1900HOTDOG

Learning Day: The Useless Droid

Added 2022-06-10 12:00:06 +0000 UTC

Today we're going to read The Useless Droid, a fully illustrated pirate Star Wars children's book about sucking. It features the droid BB-8 doing things not quite interesting or lucrative enough for Disney's lawyers to notice.

The story opens on what some defense attorney will one day explain isn't the Millenium Falcon while a narrator mocks BB-8 for being absurd and useless.

This is broken English describing a shaky premise, normally two of my favorite things. But somehow this is triggering a need for Star Warsplaininig I didn't know I had in me. "Useless" is such a strange word for a Star Wars droid. They're like specialized appliances with human emotions. Just because you don't need to open a door or figure out what a moon ape is saying at this very moment doesn't make your droid useless. You don't call a crossbow useless just because your wife's boyfriend is already dead. Things come up!

When given an opportunity to explain why BB-8 is useless, the author only comes up with two reasons and three of them are stairs. Somehow they're familiar with the popular space adventure franchise Star Wars, but the thing that truly activated their imagination was how insecure the robots must feel watching the heroes carry packages. You don't have to collect the trading cards to know this ball is designed to co-pilot a fucking starfighter, not cry at mailmen. Have they not heard of R2D2, the garbage-can-shaped same goddamn thing?

Oh, so they have heard of R2D2. But somehow being propped up on roller skates makes R2 the nerd-pounding bully of the story. "Cuckball," R2D2 blooped chadly from his pussy-smashing port. "I have 4% more squirting rods than you," he brapped as he bypassed two moisture regulators at the same time, though BB-8 could not hear anything over the sounds of regulators' orgasmic bloops.

This book is too stupid to be possible. How do you risk seizure of your family's estate selling rogue Star Wars fiction when you don't even have your head wrapped around droids? Who wrote this?

Vivian Ice? Sorry if this punchline takes 29 words, but that's something a Tallahassee stripper would name her baby 9 months after getting her Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze original motion picture soundtrack signed. Wait, hold on, I know this person. "Vivian Ice" wrote a different insane kid's book, The Best Guide to Drawing Sexy Anime! Let's look at some of their other hits:

So that's a book about a guy named "Tony Stark" who makes some kind of "iron suit" along with their fourth manual for drawing sexy girls with your children. And I think that's Alice in Wonderland, only she's in a wheelchair and someone has rolled her into Snow White and the Seven Dwarves? The copy says, "Unfortunately, she was thrown away in a distant forest." So look, I don't know who this Vivian Ice person is. All I know is that English isn't their first language and they don't have a ton of respect for copyright law. And out of six books they wrote, four of them are about teaching your kids to draw naked titties and two of them are about how anyone who uses wheels instead of feet is garbage. That feels like enough to judge their character and creative passion. What I'm saying is whoever wrote The Useless Droid would abandon Star Wars fiction in a heartbeat if they could make money selling forest orphans to Nestlé.

Let's keep reading!

You know what else metal balls can't do? Be boats. There's an entire page where BB-8 laments not being able to swim or transport goods across lakes, going so far as to imagine how everyone would make fun of him if he drowned. Vivian Ice saw this roboball and thought, "Um, stupid! What if rivers!? STAIRS!?!?" and knew their book's outline was done. Unfortunately, it's around this point when Vivian found out they were wrong.

Aside from steps and water, Vivian had no idea how being a big metal ball might be useless. So here's a scene where BB-8 is sad he can't help Chewbacca fix a spaceship. And I don't know if you've seen the Star Wars films, but fixing spaceships is almost exactly what BB-8 was made for. He does it all the time during huge, pivotal moments of billion dollar movies. Canonically speaking, this is like writing a Muppets script where Gonzo asks his human lover what a chicken is. It's like publishing a Gremlins bath book. I don't care if you've only had Star Wars explained to you by the wolves who raised you; no one should be capable of being this wrong about space robots. "You fucking know how to do this," roared Chewie, probably.

So Vivian knows about BB-8's little flame arm. Which means they've at least seen a trailer. Or maybe they saw The Force Awakens right after a shovel fight? It doesn't matter. I feel like a science fiction bucket that produces a telescoping lighter for a cheap gag is visual shorthand for "there are so many damn Swiss army things inside this robot." Look, I admit I have a panty-drying amount of Star Wars knowledge. But if a starship landed and a sentient tool box rolled out to light your cigarette from one of its 800 hatches, you'd be an idiot to say, "That must be the only thing inside this pointless piece of shit. Go back to space, assholes! Come back when it doesn't take you 70 pounds of inoxium to make a cigarette lighter!"

BB-8 then spends a few pages in a room full of droid limbs to imagine how he'd look in them. I don't know droid taboos, but this has to be close to you or I breaking into a morgue to try on the human faces. Maybe not, but if you walked in on BB-8 rolling around in a graveyard of old protocol droid arms, it would at least feel like you caught him masturbating. Which is how I would describe this fantasy BB-8 has of all his friends holding him up for becoming Champion of Having Real Arms and Legs:

BB-8 keeps going with this fantasy. Not only could he carry things with his arms and legs, but that bitch R2D2 would be so jealous.

Again, the idea that Vivian Ice is familiar with both R2D2 and BB-8, but not that they're functionally the same thing is very frustrating to me. It's like Tom Berenger cursing the night for not making him Treat Williams. Or if you were born this century, it's like Selena Gomez crawling into a corpse and screaming, "Who's laughing now, Ariana Grande!?"

BB-8 is now 12 pages into a fantasy where his four extra limbs make that damn R2D2 sorry, and he finally snaps out of it when he overhears Rey, Finn, and Han Solo failing to start a campfire. "Durr, do I clap da stones together over here?" wonders the indelicately illustrated Finn.

"Just hit it with a lightsaber, you dumb shits. What is this, your first day of Star Wars?" you might be saying. It is an elegant solution for a more civilized age, but this book is way ahead of you:

Oh no, BB-8's unnamed friend's normally helpful "laser sword" is broken. It's a weirdly convenient plot point, but an even weirder attempt by Vivian Ice to suddenly try to fool Disney's content recognition software. You're two thirds through a book with a trademarked name in the title about one of the most recognizable characters in pop culture. Their lawyers aren't going to get to this page and say, "Wait, false alarm. This nameless female character has a laser sword. Which means this is a coincidence or those bastards covered their tracks too well."

You goddamn fucking stupid useless cuckball. You were just talking about your lighter arm! You rolled onto some dismembered robot limbs and literally said all you had was "one little arm that had a little flame at the end of it." It's one thing to not know the spaceship robot fixes spaceships, but it's another to say "All this robot can do is light fires, so he can't light a fire!" Vivian Ice, I never thought I'd say this, but maybe you should give up storytelling and go back to teaching kids how to draw thong panties.

It finally occurs to the author who thinks this droid can only do one thing that his flame could be used to light the campfire. BB-8's friends were so excited Vivian decided there was no reason to redraw them. The little useless droid showed them all, and it was as glorious as he imagined it:

It took a lot to get us here. A Star Wars author had to forget everything about Star Wars and a reader had to believe the only way to start a campfire in space was to ask a nearby Jedi and hope their lightsaber didn't break for no reason. But we made it, and the moral is how even something as pointless as a BB-series astromech with six tool-bay discs worth of arc welders and holoprojectors can find their moment to shine. Because BB-8 is a lot of things. Insecure, sure. A dead robot molester, absolutely. Below average swimmer? At least. But the one thing you can't say about BB-8 is that a children's author and pornography instructor always forgets he has a cigarette lighter. The End.