Apparently this may be sacrilege to some but "Baby Yoda" isn't even a character, just a cutesy prop & plot device 5 episodes in. There was one brief scene that showed potential and ever since it has been non stop coo cooing and doe eyes. Meh!
shareI've been wondering about this. Thanks for the explanation. Yoda is already like 800 years old during Episode 1, lol.
shareYou pretty much nailed it OP. I find it cute in the same way everybody does...but it is just a cute prop/plot device and not really a character
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shareHow many babies are ever fully realized characters, in any movie or TV show? Maybe that will change at some point because of his natural ability with the Force but for now ... he's a baby. He does cute and adorable things and requires constant looking after. He may never be anything more than a MacGuffin, motivating Mando's actions. People will still go nuts over him though.
shareEven though it has been nicknamed "Baby Yoda" it's actually supposed to be a 50+ year old "child" which makes it weird that it doesn't try to speak or even vocalize to any significant degree. It comes off more as a kitten than a humanoid child or a baby for that matter. It's especially strange considering how we know from Yoda that his species can speak in the same way humans can.
I was never suggesting it was "wrong" for anyone to like "Baby Yoda" for being nothing more than a cutesy prop/macguffin style plot device (which it most certainly is) but it just doesn't work for me personally. I find it somewhat cheap and lazy but would have less of an issue with it if the entire show's story (what little there is) wasn't being driven soley by this plot device.
Human children achieve various cognitive milestones because they've reached a certain level of brain development. For example the centers dealing with abstract reasoning don't come fully "online" until adolescence - except in those rare cases we call child prodigies. Children under five are generally unable to maintain a clear distinction between fantasy and reality. Children three and under usually lack the ability to form permanent long-term memories they'll still be able to recall later in life. My first clear memory was when my mom was pregnant with my little brother. I was about 3½ at the time.
You need a fully mature brain in order to think like an adult. A child who matures so slowly it takes decades to reach the state of a normal four year old, would not be a tiny little grownup, able to speak and think like they're 50. Although sheer volume of experience would probably make them more capable than an ordinary toddler. Little Baby Yoda should know at least a few simple words if he can walk around and fiddle with control panels. And perhaps he does - we've heard him babble what might be language. But he doesn't necessarily speak the same one as Mando. Like an immigrant child in a strange foreign land, the speech he's hearing is incomprehensible noise. Or who knows? The primary language of a universally Force capable race may be telepathic. We know practically nothing about Yoda's people.
LOL! I think you might be over-analyzing things a tad. In any case that doesn't really have any bearing on "Baby Yoda" being a plot device prop.
shareNo, so far he's basically been a plot device. That's true. But don't think people who write for shows like this aren't considering the sort of things I mentioned. Because I guarantee you they've thought through the issue of the little guy's mental development as a fifty-year-old toddler.
shareI think you're giving the writers way too much credit. Many fan boys were naively certain that Jar Jar Abrams had a plan with the gaping plot holes & mystery box bullsh*t in The Force Awakens & we all know how that turned out. I think there is little chance the writers seriously delved that deep into physiological psychology of their central prop/ macguffin.
shareForce Awakens should've been called A New Hope Recycled. Even Mark Hamill has been on TV making fun of the sequels. And JJ Abrams is the guy who turned Star Trek into a mindless action franchise, so I don't exactly have high expectations where he's concerned. As a big Star Wars fan Jon Favreau would be into all the mythology and backstory. I'd expect more thought to be put into scripts than we've seen in the recent Disney SW movies.
Rogue One I liked. The rest have been varying degrees of bad. Solo was truly dreadful, I'm glad I never wasted my money seeing it at the theater!
Seems we generally agree on the state of the terribleness of the Di$ney trilogy. Rogue One is the only Star Wars film under Di$ney I thought was okay. That being said I wouldn't put too much stake on Jon Fauvreau being a big Star Wars fan as the same was said about Jar Jar Abrams sand we all know the disjointed, soft reboot, clusterf*ck that he produced.
shareI disagree. I have very clear memories of when I was extremely young. I notice that many left-handed people like myself tend to have memories as early as being newborn. I just never forgot them. I could also tell you what I was thinking and my emotions at the time. Right-handed people have later memories usually around 3-5 years. Begin to ask lefties about their earliest memories when you meet them and compare to righties.
The reason is because left-handed people have a larger corpus callosum which is related to episodic memory.
I'm not buying that children can't tell the difference between fantasy or reality either. Kids tend to be fearful, but that's different from not knowing the difference. I saw a scary movie when I was about 6 and spent years afraid that a dismembered hand would strangle me in my sleep. I knew it was silly and wouldn't happen but I still slept under the covers in a way to protect my neck. Ditto the boogeyman in the closet. I knew it didn't exist, but a creepy and dark place anyway. Many adults have irrational fears too. I think scientists don't know how to interpret research properly at times.
I agree that thinking is limited. I began thinking abstractly when I was around five. And it developed further when I was an adolescent when I became very analytical. Now my short-term memory is crap.
Babies can understand language before they can speak it. What prevents babies from speaking is biological, not only mental. They need to gain control over certain muscles to form sounds. Notice that a baby can learn sign language long before they can learn to talk. Babies around the world tend to babble the same easier sounds like "mama, "dada" and "papa" which explains why those words are universal.
Maybe Mando should teach Baby Yoda to sign. At some point he's going to babble "dada". LOL.
As I understand it, you physically cannot form permanent episodic memories in infancy. When people think they remember that far back, it's a dream or a manufactured memory. But the line where this changes is not sharply defined. Just like other cognitive milestones. We aren't machines factory set to develop at a precisely uniform rate. I thought the corpus callosum was the connecting bridge between the brain's two hemispheres. How does that affect memory?
The young of tree dwelling primates (like our distant ancestors) are often prey to wolves, hyenas, and other nocturnal predators. When the little ones are stranded on the ground and their parents can't find them, they will get to the highest place they can. Barring that they cover themselves with dirt and/or leaves to both disguise their scent and conceal them from view. Then they spent the night there, not stirring or making a sound. They don't consciously know the reasons for all this of course. They have that same sense of monsters lurking in the darkness as human children.
When you're very small you can almost sense the presence of something else in the room. Your first instinct is to go to your parents, but of course they stop letting you sleep with them just because you're scared of monsters. So you get into bed, feet off the ground (or it'll grab you!), under the covers, very still and quiet. If you stay absolutely still and make no noise maybe it won't find you. It's no accident you arrived at this particular strategy. Every child in every culture experiences the same anxieties because they aren't learned. They're hard wired instinct. The circumstances that evolved those instincts may no longer apply to our species but they haven't had time to disappear yet. There's a period in your childhood when you know intellectually there's nothing there, but you still can't shake that primal fear that there is.
"you physically cannot form permanent episodic memories in infancy."
The studies never say that nobody remembers early childhood - only most don't. Right-handed people who have much later memories are being treated as the "norm". Left-handed people are wired differently. The corpus callosum is what makes remembering early events possible. It's larger in left-handed people and obviously working more efficiently since it's been proven lefties have earlier and stronger memories.
Young children do have early memories. For instance, a three year old can remember when they were two. But most begin to forget them around the age of 9. Most, not all, and I never forgot mine.
https://psychcentral.com/news/2014/01/26/whats-your-earliest-memory/64982.html
Social scientists are repeatedly wrong about what babies know and don't know. They used to say that babies couldn't understand speech and I knew that was nonsense because I had no problem understanding people around me. Later, they realized their error.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/babies-learn-what-words-mean-before-they-can-use-them/
The primate info is apples and oranges. A young primate remaining motionless on the ground or disguising its scent is pure survival behavior. It's either learned or instinctual.
Adults have fear. I know plenty of people who are afraid to go on a ride, see a scary movie, heights, flying in a plane or public speaking. Yet no social scientist would say they can't distinguish between fantasy and reality. Both adults and children can be irrational. Scientists look down upon children (and animals) and often their research reflects their biases. A righty with an early memory of four is factual but a lefty with a memory of two is fantasy? Such bias!
Anyway, just do your own experiment and ask people around you what their earliest memories are. You'll likely see a difference. I've been asking for more than fifteen years and the results have been consistent.
I was talking about one specific thing, the fact that children of all cultures have that fear of monsters lurking in the darkness. A genetic inheritance from our pre-human ancestors. It fades as we get older, at about the point when we'd be too big for opportunistic nocturnal predators to get away with a quick grab and run.
There are plenty of other things people fear. Many are not hard wired, and are potentially trainable (both ways). I don't know how you connect this with fantasy versus reality. Fear of heights, flying, or speaking in public are all fears of real things. You're probably not scared of the boogeyman though.
Studies concerning the accuracy of very early memories recalled later in life show that there tend to be a lot of errors. Not unlike the way every witness to a crime will recall the specifics slightly differently when they're interviewed by police. Only more so. Enough details are wrong that it's often impossible to tell whether this is a genuine memory with significant errors, a composite memory formed from more than one experience which the person remembers as one, or a confabulated recollection that never happened at all. Plenty of studies show that childrens' brains are malleable enough to deliberately create false memories through manipulation. You can literally convince them they experienced things that never happened and they'll swear they remember it all later on. Such false memories can also occur on their own without direct human intervention.
If there was some kind of covert recording device following you around your whole life, and you had video of the things you remember from very early childhood, you might be surprised how different it is from the movie in your head. In some cases you wouldn't be able to find a corresponding clip anywhere. Unless you have something like superior autobiographical memory (which is incredibly rare).
Adults often remember things that were the subject of stories other family members told about their childhood. The test I would use as a researcher would be to see how many details that were never part of those stories you could recall correctly. A true memory wouldn't simply be a checklist of things you've heard, there should be additional details your relatives had never included and perhaps didn't remember themselves until reminded. In short: what a person believes they remember isn't the truest test of memory.
I'm not buying the monster in the closet bit. You're forgetting that adults are afraid of the dark, too. That's the reason why scary movies are filmed in low light.
Adults have a fear of God, the devil, ghosts, witchcraft, going to h3ll, etc. Those are not any more real than the boogeyman. BTW, phobias are irrational fears based on an overactive imagination - aka: fantasy.
A police interview is extremely detailed and may involve a traumatic event related to a crime. What a huge difference between that and remembering an early childhood general event like attending a festival like I did at two! I spent many years playing with the clown and pinball machine from it which only reinforced my memories.
Manipulating a child is also not what I'm talking about. Again, apples and oranges.
Plenty of studies also show that left-handed people have early memories based on a biological difference within the brain. Once again, right-handed biology and experiences have nothing to do with me and I don't like them applied to me. It's a fact that lefties have superior memories.
At 3 y.o. I had to walk home by myself (high crime area), get in the elevator (high rise) and push the right button (couldn't read) and find my apartment to get help for my brother. I was very proud to find my way home by myself. That's not forgettable. Many years later, I asked my brother about the incident and he was shocked that I remembered. He told me my age at the time when I asked. My family never discussed it.
When I was in a stroller, I used to repeat Spanish Rs I heard in the elevator. I've never had a problem pronouncing them because I learned them so young.
False memories may be related to hypnosis which isn't what I'm talking about.
Righties tend to reply 5 and lefties 2-3 or earlier when I ask.
Social science is a soft science meaning a lot of it is based on opinion, interpretation and bias. That's the first thing I was taught in psych. 101.
BTW, according to your own opinion, your 3 1/2 y.o. memory is false and couldn't have happened since it's too young.
shareNo, I specifically said that three was about the youngest you can reliably retain any memories and recall them later in life. Accuracy is still less than perfect though. My mother confirmed that what I remember actually happened - but certain details were wrong, for one thing I remembered being downstairs in the basement and my mom says we were actually in the kitchen. Not going into the somewhat personal specifics but it was a pretty significant event (which is why I remember it).
Everyone has some false memories, that was the point I was trying to make. It doesn't take hypnosis or deliberate mind games being played on you. Every memory feels accurate. But you can't use your own subjective point of view to gauge how accurate it really is. If we had machines that could display the content of a person's memory on a monitor, you'd find that there were almost always deviations between that and an actual video record of events. With memories from early childhood those deviations would be much more substantial. In some cases early memories are composites, amalgamations of real experiences but not a set of events that ever actually occurred in one place and time - even though you remember it that way.
Finding your way back home at age 3 under duress may be memorable but I'm betting there would still be a lot of individual details that were not correct. Human memory isn't a digital recording. What your brain stores are bits and pieces of information, just what your mind needs to create an internal reconstruction and nothing more. The amount we get right is actually surprising all things considered. But every time you retrieve a memory that stored information can be altered very slightly. Over time, memories shift and evolve. For example happy experiences tend to seem happier and more perfect while miserable experiences tend to get even worse. The memory you retrieve today isn't identical to the same memory retrieved ten or twenty years ago. If you lived long enough, only the most important details of very old memories would remain faithful to reality.
"only the most important details of very old memories would remain faithful to reality."
That's what I'm saying which is why I had mentioned that a cop asking for details isn't what I was referring to.
My memories about walking home by myself are general - not detailed. For example, I didn't know the season, exact time, or day. I had recently observed which elevator button my mother pushed or I would've been screwed since I l couldn't read the buttons.
Another memory was when I was in the crib watching TV. I was falling asleep when a man slapped a woman in the face very hard. That woke me up! Then, my brother came in the room and turned off the set so I cried. My mother assumed I was afraid of the dark instead of my wanting to see the rest of this now juicy movie. They finally figured it out and turned it back on. I remembered three very brief scenes from the film, the slap was the last. When I was a teen, I was switching channels and saw one of the scenes and couldn't believe it. The slap eventually happened! BTW, I kidded my brother about rudely turning off the TV that day. I don't know my age - just old enough to stand in a crib and cry.
Coincidentally, I read something today about scientific research. It basically said that it's limited and not the oracle of truth. Science can produce knowledge that is wrong and it is constantly updating and changing based on new findings. The reason why the term theory is used is the understanding that nothing is certain.
The reason why I'm being so insistent is because research has been extremely limited re: children and memories and is contradicting my experiences and those of people I know.
I've been annoyed by researchers since two when I watched a TV doc. about how kids think. They said 1 y.o's believe little people are in radios. My mother and brother were buying into that. At two, I knew it was wrong information since my 1 y.o. memories were still fresh.
Science is a self-correcting process. Some fields are also more advanced than others, some facts solidly established while others are still mixed with a large helping of conjecture. In all fairness the conscious brain is the most complex system known to exist. What remains to be discovered exceeds what we currently know.
However it may go down the wrong path at times and have to back up, the scientific method is still the best technique there is for learning. We weren't left with an instruction manual for the universe so we have to piece it together ourselves. In time we'll know all there is to know about physical reality (of course that's going to take a while).
I'm concerned about all the assaults on science lately. Big money special interests like the oil industry, crackpots like the anti-vaxxers, etc., people more interested in pushing an agenda than the truth. Everything we have beyond the most primitive level came from the progress of science. Scientists are only human, and so their work is not perfect, but it's the main difference between the medieval world and our own.
Finally we agree!
There's an agenda to undermine democracy too which is why there's an assault on truth, information and science. I know most people hated the prequels, but Lucas was trying to teach a lesson and warn us about how a democracy becomes a tyranny. I'm disappointed by all the SW fans who didn't understand it.
Well good news for you, Baby Yoda is only in a few tiny scenes here and there, and it’s obviously leading up to something grand.
He’s mostly there to sell toys—the other massive moneymaker for Disney this Christmas.
The show sucks.
shareI disagree about selling toys. Dopey Disney was left completely off-guard by Baby Yoda's enormous popularity which explains why those idiots had nothing in the pipeline. Not even a decent t-shirt.
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Not only isn't that going to happen, but Baby Yoda will end up being the star of the show similar to the way Fonsie, Urkel and Alex Keaton stole the limelight of their shows.
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