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It wimdy

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i was so sad, i drew a little bat so i wouldn’t be sad. and now i am no longer sad.

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“remember Peeta can camouflage himself because he’s a baker” said with a mocking tone makes me so mad because they completely misunderstand why he’s able to camouflage and why decorating cakes is mentioned in that context. Peeta was poor, a different kind of poor from the seam, but poor nonetheless. he didn’t have money for paints nor canvases. he is an artist, he creates, he uses his paintings after the first hunger games as his therapy. he loves painting, so he used whatever was available to him to show his artist soul. he was able to decorate cakes and pastries as if they were canvases because they were going to gain a profit from it, but I’m certain that in his free time he probably used the elements to draw and paint, these being water and mud and flowers and whatever he could find. plus he received official training the days before the games.

please learn how to read, stop skimming through pages to fulfil your yearly quota of books read.

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I feel like I've seen stories and posts where Leia learns to recognize the complexity and nuance of Anakin's situation enough to sympathize with him and even forgive him, but I hardly ever see it go the OTHER WAY when it comes to Padme.

While it's entirely possible that she learned about Padme, both as a political figure and even as "her mother" (even if she was never given a name in order to connect the two figures), it was likely always in a positive way. Padme was influential and kind and strong and fierce and beloved. Her mother was loving and fearless and wise.

But then she has to learn who her father was and a LOT of what she believes about her mother has to become really questionable. How did someone she's only ever known as strong and wise and kind end up falling love with someone who became a monster? How did the woman that Obi-Wan Kenobi described as DISCERNING not see through someone like Anakin Skywalker? As sympathetic as she knows Luke views him to be, the traits that made Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader wouldn't have come out of nowhere. At best, she has to assume that her mother was just lied to, same as Obi-Wan was perhaps. That she knew he struggled, but not that he had THAT kind of darkness in him.

And then somehow, maybe through Luke who perhaps started asking questions to Anakin's ghost in order to learn more about the mother the Larses hadn't been able to really tell him about, she learns that that wasn't true. That her mother had known Anakin could and had killed children. That her mother had once been scared of her own husband. That she had gone against the rules of her own government and married a Jedi and then lied about it to keep her job.

And it's DEVASTATING. How does she reconcile these two (maybe even three) versions of Padme Amidala she's now heard about? The loving woman who had just wanted to be a mother. The fierce leader who fought for the helpless. And the selfish wife who lied and covered up a massacre and stayed with a man who frightened her when he was angry. Which one was true? Surely they can't ALL be true. Surely one of them has to be less true than the others.

But of course, that's not quite how it works. People are complicated. People who do good things can also be selfish in other ways. People can make mistakes when believing that they're trying to help. Padme Amidala was many things to many people. She's not really sure that Anakin Skywalker was the person who knew her best, not with what she's heard from Luke at least. So she goes to Naboo. She learns what she can about Queen Amidala there. She meets the Naberries and her aunt and her grandparents and cousins are still alive and she hears the stories THEY have to tell about the girl they'd known and how they'd lost her. She meets what's left of the Amidalans and hears about the Queen and the Senator from the people who'd been trained to BECOME her if necessary. All of them have different things to say.

Maybe they're all real. The passionate little girl who just wanted to help people. The steely Queen who wanted more than anything to never go through a war again and was willing to fight for that ideal. The desperate tired woman who gave all of herself to her people, her planet, and her galaxy and so the only thing she had left that was solely her own was a secret marriage with a dangerous man who told her he couldn't live without her. She starts to see the threads that tie all the Padmes together, the triumphs and the losses, the path that led to her doom at the hands of the husband she'd thought she'd loved.

She'll never be able to speak to Padme the way Luke can speak to Anakin, she'll never be able to know how Padme truly felt about everything that happened to her, how Padme feels about who her children became. But she thinks she can finally accept that her mother had been a complicated person. A good one sometimes, usually even, but also a selfish one who might've helped enable the rise of a monster who had ended up destroying Leia's home and family. She thinks she can love the woman she's only able to know through other people's stories and memories, but she hopes she can learn from Padme's mistakes and not follow her mother's footsteps to her own doom.

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People are SLEEPING on the most interesting Leia & Padme comparisons because there's so much focus on Leia being "like Anakin" because she gets annoyed sometimes and Padme being this perfect moral beacon of truth and justice despite all of her very canonical lies and cover-ups and obstructing of justice.

If Luke is the Jedi that Anakin should've been, then Leia is the LEADER that Padme should've been.

Padme is a hypocrite, proclaiming that all people deserve basic decency and the right to safety, but at the same time allowing Anakin to get away with a mass murder with no consequences by covering it up.

Leia doesn't even let Han get away with being a little bit of an asshole, there's no way she'd let him get away with mass murder. She holds everyone around her to a higher standard, believing in the best of them but also but refusing to accept excuses for cowardice and selfishness.

Padme talks so much about wanting the war to end, but then allows one of the opposition's biggest generals go free just to get Anakin back because she cares about him, causing the war to continue to go on for even longer.

Leia lets Luke sacrifice himself because she knows it's possibly the only way they might have a victory and beat the Empire, even though she knows what he is to her and loves him. She knows what has to be done and respects the choice Luke is making and would never condemn their efforts just to keep him with her.

Padme's story parallels Anakin's, she devolves as the narrative goes on, until she's barely a shell of the person she used to be. That strength and moral clarity she showed as a Queen is entirely gone, leaving only a scared woman pleading with a murderer to come back to her.

Leia's story parallels Luke's, she gains more and more strength and clarity as the narrative moves forward. The bossy young woman we first met has become a confident rebel leader who knows she doesn't have to harden her heart to be strong.

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kitty car 🐱

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Like fighting a mirror

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antique.alchemist : instagram

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If you know you know.

... Extrapolating from incomplete data be like...

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this is genius!!!!

performer: @abby_seim 

video source:  @josey__terry

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I know we as the audience understand/know that Anakin had been doing the slide into Eviltown for a loooong while before his actual fall to the Dark Side (especially considering how many times Star Wars was like LISTEN 👏 TO 👏 THE 👏 IMPERIAL 👏 MARCH 👏 HERE in the PT and TCW). And, while obviously it’s not like Obi-Wan didn’t notice at ALL that Anakin was possibly/likely keeping a lot of things to himself that he refused to talk about, seemed troubled, was super close to the shady Chancellor, etc, it’s almost hard not to laugh (through the pain) at how MORBIDLY HILARIOUSLY OVER THE TOP Anakin’s fall to the Dark Side must have felt to Obi-Wan when he got back from Utapau. 

Like…they JUST had that Nice Chat 30 seconds before Obi-Wan left! Obi-Wan told Anakin he was very proud of him! Anakin apologized for being kind of an ass lately! They were smiling! Maybe the war was gonna end soon! And here Obi-Wan is, like half a day later, and he comes home TO THAT. THAT. He must have been so goddamned confused because HOW DID WE GET HERE FROM THERE IN THE SPAN OF LIKE 12-24 HOURS FOR FUCK’S SAKE?? He leaves Anakin home alone for barely long enough to watch a few back-to-back episodes of his favorite soap opera, and THIS happens?! 

I can’t even imagine the whiplash of those first few weeks in the desert. Even with the benefit of now knowing that it was Palpatine all along, he must have had absolutely no goddamn idea what the hell had entirely even just happened. Anakin never even explained to him the whole “I thought Padme was gonna die and this twisted old creep promised me that he’d help me save her” bit! All Anakin gives him is some vague shouting about how he knows the Jedi were planning to take over (which obviously Obi-Wan knows is a lie). So there he is, in the desert with a newborn, and OBI-WAN STILL DOESN’T EVEN ENTIRELY KNOW WHY ANAKIN WAS EVIL WHEN HE GOT HOME, AND THIS IS SOMEHOW THE SADDEST AND FUNNIEST THING EVER TO ME. 😂😭 

Does Obi-Wan just assume Anakin got high on the Dark Side and fell for no reason other than a power trip? Does he think Sidious literally DID somehow convince that idiot that the Jedi were somehow actually hatching a plan to take over the government (which required CHILD MURDER to be carried out in response), even though Anakin surely understands at least on SOME level that this is all bullshit because even HE’S not THAT dumb? ANAKIN WAS CLEARLY STILL A JEDI LAST TIME OBI-WAN SAW HIM (he was literally POUTING AND HAVING A SHIT FIT ABOUT NOT BEING MADE A JEDI MASTER FOR GOD’S SAKE) AND HERE THEY ARE, POSSIBLY ONE ENTIRE WEEKDAY LATER, ON TOP OF A DAMN LAVA RIVER AND ANAKIN IS YELLING AND CRYING ABOUT HOW THE JEDI ARE EVIL. I’m somehow dying laughing and crying. Poor Obi-Wan. 

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via indiarosecrawford

Frog Paints a Water Lily Pond 🪷🎨🐸

𝑓ₒᵣ ⲕᵢ𝑛𝑔 ₐ𝑛𝑑 𝑐ₒ𝑡𝑡ₐ𝑔ₑ

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bread so tasty. bread so nice. toast it once. toast it twice.