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Tumblr post by arctic-hands:
When I was a teenager and still on Neopets I was part of a pretty big Star Trek guild and eventually became part of its council, with the solemn duty of creating weekly polls. Well one day I created the poll “Which would win in a fight? Borg Cube or Death Star?”. Naturally, since this was a Star Trek guild, the answer was overwhelmingly “Borg Cube”, but someone did have the rationality to point out we were biased.
So I look up a pretty prominent Star Wars guild and message one of their council and ask them to poll the same question and get back to me in a week. They do, and naturally the fuckin geeks said “Death Star”.
So then I look up a Stargate guild and messaged the lead council member, saying the same thing, and they get back to me almost immediately saying that the Death Star would immediately one-shot a Borg Cube but they would never be able to do it again to another Cube. And I took that wisdom back to my guild and we were mollified, and for one moment the Nerd World was peaceful.
Reply from evilsoup:
An image depicting the story of the “Judgment of Solomon”, where Solomon is labelled “stargate fandom”, and the two women are labelled “star trek fandom” and “star wars fandom”. The Star Wars lady is standing grumpily with her hands on her hips, while the Star Trek woman gestures with open arms. Between the two of them, on the floor, is a baby in a wicker basket. Solomon sits over them in judgment.
Good analysis, only caveat that I’d add is that if they did warp out to the middle of nowhere, Palpatine might sense Vader is in trouble and go pick him up. As much as he hated him, he did need him. And light jumps in Star Wars seen arbitrarily fast, even ignoring the problematic “light skipping” from ep 9. They go from core systems to the outer rim like it’s nothing; Voyager would have been home for dinner if they had SW engines.
Definitely fair, the Borg are on the low end of scary as far as space zombies go and I’d say at that point we’re kind of running up against the fact that the Force does what the plot needs.
Yeah, especially with the sequels. I think George Lucas at least came up with a system to make the powers consistent and give limitations, but then Disney’s producers threw that all out and just took the approach of “we need x to happen… Let’s just use the force!” They really leaned in to the “don’t think about it too much, it’s just a movie” approach to world and plot building.
I did think of one specific thing that the Borg are significantly better than the Empire at: time travel. Everyone and their mother in Trek does it, and the Borg do it while on the run in First Contact. Meanwhile, (spoilers for a show that ended 6 years ago) the Emperor’s desire+inability to control a force-based time nexus is a subplot in Rebels to the point where he decides his best option is to try parleying with the heroes. So, if Vader became a persistent threat the Collective’s best chance would be to zip into the past and kill/assimilate child Anakin./
All that said, any ideas as to how this might work really falls apart when you look at temporal mechanics across universes. Trek canonically has a fluid (though resilient) timeline, this was stated onscreen in SNW. What little we see in Rebels indicates that Star Wars has a single stable timeline (one character survives a duel in Season 2 this way), and you can argue that this squares with Force precognition (including most notably the clear and unambiguous visions courtesy of the Mortis Gods in TCW).
That makes rebels sound more interesting. Not sure why but the descriptions on Disney+ made it seem dry and I haven’t gotten around to starting it. I like media that plays with time travel. And I think Ahsoka is in it, my favorite Jedi/non-jedi force user.
Watching through her namesake show and I love that when she was talking about her apprentice’s anger, she didn’t go into a lecture about the dark side like Yoda would. IMO the Jedi fear of the dark side was a huge blind spot (and I really wish Disney hadn’t gotten rid of the original post OT storyline where Luke turns to the dark side and then turns back when he doesn’t want to follow orders because the dark side wasn’t the one way path the Jedi thought it was… Instead of the whole “Ben might turn, better kill him!” they replaced it with).
But yeah, I think the Borg really personifies the whole idea that once a civilization gets to type II, it won’t likely ever go extinct. I’m not sure if either of them are technically type II, but the Borg are much closer than the Empire was. If the question was “who would win an all out war” IMO the answer is unquestionably the Borg. I’m having a hard time thinking of another sci-fi or fantasy faction that could take on the Borg in an all out war without some deux ex machina level abilities. Even the federation would probably fall if the Borg decided to focus all of their attention on a war with them, and that’s before any kind of time travel even enters the equation (though future federation might be a different situation). Though that’s with the caveat of the most recent series I’ve seen is Enterprise, no idea if anything in the more recent ones challenges that.