It does deflect/disperse some of the energy, how much depends on what kind of plot armor you are wearing beneath it.

Yeah, to add on to this:

At least back in the 90s/00s, the rough canon explanation from various books and such is roughly…

The ‘lasers’ are actually coherent ‘bolts’ of highly energetic plasma, ie, gas excited/heated to the point that electrons are breaking out of their atomic orbitals.

The explanation is that ‘laser’ weapons, and ‘turbolaser’ canons… by some arcane process, as the plasma travels through the barrel of the weapon, it is somehow encased in, or enveloped by, or transformed into having a very strong, self contained psuedo-magnetic forcefield, that keeps the plasma from just immediately expanding in all directions upon exiting the barrel, and keeps it vaguely spatially constrained and coherent.

It is supposed to be a sort of analogy to how rifling in a conventional firearm makes the bullet much more accurate… and it also kind of intuitively thus makes sense that a big, fuck off huge barrel, can throw a larger projectile downrange, and faster.

Its also sort of how a rail gun or coil gun works in real life, but not really.

In universe, plasma bolts do not travel at light speed, they also do not travel forever: they dissapate and sort of evaporate or fizzle out after travelling a certain distance, and this generally occurs more quickly from smaller weapons than it does from larger weapons.

Basically, their ‘coherence field’ is only stable for a short time, sort of like a gel capsule for a drug dissolves in your stomach after a certain amount of time.

This is again another rough analogy to real world ballistics with solid bullets or shells… irl, longer barrels are able to increase the kinetic emergy imparted to a projectile, thus increasing its muzzle velocity, thus increasing its effective range.

Ammo is also a thing that exists in a lot of older Star Wars canon. A blaster will eventually run out of the… plasma fuel, which is often contained in essentially a magazine… and technically, all blasters also need either the rough equivalent of a starter engine, or an independent battery/‘ignition’ system to actually do the process of transforming the ‘ammo’ into a plasma bolt, and accelerate it out of the barrel and cohere it into a bolt.

I also recall Tibanna gas, from Cloud City, being specifically mentioned as a primary component of blaster ammunition in at least one of the Rogue Squadron games, though it apparently gets more complicated with different colored plasma bolts essentially being made of different blends of different kinds of input materials having different properties and only working properly in certain kinds of blasters, again, a sort of rough analogy to different calibers of bullets and barrels and chambers.

…

Light sabers follow a similar overall principle of ‘plasma bolt contained by some kind of coherence field’… but they use totally different internals to generate both the plasma and coherence field, and can seemingly just… do this nearly infinitely, never needing to ‘reload’, never running out of energy.

Those internals?

Magic (kyber) crystals and an extremely esoteric, basically electronic circuit design.

This is why so much emphasis is placed on a Jedi constructing their own lightsaber as a fundamental rite of passage:

Every lightsaber is bespoke, unique, you have to be essentially supernaturally intelligent, ie, sufficiently in tune with the Force, to be able to comprehend how to actually construct one… and indeed, there are at least a few instances or mentions of where someone attempts this, fucks it up, and their malformed lightsaber basically blows up in their face.

You can also see the ‘coherence’ principle at play as a light saber… well the ‘blade’ grows out of the hilt, as the coherence field expands… but it never disconnects, it never expels the plasma bolt away from the hilt.

…

So, if everything, lightsaber ‘blades’ and plasma ‘bolts’ are both encapsulated by some sort of pseudo magnetic coherence field, it makes some amount ofintuitive sense that if you get them close to each other, they will repel, deflect, ricochet.

… But, this cannot be just the electromagnetic force as we understand it in our world, because… well, that shit doesn’t actually make any sense by our understanding of physics.

We have no idea how to create a self sustaining magnetic field that can be projected away from the source of what created the field and just… keeps sustaining itself on its own…

And EM is just + or -, either attactive or repulsive, so we would expect to see say a + bolt and a + lightsaber be capable of deflection… but a + bolt and a - saber, or even a + saber and a - saber… well those should actually be attractive, so you’d end up with a bolt that curves toward a light saber and then combines with it, or even two sabers being drawn toward each other and then merging.

…

In conclusion: Star Wars is science fantasy in the sense that it seems to operate under a… not completely alien, but significantly distinct set of basic laws of physics… you’d probably have to be a Jedi or Sith to truly understand how they actually work =P

We don’t need to split hairs - ‘sci-fi fantasy’ or ‘science fantasy’ is a real genre and common enough term.

You can’t stress that enough. I love sci-fi, but I never really fancied Star Wars.

Now, as a dad, I rewatch the movies and replay scenes with my son, and the similarity with fantasy action movies strikes me. For example, the beautiful display of alien species and habitats.

Space opera, specifically.

Laser swords and biological powers beyond our current grasp of the science behind them define it as science fiction.

I get it’s the quirky pickme trend to argue over this and I agree about the fantasy elements but don’t be the ‘actually’ guy in the room.