Physics and Fandoms

In ANH, Leia has a British accent when she’s still trying to bluff her way through Vader and Tarkin by pulling senatorial rank, and drops that accent when she becomes so agitated that the bluff falls apart, and she doesn’t pick it back up again.

I’d argue that this implies that Coruscant’s social elite tend to speak with a crisp British accent, and Leia adopts it when acting as a senator, because when in Rome and beat them at their own game and all that, but it’s not her normal accent.

And since Mara Jade is my fandom speciality, I can’t help but bring her into this by pointing out that she grew up within that Coruscanti elite - the Emperor’s own court, the most elite of elite, even - which would imply that her natural accent is British.

Now, she certainly had speech training that would allow her to speak naturally in any number of accents, because she often acted as an undercover agent where her own natural accent would be a dead giveaway, and she left Coruscant not long after the battle of Endor and then, in her own words, spent nearly five years “sloshing around the rotten underfringes of the galaxy”, surely places where she would want to conceal the upper crust accent that could potentially put a target on her back. Arguably she would continue to do so even after she joined Karrde; she would often be working with people and in places where such a social marker could be to her detriment. So probably by the time of HoT, Mara is so accustomed to speaking without it that her natural accent has effectively been replaced (presumably with the general American accent of the Big Three, which seems to be the accent equivalent of Basic within the GFFA).

But when Mara is really agitated, I’ve always imagined her slipping back into the crisp British accent she was presumably raised with, much the same way that, when she was really angry with her father, Hera Syndulla slipped back into a Ryloth/Twi’leki accent.

And then generative ai was created.

And now I get it. I get why nobody on Star Trek spends all their free time in the holodeck. I get why all the crew are putting on stage plays, and holding music recitals, and building models, and playing poker. I get why everyone was so skeptical and mean to the Doctor on Voyager. I get why the ONE TIME we see someone obsessed with the holodeck it infringes on people’s likeness rights and permissions.

Because fundamentally at the end of the day we are human beings and we ENJOY working with our hands and making REAL human connections. A person who learns to play an instrument is always going to be viewed as an artist over someone who asks the computer to generate music for them.

Even as recent as Lower Decks they were making fun of the fact that the crew were putting on amateurish plays and holding music recitals. But after living with Ai for so long and seeing how detrimental it’s been to the world… I’d much rather watch my friends put on a stage play than “participate” in a holodeck movie.

What’s most amazing about this is that it was completely unintentional. I do not for one second think that the writers of the time in the 90’s were really thinking about the larger issues that generative ai and chatGTP would cause. How could they? Text to speech back then was still robotic as heck. More likely they wrote that stuff in because it was cheaper to film on sets the owned than try to build, film, or rent out different locations each week.

That’s the down to earth logistical real reason Data is reciting poems about his cat or Riker is in a play put on in ten forward. It’s just cheaper to do that than to build a whole new set or move production to a new location.

Yet at the end of the day, I think that unintentionally speaks to a very human need that ai is making more and more prevalent to us day in and day out.

We have CDs again, btw! :)

Arwen with Frodo

Like Etsy used to be except artists keep their money and the site is run off of a yearly fee for hosting stuff and some non invasive ads. There's other stuff, but the point is that the artists don't have to share a percentage on what they sell with the site.