension that Han was with Chewbacca, Lando Calrissian seemed to understand him fairly well, as did Leia by ESB. In ROTJ, they all seem to understand him fine, though Han can't quite make out what he's trying to say at one point in Endor (when they come upon the net-trap, IIRC).

I think (though don't take my word for it) that somewhere it's said that Jedi and other Force sensitives can understand different languages a little better than others. Probably old EU material, but it would explain how Obi-wan was able to communicate enough with Chewbacca to commission the Falcon, and how Rey can pick up on what he's saying when Finn can't.

[The Romulan Republic]

I don't know about Jedi in general (though I'd imagine the ability to sense others' thoughts would help with communication), but Revan in Knights of the Old Republic was specifically said to be gifted with languages. Not sure if that was a Force power or just something he had a natural knack for though.

[APlayerHater]

Well droids speak in some weird computer language. Even uncle owen couldn't talk to his moisture vaporators and han solo couldn't understand the hyperdrive computer on the falcon.

For that matter, why would anyone speak the wookie language? Especially Rey. If they showed any wookies on jakuu that would at least make some kind of sense. But some junker speaks all these languages? Anakin couldn't speak droid TMK and he was a child prodigy who built droids.

I know darth revan had a power that let them comprehend all languages, but apparently that involved deliberately copying the information out of people's brains.

[Simon_Jester]

Wookiees are a rare species, but they are a whole species, and a lot of them were enslaved by the Empire according to the old EU. Assuming that background isn't retconned,* there could be a veritable Wookiee Diaspora of Wookiees taken form their homeworld and left on various planets to make their living as best they can in the post-Imperial era.

Maybe Rey knows how to speak Wookiee because she has previously met other Wookiees?

*(it may have been upheld formally by the new Rebels TV show which I don't watch)

[APlayerHater]

I tried to read that deathstar book but it slipped out of my hand. It was way too smooth.

Anyway, Vader flying without instruments (plausible, but not what we see in the movie), Tarkin's sexy admiral girlfriend, arm wrestling muscle surgery stormtrooper guy, some main character alien with inexplicable weirding way superspeed, and the death star being built by wookies just made me shake my head.

[biostem]

I always assumed the Empire enslaving people or entire species was more of a political statement/punishment thing, in line with the Death Star itself - you demonstrate your brutality a few times, and hope/expect onlookers to fall in line...

I simply wouldn't want my war machines, which my troops replied upon, to be built by forced laborers that hate me.

[APlayerHater]

The only real explanation I can see where Rey could have picked up the Wookie language is if she had already met Chewbacca. Otherwise, wookies aren't exactly common. This would mean the training/ revan mindwipe origin fan theory thing.

[Batman]

I always assumed the Empire enslaving people or entire species was more of a political statement/punishment thing, in line with the Death Star itself - you demonstrate your brutality a few times, and hope/expect onlookers to fall in line...
I simply wouldn't want my war machines, which my troops replied upon, to be built by forced laborers that hate me.

Which is why Nazi Germany totally didn't do that. Oh wait.

[biostem]

I always assumed the Empire enslaving people or entire species was more of a political statement/punishment thing, in line with the Death Star itself - you demonstrate your brutality a few times, and hope/expect onlookers to fall in line...
I simply wouldn't want my war machines, which my troops replied upon, to be built by forced laborers that hate me.

Which is why Nazi Germany totally didn't do that. Oh wait.

But the Empire is not lacking for raw materials or manufacturing capability - Germany did.

[Batman]

Since all of the old EU is gone, you don't actually know that. So your evidence is?

[Simon_Jester]

I tried to read that deathstar book but it slipped out of my hand. It was way too smooth.

Wookiees being enslaved predates that book by at least a decade or two. For some reason it's such a popular trope to have Wookiees in danger of enslavement that it even got resurrected in Knights of the Old Republic. I mean, the Legends origin story for how Han and Chewie met has to do with Han getting involved in (and busting up) a Wookiee slave trading operation.

So to heck with them building the Death Star or whatever, just because we don't routinely see Wookiees all over the place doesn't mean Chewbacca's the only one who even exists outside the Wookiee homeworld or anything. Plenty of people recognize Chewbacca as a Wookiee, which suggests he's not the first one they've ever seen before.

So I think it's perfectly plausible that Rey at some time in her life encountered another Wookiee, and learned rudiments of the language from them. Not necessarily true, but plausible.

The only real explanation I can see where Rey could have picked up the Wookie language is if she had already met Chewbacca. Otherwise, wookies aren't exactly common. This would mean the training/ revan mindwipe origin fan theory thing.

You are... really good at dismissing hypotheses without adequate grounds for doing so.

Since all of the old EU is gone, you don't actually know that. So your evidence is?

Who was that a response to?

Also, frankly, it's going to be years before the new Disney-canon EU is built up to sufficient depth that it can be used to explain or describe anything in the Star Wars universe. Until then, basing arguments on elements of Legends canon which support and explain what we saw in the first six movies, and which don't contradict any newly released canon, strike me as a good idea.

Or are we supposed to all agree to just shut up and not say anything until they've spent ten or fifteen years publishing novels and comics to fill in the gaps between the movies?

[APlayerHater]

You are... really good at dismissing hypotheses without adequate grounds for doing so.

Well that came out of nowhere.

Anyway, EU doesn't exist, therefore evidence of wookiees being enslaved doesn't exist. We never see a wookiee on Jakku, or any other wookies for that matter outside of episode 3. At this point it seems just as plausible that she speaks ewok. Chewbacca never really says anything that matters, and he certainly doesn't deliver exposition. His grunts communicate enough to us as an audience.

If you're going to make Rey actually 'understand' him, you should either give a good reason or make it a plot point building up to something.

For all we know, Rey could be a clone of Obi Wan, possessed by Obi's force ghost and then mind wiped. Obi spoke the wookiee language. Although George could have easily put Obi on the wookie planet in Ep 3 to explain this, he put yoda there instead for some reason.

-Although given her premonition(post-monition? Vision) to cloud city when she touched Anakin's lightsaber, very probably a descendant of Luke, rather than something that impossibly silly.

[Lord Revan]

Well something has to have happened between ROTS and ANH as Chewie seemed to be relatively high social ranking in ROTS and a smuggler companion in ANH and at no point in Clone Wars or ROTS is it implied or stated that Wookies are something odd in fact quite the opposite. (oh and there was wookie Senetors in the earlier episodes too so it's not like they were unknown to the galaxy).

[Channel72]

I've seen the movie a few times, and Kylo is definitely looking decidedly unhealthy compared to both Finn and Rey. I'll take screenshots when the blu-ray comes out.

Yeah, I mean, the camera literally pans down to the snow and lingers on Kylo's dripping blood, staining the snow red, for like 2 or 3 whole seconds. The movie is going out of its way to make sure we know Kylo Ren is badly wounded.

I recall that in an earlier draft, the fight ended in a stalemate with the chasm forming to separate Kylo and Rey. But the execs/producers or whatever probably wanted the movie to end on a high-note with a win for the good guys, so they had to have Rey win the fight. The writers realized this wouldn't be plausible, so they did everything they possibly could to feed the audience visual information showing that Kylo Ren was pretty badly fucked up so that he could plausibly lose to a suddenly force-powered-up Rey.

On top of that we can also add that Ren himself is never really shown to be a great lightsaber combatant either - and the lack of any extant Jedi certainly wouldn't help the situation. In any case, Rey managing to use the Force to beat a badly wounded Kylo Ren is an order of magnitude more believable than Luke Skywalker (who apparently never had any real lightsaber training) somehow beating Darth Vader - a Sith Lord with decades of lightsaber experience. The only way to make sense of any of this is to go with the idea that, contrary to the Prequels, lightsaber training is not really necessary, and mastery of the force via emotional control is all that matters.

[Simon_Jester]

Anyway, EU doesn't exist, therefore evidence of wookiees being enslaved doesn't exist. We never see a wookiee on Jakku, or any other wookies for that matter outside of episode 3. At this point it seems just as plausible that she speaks ewok. Chewbacca never really says anything that matters, and he certainly doesn't deliver exposition. His grunts communicate enough to us as an audience.

Five seconds googling suggests that evidence of Wookiees being enslaved exists after all, in Star Wars: Rebels, so nope, my speculation was as justified as it would be in the old EU.

We never see a Wookiee on Jakku, but we also never see a lot of other things on the planet (e.g. a doctor's office). That doesn't mean that such things don't exist on Jakku

Exactly what do you have invested in the idea that Chewbacca is the only Wookiee that travels around the galaxy?

If you're going to make Rey actually 'understand' him, you should either give a good reason or make it a plot point building up to something.

If they'd done that I suspect we'd be here listening to you complain that they wasted valuable minutes of screen time on some random backstory about "how come she speaks Wookiee?"

I mean, there's a damned good reason for them to establish that Rey speaks Wookiee, because someone's got to if they want to keep Chewie around in Episodes VIII and IX, and it can't be Han because they just killed him off. Finn was raised in an orphanage for child soldiers and has no real reason to speak any language other than Galactic Basic. Poe is something of a bit character in this movie so there aren't any good chances to establish him speaking Wookiee.

And thinking of ways for Rey to speak Wookiee is just plain not that hard, the most obvious one being that at some time there was a Wookiee on Jakku and they interacted, which really is not such a stretch. Wookiees were a known species throughout Star Wars, even if they were rare you never have people going "oh my goodness what is that" at Chewbacca.

[Vympel]

Episode 7 Visual Dictionary, page 31:

Rey's interaction with offworlders has allowed her to learn nonhuman languages such as Wookie and astromech binary.

So yeah, canon.

Also, Santa brought me something early.

All from the same time:







(they're full 1080p)

[APlayerHater]

I mean, there's a damned good reason for them to establish that Rey speaks Wookiee, because someone's got to if they want to keep Chewie around in Episodes VIII and IX, and it can't be Han because they just killed him off. Finn was raised in an orphanage for child soldiers and has no real reason to speak any language other than Galactic Basic. Poe is something of a bit character in this movie so there aren't any good chances to establish him speaking Wookiee.

So shameless plot convenience. Nobody was going to care if no one could understand chewie. Chewie grunts. He doesn't have real lines. Characters just say things to him and he understands basic. He grunts or roars back.

If chewie really had anything to say 3PO could just translate.

And Rey just casually understands droid speech (the only canon human to do so) because a book says "she speaks droid speak." Not a great explanation.

My fanfic characters could speak every language too. And they had a dark and mysterious past. And they were amnesiacs. Funny coincidence.

I mean, she lives as a junker who's paid in imperial rations. No education. No home. No one raised her apparently. Supergenius savant.

[biostem]

...Or they could have simply had a friend/confidant or Rey's on Jakku, who was a Wookie. It could have worked if that "half-portion" guy was instead a Wookie AND spoke both basic and Wookie...

[APlayerHater]

...Or they could have simply had a friend/confidant or Rey's on Jakku, who was a Wookie. It could have worked if that "half-portion" guy was instead a Wookie AND spoke both basic and Wookie...

Or that, yeah. Preferably that.

We could have had some scenes where we saw things that would explain these things. Like maybe if she had a droid, like and old busted astromech or computer in that walker she lived in. It could have taught her how to read and understand droid binary language. Maybe we'd finally get to see a moisture vaporator.

[Batman]

We saw those as early as ANH?

[APlayerHater]

Is that what those cone shaped things were? Like in the middle of the lars homestead?

[Simon_Jester]

I mean, there's a damned good reason for them to establish that Rey speaks Wookiee, because someone's got to if they want to keep Chewie around in Episodes VIII and IX, and it can't be Han because they just killed him off. Finn was raised in an orphanage for child soldiers and has no real reason to speak any language other than Galactic Basic. Poe is something of a bit character in this movie so there aren't any good chances to establish him speaking Wookiee.

So shameless plot convenience. Nobody was going to care if no one could understand chewie. Chewie grunts. He doesn't have real lines. Characters just say things to him and he understands basic. He grunts or roars back.

If chewie really had anything to say 3PO could just translate.

Which means they have to lug 3PO around, which clutters up scenes by adding a superfluous character who will often serve no role except to translate for Chewie. Plus, Chewie regularly communicates important things about ships or situations. Just because you don't understand what he says doesn't mean he isn't saying something important. That's not how foreign-language dialogue in movies works. Whether or not it is comprehensible in-story has nothing to do with whether you the listener personally know what is being said.

It may well prove a plot necessity at some later time that Chewie be able to make himself understood, in a situation where 3PO would be a useless and pointless burden. Setting that up in advance is preferable.

And Rey just casually understands droid speech (the only canon human to do so) because a book says "she speaks droid speak." Not a great explanation.

You're an imbecile. There is no reason to assume a technically competent human can't learn droid speak. Luke apparently didn't know it- that doesn't mean nobody else does.

My fanfic characters could speak every language too. And they had a dark and mysterious past. And they were amnesiacs. Funny coincidence.

I mean, she lives as a junker who's paid in imperial rations. No education. No home. No one raised her apparently. Supergenius savant.

We really don't know much about her background on Jakku. Because the first movie she appears in just came out a few months ago, in case you didn't notice. We didn't know much about Luke's background six months after A New Hope hit theaters, either.

Anakin Skywalker was a child on a desert planet who just happened to exhibit mechanical genius and expert piloting at the age of ten. Raised by a mother who might, maybe, have been an adequate mechanic and pilot, but who never showed us those abilities on screen.

Why are you whining more about Rey exhibiting similar abilities at the age of twenty?

...Or they could have simply had a friend/confidant or Rey's on Jakku, who was a Wookie. It could have worked if that "half-portion" guy was instead a Wookie AND spoke both basic and Wookie...

This would, I admit, have been better.

That said, it's not like we saw all of Rey's life. We saw "a day in the life." Inevitably, Rey had experiences and learned things which we just didn't see in the first hour of the movie; she's a (young) adult woman.