ochsabird

[ochsabird]

ME BOYYYYYYY

First attack of the month! The honor goes to @ochsabird and their character Ardo!

[ochsabird]

I love him I love him 🥺❤️❤️

revenge on @ochsabird’s ezan!! he’s sooo pretty <333

[ochsabird]

VADER. ✍️

[ochsabird]

i love the my mutuals #mymutuals ❤️

[ochsabird]

Sketch of our ocs!

Ko belongs to me and Leilani belongs to @toshiitea

[ochsabird]

[ochsabird]

Come on, show what you love now.

[ochsabird]

Wuh luh Wuh????

The blueprint

[ochsabird]

Howdy

[ochsabird]

i’m going to hold your hands when i say this and i am only going to be kind about it once: ai does not belong in fandom spaces, ever. not in writing, not in art, not in video, not at all. it does not matter how bad you want to see your favourite characters kiss, or how much you need a bit of help finishing a chapter, or whatever.

make friends with artists. commission somebody. learn to draw yourself. ask for a beta read. try a writing partnership. fandom spaces are communities, so engage with them! it is about the journey and the fact that we all love something enough to create and build together about that thing.

spending 30 seconds to kill a tree and get an AI to push out some soulless empty piece of “content” is antithetical to the entire point of being engaged with fandom, and if you’ve taken to doing this you should really reconsider if you belong in these spaces with the rest of us.

[ochsabird]

Dolos Zarhaa

Redraw from last years piece

[ochsabird]

it is really cool that there is now an official maori word for autism, created with input from autistic maoris, and it was specifically coined to be nonjudgmental

quote from article:

“In my experience, people with autism tend to have their own timing, spacing, pacing and life-rhythm, so I interpreted autism as ‘takiwatanga’, meaning ‘his or her own time and space’,” [Keri Opai] told government-funded Maori Television.

(source)

[ochsabird]

Hi Ezan

[ochsabird]

Drawing my girl, Star for day 5 of Mermay!

[ochsabird]

That One About the Temple Clones AU

Here's an underexplored and juicy plot point in the prequels that I can't stop thinking about! Because Sifo-Dyas was killed so early in the new canon timeline of the creation of the clones, with Dooku impersonating him to handle the subsequent details, we don’t even know exactly what he intended the clone army to be.

I think there’s even an argument to be made that Sifo-Dyas intended the clones to be culturally Jedi. Raised and trained in the Jedi Temple(s), learning Jedi skills and ways of life, growing up in a shared community alongside the Jedi. The clones serving not as an emergency button to hit in case of war, but as a support to the overstretched, under resourced Jedi Order in an increasingly violent, chaotic galaxy, one that might prevent the war he foresaw from ever even happening.

To begin, I’ll briefly touch on the galactic situation immediately before The Phantom Menace. Time and time again, we’re given a picture of the Jedi Order that is being stretched to its limit. All across the galaxy, Jedi temples such as the ones we see operating in the High Republic era in the Acolyte, are being shut down because the Jedi just can’t staff them. The novel The Living Force, set immediately before TPM, deals with the repercussions of these shut downs for the people living in those sectors - destabilization, a vacuum where the power hungry and corrupt can come into the space left and make life awful for the people. Problems arise, these systems go to the Republic for help, the Republic can't help due to bureaucratic red tape and lack of Jedi resources, and this creates more bad feelings about the Jedi and a great environment to grow the Separatist cause.

"I always heard so much about the Jedi. I never saw one, but they told me that was because you saved people -- and then you left!" - The Living Force

Enter Sifo-Dyas. As a member of the Jedi Council in this era, he would have overseen dozens of these painful but unavoidable closures. More, he was trained by Lene Kostana, a High Republic era Jedi, who remembered the golden age of the Jedi, all of these Jedi outposts, temples, and cultural centers being open and thriving, and surely filled her Padawan’s head with these stories. When Sifo-Dyas foresaw a coming cataclysmic war that would destroy the Jedi Order, it's not hard to see where he might have made a connection between the pervasive problem that was a lack of Jedi resources, and the galaxy falling further into darkness. In fact, it's exactly what happens in the prequels with a little push from the Sith.

The Living Force novel tells us outright that Sifo-Dyas’s original plan before deciding on the clones was to use his role as a Jedi Seeker to fill the Jedi Order with as many new Jedi as possible to counter the coming threats:

“(Sifo-Dyas) was always in a big damn hurry. Like the Republic would end if he didn’t swell the ranks.” - The Living Force 

Wow, Even Piell, that line aged like milk, buddy!

 Ki-Adi Mundi frowned. “Indeed, sometimes those he brought to us were not even viable candidates.”  - The Living Force 

So, Sifo-Dyas was originally trying to bring as many kids into the Order as possible, and didn’t particularly care if they were very Force sensitive. An intriguing detail, when considering how closely he might have imagined the non-Force-sensitive clones to work in Jedi roles.

Interestingly, he didn’t actually abandon that “swell the ranks” plan - he got his ass fired, so he couldn’t bring any more Jedi in the conventional way. Sifo-Dyas is in a desperate situation here, he feels he's running out of time, and he needs to get as many people into the Jedi Order as quickly as possible. I think you might see where I'm going with this.

“The future should remain unseen, but unfortunately, Sifo-Dyas has little choice in the matter.”  -Lene Kostana, Dooku Jedi Lost

We know he arranged the initial order for the clones, but not how he intended to use them, or saw their role, or even if he would have agreed with Jango as the DNA donor, since that part came in from Dooku.  If Sifo-Dyas, lifelong Jedi and true believer in the Order, was creating something to help defend his people in their darkest hour, it stands to reason that he might look within his own culture for their training, instead of outside of it.

Did he see them as a secret weapon, a surprise help in the hour of greatest need, as they would ultimately function as on Geonosis? Or did he envision the clones being raised with Jedi involvement on every level of their development, growing into keepers of the peace to fill those hundreds of empty temples and outposts and restabilize a galaxy sliding toward darkness?

I think an important clue that supports the latter argument is that as Sifo-Dyas is literally falling out of the sky to his death, he is busy trying to get a message to the Council that he ordered the clones via a recording: 

I've seen a vision of the future that I feel warrants an army. You've disagreed with me, but I felt I had no choice. Therefore I have ordered one: a clone army from the Kaminoans. Something must be done, and I made that decision. - Sifo-Dyas, Force Collector

He's hardly trying to keep the (currently embryonic!) clones a secret here. He seems to think he's done his part and the Council has no choice but to take it from there, and follow through with his unmentioned plan. He has delivered the needed personnel. And bear in mind, Sifo-Dyas did not expect his death to be a 10 year old mystery. He seems to have spent his very last breaths protecting Sillman and therefore leaving a witness to everything that happened. His last words are literally “Come find me!” 

These are not the actions of a man who has set his plan into perfect motion and a magic army will appear just at the right time in ten years. This is a man who is facing his unexpected death and realizing that he needs to tell the Council, who disagreed with him but he clearly still trusts, what he did because he won't be there to handle the details himself. It's almost poignant.

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I worried about making this post at all because I’m not actually interested in blorbo apologism. Sifo-Dyas’s story is much more interesting if he is a good man forced to go to desperate, awful lengths to keep the apocalypse from happening. Whatever he intended the clones to be, it ended in Order 66; in a way, it doesn't even matter.  And yet, I think there’s something compelling there too, and I think canon gives us just enough - at least make an argument for a culturally-Jedi clone army what-if.

[ochsabird]

Happy May the 4th! Have a tubie for this special day ⭐️

Who’s relocating the tubies, show of hands right now.

[ochsabird]

Yes waiter, Modern AU Reor’am and Clank?