The_Tempest
Senior Member
OK, Photobucket isn't loading shit for me, so I just copied the passage in manually.
Originally posted by The Ellimist
On what grounds?
Originally posted by The Ellimist
It is. It says that he used the dark side to bury it. In English usage it wouldn't be unusual for this to refer to his manipulation of any potential obstacles to its burying; see my driving across the border analogy.In the absence of all other evidence, we would indeed assume telekinesis as the most straightforward interpretation, but in conjunction with the other sources, the simpler explanation is actually the one I'm peddling, .i.e. that he was just using telepathy.
Regarding your analogy, one can easily infer from context that the "influence" exerted would be political and not physical. The validity of the contrary interpretation would require imprecise phrasing.
Likewise, the grammatically precise and straightforward interpretation in this instance is that the Emperor used the dark side to bury the ship; to have just applied TP to the burial would be to facilitate the burial or to conceal the burial. TK is the straightforward and most precise interpretation.
Originally posted by The Ellimist
See above; that's what two other sources say.
Yes, but those other two sources are not this source.
Originally posted by The Ellimist
Your interpretation requires us to just assume that these two sets of sources just decided to omit information for the heck of it, and it just happens to be that it looks as if the source in the OP were just a more vaguely worded version of the other two. It's not a matter of whether there's a contradiction, it's a matter of whether it's a plausible explanation.
It's absolutely plausible, since supplementary sources omit and add new information all the time, particularly when the event in question was never actually depicted on-screen or on page.
Originally posted by The Ellimist
Of course, we both know that wasn't the authorial intent. What are the chances that the author independently thought up of Palpatine using the dark side to bury a star destroyer? No, they obviously transcribed from the original source, which referenced Palpatine's command of the dark side being enough to TP Coruscant, took the "dark side" phrase, and then didn't notice how vaguely worded it was. Any conclusion that he was using telekinesis is purely a product of this semantics mishap.
The Lusankya—a Super Star Destroyer eight kilometers length—laid waste to the area beneath which it had lain buried for years. Green turbolaser bolts pounded the cityscape, freeing the ship from the ferrocrete and transparisteel prison in which it had laired. Wedge knew Super Star Destroyers had only come into service after the Battle of Yavin, which meant the Lusankya had to have been created and hidden on Coruscant before the battle of Endor. Unless the constructor droids just built it there, then built over it. The idea that a hundred-square-kilometer area of the planet could have been razed and rebuilt to hide a Super Star Destroyer seemed beyond belief, especially with no one noticing the ship's insertion into the hole. Could the Emperor's power through the dark side of the Force have been sufficient to compel thousands or millions of people to forget having seen the Lusankya being buried? As hideous as that idea seemed, Wedge hoped it was the truth. The likely alternative—that the Emperor had ordered the deaths of all the witnesses—seemed that much more horrible.
The phrasing of the original passage from the Krytos Trap and the Fact File is quite different. Namely because Wedge's speculation does distinguish the Emperor's telepathic concealment of the Lusankya from the actual act of burying it, which is something that the Fact File does not do.
Speaking of speculation, I don't know what the odds are that an author elected to add the TK angle to the burial, nor do I need to. I just know what the text says.
Originally posted by The Ellimist
Demonstrate to who? Nobody remembers it happening...
Coruscant's citizenry doesn't, no. But we don't know if Vader was present, another Inquisitor, or if even the demonstration in question was for Palpatine himself, as a test of his abilities.
Which is why we end where we began: the source very clearly indicates that Palpatine literally buried the ship with the dark side. As you yourself concede, this is the straightforward interpretation. There's no reason to get hung up on the other sources in question, because neither of them actually retcon the Fact File.