#people are complex and flawed

[valenteal]

Just binged The Acolyte and I am heartbroken that it’s cancelled. Like I know I am late to the party but I had kinda given up on Disney Star Wars halfway through Bad Batch s1 because it just felt like they were milking the cash cow to death by then. And the general consensus on the show appeared to be bad. APPEARED being the keyword. Because really the media was just amplifying the hate because it’s a lot more surprising than “oh ANOTHER really good show that expands on the Star Wars universe is out!” Like, I wasn’t hugely invested in what they had going on with The Mandalorian, just because post Empire stuff isn’t super appealing to me. I’m an Old Republic girl, have been since I was like 10. High Republic is different but it really allows for exploration of who the Jedi are, independent of their war against the Sith, which will always skew the narrative.

The Acolyte allows us to see the Jedi as they are instead being in a consistently high pressure environment that forces quick action and therefore decisions that can be easily defended. The show exposes the Jedi for what they are, people, who make choices, who make mistakes, who don’t always agree, who are flawed. The enemies they fight are not pure evil. They don’t seek domination or control over others. They don’t torture innocents. They simply are, and they are in a way that caused the Jedi to deem them a threat. The Jedi started the conflict, Mae, and later Osha, and to an unverified degree maybe Qimir, just respond. Maybe Mae went looking for the conflict again after it had passed, but in a way that was more akin to hunting escaped criminals to make them account for their crimes than just senseless rage. She wanted them to atone, to face what they had done rather than hide from it. Yes she was violent but she only went looking for people she saw as responsible, people who chose to be involved, who chose violence and deception.

The Jedi in The Acolyte are a religious institution with government ties and presumably funding who have unchecked power that they attempt to keep only for themselves. They falsely believe that the only way to use the Force safely is their own and they never question whether or not that’s true, or those that do are expelled or killed for questioning it. In actuality there are many ways to access the Force, just as many as there are minds connected to it. There are numerous examples of different ways to channel it, different disciplines and mindsets, the Je’daii, the Dai Bendu, the Voss, Witches, even the Knights of Zakkul, all used the Force in ways that aligned with neither Light nor Dark philosophies. The Jedi’s refusal to acknowledge that their way isn’t the only way is what led to their downfall. They made enemies where there were none and pushed all the Force sensitives who didn’t become Jedi into the arms of the Sith.

Not to mention the cult tactics that keep their own members reliant on being part of the Order, which The Acolyte was able to subtly showcase with Osha. After leaving the Order she had no transferable skills or money and was forced to take on a job that was both dangerous and illegal. That illustrates the situation all Jedi are in very well. Follow the religious teachings of the Order and the actual orders and assignments given by the Masters or strike out completely on your own, with no money or close friends or marketable skills to help support you, oh and don’t use become a rouge Force User or you’ll end up in prison or dead.

Yes the Jedi mean well, but at the end of the day they are just a collection of people. Powerful people, yes, but still people. They feel and think and have individual personalities and limitations and desires and values. They are people. People. Nothing more and nothing less.

And The Acolyte is the first canon story that truly explores all that means. I think it’s a wonderful story that allows its characters to be, rather than constantly fight for the ability to be. The intensity and the stakes being lower allows for a clearer understanding that I really appreciated.

[lavender-wiitch]

what compels me the most about jmart in TMA is how they’re the exact contrary of the “fall in love in every universe” trope. no, they’re not fated to meet, much less to even remotely like each other. they met under these extremely weird and specific circumstances from their world, and as jon himself said, if weirder circumstances didn’t happen they wouldn’t even get along. tmagp furthers this by making a point to showcase how, in protocolverse, they lived and died without ever knowing of each other’s existence.

they don’t fall in love in every universe. they only have this one. this one chance to make it work.

and they’re not perfect! they’re fucked up! they’re messy!

their communication is flawed, martin is jealous and manipulative, jon is too emotionally distant, they are each affected by their own traumas and it bleeds into their relationship, and they keep trying! and failing! and trying! until their tragic end. and you know what? that makes them EVEN MORE COMPELLING both as a couple and as characters!

we don’t need to ignore these aspects of their romance to make them interesting, and i’d argue that these complex factors and their flaws are the exact things that DO make them interesting. they had one shot, and it was flawed as hell, but they did their best to make the most of it under incredible stressors, such as the literal apocalypse. is that a less interesting kind of romance story than the others, just because they’re flawed and not always healthy and not at all fated? do we have to pretend they’re something they’re not to be enjoyable?

[scliffe]

I know most of us (including me) laughed (quite a lot) on this scene because; Earl Ciel “Sebastian-Kill-Them-All” Phantomhive of all people, is saying something like this about killing people? It sounds so fake and ridiculous right? Hypocritical, even. But I also think it’s rather empathetic of Ciel to say this in front of the Weston boys because he understands that these boys did not murder out of evil intent; it was a crime of passion, not premeditated. I’m sure that in Ciel’s eyes, these upperclassmen of his are still much more innocent than he is—and so when he speaks to them, he is speaking to “normal people”, not serial murderers. But while Ciel does not see the prefects as evil people, he doesn’t infantilize them either. He does not empathize with them trying to justify their actions; because things like school values or reputation is not a worthy cause for these boys to kill someone over. At the same time Ciel may not personally care about the lives of Derrick Arden and the others, but he does not think students should turn into murderers over such menial issues.

In comparison, when he speaks to Joker in BOC, he was unfiltered and candid—he’s speaking of something he personally believes; that deep cynicism and distrust in humanity. Unlike the Weston students, Joker’s actions were premeditated; he planned to kidnap children—knowing they would be abused and turned into some sick plaything before brutally murdered—and methodically eliminated witnesses to avoid getting caught. Joker knew exactly what he was doing when he organized these crimes to sacrifice others for his family’s lives. And yet the way Ciel spoke, he wasn’t passing judgement on Joker at all; he acutely understood the despair of facing injustice with no one lending a helping hand; the desperate wish to protect one’s family and loved ones above what’s considered to be morally correct by society; he knows better than anyone else how hell is paved with good intentions. This too, was incredibly empathetic in a strange way that only Ciel could be. Although Joker lamented their fate as abandoned orphans living in an apathetic society, Ciel does not pity them and thus did not simply reduce them to gullible victims of their circumstances. He did not justify Joker’s actions, and he did not justify his own actions in killing Joker and the circus crew either—he was incredibly self aware and fair; equally as ruthless to other people as with himself. He understood that everyone acted in their own interests. By removing complicated principles of morality out of the equation, he is able to see things clearly and act decisively without ridiculous notions of human morality. After all, what use does he have for it when his soul is already damned anyway?

Ciel keeps away from people and refrains from making personal attachments; and yet he is still very empathetic to each of them without even meaning to. In the flashbacks, he was also depicted to be a sensitive and kindhearted child. Despite everything he has gone through, he still retains a bit of that gentleness and sincerity from his childhood; which I think comes with being naturally emotionally intelligent—he has an unusually acute insight on people which certainly helps his business acumen, and ironically also helps him know how to lie and act in front of other people. While Sebastian is a “master of understanding human desires”, Ciel understands the complexity and most basic nature of humanity better than anyone else; which forms both his cynicism and his own brand of empathy.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

He was just being a silly little guy!

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[eternalera]

me: apple white is actually a really complex character and her moment with the evil queen was one of vulnerability because she can't be frustrated with how things turned out anywhere else and some part of her was still bitter that she had to give up something good for everyone else. the evil queen knew this and was playing on it. she was also playing on the pressure that snow put on her as well to 'get her happily ever after'. all of this resulted into her throwing the apple in the direction of the mirror in frustration (most likely to get her to shut up), which accidentally caused her to free the evil queen which she did not mean to do. once again afraid of making a mistake and this time having people KNOW about it she then covers for the evil queen as she's afraid of what people will think of her and not anything else because she's a flawed character. the evil queen the promises her happily ever after of course but apple doesnt really have a say in it as she's forced to do whatever the queen says in order to keep the facade that shes 'perfect' because (once again) her upbringing made her scared of making any sort of mistake so she tries to cover for herself instead.

people for some reason: YOURE JUSTIFYING HER FREEING THE EVIL QUEEN!?!?!?

[kylejsugarman]

its actually maddening when people reduce skyler down to a "girl boss" without looking into her actual character and how her competence changed the trajectory of the show's events. we're told from the very beginning that walt is intelligent, he's wasting his intellect teaching high school chemistry, he was responsible for helping launch a now wildly successful company. this is stressed to the point that the first few episodes really linger on how much "dimmer" the people around him are: hank is an ignorant loudmouth, marie is a vain airhead, jesse is a raging dumbass, and skyler has her pipe dreams of writing, doesnt she?? how Cute. but as the show progresses, we start to realize that walt is not some tortured genius surrounded by incompetents. skyler is just as smart as he is: she picks up right away on his bizarre behavior, she does her research and puts together pieces in an exacting manner, she thinks ahead to potential consequences and scenarios that walt doesnt even consider. we learn that she's brilliant with numbers and finances, that she's keenly observant and dedicated. and that fuels walt's resentment. he was the genius behind this empire, the one in control of everything, the one singlehandedly rescuing his family from ruin. his pride was such that he saw skyler as his loyal handmaiden, his inferior (trying to rape her in the kitchen is the pinnacle of this attitude). but as soon as skyler got involved and started solving problems and running things, he grew resentful and hateful. skyler forces him to confront the fact that he's not solely responsible for all of this success and that he lucked into a great amount of it. his wife becomes his equal for the first time in their marriage and he can't stand it. and it just makes u think: why Did skyler stop writing?? why did she sound so unconfident when marie asked about her novel?? why did gretchen end up with elliott?? was it just because elliott "got" her first?? or could walt never be in a relationship with someone who was so obviously his intellectual equal and could not be dissuaded from this fact??

[anghraine]

elizabethwydevilles replied to this post:

'Most "corrections" of Padmé's characterization I've seen essentially want to make her [...] not a tragic figure except by wild mischance or the missteps of other characters.' I honestly think people have a really hard job accepting that the prequels are a tragedy for *everyone* involved (except Palps). You see it in response to characters like Obi-Wan; the refusal to engage with the idea that a character can try their best and still screw up is hard to swallow.

Yes, very much so! In some ways it's even more marked with Obi-Wan, I feel, because ROTJ so clearly set him up as someone who failed tragically in the prequel era and who took away the wrong lessons from his own mistakes. OT/PT Obi-Wan is a kind, self-sacrificing, and well-meaning person who is not motivated by malice, but there is a moral arrogance to him, a hubris, that plays a significant role in the larger tragedy he is part of and that hubris lingers in the OT even after his death (with potential for further tragedy!).

I think there's a temptation to cast all these characters with fundamentally tragic flaws as solely victims or villains, but an important aspect of this kind of tragedy IMO is how these kinds of flaws collide and contribute to something far worse than any of its parts. The kinds of mistakes and flaws that we see in these characters lead to consequences that are both inevitable and unpredictable; no single one of these tragic figures could independently control or foresee what was going to result from all these different dynamics and maneuverings and choices, but at the same time, these choices do inexorably lead towards disaster. So you get the "well [x tragic choice] isn't what really caused the tragedy, because Palpatine" or "we need to fix [x tragic choice] because it makes the character Bad" without really engaging with the complicity (conscious or unconscious) of all these characters and the significance of their complicity to what the PT is doing as a story.

I don't object to "I want to imagine a happy ending for my faves" at all, btw—I do that all the time and it's not what I'm getting at. But when it comes to insisting that something must have been what "really" happened for the story to "make sense" or be "fixed" in the face of all evidence and basics of story structure, I find it tedious.

[comradesummers]

posts that portray buffy as the sole aggressor in season 6 spuffy annoy me. like even if we disregard seeing red it's just not true? for example, she absolutely does beat the shit out of him in dead things, but the same episode also features the balcony scene. the sex itself in that scene is um. i'll be generous and call it dubious consent on buffy's part. also the entire time spike is telling her that none of her friends truly love her and he's the only one who could possibly understand her etc. which is classic abuser shit. and again, don't get me wrong, i'm by no means saying that the toxicity is one sided. but the idea that it was just buffy hurting spike the whole time is demonstrably false.

[unpersoniverse]

"I recognize Haytham Kenway is an interesting character with many layers of complexity shaped from his upbringing and perspective of the world" and "I still hate his dead beat colonist ass" are two sentences that should be allowed to coexist in this fandom

[sayidsjarrah]

there's two types of people who watch lost. people who fall in love with the characters flaws and people who fall in love with the characters humanity despite their flaws.

[rexonalapis]

it is very telling that average genshin players cannot comprehend seeing an actual mature, qualified leader that is actually good at taking her job seriously after meeting archons who either is still childish, clowning whimsically, or straight up incompetent.

[howfrightening]

Would you talk some more about examples of Pete’s sexism? I binged watched the show pretty fast and I don’t remember seeing it, so I’m worried I might’ve missed some things and wanted to hear your perspective if you’re willing!

sorry i missed this! but yes omg, i love pete and one of the things i love most about his character is that a lot of his flaws are seen through rose colored glasses because he’s a nice guy which honestly i should talk more about sometime when it’s not 4 am.

but i’m speaking mainly about the plot pete shares with flower in 1x14 “Ghostwriter”. pete spends the entire episode blatantly dismissing flower’s interest and knowledge of basketball because it’s something for his “bros” (i’m paraphrasing the plot here) and barely acknowledges flower. it’s directly implied, not really implied it’s right there just not explicitly said as a piece of dialogue, it’s because pete actually carries some period typical sexism of his era based on flower and hetty’s conversation where hetty references staying quiet for the men in her life and they shouldn’t have to put up with it in this one, and also it is said by flower’s actress in an interview that if i remember i will reblog with.

i would say another thing that i count toward this is pete’s persistence with reminding alberta of his crush on her despite her very clearly stating that she is not interested many times, but i would like to make *that* a longer post.

[the-lonelybarricade]

Sometimes I want to shake people by the shoulders and scream, you need conflict to make a story interesting!

If every character got along perfectly and acted in everyone’s best interest, that would be unrealistic to the human condition but more importantly—so fucking boring

[ulteri0rm0tives]

You know. My headcanon for trans Kerry doesn't even change his character, events, or how he is in canon, etc. It's literally just him but if he happened to be trans. It's literally him, but if he was pulling up putting people at gunpoint, burning down yachts, singing, shredding, talking to V, kissing, dating.. but if he happened to be trans while doing it.

Him being trans isn't this big thing to me, it's just something he happens to be. Like. We need more characters where being trans isn't their whole characterization, but just a passive piece of info that doesn't impact the events in canon or canon revolves around, info that people can go "Oh! Cool! Alright :)!!' and move on. Where they're just another person, not something to be tokenized. Like. Hopefully that's makes sense, y'know?

Like I don't change anything about canon to mold to him being trans. He's just some guy who happens to be. That's it. That's all. The MOST I make him being trans have a bigger impact on his story is LITERALLY only during his young adulthood transitioning with Johnny around. And that's still me just playing around with headcanons 😭 There's no in game events that show us what pre 2013 Kerry was like, or how 2008 samurai was like. Like yes, there's the few scraps from ttrpg books I've seen and even concept books, but those just showcase his characterization more than solidify huge events for him in canon.

Like. I don't have this big, grand, idea on why he's trans, he's just is, and low-key it's just me projecting half the time 😭 (t4t EuroV <3). Like. I guess if I HAD to come up with more poetic reasons or point to subtle/unintentional coding, it'd be something like. Kerry's storyline in game having themes of transformation and change.

Rising from the ashes of an old life you weren't sure was ever yours, or was what you really wanted, labels constantly micromanaging who you should be, having preconceptions instilled in you about the face and identity you should project out into the world, that constant demand of *who* you should be rather than who you want to be, an unhappiness in that life that led you to a rock bottom, ashes that transform into a life you're more comfortable in, something you found you wanted, found drive for life and found worth in again. That made you happier for it, motivated, passionate about life even.

And there's also obviously his cyberware, and how his gold seams coincidentally, suspiciously, run along JUST under his pec line to the sides right under his arms. Like.. ykno... top surgery scars.

Kerry's just some trans dude, just adds a little more depth to his character for me, but it's not all he is to me. That it plays an important part of him, but at the end of the day. He's still just some dude. I want him to be just some dude. I want others to see him as some dude even if he's trans, not the one piece of information others see of his character for my headcanons and decide that's the sole reason they don't like the headcanon, don't like my interpretation of him.

Something that's reflected in society too often, people finding someone to be trans and using that as the sole purpose they don't like them, nothing at all to do with their character, just that they happen to be trans.

[somuchbetterthanthat]

I know it's "feeling sad for Alice hours" but I can't help but think about how much PL!Alice's counterphobic reaction and codependency towards Sam mirrors her attitudes towards him working together at OIAR. Like, if the implication is true, recommending your ex to your manager at your potentially dangerous job in order to selfishly rekindle a forgotten connection with him is so fucked up and childish. I love her.

Oh, I can hold lots of things in my heart, and being utterly heartbroken for Alice doesn't mean I don't agree there is an obvious parallel in how she acts in both worlds when it comes to love and loss.

I feel like it'd been made pretty clear towards the end of season 1 that she had recommanded the job for Sam with a vague hope of a maybe rekindling their relationship and I don't know if I would call it childish, per say, but kind of fucked up? Probably. Especially when Sam was in clearly a bad spot and would, of course, agree. It IS a tragic mirror of "I'm suffering, you're suffering, we could be suffering together", except I'm sure Protocol!Alice assumed they might be better together. I honestly read Protocol!Alice has having been rather unhappy and lonely with her life at the beginning of the podcast, and having tons of nostalgia for a nebulous time before where she would have been happy, and associating that time specifically with Sam.

We also know from the bonus episode with the ex talk that, my god, Alice is VERY BAD at letting go of relationships, EVEN IF THE EXES ARE CRAZY. So of course she'd have a hard time letting go of Sam, who, comparatively, is a pure angel on Earth. From the way she wanted both Sam&Celia to come to Luke's concert in S1, I even think she'd have been "happy" (or thought she could be happy) if Sam and Celia had agreed to involve her in their blooming relationship.

All that to say, I adore her and I think that's an incredibly compelling element of her personality, and that does give us hints of why Sam was so hesitant at times to indulge her too much intimacy between them. "It was mutual," he says, and maybe it was, but I genuinely think he's the one who had the thought first and Alice agreed, certainly not the contrary.

It makes me extra curious of how she might deal with things when she inevitably realizes that her frennemy of several years has literally been in repressed love for her for ages. If she realizes at all :')

[dukeofthomas]

"Angry robin" "violent robin" "misbehaving robin" shut up and accept my alternative; spunky Robin. Determined and head strong, can out-stubborn the Batman, has a strong moral-backbone and does what he thinks is right regardless of what anybody else says, Robin. Jason who was sassy and quippy and made crude jokes with a smile on his face. Jason who hid in Bruce's cape and whispered gossip to him. Jason who, if Bruce refused him something, could keep bothering endlessly until Bruce caved. And also dramatic Jason. If Bruce tells him no, it becomes a whole theatrical show; a monologue, a narration, embellishments, and falling onto the floor in his grief upon the fact his cruel father has denied him once again.

(Jason who has suffered through abuse and homelessness and poverty and starvation, who is the Fight out of Fight or Flight, who's built up defenses and walls and when pushed and triggered responds with the thing that's always protected him; anger. He's sweet and kind and funny, and when he sees a pimp hitting a prostitute he gets furious and responds with violence.)