#VERSE. ( prequel trilogy. iii. )

[sufferingfcrged]

@intcthatgoodnight​ / obi wan sent a meme.

[ HESITATE ]:     startled by a sudden hug from the receiver, the sender pauses for a moment, before hesitantly returning the embrace.

A MEME I READ ENTIRELY WRONG AT FIRST GLANCE BUT I ALREADY HAD THE REPLY WRITTEN SO PRETEND THE ROLES WERE REVERSED ON THIS ONE AND I’LL REPLY TO THE CORRECT MEME WITH A  YOUNGER ANI LATER ON SORRY.

      It would have been an understatement to say that the Jedi Master’s movements caught the Knight off guard -- there was an initial reaction of stiffness, partially brought on by the sheer unexpectedness of the gesture, and partially out of an unfamiliarity with touch, especially one meant to soothe, or reassure, as openly as a hug was oft meant to.   And then, a shift, his own arms raising to tuck around Obi Wan, albeit on the side of awkward, a light pat against his master’s back, though he could not deny there was a rush of warmth in his chest that made him grateful for the unexpected gesture.  “All right, so, how hard did you hit your head back there, Master?” It was asked lightly, in jest, but there was a kindness and perhaps even a softness to it that their jests might sometimes lack.

[chao-chachaslide]

Sonic the Hedgehog (film): The Complete Saga

I wrote this in the pre-tumblr days (2020) but I think it's about time I returned to it

Sonic the Hedgehog 1 (2020)

Your average intro movie. Just Sonic and Eggman. Essentially Sonic 1 (the game) but a lot more fleshed out and San Francisco.

Sonic 2: Sonic Vs Knuckles (2022)

This is looking to be a adaptation of the Sonic 2-Sonic 3&K arc of the games. Maybe we'll get a Death Egg and a joke about Eggman being a Star Wars fan or something (plausible since we've already seen Sonic reference Obi-Wan). This marks the debut of Tails, Knuckles and the M.E. It also seems to have a lot of SA1/2 references. Remember this for later.

Sonic Movie 3 that will inevitably happen (feb 22 edit: it inevitably happened)

So as I literally just mentioned - Sonic Adventure 2 references. Just judging by the fact G.U.N is here (and a *possible* SHtH Commander), it's very likely that Shadow will show up at some point. But we seem to be starting subtle in SvsK so I don't think the 3rd film will actually feature him. Maybe in a post-credits scene, but not in the actual picture. Besides we're still missing one of the Core4: Amy Rose. My theory is that this will be a vague Sonic CD adaptation, introducing Amy and everyone's favourite angsty mecha, Metal Sonic (who could very easily be powered by one of Sonic's quills). We can probably eliminate the time travel aspect of CD but I reckon this could be the place for a Death Egg if we don't get one in SvsK. I mean there is a certain time traveller in the cast but I think it's a little early for him to show up.

Sonic movie 4 that will probably happen

This is where I think a vague SA2 adaptation could happen. It's got enough time for build up with 2 films before it, and we will've gotten the Core4 + Metal out of the way already. Now the main thing is, how are they going to adapt the story? The problem here is killing off kids on-screen, amongst literally everything else that happened on the ark. It will be extremely difficult to adapt Shadow's backstory without getting a 12 rating. It is possible to have heavy hitting plots in media aimed at a younger audience (Into the Spider-Verse is one example, with a few on screen deaths), but what happened to Maria and Gerald is really deep in a anti-military way and it doesn't adapt well into a kids movie. But also consider how the Star Wars prequel trilogy goes U, PG, 12 on their ratings and in Episode III they purge children on screen, as well as the whole trilogy and TV show spinoff having heavy political plot. Obviously this is different but it wouldn't surprise me if we get a 12-rated sonic film. There are 12-rated games. On another note I would expect Rouge to show up at this point.

Sonic movie 5 that could happen? Sonic 4 Episode II? SCU??

I don't know honestly. Blaze? Silver? Cream? All 3? Idk. Blaze can easily be written in, with the Sol Dimension instead being an alternate planet like the ones Sonic had on his map in the first movie. Silver is a little harder. I mean it's Sonic though, anything is possible. Even time travel. Cream is by far the easiest lol; I could definitely see her appearing at some point.

How do I end this post...

Uhh everyone manifest Sonic Cinematic Universe

[mangohub]

expected updates timeline for @affcgato​!

please note, any dates are deadlines for me to get my shit together & not hard limits.

Star Wars, p2 (redux)

I hard originally included this in p1 but apparently I underestimated how much time I’d be spending on the prequels so uh whoops. Jyn will officially be added! & I’ll start laying the ground work for Leia a little more firmly. 

Expected: May - June. It’s going to take a while because after Episode III, I have no less than fourteen fucking novels to get through before I start Rebels. 

Muses affected: Leia will be worked on slowly in terms of her pre-canon & original trilogy verses. Poe has skipped the queue & is officially on the multi as of this time. 

Canon bracket: everything between Episode II; Attack of the Clones through Episode VI; The Return of the Jedi. ( incl. The Bad Batch, releasing May 4! )

Minor unrelated updates during this time: 

The Old Guard’s newest installment, Tales will start releasing in April

The Falcon & The Winter Soldier will run from March through April.

I’ll be reading the Shadow & Bone trilogy between SW novels to give myself a break.  

Loki, starting June 11.

Star Wars, p3

holy shit I am so tired send help. FINALLY I will start moving into the sequel trilogy. this will finish out Leia, & also will finally mean I can get the info for Ben / Kylo officially up on the blog JK just like Poe the fucker jumped the queue. 

Expected: July/August! I finally finish Episode VI on the literal first of July, so fucking finally. 

Muses affected: Leia ( will be fully finished & added ), Kylo/Ben ( will be started & hopefully finished in one go ). Poe has already been added, the fuck. 

Canon bracket: everything from Shattered Empire 1-4 through Episode IX; The Rise of Skywalker, to include released books in the Aftermath trilogy.

Minor unrelated updates during this time:

Black Widow. Likely will not directly influence other MCU muses, but may provide further context for worldbuilding. 

MISC muses! 

this chunk requires very little in terms of me reading or watching literally anything so there’s a chance I might slip a few of these updates in between all of the others, but largely I just feel like this will be a great break after the canon marathon that was star wars.

Expected: September into October. I don’t have a concrete date for finishing the sequel trilogy, but that doesn’t have nearly the canon novel companions the others do so I should be sliding into this endeavor around here. 

Muses affected: Daphne Blake, Layla Williams, & Brock Rumlow.

What it will be: Daphne, & Layla will be officially added if they haven’t snuck on already, Brock may also get an update to his Resident Evil verse. Other muses may end up with verses, if there’s a request for it.

Note: some of this might end up happening concurrent with the OG & Sequel trilogies after I finish the fourteen novel sprint immediately at the end of the prequels, it just depends on my headspace entirely. 

Note: this will coincide with September 03; Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City.

Reading: the only reading I’ll have during this period is the 7 short novels encompassing the Resident Evil series, & they’re relatively short. Unlike SW, I’ve also read every single one of them before so it’s mostly skimming for details.

Norah & her weird niche canon + Ersken

Despite not being an OC, Norah will be treated as such, & her information will be  updated to the blog as needed while I read through The Meg series + Goliath for her,  then I’m trading Sci Fi out for Fantasy & delving back into Ersken’s lore.

Expected: Full TBA. At this rate it is what it is. 

Muses affected: Norah, largely, but also Ersken will get some additional lore as I re-read through two books that encapsulate some of his core lore.

other updates of note!

November 02: Queen’s Hope. potential canon update for Sabé & Leia.

December: The Book of Boba Fett

TBD: Andor

TBD: Obi-Wan Kenobi

TBD: The Acolyte

March 2022: Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

May 2022: Thor: Love and Thunder

July 2022: Black Panther II

November 2022: Captain Marvel 2

2023: Rogue Squadron (SW)

TBD: Moon Knight

TBD: Secret Invasion

TBD: Wakanda series

currently unscheduled!

the witcher (s2 + novels)

shadow & bone (novels + netflix series)

a court of thorns and roses (series)

scooby apocalypse comic

kate kane comic sprint (paused)

MCU comic sprint: Tony

MCU comic sprint: Bucky

MCU comic sprint: Loki

MCU comic sprint: Steve (for supplemental info for Brock)

[chamerionwrites]

“I’d been thinking about this vaguely after Dooku’s whole spiel at the end of attack of the clones, which he seems to believe - but then the narrative tells us on a meta level is just ttly fake. (and also, lucasfilm, why tell us there were heroes on both sides in the revenge of the sith crawl and then NOT give us any heroes apart from the guys who try to make peace with the republic?). Cassian’s kind of a great way to snatch that narrative back from the jaws of lucasfilm having dug themselves into a spot where they have to have the republic be the heroes in the republic-separatist conflict…”

YES. Exactly.

My own Separatist feels stem largely from the fact that - while I’m not as well versed in the Star Wars EU as I think you are - Revenge of the Sith took me on this emotional roller-coaster ride between outright scoffing at the cheese and being really, deeply emotionally moved in spite of myself, and I’ve been trying to reconcile those contradictory feelings about the prequels ever since. They have so much potential, they really do. There’s a Greek-tragedy feel to the last film in particular. I think that’s why they get so much hate; it’d be easier to just shrug if the story were a mess from beginning to end. At any rate, the more I try to put my finger on exactly what’s wrong with them (aside from the dialogue), the more I feel that a lot of the weirdness of those films stems from their telling a fundamentally political story that repeatedly fails to engage with its own politics.

I mean - all art is political. But the plot of episodes I-III is, in its most basic building blocks, a political intrigue. And yet, as you point out re: the RotS crawl and Dooku’s spiel, any political complexity in the films is mostly an informed attribute. It’s definitely there if you care to look below the surface, but often it feels like that’s more by way of accident than deliberate subtext, or else that the narrative is confused about exactly what subtext it’s trying to get across.

For example: of the trilogy AotC is the one I find well-nigh unwatchable, but one scene that’s always stuck with me is Yoda turning up on Geonosis with the clone army. They literally play the Imperial March as the clone troopers board their ships, and then put the audience in the position of rooting for them. Of complicity. The cognitive dissonance, especially for those of us who had those iconic stormtrooper silhouettes seared into our brains at a very young age, is…intense. Likewise, they set up this fascinating ambiguity around Dooku when he’s first introduced, because the audience is well aware that he’s telling the truth about the Senate being controlled by a Sith lord. That deeply unsettling we have met the enemy and he is us vibe is one thing the prequels do really, really well. And then they go and SQUANDER it by making every onscreen separatist a caricature of cackling villainy. That’s not just bad storytelling - it lets the Republic off the ethical hook in a way that I find more and more troubling in its real-world implications the older I get, the more so because I don’t think that was Lucasfilm’s intent (if anything the films were critical of contemporary American policy). The way the narrative handles Dooku bothers me, because by making his statements about the Sith influence in the Senate an attempt at manipulating Obi-Wan they allow the audience to dismiss his critique of the Republic’s corruption, too.

Maybe that’s not deliberate, but it feels too close to the sort of people who will quote Orwell out of context (”One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship”) to cynically condemn all revolutionary movements as nothing more than attempted power grabs. I’m with you in reading the Republic/Empire as commentary on the United States, and as an American who’s spent a lot of time traveling and living in the so-called developing world, being asked to take for granted that the Republic is the good side here feels to me like an eerily familiar blind spot, the sort of unquestioned exceptionalism that I often encounter in all corners of the American political spectrum (not just from the, um…Trade Federation types).

None of which is to say that politics in fiction should track 1:1 with real-world events (in fact, they probably shouldn’t). But when the narrative repeatedly disengages just before reaching a point that might prove challenging or uncomfortable to the intended audience, it starts to feel like either malice or blindness. And yet the fact remains that Dooku DOES have a point. The Senate IS controlled by a Sith Lord. The danger to the Republic is from within, not from without. We have already met the enemy, and he is us. Which, death of the author or no, leaves me throwing up my hands and wondering whether that was the message they intended all along and simply failed to convey clearly enough, or if they just stumbled onto all of this interesting subtext by accident. At any rate I would have liked to hear a character who wasn’t established as (1)a silver-tongued liar (2)callously cruel beneath his civilized veneer and (3)a Sith lord himself make the Separatist case, at some point. Especially when it’s so evident - blindingly so in supplementary materials, but there in the films too if you care to see it - that the Republic really DOES have serious issues. And especially when I think the fact that their political intrigue doesn’t engage very deeply with politics puts a TON of responsibility for explaining Anakin’s fall to the dark side on the love story, in a way that I think ends up being really detrimental to the plot and characterization both.

So yeah, in addition to finding the character incredibly compelling in his own right, Cassian Andor reads to me like a chance (whether deliberately written as such or not) to save the movies from themselves re: their treatment of the Separatists, in much the same way that Galen Erso reads a bit like the writers saying SHUT UP SHUT UP IT’S NOT A SILLY PLOT DEVICE IT WAS SABOTAGE. I’m with you that the character opens up an interesting avenue to explore both the complexities of the Separatist conflict and real-world examples of grassroots struggles against real oppression getting hijacked by people interested in making power grabs, too.

(And of course, it helps that I have a longstanding interest in history in general as well as both partisan resistance movements and Latin American history in particular, dating to well before I spent a few years living there and not exactly tempered by the experience. Also a serious weakness for morally grey-ish characters who are agonized and conflicted over their own moral choices. And emotional repression and trauma and burnout. And characters who devote themselves to causes to the point of wrapping their identity up in those causes to an unhealthy degree. And spy stories. So Cassian-Andor-as-played-spectacularly-by-Diego-Luna is catnip to me on any number of levels.)

Oh boy that got long. You did say you wanted to hear about my feels.

"because let's be real cassian andor was fighting space colonialism before the empire was the empire, cassian andor is a space zapatista fight me" HI I AM SO GLAD TO SEE SOMEONE ELSE SHARES MY VERY SPECIFIC CASSIAN ANDOR POLITICAL AFFILIATIONS HEADCANON

HI I AM ALSO GLAD TO FIND A HEADCANON TWIN

tbh my specific wording there was mostly in honor of Diego Luna, but just generally speaking there’s…a whole lotta resonance in seeing a Latin American man as the narrative face of Star Wars’ anti-imperialist revolutionary movement, especially when the character is (given what we know of his backstory) in a position to be heavily critical not only of the in-your-face fascist allegory that is the Empire, but also the much more insidiously oppressive - and familiar, to the average viewer - policies of the Republic that preceded it. I have feels about it. (Though I’m sorry to say they’re probably not very coherent right now, because my brain is half-asleep.)

[scifiandscary]

October Coast just released a first look at The Time War to a few select sites, and Sci-Fi & Scary was happy to be one of them. Read on for more information on The Time War, due for release in 2018, and enjoy the released stills! A nice bit of circumstance that this is running right after our published interview with Tracey Birdsall about Rogue Warrior: Robot Fighter!

First Look: The Time War

Daniel Logan (Boba Fett from the Star Wars prequels) and Aaron Jacques have joined the cast of The Time War, the next sci-fi actioner from the team behind this Summer’s Rogue Warrior : Robot Fighter.

The film, written/directed by Neil Johnson and starring Tracey Birdsall, features a superlative cast of sci-fi veterans including the aforesaid Logan, Star Trek III’s Stephen Manley and The Hobbit trilogy’s William Kircher. The late Christopher Lee provides narration for the movie.

During World War 2, the Nazis were alleged to be experimenting with Time Travel Technology.  What if they were successful?

The Time War shows the consequences of Adolf Hitler traveling through time and re-writing history.  Rather than taking a campy-cartoony stance on the notion, The Time War takes a more serious, scientific-based approach to the consequences of time travel and the theoretical multi-verse.  As Adolf Hitler starts to re-write his genetics, he learns that cause and effect are not as simple as it may seem on paper.  After dealing with multiple versions of himself, his greatest nemesis is his own daughter Dijanne (played by Tracey Birdsall) who takes on his legacy of empire building and creates an army of one, from various versions of herself from across a billion different time lines.

The resulting Time War spans thousands of years and lays waste to the earth following a devastating atomic war.  Time travel and rewriting history are heavily complex notions, and Dijanne, daughter of Adolf Hitler, discovers that she is the center of the universal destruction that threatens to extinguish all life from planet earth.

Logan, best known for his portrayal of young Boba Fett from the 2002 film Star Wars: Episode II : Attack of the Clones, will play Mordred, the leader of the Rephaim  – genetically modified soldiers created by Adolf Hitler, who are attempting a military coup. Jacques, last seen in Johnson’s Rogue Warrior: Robot Fighter, plays the character Ector.

Daniel Logan – The Time War

Film is currently in production USA and UK.

  The Time War is due for release 2018.

Click any of the images below to view them full-size.

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Daniel Logan – The Time War

Tracey Birdsall in The Time War

Daniel Logan & Aaron Jacques in The Time War

Tracey Birdsall & Daniel Logan in The Time War

Tracey Birdsall & William Kircher – The Time War

Tracey Birdsall in The Time War

First Look: The Time War starring @traceybirdsall1 , @Daniel_Logan , and @WilliamKircher - Courtesy of @OctoberGang October Coast just released a first look at The Time War to a few select sites, and Sci-Fi & Scary was happy to be one of them.