Elegant Weapon for a More Civilized Age/Headscratchers


 * Anyone who thinks stabbing people with long pointy pieces of iron is "more civilized" is not using their imagination. It's not like the Bloodless Carnage on screen where you get injured below the camera angle and just have time to deliver your profound final words before you expire and get carted off to your open casket funeral. Unless you are decapitated by a Viking longsword, getting whaled on by a sword requires many blows to kill you. So you are getting bones broken and pieces of flesh hacked off by some grunting, wild-eyed, sweaty brute. Unless of course they just stab you in the gut and leave you to bleed to death. Which can take hours. Civilized?!?!
 * Riposte: "Men prefer to fight with swords so they can see each other's eyes." -Mulai Ahmed Mohammed el Raisuli the Magnificent
 * Being 'civilized' just means not getting your hands dirty. Stabbing people is about honour.
 * As much as the virtues of the prequels may be debatable in other ways, it's hard to argue that the old Republic wasn't, in fact, overall more 'civilized' than the Empire that followed it. And of course the line is originally delivered by Ben/Obi-Wan Kenobi, who was there as a proper Jedi and has every reason to view the lost past through slightly rose-colored glasses. Add a dash of old-fashioned "guns are a coward's weapon" sentiment (not altogether out of character for an order of mystical warrior-monks), and there you are.
 * As someone who loves firearms, I take great offense to the "guns are a coward's weapon" sentiment, and find myself sorely tempted to dope slap anyone who expresses such within earshot of me.
 * I completely agree. "Yes, go ahead, come at me with a sword. My cowardly SCAR-L will mow you down as soon as you get within 400 yards"
 * Thereby disproving said sentiment...how, exactly? That's getting off topic, though. The point isn't whether one agrees with the notion or not, but simply whether it fits a bunch of people who spend much of their time training with glowy swords and regularly beating people with guns in actual combat.
 * It doesn't. It was just Jedi posturing. As to the sidetrack about "cowardly" guns, if a martial artist (don't even care if he HAS a weapon) wants to rip me a new one, I don't have to be a coward to refuse to play his game. A coward would beg for mercy, not aim center mass. It's better to grab for a gun than for an Idiot Ball anyway.
 * Anyone who thinks stabbing people with long pointy pieces of iron is "more civilized" is not using their imagination. And no one was saying that this was "more civilized" in the article.
 * Wut? It says it in the title.
 * No, it says it's "more elegant" the age was more civilized. And there is elegance to sword fighting, even if it is a kind of ugly elegance. Gun fighting? Uh, hiding behind cover and taking potshots at each other? Yeah, very elegant.
 * I think the logic goes that in sword-fighting, you are, in a way, getting up-close and personal with the person who you may kill or who may kill you; there's a directness to the action of fighting and killing them, and you are theoretically exposing yourself to as much danger as you are placing the other person in, since you can't use a sword at a distance; even if you sneak up behind them, they can possibly hear you, counter your attack and successfully kill you instead. There's also an immediacy to killing them; you'll get their blood over your hands and sword, you can look them in the eye, even converse with them. There's a sort of bonding happening, which can if you're so inclined lend the process a sort of romantic nobility (in as much as stabbing someone with a sharpened bit of metal can be said to have any). At the very least, if you have to kill someone, you are at least directly killing them in person; there's a certain honor there. With a gun, however, you can avoid all this; you can shoot someone from a distance, hidden in the shadows without them even being aware of your existence, and you can keep your hands clean. It's a bit more distant, a bit more impersonal, a bit more cold. Again, if you're so inclined, it's not hard to view this as a cowardly 'cheat' of sorts, since you're keeping yourself out of the same danger you're inflicting on your victim. Of course, now that both sides are more likely to have guns than swords (or one side with a gun and the other with a sword), this is less likely to apply, but romantic views of the world can be hard to shake.
 * An element missed in the above discussion is that, absent some improbable circumstance, there are no "innocent bystanders." There's never been a swordfight that killed a random kid half a block away.


 * It says early on the page that lightsabers can cut through "all but four" materials. What are those materials?
 * Other lightsabers, cortosis ore, phrick... Um, other force fields? I dunno, I didn't write the article.
 * A jedi's will?
 * Another lightsaber, cortosis, phrick, and Mandalorian Iron (although the last two three are debatable lametastic).
 * Kyle Katarn's beard?
 * Number 4 is the shell of the Vonduun crab, which serve as the hard parts of the Yuuzahn Vong warrior caste's armor. Katarn's beard is filaments of the same material.