#I have a lot of things to say about Ordo as a leader but like I'm too tired to do it now

[mrbubblyurchin]

My thoughts on Imperial Commando and Republic Commando as a whole

RC

So, I started and finished Imperial Commando on an eight hour plane ride last night. This means I am done with the series overall and this will be me going over it and the characters. But let’s discuss my thoughts on this book first

Needless to say, I was disappointed. It’s not that it was bad or anything, it just wasn’t as good as Order 66 in my opinion, and, of course, even though it’s the last book of the series, the series was left incomplete, leaving me a bit disappointed in the end.

The author obviously planned on writing more Republic Commando books after this one, with how the Jusik and Arla plot line was set up, how the age reversing was going, and how Darman planned to kill the Jedi, but obviously, the sequel was never made, and thus, the overall story feels incomplete. But, enough about that. Let’s talk about RC as a whole.

Oh, and I’ll be completely omitting Karen Traviss from this conversation. She as a person has nothing to do with the plot or characters, which are the things I will be judging today. If you have a problem with me talking about the actual book and not ranting about the author who wrote it, then too bad. 

Let’s start off at the beginning. With Omega. Omega Squad was definitely a pleasant surprise for me. I enjoyed each of their characters and liked how most of them found peace in the end. That being said, I do have some notes.

The biggest is Atin. I feel like after Triple Zero he kind of fell into the background besides when he married Laseema in Order 66. (And his relationship with her fell into the background as well) And he felt practically invisible in Imperial Commando. And I get why Niner and Dar were more in focus for that story, but it would’ve been nice to see some Atin. Also, he’s he only OG Omega member who’s POV we never got to see. 

Next up, Niner. Niner got two POV’s in the series, in both the first and last books. And those books were where I enjoyed him the best. Niner was a solid leader for the squad, and was loyal to them through and through, especially in his friendship with Darman. He didn’t fade as much as Atin, but I still wish he had been a little more prevalent throughout the series.

Then we have Fi. Fi is my favorite from the squad still, and I love seeing him whenever he appears. His one liners are great, and to be honest, he’s kind of the opposite of Niner here. He was very prevalent for books 2-4, but fell into the background in the first and last book. He still appeared more than Atin in book 5, but I barely recall even seeing Parja. (Which was sad cuz I loved the two of them together)

The last of the OG Omega, Darman. Dar is definitely a strong character, and he has a very heavy theme of being used, manipulated, and lied to throughout the books. By the Kaminoans, the Jedi, and even Kal, Etain, and Niner at times! His mental resolve to protect Kad at all costs is what is barely keeping him together after Etain died, and while he does resolve to hunt Jedi at the end of the book, it’s a nice full circle moment to see that while Darman thought his one true purpose at the beginning of the series was to be a soldier, he now sees he was destined for a greater one all along. Being a father. 

Next let’s move on to Ordo, Corr, the Jedi, and Mandos. We got a LOT to cover here.

Ordo- Ordo is definitely one of my favorites. Him and Besany are cute and great and I love both of them. I like all the moments he gets throughout the series. However, I do think he was focused on a little too heavily. While I do wish some of the other Nulls like Jaing, Prudii, or Kom’rk had been given some time to shine, I still loved Ordo and I think he’s great. (That being said, I will be omitting the rest of the Nulls because I really only know enough to talk about Mereel and A’den for a couple sentences)

Corr- A really sarcastic, witty, and funny guy that did not deserve what he got. Losing both of his hands was tragic, but, with lost flesh, he gained a new family in Clan Skirata. He was a nice addition to Omega after Fi had to leave, and I liked him a lot. (He and Jilka were pretty cute in book 5)

Etain- So… Etain. I like her, I really do. But sometimes, there are some choices that I cannot get behind. (Like how she purposefully went behind Dar’s back to get pregnant in Triple Zero) But even still, she is a good person, and she just wanted to be a good mother to Kad and live a happy life with Darman, and she didn’t deserve to meet the end she got.

Bardan- An all around solid character. I liked his development from bright eyed Padawan to rugged ex Jedi Mandalorian, and I think his sense of responsibility to Clan Skirata and also to Kad is very important. He made sure to put others before himself no matter the consequences, a quality with several others lack. 

Walon- A hardened Mando bounty Hunter with good intentions at heart. (Probably). I mean, he did save Jilka, lend Kal credits, and he also did try to find Sev. He cares. Even if it is in his own twisted way sometimes. (Still, what he did to Atin was brutal)

Besany- Love her. Since the beginning, she was all about standing up for the clones and their rights. She cared about them as people and not as property, and she saw their differences as well, and what made them unique, and she really does love Ordo, and I think the two of them are very sweet.

Kal- Oh boy. Here we go. I know I’m gonna get hate for this. Here I go. Brace yourselves. If you need tissues to cry, grab them. 

I like Kal Skirata.

…

…

…

Okay. I’ll continue. I am not going to say I agree with him on everything, and I’m not going to pretend he is a saint or anything. But I like his character. He cares about his family, and he does make mistakes. Everybody does. The problem is everybody has gotten so used to pointing out Kal’s every mistake that they refuse to acknowledge anything he did right. And guess what? Kal makes mistakes. He’s flawed. He’s not perfect. And that’s the point. Characters are flawed. People are flawed. They aren’t perfect. And neither is Kal. And HE ADMITS THAT IN BOOK 5. In fact, NY ADMITS IT TOO! She acknowledges that Kal taking over the Nulls and not seeing the similarities to the Jedi taking children is arrogant! She acknowledges that! And Kal acknowledges that and his flaws later in the book! Kal is arrogant, yes, but he sees that! He knows it! So before you go around saying how Kal thinks he is some saint god or whatever. He doesn’t. And there is proof of that in the books.

So, uhh, yeah. Overall, I think the Republic Commando series was good. There were some things that definitely could have been improved upon, but I liked it. I liked the story, and I liked the characters, so yeah.

Thanks for coming to my TEDTalk.

[captainofthetidesbreath]

And while Ordo knew intellectually that a detached, unsentimental officer was the kind who won wars and saved the most lives, his heart said that a sergeant who was ready to die to protect his men got the very last drop of sweat and blood from them, and given gladly. —Triple Zero

Ordo hoped the commandos didn’t get too attached to the man. Charismatic leaders like Melusar could inspire you to do anything and feel it was a privilege to die for them. Ordo felt a little wary prickle tighten his scalp, and reminded himself that Skirata was just like that, too—pulling a knife on Kaminoan clonemasters, defying generals, instilling a sense of invincibility into any clone he trained, managing to be both uplifting and dangerous at the same time. Men like that could wield enormous power for good or ill. —501st

Really, like, Ordo and reflecting on what it means to lead and the different types and dangers of leadership was something that I needed a little more of, especially since Ordo finds himself in leadership position, both militarily and within the family.

[clonecumber]

Niner for the character ask (but in like a month or two because you've written so many of these! 😅)

I appreciate the generous timeline, but you're asking me about my favorite character here.

(Thank you :) )

First impression : You know the beat up old stuffed toy who just looks like they have seen some shit that some people have? That was Niner to kid me. I latched on to him like a limpet, and expressed this affection by throwing him at every weirdass plot a kid my age could come up with. I had a thing for "oldest sibling"/"leader" character types with anxiety who are under a lot of pressure and just really, really wanted things to do what they were supposed to do and Niner hit all my buttons. Him and Silverbolt from the G1 Transformers cartoon, man. I put them through the wringer.

Impression now : Honestly, hasn't changed much? Mostly it's just gained new elements and perspective. I have a much better appreciation for his obstinacy and temper, which is a part of his character I sort of slept on when I was a child, and especially how it lives alongside his deeply caring nature (and anxiety), for better and for worse. I really like that he feels things very deeply, and needs to express his thoughts and feelings externally to really process them, but struggles with actually articulating those strong emotions and difficult thoughts to the point he usually just ends up blurting them out in a really garbled or unfiltered way that either confuses anyone who doesn't speak fluent Niner...or straight up pisses them off (looking at A'den). But also that he keeps working at it. He doesn't just, you know, shrug and go, "Oh, well, guess that's that," like Ordo does with his total inability to act reassuring even though he notes it as a problem at least twice in the series, or Kal does with his...everything. Instead he actively tries to improve. Most of his confused emotional outbursts happen when he's younger too, which is another fun thing, because we get to watch Niner grow into himself a bit over the course of the series. By 501st, Niner's shown on page to have been looking into things to understand and help Darman, and understanding his own limitations to the extent he goes out and finds answers so he can better help. We also see him reaching out to his squad in Order 66 similarly, which makes me think he's been trying to learn better communication skills and deepen his emotional literacy for awhile. Compare to Hard Contact and his way of approaching Fi in literally their first chapter together, and how he tries to get Fi to talk to him later in the book when Fi flat-out tells him he's checked out of the situation with Atin because he can't deal with it otherwise. Young!Niner keeps pushing at Fi because he wants to help, which only makes Fi lash out at him. It's a stark contrast to how he handles Darman in 501st, where he's consistent about checking on Darman and making sure Darman knows he's there for him without actually pushing him past where he's ready to go, which I thought was pretty great character development. This is less a general impression than a fixation on a particular part of his character, I know, but it's what I've got.

Also think it's hilarious that Niner is 100% transparent in a book where everyone is playing some sort of game 90% of the time. He is capable of chewing a man up one side and down the other in the same breath he tucks them in and asks if they want a glass of water and not a single person in his life ever feels like these are somehow mixed messages. He doesn't play emotional games and he doesn't withhold affection because he's irritated with someone, and so no one in his life doubts his affection and goodwill even when it's coming with a heavy dose of stress fussing.

Honestly, everyone in the book says Niner emulates Kal, but sometimes I think Niner is actually just much closer to being the guy Kal thinks he is to his kids.

Favorite moment : I've had a policy of never looking these up to check my memory and also for going with the first, most vivid scene to pop in my head, so: Niner in TZ when he covered a sleeping Skirata with a blanket. Just him standing over him with his hands on his hips and tutting, and then going to get the blanket and tucking this fifty-something year old man in, was just. So very Niner. Also not something we often get to see male characters doing in media, especially for other adult characters, and especially for other adult, male characters, for all that I don't actually want to give KT any sort of points in that direction whatsoever. I'm aware it was probably supposed to be more about Skirata than Niner, but it was a very nice moment regardless, and character-defining for Niner, I think.

Idea for a story : *slams fist on desk* CUDDLING. In a purely platonic way, I want to see Niner to have control taken away from him for a bit by someone he trusts, who wants to do that for him. I vote Boss.

I've only ever seen this written in a BDSM context? Which isn't really what I'm going for, but I guess if you can do platonic BDSM elements, then...that?

Just let him be quiet for awhile and not have to worry about anything. Cherish the man. Platonically.

Unpopular opinion : There are no such things as popular opinions here, I think, lol. Uhh, I don't know, I'm pretty attached to my "Niner is a sheepdog" comparison. I feel like it really says it all.

Favorite relationship : I've been intrigued by his relationship with Boss ever since I was a child and that has not changed. I think their dynamic is interesting and - while it has evolved a bit with time and age - hasn't actually shifted that much from my initial read of it. I feel like their personalities are an interesting blend of clashing and perfectly complimentary, and they can relate to each other in a way they can't with their squads. I sort of see them growing on each other like fungii.

Favorite headcanon : That Niner is very, very ace. I go back and forth a bit on the aro side of things, but even then I tend to lean toward quoiromantic at most.

---

https://clonecumber.dreamwidth.org/3866.html - post with all the collected asks

[the-blind-assassin-12]

Who currently in your story and timeline know the most about Mandalorian history and legends? And does anyone know about the Mask of Mandalore? Or has that been lost to time?

Hey, question for you- HOW DO YOU KEEP COMING UP WITH SUCH EXCELLENT QUESTIONS?! Ugh. I love it. Keep them coming! 

In terms of who in my story knows the most about Mandalorian history and legends, it would be (from most knowledgeable to least): 

1. The Armorer As the perceived leader of the covert on Nevarro, she is the one who passes down and preserves teachings and beliefs. She also knew of the Jedi- reportedly extinct- and therefore it would make sense (to me) that she would know things about the history of the Mandalorian people/ the planet Mandalore. 

2. Bo-Katan Kryze Born on Mandalore and raised as part of a ruling family, I think she would have learned about Mandalorian history and culture. She knows about the Darksaber, for example. Even when she was in active rebellion against her sister and the pacifist regime, she had the opportunity to learn about Mandalorians as an opponent.

3. Boba Fett I mean... this guy has seen everything. He knows a lot. He may not believe everything that he knows/ has learned, but I would be willing to bet that there’s not a piece of Mandalorian lore that Boba couldn’t at least roll his eyes and say “not that pile of bantha crap again...” 

4. Paz Vizsla A member of Clan Vizsla who now receives guidance and wisdom from The Armorer? Yeah, he makes the list. I think because of the tumultuous history of his own house/clan, he’d make it a point to learn things whenever he could. He might come off as a big brute, but I think he genuinely cares about the Mandalorian people and keeping them safe and passing things on. 

5. Din Djarin/ Navina Harsa   Rounding out the top 5 are the two main characters of the story who really are just doing their best with the scraps that have been thrown to them. Din knows whatever he was taught in the covert- The Way, as interpreted by his Tribe- and Navina knows what she was taught by her parents- The Way, as interpreted by two Mandalorian exiles. They both know some different tidbits of information as well, for example Navina knew about the Darksaber long before Din did. 

Now to the second question- the Mask of Mandalore. (!!!!) 

For anyone who is unfamiliar, the Mask of Mandalore was a cermoinal war mask made from Mythosaur bone that was worn by Mandalore the First, who was a Taung warrior. As such, the mask is adorned with ridged concentric circles, similar to the facial/ bone structure of the Taung species. It was seen as a type of “crown” or symbol of leadership for the Mand’alor in ancient times, long before the creation of the Darksaber. The mask is gold and features the T-shape visor that Mandalorians based their helmets off of. The mask was only passed down through four generations of Mand’alor though, stopping with Canderous Ordo and then apparently becoming lost to the ages. 

*fun fact- Canderous Ordo, once he assumed the title of Mand’alor and put on the mask, reportedly never took it off in the presence of others again, not even in sleep. This could be where the Children of the Watch get their strict belief that no other living thing can see a Mandalorian’s face once they have sworn the creed.* 

So. While it has been thousands of years since the mask was last seen, its likely that all of the characters in Resol’nare have accepted it to be lost to time or possibly destroyed. It was the thing that unified Mandalorian clans before the Darksaber, so enemies of Mandalore -and they had so many throughout time, the Sith, the Jedi, the Empire, other species that they fought with- if they found it, would have likely destroyed it or kept it hidden so as not to give Mandalorian’s a spark of hope for unity. I do think, however, given that Ordo kept his face hidden and so do the Children of the Watch, anyone raised in that sect/ cell would know about the mask, even if they believed it to be lost forever. 

but I personally don’t think it’s lost forever so... ;) 

As always, thank you so much for your support of this story and for being such an interactive reader. Your questions make me so thrilled every single time. I encourage any and all questions regarding plots, characters, canon lore, HCs...you name it, so please everyone feel free to ask away! 

Have a lovely day my friend! 

[thethirdamell]

I’ve seen a lot of people posting a few writing memes about fic titles so I just wanted to break down where all of mine have come from and what they mean in Accursed Ones because I’m bored. Probably nothing you don’t already know in here

1. Awakening  - Name of the game + Anders literally waking up + metaphorically waking up and understanding his obligation to help 2. Nothing For It - Mean to imply that Anders had no alternative but to help and be helped by Amell in turn 3. Conscription  - What it says on the tin 4. Joining  - What it says on the tin 5. It Comes From Beneath  - Name of the quest 6. Last of the Legion  - Name of the quest 7. Memories of the Stone  - Name of the quest 8. A Night of Revelry - Meant to be ironic considering what happens 9. Freedom for Anders  - Name of the quest 10. Freedom for Anders Part Two - Name of the quest 11. The Righteous Path  - Name of the quest 12. In Retreat, Panic  - A play on the Grey Warden motto. (Also my favorite chapter in the story.) 13. All Soul's Day - Name of the annum 14. The Dark Theurge  - Name of the demon 15. Paramour  - Name of the achievement for a romance 16. Ground Rules - Ground rules for a relationship 17. Lost in Dreams  - Name of a similar quest 18. Far Afield - Name of the quest 19. Far Afield Part Two - Name of the quest 20. Uprising  - Name of the quest 21. The Resolutionist and The Aequitarian - Amell and Wynne’s respective fraternities  22. Serpents High, Angels Low - Both the rules of the team’s card game and an over-arching theme of the fic where things that are presumed to be good/evil are often the reverse.  23. Malleus Maleficarum  - The name of a treatise on witchcraft elevating sorcery to heresy and a song Malleus Maleficarum by Ordo Funebris 24. Shadows of the Blackmarsh  - Name of the quest 25. The Blackmarsh Undying  - Name of the quest 26. Pride Goes Before Destruction - A reference to the Pride demon and Amell’s pride in thinking he can handle it 27. And a Haughty Spirit Before a Fall - A reference to Justice and Anders falling for Amell 28. The Apple And The Tree - A quote about Amell being like his father 29. Lullabies - A Song - Lullabies by Yuna 30. Fools Gold - Meant to reference both Quentin and Anders’ happiness. Also a song Fools Gold Fitz and the Tantrums.  31. Eyes of the Beholder - A play off “Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder” meant to reference the difference between Amell and Anders’ perspectives on losing his eyes.  32. Blame it on the Night - Meant to indicate what happened isn’t Anders’ fault. Also a song - Blame it on the Night by Calvin Harris  33. White Lies, Red Eyes - A reference to both the colors of the Amell family and Amell’s personality 34. Spirits and Demons - What it says on the tin 35. Love is Blind - An overarching theme in the story. 36. Satinalia - Name of the annum 37. Brothers and Sisters - A reference to Wardens and Anders still having family without Amell.  38. Score One for Our Heroes - Meant to be ironic. Also a quote from Anders. 39. Out of Control - The current state of things and also a reference to A Leader on Losing Control by Corb Lund which is a Leonie song.  40. Justice for Naught - Meant to imply that sometimes there is no justice but you have to keep trying anyway 41. Here's to Us Blighters - What Oghren says when night is darkest 42. Bold and Brazen and Beautiful - Amell’s description of Anders 43. Monsters and Men - Self explanatory for Justice/Anders.  44. The Best Intentions - Oft Go Awry is Unspoken  45. Blessed Are the Peacekeepers - A quote from the Chant of Light 46. Champions of the Just - The rest of the quote. Meant to be ironic.  47. The Black City - A reference to both Kirkwall and the actual Black City 48. Rip Up Your Roots - A quote from Cor and what Anders does to cope, but the follow up, “You ain’t gonna have a tree.” is equally important.  49. A Good Man - A quote from Lirene about Anders 50. First Day - The name of the annum 51. As The Crow Flies - Foreshadowing Anders learning shapeshifting 52. Wintersend - Name of the annum 53. Chasing the Sun - Name of a song. Chasing the Sun by the Wanted.  54. Doubts and Revelations - What it says on the tin 55. Birds of a Feather - Flock together. Both a joke about shapeshifting and Kanders.  56. Snap - What it says on the tin 57. Ray of Sunshine - Joke on Bethany’s name 58. Oopsy Daisy - Joke on Merrill’s name 59. Pretty Reckless - Meant to reference both Anders and Hawke’s behavior.  60. Let's Try This Again - What it says on the tin 61. A Preoccupation with Spirits - A joke about Justice and alcohol 62. Meetings - What it says on the tin 63. Acquainted - Basically just Meetings Part 2 64. Bloodline Part One -  What it says on the tin 65. Bloodline Part Two -  What it says on the tin 66. Trail of Love - Name of the quest but also references Anders’ many past and future loves. Amell, Karl, Isabela, Hawke.  67. Rude Awakening - A call back to the first chapter meant to show how much Anders has changed. Anders takes on the role of Amell here and Hawke takes on the role of Anders with respects to Blood Magic.  68. Safe Harbors - A joke about sex with Isabela 69. The Best Laid Plans - Oft Go Awry is implicit.  70. Oft Go Awry -  What it says on the tin 71. All New, Faded For Him - This was an anagram like the quest in DAI but I can’t remember what it is an anagram for. RIP 72. A Year Ago Today -  What it says on the tin 73. Friends in Low Places - Name of the quest  74. No Turning Back -  What it says on the tin 75. Senior Warden Anders -  What it says on the tin 76. Bodies So Maimed - Quote from the Chant of Light about darkspawn 77. Down in the Dark with the Dead - A quote from Eli 78. Up in the Light with the Life - The opposite of the above quote 79. A Day for Silence - Name of the annum 80. My Failing and My Falling Part One - A line from Anders’ story for Nika and a reference to Hawke’s failure to protect his sister.  81. My Failing and My Falling Part Two - Same as above 82. Pain and Bane - Name of the poem Merrill sings. Also an overarching theme of the story 83. Luck of the Dog - Reference to the Dog Lords but also ironic considering Anders is not lucky.  84. Bird's Eye View - Both a reference to Anders’ transformation magic and his perspective on the Circles and how Bethany doesn’t share them 85. Act of Mercy - Name of the quest 86. The Revolutionists - Name of Decimus’s fraternity 87. Burn After Reading - what it says on the tin 88. Not in Hand, Not in Play - A quote from the chapter but also Fenris’ perspective on love and a theme of the story. It is or it isn’t.  89. Enemies Among Us - Name of the quest 90. Save Me - What it says on the tin 91. Benedictions - A Canticle in the Chant of Light that makes Hawke think of Anders 92. What Will The Neighbors Think? - A mini-theme throughout the story regarding Anders (in)ability to be openly in a relationship, be it with Amell, Justice, Hawke, etc.  93. Have Your Pie and Eat it Too - What Anders keeps trying and failing to do 94. Dead Set on Ending Badly - Foreshadowing  95. Where We Stand - Where Hawke and Anders’ relationship stands 96. Hearts of Gold or Near Enough - Meant to apply to all of the main characters 97. Ghilan’him Banal’vhen - The Path that Leads Astray. Foreshadowing. 98. Abstention and Absolution - Meant to be Ironic 99. Until the Last Dog is Hung - What it says on the tin 100. Free To Good Home - References the mages, Dog Lords, and also Anders 101. It Gets Easier - Narrator Voice: It did not get easier. 102. Luxury of Leaning - A reference to Hawke not having the option to pursue men as the scion of a noble house but doing it anyway because fuck you mom. 103. Dissent - Name of the quest 104. Into Madness - Play on words. Descend into Madness / Dissent into Madness 105. Fester - What it says on the tin 106. The First Sacrifice - Name of the quest 107. Once Removed - Play on words. A reference to Amell/Hawke’s Eyes and Quentin being Hawke’s cousin once removed.  108. Not Again - Haha get wrekt  109. All That Remains - Name of the quest 110. The Way Forward - A reference to Fenris’ quote about the stairs being out. Meant to symbolize that there are no other options for Anders, Hawke, and the narrative as a whole. Also, ironically, meant to show that Hawke does not actually move forward.  111. Lyrium and Lies - Foreshadowing 112. Ser Cumference and the Terrible Tower - A children’s tale vibe meant to show the dichotomy of man.  113. The Calm Before - Foreshadowing for the name of the next chapter.  114. The Storm - What was foreshadowed.  115. Long Time No See - A reference to both not seeing Amell for a long time and Amell not being able to see for a long time.  116. To Catch a Thief - Name of the quest 117. To Save a Sinner - Similar naming methodology of the previous chapter meant to show Isabela is more than just a thief.  118. On Deaf Ears - Both Hawke being deaf and Hawke not agreeing with Anders. 119. Hey Sparkles - Meant to give a “It’s gonna be okay dude” vibe.  120. Give Me A Sign - Sign language reference but also a plea for Hawke and Anders’ relationship to get better. 121. We Should Talk - About both Hawke and Amell, but Amell is the only one Anders talks to in this chapter.  122. The Weight of Years - Shit’s heavy 123. How Have You Been? - Asking the dangerous questions again 124. Spin a Story - Varric’s terrible advice to Anders but also Amell’s approach to interacting with Anders after they’ve been apart for so long. 125. Give and Take Part One - Commentary on Anders relationship with both Amell and Hawke.  126. Give and Take Part Two - See above  127. What You Make It - What love is according to Fenris 128. Letters from the Vigil - What it says on the tin 129. Consent is Key - A quote from the chapter and commentary on responsible use of blood magic.  130. What Have You Done Now? - A song. What Have you Done Now by Within Temptation 131. But This is All I Ever Was - A song lyric. Ditmas by Mumford & Sons 132. Wasted Time - Also a song lyric from Ditmas but like accidentally. 

[jarael]

Novi studied the ancient structure, one dark eyebrow cocked underneath her helmet.  “This must have been the palace,” she concluded.  “I recognize the patterns on the base.”

“So the Zakuulans were a bunch of fancy pants after all,” Javix chimed in dryly.  “Wouldn’t have thought your clan would have been fans.”

“Not really.  Bralova let Lorna do her thing--when they weren’t arguing.”

“They sound like such good friends.”

“They were.  You know my clan’s history.”

“Oh, yes.”  The Pantoran flicked their bubblegum pink undercut mockingly before puffing their chest.  “Clan Ordo-Teniir, descendants of the great Revan and Canderous Ordo!  Revan, whose crusades against Vitiate made him saltier than Manaan’s seas to the point of forcing their descendant Bralova to be his new Wrath!  And then Bralova had to Rasputin him!”  They rolled the r’s, drawing a snort from Novi.

“You exaggerate.  Anyway, I want to look around.  I sense...something.”  She wasn’t entirely cut off from the Force, at least not any more.  Sensing her mother and her cousin die as a child had been a lot, to say the least.  Meena, wife, then widow, to her cousin, had said a few times before her own death, that Novi had once been cheery as a child.  But what was she supposed to do?  Meena had done the best she could have.  Now Novi was the last known survivor of her clan.  It wasn’t entirely the Empire’s fault.  If she ever met a member of Clan Kryze--the audacity of them calling themselves a clan, when they had inflicted so much damage to Mandalore and her ade!  No, she needed to focus on keeping herself alive.

The Spire’s elevators still worked.  Perhaps things weren’t as abandoned as the duo had thought.  Novi sensed something...strange, but not threatening.  They weren’t in the swamp any more, so they didn’t have to worry about giant arachnids or other beasties chasing them down.  And yet...

“What might you be looking for?  A sign of life?”  This voice was very aristocratic, a bit condescending, and probably friendly.  Novi spun around, blaster drawn.  It wouldn’t have done her any good; ghosts couldn’t be shot.  This ghost was a few inches taller than Novi, her fair skin contrasting with her dark robes, raven hair framing piercing blue eyes and a smug grin.  The ghost chuckled a bit at the response.  “You’d shoot a family friend?”

“Didn’t think I’d see you in real life, Vaylin.”

“You do recognize me?”

“Of course.  You’re in a lot of old holos, at least the surviving ones.”

“Surviving holos?”

“Um, excuse me.”  Javix stuck their head in between the two conversationalists.  “Are you having a weird Force moment thing?  Or do I need to run the fuck away very fast?”

“He can’t see me, can he?” inquired Vaylin.

“No, they can’t,” Novi answered.  “Javix, go see if there’s anything we can use on the ship.”

“Whatever.”  They sauntered off, muttering underneath their breath about how not having the Force was, actually, a good thing.

“They seem nice,” Vaylin quipped.  “And it’s nice to meet someone from your clan 3000 years later.”

Novi thoughtfully brushed her hand over the clan sigil on her left breastplate: a golden mythosaur with red strings woven about it, and a Kell dragon beneath it, baring its teeth.  “Why are you still here?  You should be at peace, with your family.”

“My master, Darth Imperius, Empress Lorna, gave me orders to serve her allies as I served her, until all was right.  I’m following that order.”

“All this time later?  Your...”  Should she call Vitiate her father, after everything that he’d done?  “Vitiate died, killed by Lorna and Bralova.  And you played your role in democratizing Zakuul.”

Vaylin sought the right words.  “I used to have dreams about the future, on top of my nightmares borne from Vitiate’s actions.  I knew that peace would be temporary, and that both Lorna’s descendants and Bralova’s--genetic or not--descendants would need my help at one point or another.”

“But Zakuul is abandoned now.  Why?”

“Not everyone took to Zakuul moving away from authoritarianism, believe it or not.  They liked it even less than a Togruta, married to a pirate, had both a Miraluka and a Force blind Cathar as her heirs.  When Alijandra decided to marry Ruusa, your ancestor, and abdicate the throne, there was an uprising.  It was never fully put down, even with Moshishi--Alijandra’s sister--killing their first two leaders.  1000 years ago, the leader of the Old Zakuulan Society, Kaleb Corr, got fed up and ordered his army to bombard as much of Zakuul as they could.”

“Zakuul rejected a dictatorship, so he...bombed his own people?  What a fucking basket case.”

“Thankfully, Zakuul’s president had a mole, who let him know of the planned attack and managed to evacuate 80% of the population.  They settled on other worlds.  When Korr found out, he set out on a quest to get to the heart of the matter, to destroy those most intent on keeping Zakuul free.”

“That’s a dictator for you.  Can’t be worse than Palpatine.”

“Oh, he runs the show now?  He can’t be worse than Vitiate.”

“I don’t know that he’s eaten planets.  But his thugs took my mother and my cousin, and maybe my dad.  I’m a treasure hunter now, and an archaeologist, and just...trying to save my clan.”  

“You inherited your clan’s affinity for the Force,” Vaylin noted, “but you’re not trained.”

“I’m not, and I don’t want to be.  Respectfully, the Force has only caused Clan Teniir a lot of pain.”  

“Maybe so.  I always sensed that Bralova was never really happy with their lot in life.”  Vaylin hesitated.  “Do you not want my help then?”

It would be a risk, yes.  Even in death, Vaylin’s presence in the Force couldn’t be ignored, even though her power was lacking.  But she could bring an unique perspective to Novi’s life.  She remembered how her mother would complain about how closeminded her Jedi master had been, and how she didn’t want that for Novi.  “Join me.  Fulfill your duty.”

“Of course.”

[rainofaugustsith]

SWTOR: Full list of future predictions

I am writing up a post with my predictions for future storylines (I’m right sometimes!).

SPOILERS FOR EVERYTHING INCLUDING SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE AND ECHOES OF OBLIVION

The Mandalorian storyline

We're going to be placed in the position of supporting Shae Vizla or not, and our actions will determine who the Mandalorians side with overall and who they attack - which will have additional consequences for the larger war.

At the end of the Spirit of Vengeance story, Heta Kol takes off her helmet, looks at the Clan Caldera banner and says mando'ad draar digu, which translates to "A Mandalorian never forgets."  Personally I think we're going to find out she is related to Torian in some way. Mother. Sister. Old friend. There's a reason she stole the Clan Cadera banner specifically. I don't think she's there to avenge Torian, because her actions are the same regardless if Torian is alive or dead. But I think that may factor into how she views the Commander.

What do we know about Torian's clan? Clan Cadera, along with Ordo's clan, broke with Mandalore and the others to support the Republic instead of the Empire. This brought great shame on the clan - although from what we see of Jicoln Cadera on Taris, I have a feeling there were numerous other things that he did to cause shame. Regardless, Kol and her allies may view Clan Cadera as a symbol of resistance. I don't have a feeling that her group has any special love for the Republic, just the mindset of rebelling against the other factions.

The second ship in the flashpoint belongs to the Darmanda - we met them on Mek-Sha. We were able to extract a favor from Indigo if we did one for him, but he may have his own agenda apart from Kol's. His group seemed to want to splinter away from the Mandalorians altogether. There's also some measure of dissent shown amongst Kol's allies. I think it's therefore possible we will have two battles going on - we may have to choose to ally with someone against Kol, and decide to support Shae as Mandalore or someone else. Vaylin Strikes Back.

Yep, we've got another Dead Person Who Isn't Actually Dead. This one's pretty obvious given the clues in Echoes of Oblivion. Vaylin 'borrowed' the corpse of one of Satele Shan's students and now she's hanging out on Coruscant. Shhhh. Don't tell anyone.

I think that Vaylin may show up as a very obvious foe if Senya and Arcann are still alive. You helped two people who participated in her subjugation and did nothing to stop it. In Echoes of Oblivion she is pissed at all of you, has words for you, and says she’s there because she’s being dragged along. You've now had two letters from Senya who is worried that Vaylin's spirit won't rest. She's going to come back, she's going to be pissed off and she's likely going to want revenge.

On the other hand, if you killed Senya and Arcann, I think Vaylin may be far more amiable to the PC. After all, in KOTET, she's not angry you killed them. She's only angry you got to kill Senya before she did, and you can still talk her through that. She actually says that the PC is "fun" if they give her the right answer.  And in Echoes of Oblivion, if you killed Arcann and Senya, Vaylin does not show any animosity toward you - even when the rest of her family does. She doesn't even look at her family. Instead, she turns to zap Tenebrae with lightning when he advances toward you.  

In the former scenario I think it's going to be Stop Vaylin Again or Convert her to the Jedi!! as the storyline. In the latter I think you may have a chance to gain her allegiance and let her live her life.

Task Force Nova

If you are Republic, Daerunn and Gnost-Dural let you know that they are developing Task Force Nova to bring Jedi back into the fold. There are also at least two conversations where it's pointed out that some Jedi really do not want to return to war, and others are still in hiding or working strictly in non-combat roles. Gnost-Dural repeatedly says that it is the Jedis' "duty" to fight for the Republic and that doesn't seem to have an endpoint.

Arn Peralun supports all of the above. He's clearly dealing with some very deep trauma but is being forced to remain on the front lines.

I think this is an issue that is going to have an impact on characters from both factions, and loyalists and saboteurs alike. Do you help Gnost-Dural recruit and conscript Jedi who may not wish to fight in a war again? Do you protect Jedi who are fleeing Task Force Nova? What about the Jedi on the Alliance base?

I also think that if scripted right, this can be a nuanced issue. IMHO OCs from both factions may want to protect Jedi from being forced to return to the battlefield if that is not their wish. Let's hope the devs don't make that one of their famous "either you're singing Sound of Music on the mountainside or you kick puppies for fun" choices.

Malgus

By now we've had lots of evidence that Malgus was subjected to some pretty hardcore conditioning when he was pulled from carbonite or otherwise brought back from the dead. There's also evidence that Malgus is on his way to Dantooine to try to shake his conditioning. It's the Imperial Agent Chapter 2 story, but amplified.

My personal hypothesis is this: There's scrapped footage showing the Zakuul twins bringing Malgus - in carbonite - as a present to their father. There are rumors that Arcann and Acina were chummy for a time. So...part of the deal with Acina and the Eternal Empire was to return Malgus, complete with awful Nathema-style conditioning, so Acina could have an enforcer. Along with putting down her opponents, she put down those who would have looked for the Empire's fighters.

That could have been the Outlander. Acina surely would have loved to use them as a tool. But why wasn't it? Because Valkorion was in the Outlander's head, Arcann knew that, and he sure as hell wasn't about to let Daddy run around freely in the Empire again. Valkorion's presence also may have made it impossible to condition the Outlander.

But I do think that both Acina AND Saresh knew damned well where the Outlander was, they just were not about to free them.

This supports Quinn being thrown in jail for searching for the Sith Warrior and also supports Lana Beniko being forced to flee...she was digging too deep and asking too many questions, and she also was a powerful Sith who very much had the ability to counter Acina. Elara Dorne suffered a similar fate; she kept asking and asking and the Republic military censured her. Kira and Scourge and the Bounty Hunter companions did go look, but they very clearly broke from their factions to do so.

When does the Sith Empire officially ally with the Alliance? When Arcann is deposed. Before that, as per Ranken, the Sith Empire cannot openly support the Alliance. Vaylin's in charge, and for whatever reason, they're not about to deal with her. They see an opening to overthrow the Eternal Empire and they grab for that chance with all their might. I actually do believe Acina when she says she wants to protect her people and also that she has changed the Empire for the better. But I also believe that like other leaders in both factions, she will slaughter as needed.

And here's a fun twist - Arcann also knew about Malgus's programming and could turn him on Acina if the Empire crossed him or tried to fight back. The complication to this hypothesis is that if Arcann is still alive he still could do that, but he's not currently the Emperor of Zakuul in charge of a scary fleet so his power may be limited. But this would explain why Acina's so much more willing to deal when Arcann's out of the picture as a ruler.

I think that we're going to have to help or hinder Malgus's deconditioning, and then perhaps we're also going to be faced with a difficult choice: do we align with Malgus or with the Sith Empress/Emperor? For me, this would be a far easier choice if the ruler is Acina vs. Vowrawn, but it may mean the difference between the Empire adopting a more progressive bent or going back to being more totalitarian. This is something that could affect both sides, and thus I think both sides will have some impact.

[nonopiimagines]

scattered; canderous ordo/mandalore the preserver x f!revan; kotor2

---

“Revan was one of the greatest military leaders in the galaxy, in history. She knew what she was doing.” He paused, suddenly out of breath, suddenly aware of how much meaning was coming out of his mouth. “And I always follow orders.”

He better shut his kriffing mouth before he says anything else damning. Visas and the exile looked at him like he had grown a second head. Damn these Jedi. They were probably reading his thoughts right now, scraping his emotions up to use against him later.

“Let’s get off this ship and detonate the charges,” he motioned for them to keep moving down the hallway, his ears constantly straining to hear any wavering in his voice. “My men are waiting.”

“You’re right, let’s go.” The exile took off ahead with her little padawan following right behind her. He was more than happy to bring up the rear.

He could feel the heat coming off his face, the tangled feelings caught in his throat, filling up his head, his helmet, his body with thoughts he had tried so hard to suppress. It had been four years. No word from her, just a stranger with her ship and her droids. He didn’t want to admit that brief but unavoidable thoughts crossed his mind that maybe he could find pieces of her scattered around the ship, scattered around the galaxy, scattered around in people she had touched with her presence. 

But it was still the same silence.

---

The exile spent most of her time whispering to the Zabrak, practicing her forms with her force witches, playing her hundredth game of pazaak with the pilot and the T3 unit. Little time was afforded to mending Jedi relations with the Mandalorians, or that’s what he expected was going on in her avoidance of him. So when she approached him, his head preoccupied with reports from Dxun, he could only say one thing to her. “What do you want?”

Her face was too emotive, but he was sure she knew this too and used it to her advantage on many occasions. At this moment, her brow creased in hesitation, but her eyes shined with the truth of the words she was about to share with him. Something important and maybe out-of-line, but something she had to share nonetheless.

“I met with Admiral Onasi before we left Telos. He had some things to say about Revan.” 

He stared at her, trying to guess what Carth would have to say about Revan that he didn’t already know. It was worth hearing, he decided. Anything for a piece of her, no matter how small. Feeling vulnerable, acutely aware of the droids within hearing range, he tossed the datapad onto the table and steered the exile into the medbay. He could feel the tension bubbling in his throat again. This was not the time or place to experience memories of a past that clearly had no future. But it was what drove him forward. It pulled at his fingertips as he closed the medbay doors and turned to the exile abruptly, his hands balled into fists.

“What did you hear? I’m sure the admiral has a lot to say.” It was more of a sneering remark than he intended. He wasn’t sure if he would ever call Carth a friend, but he was loyal to Revan all the same.

“He said that she went away to fix what she had done,” the exile paused, eyes analyzing his posture, her eyebrows knitted together in concern. She chose her next words carefully. “She thought that there was something out there that she had to stop.” 

He knew all of this already. It was still crystal clear in his mind. She never withheld the truth from him. She was always a bare imprint on his memories, entirely herself, no masks, no hiding. But that came with the pain of knowing why she was gone and the very real possibility that she was never coming back.

“Keep going, exile. I want to hear it all.”

“She felt that someone or something else was behind the Mandalorian Wars. That the Mandalorians were just pawns for a bigger war to come.” She leaned back against the wall, her eyes trained on him, waiting for his reaction.

But he wouldn’t give her one. His feelings about Revan were between them. Not to display to outsiders. Before he was Mandalore, they were a clan of two. “Are we done here?”

The exile waited again, waiting for something, perhaps reading his mind again, prying his coherent thoughts out of the murky regions of his consciousness. It felt nothing like the cool caress of Revan sliding against him, calming his rage, his memories of a war lost to her.

“Yeah, we’re done here,” she conceded. She turned away, looking frustrated, like she expected him to divulge his life story to her. Not this time, exile.

He did not wait for her. He stalked back to his datapad, filling his brain with plans of Dxun and the future of the Mandalorians. A future without her.

[2lim3rz]

Lord of the Night, Why I Love It And Why I Connect To It [Super Long]

To Preface This: Spoilers. So much spoilers. Also rambling tangents.

Aka oops, 1441 words lol

You’re first started off with the image if a primal man. A feral man. Zso Sahaal is hardly human in the first chapter as he goes buckass wild on the thieves that stole the Corona Nox. Already, I was sucked into a new world. A world about a man who just wants his inheritance. Who lives in the past even when he knows he’s in the future. The world of Zso Sahaal, brutal, cunning, and merciless in his killings. All you know is that someone close to him was dead and that xenos took the Corona Nox from him.

And then you get to Mita Ashlyn, a psyker meditating in her cell where she foresees [well, really sees the past 2 hours] of some vague vision. You learn she’s pretty stalwart in her ways from the get-go and had a very accomplished, daresay even comfortable for an interrogator, with her previous master before she was and Mita was picked up by Inquisitor Kaustus. An Ordo Xenos Inquisitor with a very good reputation who seems to had odd mood swings. Chillingly cold one moment and smiling the next. His soul, to Mita’s pov, is a locked off and cold lantern

She assumes it’s just because of tricks the Ordo has taught him, despite the odd flashes of thought and emotion she gains sometimes. Of course, Mita doesn’t get along with Kaustus too well. She’s mocked by him even and her only closest companion is an Abhuman named Cog. Cog reminds me a lot of Lonnie from Of Mice and Men, simple and just wanting to live his best life. I love Cog. And though Mita treats him almost like a dog, she cares about him.

Of course, the story goes on and I’ma talk about Zso Sahaal first. Zso Sahaal meets Pahvulti [Love the lil shit] and eventually meets a sort of clan of VERY devout to the Emperor people called the Shadowkin after he destroys the Glacier Rats’ hideaway. They’re sneaky and not very well liked in the Underhive, but they don’t quite care. Of course, they see Zso as the Emperor’s angel and, after unwittingly killing their leader, Zso meets a woman named Chianni who’s their newfound leader

Following Zso was a confusing aspect. Well, not really, but it was surprising to see his reasoning. His methods were brutal, but.. well he does know of other ways, but in a way, it’s all he knows. It’s all he remembers from Konrad Curze. The scant moments he lets himself slip to memory even. And then he’s grappling with, unwittingly, his own fall into Chaos. At least, until he’s reawoken in a sense. Having broken free of it.

With a much clearly mind, Zso starts achieving his plans, unwittingly playing into his enemies’s hands. Unwittingly, his closest companion of his ‘empire’ is one of his betrayers. He even grows attatched to his ‘empire’ before realizing he has to cut himself off of it.

It all comes to one big culmination when he’s finally rams into the Governor’s like.. collection area to get the Corona Nox when it’s revealed that Kaustus is controlled by Eldar, Eldar shows up, but I think the most profound thing happens when Mita and him are in Zso’s.. mind..?

“I hate a being so sick, so certain of his own brilliance, so twisted by the call of glory, that he repays the greatest sacrifice of all with betrayal!” and ”He sacrificed his humanity, child.” And suddenly his voice was so melancholic, so deep and so calm, so bloated by sadness” juST Zso Sahaal hurts, he hurts and he finally releases it all to Mita. The truth of himself, in a way, even. And then when he sees what has truly happened to the Legion he once.. I wanna say loved. The battle-brothers he once knew and cared for, and the ones he scorned like Krieg, he’s hurt. I can’t remember if he even cries but either way, Zso grieves, even as his arm is torn off and Krieg tells him how Konrad fell to chaos before his focus

His focus, the only thing Zso had faith in. Focus. Discipline. Controlling himself. And that’s maybe why I relate to him so much. Because, and I know this is stupid to say, but its all too easy to find yourself slipping to emotion. Being happy and excitable is fun until your all too scatter brained to even drive straight. Focus. Something that’s easy to tell yourself but hard to execute. Focus. A thing that even Zso Sahaal struggled with, even though it’s his biggest strength. Even when all has fallen from his hands and he has.. honestly, not much to live for, he rescues the only one that has been true to him, even if she was his enemy. Mita Ashlyn.

-

Which leads me to my next topic, Mita! You’re introduced to her and, honestly, I thought she was bullied throughout the book. Kaustrus is downright rude to her most times and so is his retinue, in fact, everyone’s kinda putting her down just because she’s a psyker. Maybe not the strongest, but certainly of some note. In my opinion, Mita is explosive. She has a temper, and quick to anger. She’s dead set on eliminating Zso Sahaal, wisely, because of the threat he brings to them all.

She’s focused and determined on her goals and willing to see them through even if it kills her. Going so far as to go renegade against the Inquisition for this threat. And then she realizes something throughout the book.

She’s looking in a mirror.

Power, ambition, the fortitude to survive and thrive, the anger and sadness.

She and Zso Sahaal are one in the same. Even down to their goals, opposite as they are.

They want the best for the Imperium. They want the best for humankind.

And I just, just absolutely LOVE how Mita’s crisis of Faith went. Her one thing tying her to the Imperium this entire time was the hope, just the barest thread of hope that maybe just maybe the Emperor loves her. That someone in the entire galaxy cares about her [though this is mainly prevalent after Cog’s death, someone who did genuinely care about her even if it was mostly a literal feral brain going !! pretty woman! Wonderful mom of possible children!] that would actually give a single damn if she died fulfilling her duty

Until Zso reveals the truth. That the Emperor doesn’t care. That he only cared about the whole of the Imperium and not one single fuck is given to the little people. The only ones he cared about was if they were doing their job right. Zso tells it to her brutally straight.

And Mita realizes he’s right. And that brings me to my final statement;

Both of them let go and free themselves. Both of them only save each other through each other. 

Both Zso and Mita had something quite literally holding them back. For Zso Sahaal, it was the warp’s touch and then it was his cracking hope that maybe his Legion is alright; when he lets go of that when he finally gets the truth that his Legion is as damned as the rest, instead of joining he fights to the end for his beliefs. For Mita Ashlyn, it was that the thought that someone loved her, even if it was their God. Her faight was her chains shackling her power.

“The Emperor does not give me my power. My tutors lied! It is my own!”

And that is how I relate to Mita. Instead of religious faith pulling her down, for me it was my own belief that my own happiness only stemmed from others. If someone else was happy, then I was! It was not until recent that I realized no. I can bring my own happiness. I can let go and be free to be happy.

Lord of the Night taught me that sometimes, you need to let go of the thing you hold onto most. The thing that anchors you so tightly to something you didn’t even know.

And THAT is what I love the most. That even though Zso Sahaal curses and seethes at the thought of Mita Ashlyn [as she does likewise], they both are such a wonderful mirror of each other in different ways. Two sides of the same coin. That, even though they were mortal enemies, they found [in a way] solace and freedom with each other.

And that is why I recommend Lord of the Night by Simon Spurrier. A wonderful book!

Ave Dominus Nox and Ave Imperator!

[cienie-isengardu]

Why do you think Jango Fett hired Dred Priest and Isabet Reau, even tho they were suspected death watch sympathizers? I cant imagine the Commandos they trained would be happy to be serving under jedi...

Before I will talk about Priest and Reau, I think is worth to point that no Mandalorian training commandos was overly fond of Jedi or Republic.  Not all commandos / ARC liked to work with Jedi, some were disappointed by their force-sensitive commanders, but I doubt Dred and Isabet personal hate/dislike, even if passed down to their trainees, would make soldiers disobey the orders coming from Jedi. Frankly, commandos get along & work the best with their own brothers, but that is just the way they were raised. Personal feelings will not get in the way, they are too professional for that.

As for the major ask, here we go:

The Imperial Commando: 501’st raised this topic in one of talk between Ordo and Mij Gilamar:

“What was Jango doing recruiting them? He had more reason to hate the Death Watch than anybody.”

“Priest and Reau weren’t exactly card-carrying members. Jango thought they were all talk. He only cared about results.”

But I think the matter was more complicated than that.

Jango Fett hired one hundred people - the best soldiers, tacticians, sappers, communicators, survival experts - to train future Republic Commandos, but managed to get only 75 Mandalorians. Due to Jango Fett: Open Season comics, we know that many friends / associates / allies of Jango were interrogated - and most likely killed afterwards, like Silas - by Dooku during his “research” about Fett’s past, so the limited number of people to choose from influenced the decision to some degree. 

We know little about Isabet, but Dred was considered as a good (albeit idiot) soldier, so he met the requirements.

Then again, even with limited choices, Fett still didn’t want to hire Kal Skirata and he did so only because Walon Vau insisted. But Vau hated Death Watch above everything else, and I don’t think he would agree to work for Fett and/or get along with Priest and Reau, if they were true Death Watch sympathizers back then. 

“How do you lie to a Jedi Master?” Laseema asked. “Without him sensing it, that is?”

“I didn’t,” said Vau. “I said I’d tell him if I found Kal doing anything to help the enemy. The minute that this little shabuire opens a comlink to any former Death Watch personnel, I shall gladly turn him in.”

Skirata paused for a moment, then managed to laugh. “Do I know any?”

“No, but they’re the only group I’d really call my enemy. So I didn’t lie, and I was genuinely emotional enough for him to believe what his Force senses told him he wanted to believe.” [Order 66]

In this short passage, Vau says that Kal Skirata does not know any former members of Death Watch, so during the conflict between DW and True Mandalorians, Reau and Priest weren’t part of enemy group. So, if Jango knew them (otherwise, how he could judge if their skills are good enough to train future commandos?), they most likely were his former allies / subordinates or some freelancers whom he met over the years, right? 

Between Order 66 and 501’st, the biggest hater of Dred and Isabet is Mij Gilamar and I think his hate is only partially fueled by their Death Watch-like ideology. He is the one to say “`They had the makings of the Death Watch in them, those two. Him and that perverted secret fight club, her and that let’s-conquer-the-galaxy-again osik”. Alongside him, Ordo and Skirata were the most vocal about those two Mandalorians. Interesting, Walon Vau - for whom Death Watch is trigger to extreme hatred - did not despite them openly, at least until he saw DW badge on their armors. Then, he was all okay with killing them.

Here is the thing: was Dred and Isabet truly Death Watch sympathizers back on Kamino, or did their ideological thinking was just additional reason why Mij hated them both? Because we know he “loathed them with passion” and being “marooned indefinitely on Kamino with folks you hated on sight and nowhere to escape them” for sure did not help the situation. 

Frankly, Mij and Dred is not the first duo that fought and hated each other guts. Walon Vau, when introduced, also was seen as the psycho, cruel, bad Mandalorian; an image fueled by Skirata’s, Ordo’s and Atin’s POV yet with passing time, perception of his character has changed. So, can we be sure that Dred and Isabet were so awful? Especially since Vau and Fett could tolerate their sentiments, even if that sounded a lot like Death Watch’s ideology?

This leads me to two conclusion.

The Priest and Reau’s ideology was not really unique only to Death Watch. They wanted A) Mandalore to be great empire again, B) Mandalorian people to serve their own interest rather than fighting for foreign governments and strangers. Most likely many other Mandalorians were bitter about their past and current situation. If we take Legends and New Canon into account, this kind of sentiment actually makes sense. Death Watch may take that into extreme, but even people like Skirata - or his just-adjusting to Mandalorian life daughter - from time to time were thinking that Mandalorians shouldn’t fight for aruetii (foreigners) and doing their dirty jobs.

“I’m not arguing,” Gilamar said. “Just making it clear that if I run into Dred and he starts on that bring-back-the-good-old-days garbage, I’ll gut him. And his crazy girlfriend.”

“No reason to run into him,” Ordo said. “Unless you’re in Keldabe.”

“Don’t you think it’s time we started fighting for our own interests?” Ruu took the mug out of her father’s hand and peered into it as if checking up on him. “I’m not saying this guy’s right, but being at every aruetii’s beck and call and doing the dying for them doesn’t sound smart to me. Look at this world. It’s dirt-poor. That’s not much to show for the lives we’ve spent on shoring up other governments.”

“Good point,” Vau said. “You’re definitely a Skirata.”

That was an odd thing for Vau to say, seeing as no Mando cared much about biological parentage. It was a culture of adoption and blurred lines between offspring and in-laws.

He just means she says the same things as Kal'buir. That’s all.

If Skirata can talk/think how Mandalorians shouldn’t kill each other for foreigners’ money, like in True Colors:

Mandalorians ended up killing one another for all kinds of reasons, personal and incidental. It still didn’t make it right. The covert ops troopers sent after Sull, now these strangers-the thought of nek dogs came back to him, dog set on dog for sport, or just a killing machine to do the master’s bidding. Skirata felt it was time Mando'ade stopped being everyone’s nek.

then maybe the idea of “coming back to roots” and creating one mighty army is not so controversial? I mean, Jaster Mereel saw Mandalorians as just well-paid mercenaries, yet by leading (at least three) military units of well trained warriors he had better bargaining position to pick up missions, clients and how much money should be paid than a lone mandalorian freelancer could have. I think that last decade or so before the Clone Wars was time in which “national movements” happened in various mandalorian groups.

We may only wonder how much Priest and Reau’s ideology changed over the years, when they all were stuck on Kamino training little kids to fight for Republic/Jedi Order that no Mandalorian was overly fond of.  

There is also the little passage in Bounty Hunter Code, in which Jango commented that the Death Watch manifesto does not sound like Tor Vizsla (that Fett considered just a thug), the original leader of the group. But is something that Priest or Reau could said.

Jango could not be aware of how deep they felt about the whole “great mandalorian empire”, but either, like 501’st said, he thought they were all talk or knew, but did not care.

What brings me to the second point. Jango changed a lot between Jaster Mereel’s death and agreeing to be DNA donor for Great Army of Republic. Especially after Galidraan. He agreed to work for Dooku, because the man promised to destroy Jedi Order. And as much as Jango hated Death Watch, ultimately he hated Jedi even more. So, he could be as well aware that Priest and Reau were at heart Death Watch sympathizers, but did not care. He needed the best soldiers to train an army to eliminate Jedi - the ultimately enemy of all Mandalorians - once and for good.

“Now do you see? Do you?“ Vau hissed the sibilant like escaping steam. Mird cowered on the floor, whining softly. “I’m sick to death of your sentimental twaddle about Jango betraying us by letting Kamino use his genes. He did it to stop the Jedi. He did it to create an army strong enough to bring them down. You drone on about the injustice of unelected elites, my little working-class hero-well, now they’re gone. Yes, it cost our boys’ lives, but the Jedi are gone, gone, gone. And they won’t be killing Mandalorians again, not for a long time. Maybe never.”

And here comes my, most likely, unpopular opinion: I don’t think Fett cared much for the ideology. He hated Vizsla and DW, because they killed his family and mentor. He lead True Mandalorians because he cared for Jaster Mereel and tried his best to carry on his legacy. But in the end, somehow, in some ironic way, Jango adapted Tor Vizsla’s ruthless determination to achieve his goal. If to destroy Jedi Order he needed to sacrifice milions of his own clones and deal with two Death Watch sympathizers, so be it.

[septembersung]

Based on the discourse crossing my dash, it looks to me like what a lot of people are missing the in the censorship argument are three important things: 1) agreed-upon definitions of the words they’re using (censorship, free speech, right) 2) social context and 3) Catholic doctrine.

Let’s take these issues one at a time.

Would censorship work as public policy on a mass scale today in America? No. Should it? You can argue both yes and no, depending on which perspective you’re answering the question from: moral or political.

Here’s one approach to the “yes” answer: It’s about morality, which, and I’m addressing my fellow believers here, we know to objective, not relative or subjective, and knowable by reason even by persons without faith, for the natural law is written on the heart of man. Look at it this way: If you, the reader of this post, presumably a Catholic or at least some kind of religious conservative if you’re reading my blog, think that schools and media should have decency standards to protect the innocent, especially children, or that porn should be illegal, or that the gender ideology should be excluded from classrooms, or that you the parent should have the right to decide what educational materials and media your children consume and when, then you are in favor of a kind of censorship.

Would such bans, say on porn or certain kinds of material in media in the name of public decency, be a kind of censorship that violates the American right to free speech? In the Constitution, “free speech” was written to mean individuals are to be protected from governmental reprisal when they criticize or challenge the government. It was a political protection for political topics for a people whose politics had not become morality debates and who shares a common morality. Similarly, freedom of the press is supposed to mean the press is not a propaganda arm of the government. Nowhere is any individual granted a Constitutionally guaranteed right to fling whatever filth they want on the public. And certainly not when the public cannot agree on what constitutes “filth.” 

All of that remains true and we can see that censorship of any sort, even common sense moral safeguards like a ban on pornography, are not going to fly or be workable in a society like today’s America, which is where we get to the “no” answer. America is secular, which means default atheistic, and, especially today, is radically pluralistic, which means there is exactly nothing that all or even a majority of its citizens hold in common, neither in culture, morals, political ideals, or religion. We recognize that a secular - let’s be absolutely clear what we mean - an atheistic government, particularly a supposedly pluralistic-population-representative one owing its legitimacy to “the people,” does not have the authority or the ability to create and enforce uniform standards of legal morality. Laws that deal with morality, whether it be public decency or murder, are borne out of the social mores and religious convictions of its people, and taken as a unified citizenry, Americans have none. 

But here’s the kicker for us Catholics. We are obligated to believe that Jesus Christ is the true King and rightful master of every soul, whether that soul believes in Him or not, and the rightful supreme ruler of every nation, whether that nation believes in Him or not. We celebrate this every year on the feast of the Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ. In the traditional Roman celebration of this feast, the emphasis is on His social kingship. In the Novus Ordo, it’s on His spiritual kingship. The emphases are different but they are both true and both present in each. 

This is where “error has no rights” comes from. Now we’re in the realm of theology and doctrine, not political philosophy. Is there any creature who has the “right” to defy the King of the Universe? Catholic teaching clearly and consistently has always taught: no. We have the ability to do it, because we are rational free beings. If we reject God, He will honor that choice and we will spend eternity without Him, in hell. But we do not have a “right” to do it. “Freedom” in Catholic teaching has always meant freedom for excellence, not “license to do anything you want,” because sin and error are not freedom, but slavery - sin - the “wages” of which is “death,” as St. Paul says. We do not have a “right” to sin. (To address the inevitable objection: Does this mean we ought to force conversions? No. Forced conversions are sinful and illegitimate, as the Church has always taught, and I wrote about elsewhere.)

This truth, about the universality of Christ’s kingship and the duty all souls owe to him, does have an application in political philosophy. What binds on individuals binds especially so on leaders of individuals, including the state. Numerous popes (among other sources) have written extensively on the duty of states to support the genuine and objective best welfare of their people. The popes have again and again decried the “godless state” as an offense against God and a serious problem that will lead societies into terrible trouble and souls into hell - precisely because the godless state is in a state of rebellion against God and against its duties to its people. 

Now consider much of the history of nations, before nations became secular - that is, atheist. Even after the unity of Christendom was broken by the splitting of Protestants from the Church, for some time Europe had culturally cohesive states with a unified moral code. They understood that some things, in morality and in philosophy, are wrong. They are sins, and as sins, are dangerous to the salvation of souls and to the commonweal. Souls and society stand or fall together. This understanding of the importance of protecting the innocent, fulfilling the virtue of religion (giving to God what is His due), and serving the objective best interests of the people, is how you arrive at a conclusion like, “no one has a right to disseminate atheistic literature.” 

The Catholic Church has always upheld censorship as a just power of legitimate authority, particularly for the Church herself (after all, she kept a famous Index of banned books for a very long time,) and in some measure by the secular state as well. Note the distinction between the Church’s use and the state’s use. They are distinct, but historically, have overlapped; sometimes the state is the proper authority to enforce something, and sometimes the Church.

The example of the family is instructive; it’s on a scale we more easily comprehend. If you are a good father or mother, do you allow people you think wrong and dangerous to come into your home and start teaching your children their wrong and dangerous view of the world and terrible habits? Of course not. The younger and more innocent, and therefore the more vulnerable, your children are, the more important this is. My oldest is only just approaching the age of reason, so I say this with vehement personal conviction. Grossly undervaluing the vital necessity of protecting the innocent (of all ages) is a major mistake being made by an awful lot of people, and we can look around our society and see the consequences of that.

Now pay attention, because, even if you’ve followed this far, this is the point where a lot is lost in translation on this topic. Analogies only go so far, obviously, so let’s take it a little further: 

Children grow up. Good parents are actively involved in what their children are learning and are helping them absorb information in a healthy and age-appropriately nuanced way. This includes, at the right time, introducing them to error. I think what most blows me away about the discourse I’ve seen is how people are equating “error has no rights” with “enforce totalitarian groupthink where no one can ever ask questions.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Asking questions, challenging the truth in your own mind, coming to grips with it, is essential for forming mature thinkers and especially mature believers. This was as true in Christendom, in a unified, Catholic society where censorship could be reasonably understood and employed, as it is in our pluralistic, atheistic society. The difference is we no longer have the safeguards of a moral and just society - we have to reinvent the wheel in our own families, and try to create that safe and stable environment in which our children can be formed in virtue and grow in truth and holiness. 

Okay, so much for children and the family as an analogy. But we’re grownups, right, and and society as we’re discussing it is made up of grownups, who are supposed to do this truth-pursuing, virtue-growing, salvation-striving thing for themselves, right, on our own, and we don’t need a nanny-government hanging over our shoulder! Well - wrong and right. From the Church’s point of view, we are all children, and we do need that guidance as grownups. Not from a nanny-state, certainly not in today’s context where there’s no organization less authorized or qualified, but from the Church, our holy Mother. Which is why things like Index of prohibited books existed. To protect the faith and the innocence of ordinary people who do not have the time or the expertise or the sheer stamina to wade through all the absolute garbage and damaging stuff out there to “figure it out” for ourselves. 

Let’s be clear. Such a list didn’t stop people who wanted to from reading those books. To be even clearer, having a unified Catholic culture did not stop people from being unbelievers, from asking questions, from speaking and writing their views and having debates. The famed medieval disputatio was not all (or, ever,) “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin,” nor were debates and wrestling with faith and the big questions of life just for monk-academics. What we’re talking about is a culture that, as a whole, understood and agreed upon the most important foundational truths of the world, and had safeguards in place to preserve society from those forces which would tear it apart. I’m asking you to seriously think about that, as a Christian, who believes that getting souls to heaven is the most important thing there is. Are you really willing to argue that such a view of a healthy society is not a good thing? (I didn’t say “think it’s perfect” or “think it’s without flaws”, but - do you really think it’s not a good thing?)

Remember I am writing to you, my fellow Christians, who, I hope believe with me that salvation is the single most important goal. I didn’t write all this out to be like “yeah man, let’s burn all the Dawkins books and throw all the atheists in jail and get Congress to pass another amendment promising fines for non-Christians.” I just spent the last hour or so of my life writing this out to hopefully help you see that what this discourse is dancing around - with a lot of really unpleasant to watch flying-off-the-handle all around - are some extremely serious and already well-defined issues in Catholic thought, and actual doctrine that’s being run roughshod over. When it comes to the faith and philosophy, just because it shows up as an argument on tumblr doesn’t mean we can afford to indulge a knee-jerk reaction. 

tl;dr: “Censorship” is not a dirty word. It does not mean advocating for thought control and no debate or asking questions about anything ever. It does not mean punishing people who are wrong. It is, instead, a practice defended and adopted the Church when exercised by legitimate authority in the service of the objective truth, the rights of God, and the best interest of souls and society. 

I really would like to believe that most of the Christian community on tumblr is capable of thinking on issues like this with a little bit of caution and nuance. When we talk about issues that touch on everything from dogma to political philosophy to Church-approved ways to help safeguard the salvation of souls, we could all use a little more education on the topics involved (myself included!) - and a little more level-headedness. 

[thesummerstorms]

Can we hear more about the timetravel au??

(response to this post here)

Like, tbh it’s hard to describe because a lot of it isn’t concrete so much as “small but intense moments of dramatic irony, fond longing, and sad smiles”.

Either adult!Kad or teenage!Koa eventually turns up and gives Dar quite a turn though.

And Etain full of soft, sad smiles in Darman’s direction, since he’s normally the one she turns to when she’s overwhelmed, but this Darman doesn’t know she loves him yet.

And Darman feeling quietly sad/disappointed/bitter because older!Etain seems strange to him, but also reinforces how much he’d like to still know and be close to her at that age? And with his rapid aging he doesn’t think it’s a possibility. But he still loves her, so when she slips up and mentions her kids and her kids being in danger, he still tries to do his best by her.

And meanwhile she’s just watching him full of longing, and also fear because it would be so easy to change things, for better or worse, with one word to him now.

Until, surprise surprise, one of the kids turn up and her kids are his kids. Or even maybe somehow future!Dar turns up, graying and shaking with relief for her. (Idk, this is not a logical or coherent AU).

A Sith hunter who’s been stalking Etain in her own timeline is trying to prevent Etain from foiling the Rise of the Empire, and also trying to hunt down Etain and her super-soldier-descended Force-using children for experimentation, and it’s giving Ordo some horror when Etain explains what the Sith do with the Force-sensitive kids they find. (The young enough ones, anyway; Kad might be considered too old for easy corruption.)

The fire and grief in Leia’s eyes as she readies herself to do some impossible task and Zey or Kal asks who she is, and Etain dips her head and says- “Leia- the Last Queen of Alderaan.” The visible shock when the past!characters realize Alderaan was destroyed.

The Mandalorian characters feeling the weight shift as Sabine introduces herself as Mandalore and leader of the Mandalorian resistance, unsheathing the Darksaber.

Zey, whitefaced, finally seeing the Sith and putting all the clues together into what Etain was too afraid to tell him, forseeing all at once the downfall of the Order he’s dedicated his whole life to.

Like I said, it’s all scenes, full of visuals not coherency.

That said, idk, if you have specific questions I may or may not have answers???

[sidroth55]

ISN Ministry with Paul McGuire

AUDIENCE: [APPLAUSE]

SID: So last night Paul and I were having dinner and the subject was brought up that I've taught on speaking in supernatural languages, in tongues and I started saying I pray in tongues one hour a day. And Paul said, 'You really do it an hour a day.' And I said, 'Yes, and let me tell you why. The stuff you're teaching I don't know how anyone can survive if they're not. Because when you're praying in tongues you're praying perfect prayers with perfect faith with perfect understanding of the future because it's coming from the Spirit of God.' So let's suppose, for example, last night after dinner I am driving home and I get a call from my wife. My wife is in her car right behind me. She said, 'Do you know your headlights are not on?' And I said, 'No I didn't know my headlights were not on because everything is lit up like it is.' Well someone had accidentally taken it off of automatic. My wife yesterday morning was not going to come to dinner yesterday and yesterday morning she said to me, 'I'm coming to dinner tonight.' I said, 'Wonderful!' I believe when I prayed in tongues that morning the Holy Spirit put it on her heart to come to dinner to drive behind my car to tell me that my lights were not on and save my life!

 AUDIENCE: [APPLAUSE]

 SID: My mother didn't raise a dummy, I'm praying in tongues one hour a day. So because I said that, [turning to Paul] what did you do last night, you prayed in tongues the next morning, you prayed in tongues for an hour. What happened with you?

 PAUL: Well, the Lord spoke to me through your sharing that you disciplined yourself to speak in tongues for an hour, and I've spoken in tongues and have all my life but I never disciplined myself to do it for an hour. So I was like groggy on west coast time, and I made a commitment I was going to pray in tongues for an hour, especially when you have to minister up here, and I was feeling about as spiritual as-a dirty carpet.

 AUDIENCE: [LAUGHS]

 PAUL: So I'm praying in tongues. First 20 minutes I don't feel anything, and I'm just being obedient. After about 20 minutes that fog lifts, and all of a sudden the anointing comes upon me. Many of the things that I shared came from pictures and visions the Lord gave me. But what released it was the speaking in tongues. But I didn't do it because I felt like it. I did it obediently but 20 minutes into it the glory of God showed up.

 SID: And when the glory showed up God showed him things for the future. [Turning to Paul] What did he show you?

 PAUL: Well what happened was I began [laughs], I'm laughing because I began to see pictures and visions. And I don't use those words carelessly. But I saw this studio, I saw Sid, and I specifically saw the same golden light that I was describing in the vision that I had, I saw that golden light over Sid, over the studio, over me but over the other guests, and that golden light was being transmitted and it was pouring through the set into television sets all around the world. And it was a very clear thing, and that's why I prayed in the nature that I did. And then the Lord showed me even more. He showed me many people are hungry for God, but they're so biased against Christianity, but if they hear about a supernatural force they'll listen. And then the Lord began to show me specifically that powerful leaders, powerful political leaders in the United States, other kinds of leaders, and specifically Russian leaders-

 SID: By the way we're on 5 days a week in the entire Soviet Union in Russian.

 AUDIENCE: [APPLAUSE]

 PAUL: Amen, praise the Lord! And the Lord showed me that these men were hungry for answers, that they had problems and their challenges. But talking about a whole bunch of God stuff wouldn't relate to them, so talking about the supernatural force would intrigue them. And then I saw this glory coming out of this set touching leaders across the world and changing them. And then of course the Lord showed me that would be the first step in them coming to know Jesus Christ.

 SID: [To audience] Now the supernatural information that the God has put into Paul McGuire I want you to learn some of that. You ready? You open ?

 AUDIENCE: Yes!

 PAUL: Praise the Lord. Thank you for having me here. So I'll just share a number of things that the Lord has put on my heart. Number 1, is in the shortness of the show it's hard to get into all the intensity. I want you to know that I'm the type of guy, I will research-I work 12 hours a day- I'm constantly researching thousands of pages because everything I teach on prophecy, everything, I am always a skeptic. I don't believe it, and I just don't believe it, it sounds too far-fetched. So when I delve into the subject, and I see the first-hand scientific reports, etc., etc. then I realize it's true and then I can speak about it passionately, despite whether or not people think like I'm from outer space. I know it's true 'cause I did my homework. And every time I get challenged in the debate, and I mean this respectfully, usually the person debating with me and attacking me for saying what I've said has invested about 5 minutes of time on the research, inevitably, because I'll ask 'em. But the Lord has taught me to be compassionate, because I used to be that way too. You know if you've never heard this stuff, let's be honest, it sounds like a sci-fi movie. Okay? So if you feel that way towards what I said, you know I understand, Okay? I'm not mad at you. I used to be the same way. So here's the deal. There are things going on in our world, that really they're in a lot of the science fiction movies, but what a lot of people don't understand, [is] they're true. We are living in the world of the future. I don't know how old you all are, I can kind of guess some of you, others I have no idea. But I know when I was a kid, cell phone? With the TV thing in it. Man, personal computer? When I started writing books I used the regular typewriter, and then I made the big transition to some really cheap word processor. And then I remember in the early [days], I've written 22 books, I remember in the early days white-out was finally invented.

 AUDIENCE: [APPLAUSE]

 PAUL: Man, that saved my life 'cause I could go to the Xerox machine and if you did it really good it looks like an original. And remember the typewriters that used to auto erase?

 AUDIENCE: Yeah!

 PAUL: Okay. Well, now we have word processors. That's huge. And because of the internet I used to have to go the library and pour through books and go to 20 libraries to find facts. Now you can Google search and if you know how to distinguish between the lunatic web sites from Area 51 and the regular ones you can find interesting information. Okay. So because of this research I believe that we are in the time immediately preceding the return of the Lord. And people ask me, 'Why?' I can give you all kinds of documentation. You got a taste of it tonight. I don't set dates, ever! The Lord could surprise me. I'm putting my kids through college and everything else through a lot of loans-And you know I'm planning for the future. But the closeness to the Lord's return, all the prophetic signs are here. Okay? Now-I began to teach all this stuff, because I'm an expert, unfortunately, in mind control and in many other things that are just kind of fields-it's like opening Pandora's Box- you just wish you hadn't gotten there, but now you know what you know and you've got to deal with it. And I research a lot of very intense fields such as the occult and the Luciferian Elite that really exist and really do run this planet. They're real people. See, the Bible says that we are in a spiritual war. Apostle Paul [says]: For our fight is not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers and the dark unseen forces of wickedness in heavenly places. [Ephesians 6:12] Christians for the most part give lip service to that but they don't really take it seriously. So the reality is Lucifer is communicating, his organizational structure is like a pyramid that goes back to Pharaoh-and the slaves are at the bottom and, by the way, on the back of your dollar bill you see the occult pyramid. And probably most of you are familiar with that eye ball in the pyramid on the back of your dollar bill? That's the all-seeing eye of Lucifer. Okay? That's Satan's eye ball. Now ask yourself a question: 'What is Satan's eye ball doing on the back of the dollar bill?' In case you're confused as to why-and by the way that's not my opinion. That is the opinion of scholars, it's not a debatable thing that I said it. You can't debate that, Okay? You can try, but do some homework and the debate's ended. Okay. So on the bottom of the pyramid are the words in Latin: NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM  — New Order of the Ages  — which means “New World Order.” So we see on the back of the dollar bill an occult pyramid with the words [that translate as] New World Order. [And] that's where America [comes in]-Sir Francis Bacon in the mid-1600's planned for America to be the new Atlantis and the head of the New World Order. He was the head of the Rosicrucians, which became the Illuminati, an occult secret society which goes back to ancient Babylon. All right? Now the Illuminati -they're still in existence today, a very powerful occult organization that runs the world- remember the Illuminati financed the Communists and they financed Hitler. Okay? They also backed the KKK [Ku Klux Klan]. What does it have to do with the KKK? The KKK is this master race stuff. Okay? So, the goal is to go into a new world order, which is all in the Bible. Now the Phoenix, which I for most of my life thought was an Eagle-and there's many other occult symbols all over the dollar. Okay? The goal is to go into a global currency-.well look, never before in the history of mankind were [we] now in a place where the global currency is within striking distance. The target date is 2018. They've made similar announcements, they may not hit that date, but that's their target date. And the target name for the global currency is “The Phoenix” based on that occult bird. America is moving very quickly into this new world order. Okay? That's why we see all of the transformation going [on.] Everything that's happening for the most part is not accidental, it's strategic. All the things that appear to be random are not random they're part of a plan. And I'm just gonna get down to it really bluntly. The motto of the Illuminati, an occult organization, was “order out of chaos.” So the Illuminati- they're occult- deliberately creates chaos so they can bring in their new world order. That's their operating game plan. That's why they finance the Russians and the Nazis. Number 2, the Communist Manifesto, that-promises the Worker's Paradise, [that] we'll redistribute the wealth. You know all our kids in school are being taught that. You go to Moscow, Moscow's got more billionaires that any other city in the world. Do you see the wealth equally shared in Moscow? I don't. Do you see that wealth equally shared in Cuba? Do you see the wealth equally shared in China? Everywhere a communist dictatorship has been installed there's no Worker's Paradise, the workers are worse off than they ever were. Okay? [It's a] lie. But guess what? The Communist Manifesto is a total mirror copy of the Illuminati occult manifesto that was published a hundred years earlier. So that tells you there's a relationship between communism and the Illuminati. And by the way  — Karl Marx the author of the Communist Manifesto was a practicing Satanist. They didn't tell you that in school because they don't want you to know. He was a practicing Satanist and he hated Christ. Now, Hitler was also deeply involved in the occult. So, in America, see, if we don't know history-you know the old expression-'you're doomed to repeat it.' Americans don't know history. Most of you probably know history a whole lot more than the younger generations. Why did the German Evangelical Church legally vote for Hitler as their head? He was voted into office. Why did the Evangelical Church overwhelmingly support Hitler? And the question should be asked: 'If they had the Holy Spirit inside them and if they had an ounce of spiritual discernment in them and they paid attention at all'-it was quite out in the open-that the Third Reich, by the way, was not a political party first, it was an occult party first. Everybody in Germany knew that. All the secret occult societies were openly putting Hitler into power  — 'So how come [in] the Evangelical Church nobody had a discernment from the Holy Spirit that this man [Hitler] was demon-possessed?' If somebody walked into this room demon-possessed and pretended to be a leader, all of you with the Holy Spirit inside, you would have that uncomfortable feeling, right? But they welcomed Hitler as the Messiah! Why was that? Why was the Evangelical Church so hypnotized? The-Church in America today is in the exact same place spiritually as the Evangelical Church was in Nazi Germany. That's a serious warning. Because it goes in steps. First you demonize Christians. We're on the top of the list. You can go and Google and search it. There's an Air Force report that came out the other day. Evangelical Christians are number 1 on the list of religious extremists [as] possible terrorists. We're above the KKK, we're above Al Qaeda, we're above the Muslim Brotherhood. What's that about? Okay, you know what that means? In a time of crisis they come after us first. And you all know what [happened] in Nazi Germany, where it led to concentration camps and so on and so forth. Now, [as] all these prophetic signs happening, are we supposed to be paralyzed in fear and do nothing? No, that's what the devil wants us to believe. So I shared the vision I had of a Great Awakening in America. Now people think, 'Well that interferes with Bible prophecy.' It's amazing how people think everything good interferes with Bible Prophecy. Okay? No, because there's nowhere in Bible prophecy which says you can't have a Great-it's amazing the lack of logic and common sense people use in their arguments-there's nothing in the Bible and in Bible prophecy which says you can't have a revival and you can't have a Great Awakening in the last days. And the argument is, 'Well it will be a counterfeit revival, it will be The Great Apostasy.' Yes, there is a great apostasy, it's going on now. I could name churches and movements that are in apostasy. And there is a counterfeit revival and it's going on now. Both of those things are true. But just because there's a counterfeit revival doesn't mean there can't be a Biblical revival going on at the same time.

 AUDIENCE: [APPLAUSE]

 PAUL: And here's the proof why. The Apostle Paul said the Last Days began when the Apostle Paul was teaching. So, we had “The Reformation,” a massive global revival during the Last Days. We had the “First Great Awakening” which rocked the American colonies. We wouldn't have the freedoms of America today in our Bill of Rights and Constitution, and by the way, if you believe in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution according to the Department of Homeland Security you are a terrorist. That's a fact! Read the document on the report of right wing extremism. O.K. So, there was a “[Second] Great Awakening” and it changed our nation and it gave us these radical freedoms that no other country has. Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness and stuff like that-freedom of speech, freedom of religion, that came from the Christian input, it came from the revival of the “First Great Awakening.” That was in the Last Days. The “Second Great Awakening” which partially freed the slaves with Charles Finney. That was in the Last Days. The healing revivals in 1940's,1948. That was in the Last Days. The “Jesus Movement,” how I got saved, or the “Charismatic Movement.” That was in the Last Days. So I've given you numerous illustrations of powerful revivals that have all occurred in the Last Days. So why can not there be another revival in the last days before the Lord returns? There can be  — and there will be. You know why? Because you can't fulfill the Great Harvest before the return of the Lord if you don't have the power of the Lord. Jesus Christ said-

 PAUL: [READS JOHN 15:4]

 PAUL: And then you ask anything in His name. There'll be miracles, you'll have supernatural power if you abide in the Vine, which is Jesus Christ, you will move miraculously. We cannot fulfill the great end time soul harvest on our own strength. That soul harvest is produced by Christians who are filled with the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit and revival. So that's the end of the argument of the critics. Okay? [The]Argument is over. Now, here's the deal for you and I: Because I love you, I tell you the truth, okay? And so-there's a lot of preachers that they mock fire and brimstone preaching-Jesus was a fire and brimstone preacher. Founder and father of the “First Great Awakening,” Jonathan Edwards, you read his sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” — 2 hours of the most graphic description of hell, and the torments of hell, and fire and brimstone you'll ever read in your life! And he changed the nation. He was a fire and brimstone preacher! Now, one other thing: And that is you have an assignment. The assignment is called “America.” Do not participate in the lie of the devil. The flaming missiles of the evil one. God is not finished with America yet. America has not become so evil that God has taken His hand completely off of America. I'm not saying that we are not experiencing the judgment of God to some degree. And I'm not saying that God is not allowing us to be chastised nor am I saying that we're not in the greatest danger we've ever been in. But I'm saying the hand of God is still on our nation at this moment and in the spiritual realm God is giving us a brief opportunity to release His power in this nation. But that release can't happen if you're gonna embrace the lie that God is finished with America. Listen! God is not finished with America and God is not finished with you! And that idea that God is finished with America is just like somebody who is possessed by a demon. As long as you hold onto it you're paralyzed. So God wants to break that spirit off of your life and the life of other people so that He can send a Third Great Awakening and power contingent upon repentance and your asking. God says: “Call unto me and I will answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things which thou knowest not.” [Jeremiah 33:3]

 PAUL: [PRAYING AND IMPARTING] So Lord we pray right now in the name of Jesus, we thank You that You are a God of miracles. We declare God that You are not finished with America and we break that spirit off of the church and the consciousness of all God's people. You are not finished with America, and Lord, right now in the name of Jesus we receive by faith the outpouring of a Third Great Awakening. We receive by faith an infusion of power, and right now in the name of Jesus I want you to not doubt, simply be open to it like a little child-at this moment the Lord is setting you on fire with the power of the Holy Spirit, and if you focus your eyes on the Lord you're gonna notice that you are being set on fire by the power of the Holy Spirit, and that you are burning in the Holy Spirit. And that burning and that fire is a Third Great Awakening, and everybody in this room who is open to it and not resisting it is being set on fire by the power of the Holy Spirit. You're burning and you're being set on fire. And the Lord is breathing His life in you and the Lord wants you to knows that at this second  — not tomorrow not next week  — but at this second the Lord is setting you on fire at a greater dimension in the spiritual realm, and there is a supernatural impartation with force, with dominion, with kingdom glory, and the spirit of God is setting you on fire-and I speak to you now under the anointing of the Holy Spirit that you have been set on fire right now because you were called for such a time as this. And the Lord is saying He wants you to rise in spiritual authority and allow Him to set you on fire. And for every single person that has received that with child-like faith you are being set ablaze in the spirit. You are being set on fire by the Spirit. And the Lord is saying: “You will remember this day for the rest of your life for this was the day that I lit you on fire again for a purpose.” In Jesus name. Amen and amen.

 SID: [CLOSING IMPARTATION] Thank you. Would you please stand? Now don't get faked out. When he prayed that you will be ablaze with fire, if you did not feel a fire that does not mean you did not receive the anointing. You keep that in mind. It's all by faith. It's all by faith. Some of you did feel a fire. But some of you felt just a nice presence of God. Don't stop what God has started. If you were opened, you received. My Bible says: “Everyone who asks receives. Everyone who seeks finds. Everyone who knocks the door shall be opened.” The Lord is blessing you right now. The Lord is keeping you right now. The Lord, He's smiling upon you right now. The Lord is gifting you, just receive, just receive. The Lord is gifting you right now. The Lord is surrounding you with His favor right now, supernatural favor. The Lord is giving you His Shalom, His completeness right now. Completeness in your spirit, completeness in your soul, and completeness in your body right now in the Name that is above every problem: Yeshua HaMashiach Tsidkenu, Jesus the Messiah, our Righteousness. And all God's people: Stop their pity party, stop their depression, stop their moaning and groaning, stop their gossip and recognize that they have been called to the kingdom for such a time as this  — because now is the set time, now is your time! Do not look back, look forward, on the high calling that you have been called to. In Yeshua's name, in Jesus' name. Amen.

This is the conversation of SID ROTH and PAUL , AUDIENCE From the Show It’s Supernatural.

[heavymetalbebop]

#13: MATT MITCHELL

As with the Dieterich/Rodriguez installment, I'd like to thank my subject this time around, the brilliant pianist Matt Mitchell, for his patience regarding the following post. The initial conversation here took place more than a year ago, in August of 2016, at my former apartment in Brooklyn's South Slope neighborhood. Matt and I had been corresponding about metal for a while, comparing notes on bands like Incantation and Revenge via Twitter. I was already a fan of his work, both as a leader and with Tim Berne, Darius Jones and various others, and as soon as I learned of his musical predilections along these lines, I knew I wanted to talk to him for HMB. I warned him in advance that it might be a bit before I could post the convo, and here we are, some 13 months later. (In between, we spent a fun night out at the Gramercy Theatre checking out a killer double bill of Morbid Angel and Suffocation.)

I'm thrilled to announce that this time around, I'm partnering with esteemed jazz scribe Nate Chinen and WBGO.org, which is hosting an abridged version of this interview. To read the "theatrical release" of this interview, please go here. Below you’ll find the jumbo-size director's cut, followed by an email Q&A I did with Matt earlier this month in which he discusses how his metal intake may have informed the pieces heard on his dazzling new Pi Recordings album, A Pouting Grimace (officially out 9/29/17). I've dug both of his prior albums as a leader so far, 2013's Fiction and 2015's Vista Accumulation, but to my ears, this latest one is not only vastly weirder and more distinctive but vastly more engrossing. It feels like a true arrival for him, and I expect it to make some serious waves. Without further ado, please enjoy Heavy Metal Be-Bop #13!

What was your introduction to metal? My entrée into metal, as I think it might have been for some jazz people, was actually via John Zorn and Naked City. I was in high school when Naked City was happening. I never saw them, but I listened to them incessantly, especially the Torture Garden tape. My senior year of high school was the Torture Garden tape and the first Mr. Bungle album, at the same time as a lot of Frank Zappa stuff that I was getting into. That's basically how I even heard of bands like Carcass and Napalm Death and whatnot. And then a friend of mine named Matt Johnson — this was back when you made tapes for people — he made me four full tapes, like 90-minute tapes; basically he made a metal comp for me. He titled it "Death Is My Life." He was a huge, huge metal fan. He was, like, the metal guy. He was a year ahead of me and it was like the last month of high school for me, and that's where I first heard bands like Death, Napalm Death, Bolt Thrower — he loved Bolt Thrower a lot. He was super tapped in. This was when, like, Nocturnus was a thing. The other day I just kind of came across that name, and I was like, "Oh, I remember listening to them back in the day."

He loved Morbid Angel too, of course, and Entombed. Obituary was an early one as well. And that sort of led me to gradually start buying my own shit. I tended to gravitate towards different stuff than he liked. He didn't like the fast shit as much. Bolt Thrower was one he really liked a lot; that was his thing, a little groovier. I gravitated toward the fuckin' insane shit. I was drawn to Napalm Death, so I got Scum and From Enslavement to Obliteration, and basically I was into the grind kind of thing at the time. I wasn't super aware of all the distinctions. But I was just interested in it from a kind of complexity sort of view, and the heaviness combined with that. It's not like I sat around longing for it, but then I realized, "Oh, this is crazy shit. Everyone's kind of playing everything at the same time. Kind of chromatic. The rhythms are a little weird." And that was around the time that [Napalm Death's] Fear, Emptiness, Despair was new, so I got that and was like, "OK, now I'm starting to really [get into this]." And since then it's been like, every couple years I'd get back in and catch up on what I missed, get a bunch of stuff. So that's sort of what's happened this year: I just keep going with it, and I keep getting new stuff.

Where are you finding new metal these days? Online. Bandcamp. All the sort of big labels have their own Bandcamps, and a lot of the bands will just have their own Bandcamp if they're not on a quote-unquote bigger label. I'm not really sure what the [sales] numbers are in terms of metal; I'm sure they way outstrip jazz. So I'll find the Bandcamp for a band, listen to it, and if I dig it, I'll try to track it down on CD. Not super hard — usually I'll go as far as Amazon. But I actually got a few CDs today in the mail from Nuclear War Now. I think every single one of those bands, when I was led to that page a few weeks ago, I'd never heard of any of them. I'd heard of a couple of them, like Black Witchery, but I didn't really know them that well. I got to them via getting turned onto Grave Upheaval, which unfortunately does not have a CD available. They just do vinyl and download, so I bought the download. So the CDs I got were two CDs by Irkallian Oracle, which I really dug because I saw them as sort of related to the "cavern-core" from Australia, like Portal and Impetuous Ritual. Sonically they're similar to that but kind of a little bit more defined, at least than Impetuous — sonically a little sharper. Although I do like a little bit of the sonic obscurity of Impetuous. So them and then there's an American band called Prosanctus Inferi — they're a little bit more ... I don't know; I have in some ways zero metal cred by the way I describe these things, but they strike me more as a grindcore / brutal death kind of take. Really kind of together but the drumming is sort of bizarre. It's kind of got a rawness to the playing, but sonically it's really clear. That really appealed to me.

Have you always been into the extreme stuff, or did you go back and check out things like Metallica? I did. I never bought a Metallica album, but I've listened to them. They were kind of more around. A lot of my friends knew about them. I definitely liked them. I probably would appreciate them the most now, but I tended to just go for the more extreme stuff. Even though they were obviously heavy and good at one point, by the time I was into it, it wasn't as... I just wanted stuff that scared me a little. I still want that.

I was sort of the same way — it was a pretty straightforward path for me from liking Poison in fifth grade to liking Morbid Angel in 10th grade. And then with all the punk stuff in between. Sure, I listened to that too. The girl I was with for a while was into Sonic Youth big time. Obviously they're a little different, but there was a lot of punk in there too. Then I got Gorguts' Obscura right when it came out, and that was, as most metal people know, super significant. I think I got into Cryptopsy around then too. (I've also barely heard half these names pronounced by people, so I don't even know if I'm saying them right.) So that was awesome. And then later Pig Destroyer and Agoraphobic Nosebleed. I actually got an Agoraphobic Nosebleed album before Pig Destroyer; I think Relapse might have put that one out first: Honky Reduction came out before 38 Counts of Battery or Prowler in the Yard. But that still is some of my favorite shit, for sure. Cephalic Carnage I got into. I still like them. I guess they're still together but their last album was four or five years ago, but I still think they're pretty happening. Around that same time I got my first Deeds of Flesh album, Path of the Weakening. And then I got She Lay Gutted by Disgorge. So that was sort of the "brutal death" entry for me, whatever that means; or I guess it means a specific thing to a lot of people.

I like Nasum, and early on I was into Brutal Truth. And their reunion albums are happening. They're pretty strong throughout their whole discography. The album for me by that band that really hit home was Sounds of the Animal Kingdom. You could almost say that's like their Sgt. Pepper, or whatever. Super expansive. Man, it's so awesome. And the EP that came before it, Kill Trend Suicide. 

So even up till now, it's sort of parallel tracks of more grind kind of shit and then the brutal death and sometimes a little bit in the middle.

Was black metal a thing? I dipped my toe into that a little bit. I found it hard to find bands I liked as much in that style. That seemed to be an area that was slightly more concerned with image than musical content. That's putting it really simply. I did find some that I like. I like Darkthrone. I like Mayhem — I love that album De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas; it's just fucking awesome. And some of their later stuff is super killing too. Like Ordo Ad Chao is out there. Ches Smith was telling me that they produced the album themselves, so Mayhem, at least with that lineup as it was at the time of that record, that's their unfiltered-by-a-producer vision. Left to their own devices, they made their most bizarre album.

I was never obsessed with [black metal] like I was those other types.

Part of what's interesting to me these days is, with bands like Portal and some of those Australian and New Zealand type bands is they sort of bring what I like about the black metal into it, the atmosphere. But of course a lot of that is because it's just sort of descended from Incantation. Really, Incantation's clearly, to me, one of the granddaddies of that whole sound.

Even the first Incantation album, Onward to Golgotha and [De Mysteriis] are not that hugely different in terms of vibe. That sort of just occurred to me right now. It's interesting: It's like they sort of started in the same relative part of town and just went wherever.

Do you know Jute Gyte? I guess it's technically black metal. It's one guy who lives in St. Louis; he's super-prolific, and he puts out two or three albums a year. He plays a microtonal guitar, a 24-note-per-octave guitar, and plays crazy harmonies too, inside that. It's already super-chromatic. It's not just your typical minor-triad kind of black metal. Harmonically it's super, super sophisticated. Sonically, it's pretty bizarre too. Even the fact that it's a drum machine, he uses that sort of like a creative advantage. And every third album is, like, this weird electronica that has almost nothing to do with metal. He has so many records, but it's all on Bandcamp. He's a guy that is just totally standing alone in a weird way. It's really compositionally substantive. Even somebody that loves contemporary classical music, like I do — I mean, this guy clearly studies that type of shit. Even now he's getting into polyrhythms, like having whole sections where it's two different tempos at the same time and shit like that. 'Cause he puts notes on each one of his Bandcamp album pages. He sort of nerds out a little bit, like, "This tune I used this." So it's like 12-tone and rhythmic canons and shit. But it's also just super evil-sounding fucking black metal too. 

And Craig Taborn turned me on to Virus. He loves Virus and he got me into them.

Yeah, that music is really odd. I don't even know what to call that. Yeah, I guess you can see how it might have been related to metal at one point, but it's just weird, like, art rock. But the guitar parts are super substantive. There's a lot going on there, harmonically; the tones are really cool; the production is super well-considered. My mode a lot of times is just to put on my metal, either on my iPod or on my phone, in one playlist, and I just shuffle it just so I don't have to choose. But then a Virus song will come up and I'm like, "I'm still in brutal mode and this is awesome but..." I tend to skip the Virus tunes and then just listen to them separately, by themselves. It's like if Bowie made metal, or something like that.

For me, my trajectory is so idiosyncratic. There's huge tracts of stuff I just don't know that well. It's just vast. [Laughs] It's too much to keep up with, especially because, also, I make a living as a jazz pianist, so there's all this other shit too. If you actually want to create music, like play music and write it, you have to, at some point, just do it. You have to stop, not collect everything. You have to give up! On some level.

How did listening to so much metal affect your development as a jazz musician? I was talking to Kim Cass, the bass player, 'cause he comes over to shed and rehearse a lot. I remember him saying to me — I'm sure he won't mind me saying that he said this, but he was like, "Man, I just don't know how to access this stuff." And he's a bass player, too; he can play fuckin' electric bass. But he's just a total complete upright-bass virtuoso, plays any conceivable style of jazz you can imagine super, super well, but has been getting into metal also. I'm not sure if he's been listening to it quite as long as me, but he might have been. But we were talking like this, like how do we... It's not even something I know that I've figured out, how to deal with it. I think looking back on some of the music I've made, there's maybe a connection with some of the more, the type of jazz that for lack of a better term, deals with composition in a certain way and has sort of loping bass figures that might have, not heaviness, but sort of like a groove concept, laying into a rhythmic grid in a certain way.

I guess I have some tunes where, it's not like I'm setting out to write a metal tune; I definitely don't do that, like where I'm going to play metal tunes on the piano or anything like that, but rather sometimes, some lines, especially in the lower area of the guitar, or a downtuned guitar register might sort of... You could give it to a couple guitarists and some loud drums, and it might work that way.  But there's something about metal, especially death metal and that kind of stuff — not to be all intellectual about it, but there's some kind of rigor to how the riff structures go, how they develop, or the way one comes after another, or in terms of pitch, the way stuff happens. And that combined with a sort of directness of purpose, or something, I think [has been influential]. I think the connections are sort of more ethereal for me, in a way. Also, like, in terms of intensity. I love music that's more mellow too. I'm a huge Morton Feldman fan, which is like the opposite complete extreme, although interestingly, after listening to metal for four hours the other night, it was late, and I just needed to cleanse my palate, so I put on the second string quartet of Feldman and it almost kind of totally just fit because it was still these little figures that repeated in weird ways; it was just being played by a string quartet. [Laughs] It was almost like inverted metal, in a weird way.

[Metal is] music that deals with basic parameters of music in a sort of elemental way: pitch, rhythm, form. And a lot of the other music I like sort of does that in a clear way too, whether it's freely improvised... Like, Evan Parker, to me, does that. One reason I think Evan Parker, especially his solo soprano improvising, is so compelling is because it's so well considered. He's dealing with music in a sort of abstract zone. [That term] gets into territory that I don't love because then people talk about music being abstract versus emotional, which I sort of think — personally for me — is a bullshit dichotomy. But abstract in the sense of, just dealing with pitches and rhythms and sound. And to me, what I like about metal is, it deals with that in a really specific way, and that sort of affects how I like to improvise. It's just a directness, a conciseness, just, like, boom, we're just gonna hit it right now. It doesn't necessarily have to be concise in the sense of, like, we're only gonna play for 90 seconds, but it kind of gets to the point. You don't get the sense that it's noodly or searching. Even it's long improvisation, there's a path, sort of like an inexorability about it.

But yeah, it's that sort of thing, just sort of like a clarity. Even when it's sonically not clear, like a Defeated Sanity record — some of those, especially Psalms of the Moribund, I have to really stretch to hear what the actual pitch content of some of those things are. But that's part of what's appealing to me. But even if you can't tell the exact pitch content, you can tell the relative... you can tell that there's, like, clumps that happen next to each other, in time and/or space. And also with a lot of those bands, just the way they each kind of set up their own certain problems and solve them kind of in the same way each album but a little better each time. You get into a different band and it's just like, how does that band deal with the problem? 

You check out Ulcerate: OK, they started off more a little Immolation-y, maybe... You follow it all the way through and it's like, oh, they're really refining things in a certain way and they sort of expand within that. It's like a lot of composers — after a while, you're like, OK, over time, you can really tell this is the same composer, like Feldman, Xenakis. Stravinsky maybe was a little bit of a different case because he had these periods that were defined by super changing it up, but a lot of times, a composer sort of refines their shit, but then within that, you have a lot of variety just depending on whether or not you zoom in or out. And what I think is interesting is that metal bands do that too and a lot of times they achieve it with the compositional efforts being sort of... I don't know what the breakdown is for a lot of these bands, but a lot of times, the compositional efforts are sort of group-based, which is kind of interesting.

This hits on one of the things I love about metal, which is these large discographies and just that idea of micro-refinement. You mentioned Obituary before, and their albums get to a level of development that basically wouldn't even be apparent to most people because they basically don't ever change.  I saw them play in Rochester in, like, 1997 or '98.

Nice! That's an underrated period for them. Back From the Dead.

Back From the Dead! That's a great album. I had a Back From the Dead T-shirt. Isn't that the album that has the rap track at the end?

It is! And there's a really good live album to come out of that which is just called Dead. [Both laugh]

When you get these bands that have 10 to 15 albums, that's when it really gets interesting: There's something about how metal bands just kind of dig in, because there's never really a hope of transcending the underground; that's not even a goal. That brings up an interesting thing too. This is kind of speculative; I'm just sort of inferring it based on reading occasional interviews with people in these bands. But it seems like there's a not too crazy analog with the life of a jazz musician. Because a lot of these bands don't quite make a living doing what they do, so they're not beholden to anyone; they just do what the fuck they want. So they just stick to their guns and they just do it out of pure... It has that special kind of dedication that you do when you're desperately trying to fit in music with a day job. I kind of know what this is like, from having had a day job, where you're just trying to stuff it in. It lends a certain urgency to it. And if you're a group of four or five people with that sort of common purpose, you're all, like, this band is your fuckin' life. 

You mentioned Immolation, and for them, I know that's the case. I think one of the guys drives a truck and one of them does sound for events. That's crazy.

Yeah, it's one of those things where they're just like regular dudes here but then they go over to Europe and headline big festivals. Which, again, there's a long jazz tradition of that, too. But it's much different: It's rarer in metal to have [a musician who's in multiple bands]. Like, I can say I'm a member of eight to 12 bands. Some of them work more than others but none of them I can make a complete living off of. And that's kind of why I am a member of these bands too. I think except for your kind of rogue guitar hero type, or your drummers who tend to play and be the session drummer types, they can make a living doing it, it's a little rare. You're just in one of these bands.

Yeah, by and large, rock is about stable lineups, and jazz is a mix-and-match thing. In jazz, somebody's greatest record could be a record that's not their own album. Like, is the best place to hear Tony Williams on a Tony Williams album?  You could make a case that the best Wayne Shorter ever is Live at the Plugged Nickel. I'm not saying I would definitely say that but I've heard some people say that.

I like Miles Smiles as a Wayne Shorter record as much as I like Speak No Evil, or something. I got into those records when I was definitely no older than 14. I just found my way to jazz around when I was 12 or 13. So I started getting these albums on tape, 'cause we're talking 1987, '88. Back then, the attraction for me was Herbie Hancock, period. I mean, I loved all of it, but it was just like, "I want to hear Herbie." I would read reviews, I would read books about jazz, and I just somehow found my way to this or that record, and I was like, oh, Herbie Hancock, yeah, I love him. And oh, he was on Nefertiti, so I'd go to that, and then, after a while — it didn't really take that long — I still went to it for the Herbie but obviously then it was, like, the way Tony Williams played. People don't talk as much as I think they should about Miles' actual playing on those records. Especially Live at the Plugged Nickel, I think he gets short shrift, even though he was definitely in pain a lot when that date happened. But I love how he actually plays the trumpet; the improvising he does on the trumpet on the Plugged Nickel sessions is completely bizarre and awesome to me. That was a little bit more of a later... like, oh, man, I've been sleeping on this even though I've been listening to it constantly. Which is something that's pretty common with music — you just focus on some shit that appeals to you at the time. 

Yeah, I think in a lot of ways, good jazz records are inexhaustible. You can just focus on someone else, throughout the whole piece. Being a fan of jazz who's not a schooled jazz musician, that's what jazz is to me: it's combinations of different voices; just learning what a musician sounds like, and then what does that person sound like with all these other players. It's definitely an appeal for the quote-unquote schooled jazz musician too. For a musician who's spent his life learning how to play it, that's sort of inevitable because assuming you still do it after 30 years, assuming you're still bothering to try, it's because it appeals to you on some level. But I do like to sit back and just... 

I transcribed a lot of solos for five to seven years, or so — like age 15 to 20, 21. And then I kind of just stopped. I didn't stop listening to jazz; I just stopped writing down the solos. Because at a certain point, you have an idea how to connect notes together, and then it's just getting your technique and then just figuring out your way of connecting the notes. But my listening then just kind of entailed zooming out a bit, and sort of just listening in this way, like a little bit more of a grander scale. Kind of like a more aerial view, perhaps, like contour of a solo, or character or even more abstract concepts than notes. Similar things like that. Almost to the point where it's like, I'm trying to avoid being so lost in the thicket of the nuts and bolts of it. Even though that absolutely appeals to me. I just do that when I compose. That's when I allow myself to do that. I write something super, super specific, it might be really hard to play, and then I learn how to play it, and then I just decide how to be free with it. Just kind of kick it around a little bit.

Also, the notion of hearing stuff, it being inexhaustible, I've been experiencing that a lot lately because I've been having these listening sessions with Dan Weiss. He got some good speakers and a nice record player, so he's been getting back into vinyl, so we've been just listening to stuff we've known separately forever, but now that he has this nice system, we're checking it out. So he'll text me, like, "You have to come hear Nefertiti on the system." If there's an album I can say I know like the back of my hand, that's one of them. And then hearing it, it's just like, oh, my God. Hearing Ron Carter on a good vinyl pressing, for instance. The other day we had a hang with him and [Jon] Irabagon and Ben Gerstein and Todd Neufeld and me and Dan, and we listened to [John Coltrane's] Impressions and [Sonny Rollins'] East Broadway Rundown. Albums that everyone knows, but also several people listening to an album that they separately are way into but haven't listened to together, that's a whole thing. it becomes like a little mini hive mind of the room, in terms of the vibe of what you're listening to.

Yeah, it's an underrated and underutilized thing, to listen with other people. My listening is often so private. So much of this extreme metal stuff, unless you're in a very specific environment, you're not exactly going to blast that over speakers.  Yeah, and I find myself reluctant to bring it up too. Obviously I'm in no way embarrassed about liking it. It's just you have to then go through a whole thing about explaining... Like, "Oh, you like metal?" And then you're like, "This band, this band, this band" — just total blank stare.

Yeah, that's the thing, like, "Are you into metal?" Well, I like certain artists, but there's also a lot of it that I don't like at all… Sure [laughs]. I was thinking about that on the way over, how taste in metal is so [subjective], because of the total vastness of metal. That sounded so ridiculous: [Mock-pompously] Because of the total vastness of metal. But it is. Because there's so much of it, the tastes from individual to individual can vary so much. You could take 50 bands and make connections between any grouping of 10 of them and have them make sense, and one grouping can appeal to one person and totally not to another. 

Right, and also, in terms of my own listening, I like bands that have opposite qualities: a band like Necrophagist where it's incredibly complicated and air-tight; I also like a band like Revenge. Extremely filthy-sounding, kind of the border of black metal and death metal. Do you know Bestial Warlust, or Sadistik Exekution? They have that album called Fukk, and then there's an album called Fukk II. I have both those records, of course. [Laughs]

One thing that what you just said made think of is, some music hits the spot because it matches something that I feel like I want to hear but maybe I don't know in what form it actually exists. There's some jazz that I have encountered that did that for me. Nefertiti somehow was like that; [Cecil Taylor's] Conquistador and Unit Structures were like that. A lot of those Blue Notes were like that. [Eric Dolphy's] Out to Lunch was like that. When I heard it, it was instantly like, oh... That could be just because the music is so well conceived, it's convinced you that you've been waiting to hear this. That's a pretty ethereal thing. But some metal, like, say, by the time I heard Meshuggah, it was like, oh, OK, this totally makes sense, someone dealing with rhythm in this way, playing heavy music that's still fundamentally, like, basically rock music, super-heavy rock music. I remember hearing that and I was like, wow, it took this long for some guys to do this. I don't know why I thought that, but that's what I thought at the time when I first heard Destroy, Erase, Improve. It's like, oh, this totally makes sense; it's doing the shit I used to do on my sequencer in ninth grade where I'd just have one thing be in one time signature, turn it off, play the next thing in another time signature, just let it play and hear how it sounded. Not quite the same thing but pretty similar. They were just writing down compositions that the whole band was playing. It was like, oh, bands can play this this shit now too.

Yeah, I really liked what you said about how often metal bands will come up with a certain problem and just try to solve it again and again; Meshuggah are like that. Yeah, well, I heard that new track that they put out ["Born in Dissonance," from 2016's The Violent Sleep of Reason], and I was like, yep, there we go.

I kind of took them for granted for a while. Me too. I take them for granted because Dan [Weiss] is one of my best friends, and he is probably the biggest Meshuggah freak I know. I totally think they're great also, but his fandom just makes me look like a poseur with regard to them. So they're never quite as far from my mind because whenever [Dan and I] talk about metal, it's one of his favorites. It's funny 'cause that new track the other day, I listened to it and I was like, yep, it sounds like them, but a little bit of a new twist. I could smell the [Allan] Holdsworth-y solo coming a mile away, but that's cool; that's one reason you go to them.

Yeah, it's a strange thing. You can have this taste for quote-unquote weird music, but with a band like that you don't want them to not sound like Meshuggah. Which begs the question of, how much challenge are we actually looking for? Sure. I don't need them to be Defeated Sanity or Cenotaph. I have those bands for that. And then you go back to Meshuggah and you're like, oh, on a certain level, they don't quote-unquote play fast. They do play fast, but in the sense of the bass drum. This is a super obvious observation but it's mostly just about being groovy for them. Basically they do all the rhythmic shit that the other bands do, but there's always a snare on three.

It's beautiful how sort of mechanized but human their music is. Yeah, I mean, you can't fuck with them. It's one thing to not like it aesthetically...

The singer turned me off for a while. The delivery is just so flat. But I guess it's supposed to be.  This actually came up recently too. Basically what Kim Cass and Kate [Gentile] and I will do when we shed or rehearse, we'll play for a while and then we take a break and lately we've just been putting on metal when we have a drink, or whatever. I'm sure Kate won't mind me saying that we were talking about Meshuggah and she didn't really get the vocalist either and Kim was like, yeah, but you wouldn't really expect to hear one of those overtone-y growls like Lenzig from Cephalic Carnage would do — that wouldn't really quite fit. Now that I say that, it would be interesting to hear.

What's weird is lately it took me aback how clear they are, how much I can understand the words.

Yeah, and also it's that kind of metal singing where there's no sense that there's anything emotionally on the line. He's just kind of making sounds with his throat. As opposed to a lot of metal, where it seems like the vocalist is dredging up some element of their soul through performance. I know what you mean. [Meshuggah's vocals are] more like an instrument. [Gorguts'] Luc Lemay would be someone where, there's a lot of soul. There is. And the vocals are different from record to record too. That could be ... I don't know how old he is. He's got to be close to 50 or over 50. Sorry to age you, Luc!

Man, Obscura came on the other day. I've had that album for almost 20 years, since it came out, and it struck me how totally fucked that album is. It's so bizarre. [Laughs] It's really out there, man. And I basically live off of weird music, and that's, like, still... even in metal, there's nothing that quite goes that far.

/////

Follow-up email Q&A: September 2017

Can you talk about how this latest wave of metal listening that you were in the midst of when we spoke in 2016 might have informed the writing or playing we hear on A Pouting Grimace? With this project I definitely didn’t set out to write “metal-type tunes,” though in retrospect there are elements that come to mind with three of the pieces, “plate shapes," “brim," and “heft." “Heft” is probably the most overt nod to my love of some doom metal and slower type things. The other two pieces I’d say are relevant in the sense that they deal with repetition of material in a sort of riff-like fashion. Obviously that’s far from the sole province of metal, but I’d bet that the way it manifested in these pieces is somewhat related to the various sorts of heavy music obsessions I’d be inundating myself with around the time I wrote the music.

These albums/bands are not conscious influences but they’ve been some of my “new” discoveries over the past year or so:

1) Revenge, any of the records. J. Read’s drumming has to be heard to be believed, and I love the extremely raw energy.

2) Martire, Brutal Legions of the Apocalypse. An Australian band, chaotic energy, buzzsaw guitar 

3) Encoffination, III: Hear Me, O Death. Guitar/drums duo, slow and doomy, like Incantation on extreme depressants.

4) Impetuous Ritual, Blight Upon Martyred Sentience. One of my favorite bands, dark and evil sounding.

5) Grave Upheaval, self-titled. Australia again, shares personnel with Impetuous and Portal. The “cavern-core” approach pushed to an extreme.

6) Pissgrave, Suicide Euphoria. Philadelphia! Crushing. 

You don't strike me as the kind of musician who's interested in overt genre hybrids, or genres at all, as far as your own work goes. There are obviously elements of jazz, contemporary composition, Indian classical, etc., on the new album, for example, but it doesn't seem like any kind facile "fusion" is the point. That said, could you ever see yourself incorporating a metal influence into your work a more straightforward way? I’ve thought about it. You’re definitely right about not caring about genre hybrids per se. What interests me are dealing with the elements of music on an abstract, elemental level: notes, rhythms, etc. More like cross-breeding rather than Mr. Potato Head–style, slapping jazz ears and glasses on the metal body, so to speak. 

I’d likely approach such a project more as a “heavy music” concept, not beholden to this or that subgenre of heavy music, nor beholden to specific types of improvising. But I definitely fantasize about a very loud project somewhat in that vein.

I asked Craig Taborn this question, and I'm curious what your response would be: Leaving composition aside for a sec, do you ever find yourself thinking about or drawing upon metal when you're improvising at the piano? If so, how might that manifest? It really depends on sonic situation. Loud is one thing, fast is another, loud and fast is very tough unless the piano is really amplified, assuming there are drums present too. But in general for me the inspiration is only in the general attitude, or maybe a series of shapes, and it always is going to be refracted through my own tendencies, whether it’s pitch preferences, the rhythmic environment, etc.

[izzyovercoffee]

Do you have any ships in the clone wars/repcom fandom?

DO I

TBH I have a really… really long list of ships. I’m one of those people that could potentially ship anyone/everyone given enough time to come up with at least vaguely acceptable reasoning. 

I mean … I’m the one behind the ship of Mereel and The Stars so I don’t … uh, have a whole lot of requirements for shipping.

My lines are: Everyone is an Adult at time of ship; and any potentially coercive relationships are written with a very clear, honest presentation and understanding of that coercive nature (zero tolerance policy for romanticizing abuse).

Fair warning, though: I do have clone/clone ships, too, and I know that makes people uncomfortable — hence the warning. And for the record, any of the below ships? I don’t expect anyone else to ship it, and I don’t generally expect people to be down w/ it or write it, either. B’)

I also … have Mereel listed kind of a lot in here. He just has so much love to give, okay. B’)

and under a cut bc damn this got long

Republic Commando: 

Mereel and the Stars

Stars. Ka’ra. Ruling Council of Fallen Leaders. 

When Mand’alore die, it’s said they ascend to the stars. Is that where it ends, really, or do they become something more, something greater than they were in life? And if they do — do they interact with the people?

Do they keep favorites? Do they adore and adulate their champions?

And how difficult, exactly, is that relationship for the mortal who can’t quite reach out and touch the one he loves most?

Ordo and Besany

like honestly my OTP for the longest time lmao 

I never finished my ‘Are These For Me?’ 30 drabbles for them … but maybe one day. One day.

Fi and Ordo

Boy meets Boy. Boy compliments Boy’s skirt. Boy hugs other Boy so hard they hit the floor.

#true love

Besany, Fi, Ordo

Besany is the type of person who is so kind, and so considerate, and so understanding. And Fi … he needs that. He needs it just as much as Ordo needs it, and as they need each other, and Besany. 

Some might not find a closed polytriad “normal,” but if it works for them, then it shouldn’t be anyone else’s business. 

Darman and Etain 

My heart constantly breaks for them. They deserved so much better than what they got, and it kills me.

And their relationship was so … so good. So good, in the beginning. Tragic, what Kal did to them.

Atin and Laseema

They were lucky in that they weren’t Kal’s favorites, and so were able to fly mostly under the radar and out of his attention. Kal still held a lot of … really unhealthy financial control over them, but … I genuinely feel that Atin and Laseema could relate deeply on several levels.

They have… compatible demons, for lack of a better term. They balance each other. And Laseema was always an interesting character I wish we could learn more of — and her friendships with the rest of the clan. After all, she seemed to be the one in active communication with everyone. 

Niner and Boss

Listen … I love this ship. I feel like there’s a lot of UST going on whenever they’re onscreen, and it’s an interesting sort of dichotomy that goes on between them — two sergeants of two squads whose trainers viciously hated each other during training days. 

There’s a competitiveness there that can’t really be quashed, but there’s also an understanding that exists between them that’s unique to their experiences.

Jaing and Kom’rk

This is one of those incredibly obscure, controversial ships. 

Full disclosure: this is a pretty fucked up ship, and it’s mostly from the perspective of “wow, that’s kinda fucked up.” I don’t expect anyone else to ship it, and I don’t generally expect people to be down w/ it or write it, either. If they do, the fucked-up part needs to be recognized and recognizable, however obliquely, or it just doesn’t work. 

They’re two very damaged people, there’s no use shying away from that. 

I fell into this ship by total accident, going through all the nulls’ tags on ao3 years ago and stumbled on one fic, and like … since then, I haven’t really been able to climb out this hole.  

Corr, Ruusan, and Jilka

I am not a fan of Corr and Jilka, alone.

That said … I am a fan of Corr and Ruusan, of Jilka and Ruusan, and … of the potential dynamics of this poly combination, with the given that Jilka and Corr remain platonic as opposed to romantic. 

It just feels more … balanced? Also Rev @thesummerstorms and Gena @cassiansfuzzyjacket explain it way better than I do.

RepComm crack!ships:

these are very, very clearly not-canon and not to ever be taken as canon (by me, at least?) but damn. they’re nice to think about, and try to come up with ways in which it might work.

Etain and Mereel

“WHAT THE FUCK IZZY?” I KNOW! I KNOWWWWWW

But more seriously … Mereel was there every day for Etain during a very, very difficult time (the months after her almost-miscarriage). Of all the characters in the series during the course of the series, after Etain and Darman, Etain and Mereel spend the most unobstructed alone time together (about three months?) — and we would never know because, lol, the pacing and timeline of the series is not really presented in a way that makes that noticeable.

Mereel also does something with Etain he doesn’t do with anyone else, ever, that we see in the series: admit vulnerability. He’s genuinely vulnerable with her, in a way that he is not with anyone else. That means something — especially given the context that he doesn’t open up with anyone else, not his brothers, and never Kal. 

Someone that Mereel can be genuinely vulnerable with? That he must trust, implicitly, to share that vulnerability? 

And then you have Etain, who is isolated after the mess of pregnancy news blows up. She’s someone who doesn’t have anyone she can trust, or depend on, who isn’t looking to use her in some way — or someone that she can be equally open and honest with — in those months … right up until Mereel (and Rav), when she’s evac’d to Kyrimorut.

And when she is, she’s treated like a whole person. Not someone who’s just a vessel for a potential, not someone to be used or leveraged for misogynistic reasons. A genuine, whole, person who is highly intelligent, highly capable — and treated as an actual equal. She was not given that respect since the conclusion of Hard Contact (except, briefly, when hunting with Vau).

The whole situation, as terrible as it all is, allows for the foundation of genuine, real, trust to form between them.

There’s a lot of … well, there’s a lot of potential there. A lot of room for complications and conflicted feelings and angst — UST and one-sided pining and mixed signals and confusion and just raw feeling — and it’s all things that don’t necessarily need to be resolved negatively (or right away, or at all), that don’t have to end in heartbreak, that can be just as it is: complicated feelings that begin during a difficult time and, given room to grow, become something else or something more many, many years down the line.

Mereel and Boss

Don’t even look at me.

So this ship came as a result of SW RP (bc of course it did) and, tbh, they have a lot of … difficult commonalities and clashes of personality. Boss is a difficult man with a lot on his shoulders — a lot of responsibility, a lot of stress, just … a lot. And Mereel? Mereel is someone good at managing stress — out of necessity, and practice, and effort.

And the thing with Mereel is he’s fun, he’s easy, and he demands nothing. Boss doesn’t need to take care of him, because Mereel can take care of himself — and sometimes Mereel can take care of Boss, whether he likes it, or not (or likes to say he doesn’t when he does).

Boss certainly needs someone like that, especially after long days and hard nights with other people always needing him, depending on him. It’s good, it’s necessary, to have someone for whom he can truly relax and let his guard down around — that he can trust implicitly, and be allowed to be vulnerable, to have his ugly parts exposed, and still be loved unconditionally, because that’s just what Mereel’s best at doing.

Parja and Mereel

“SERIOUSLY?” LISTEN

This also came as a result of SW RP, and mostly takes place in an AU where … Parja and Fi’s relationship inevitably crumbles, and they split — but they split amicably, and remain friends. Parja remains a mechanic and never is forced to give up her shop because of (poor misogynistic writing and) Kal. 

Mereel and Parja and Bardan are all particularly good friends and get up to all kinds of nonsense and pranks, and prank wars.

And … sometimes, late nights spent tinkering on separate projects in the same space, late nights working on the same projects, late nights spent together — and sometimes Mereel can’t quite come clean that he needs someone, that well after the conclusion of the war he needs physical contact in order to sleep.

And after the end of what Parja put too much stock and energy into what she hoped would be a sure future, a sure thing — maybe it hurts too much to sleep alone, but it’s too much of a risk to fill that empty space with romance when she’s not ready. Why not someone she trusts, that she knows would never, not ever, not in a million years, ever cross that boundary — someone who would never violate that trust, never take the invitation to share her bed as anything more than just that: a mutually beneficial way to get some rest.

Sometimes feelings happen. Gradually, and slow, and sneaks up on even the most vigilant. After a while, it becomes expected. After a while, it becomes wanted. After a while, they become needed.

other ships I’ve fallen into that I don’t have time/want to explain:

FI AND SEV

Atin/Sev

Sev/Boss

Scorch/Sev

MAZE/ZEY

Jaing/Sev

Fixer/peace of mind

Uthan/Mij (but way more hostile on Uthan’s part)

Walon/his star-crossed princess (literally, a real thing. I can’t get over how this is an actual thing)

Clone Wars:

admittedly, it’s been a while since I watched the series all the way through, but … repeating the warning for clone/clone bc that’s a thing in here, and the explanations are shorter bc, again, it’s been a while.

Marshal Commander Cody and Captain Rex

Their personalities mesh so well together, and honestly they’re just … so compatible ??? They also work so well together, went through training together … if there’s anyone Rex can really trust implicitly, it’s Cody.

Their friendship grows over the series and expanded (Legends) materials, and just … it works, in the way they need it to work.

Echo and Fives

Just punch me right in the chest.

really any combination from Domino Squad

because we all need tragedy in our hearts

General Aayla Secura and Commander Bly

You know … for the most part, I’m a little leery on ships like this where there’s a clear and obvious potential for really serious coercion. Most Clone/Jedi-who-are-their-direct-superiors tend to fall into this category.

but I’m just a sucker for Bly-post-war angst, for the conflict of fraternizing with a superior, with trying to navigate that Aayla really did have his life in her hands, and then the conflict of navigating those feelings surrounding killing her at the end of the war.

I’m a terrible person.

Duchess Satine Kryze and Obi-wan Kenobi

let me just like … repeat the above. My one thing about this is that I hate how Satine was killed off for Kenobi-man-pain, and generally only want to know stories that you know … fix-it, lmao, or give her a more respectable death that was written with better care to her character and her arc

Ventress and Obi-wan Kenobi

All of that flirting went fuck and nowhere. What a hugely missed opportunity — especially when Ventress was trying to work towards being better, or making a life for herself, turn over a new leaf or whatever.

I mean, we all know she hangs out in the kind of tapcafs Kenobi loves to get drunk in, let’s be honest with ourselves.

clone wars crack!ships :

I’m sorry in advance lmao

Captain Rex and Lieutenant Mereel

“What the hell.” Listen.

“Did this come out of SW RP?” HOW DID YOU GUESS.

Much like the other ships with Mereel, it’s all contingent on … Mereel operating as a free agent — a solo operator. Mereel pulling strings and favors across the GAR to make things just a little bit easier for Rex, for clearing up or speeding up administrative bull shit so that Rex can focus on getting what he needs for his men in a reasonable amount of time — or free up some time for himself.

And with the way Mereel’s … operations tend to go, paths sometimes cross that didn’t before. 

Anyway, who doesn’t like camping?

Quinlan Voss and Obi-wan Kenobi

Listen … they have a kind of fun playfully antagonistic thing going on. I don’t know if I could ever seriously ship it, mostly bc everyone who falls in love with either of them straight up die, so we come to a “unstoppable force vs immovable object” impasse if this ship ever actually came to fruition.

that and fandom can be kinda … gross w/ this ship sometimes so I’ve been avoiding it lately for that reason.

Senator Padme Amidala and Duchess Satine Kryze

how can anyone watch the episodes where they’re together and not see how good they are together. and like, the men in their lives, cause their deaths. so why not just … leave their men for each other?

Everyone wins.

not exactly clone wars honorable mention:

Ahsoka Tano and Kaeden Larte

I ship it so hard. if only !!! if only they didn’t meet when they did, when Ahsoka wasn’t as wounded, still, from the fallout of the end of The Clone Wars. and all of that tragedy. i just.

I just !!! ugh. they’re so good together.

aaand I think that’s all of them, or at least all that I can remember off the top of my head for now.

[anticattocomunismo]

Catholic historian explains the disturbing history behind Pope Francis’ ‘novel’ rhetoric

By Diane Montagna (Tue Jul 17, 2018 - 1:39 pm EST)

LAKE GARDA, Italy, July 17, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) — Papal homilies about the “God of surprises,” discourses on the “ideologues of doctrine,” and the upcoming youth synod’s stress on the need to listen to “the voices” inside and outside the Church in order discern the Spirit, may seem new to many Catholics.

But for one noted historian, this language isn’t new at all but is steeped in a “fascist spirit” that emerged in Catholic circles during the interwar period of the 1920s-30s, was carried forth by controversial figures like Teilhard de Chardin, and is now being unleashed.

According to Dr. John Rao, this spirit is irreconcilable with Catholic tradition, involves “a dismantling of definitive faith,” and refuses to allow anyone “to investigate history and investigate ideas.” Ironically, he says, it also uses “dictatorial force” to muzzle those who question it, casting its opponents as “enemies of the Spirit” and “fascists.”

Educated in Modern European History at Oxford University, Dr. Rao is a professor at St. John’s University in New York and is the director of the Roman Forum. His books include Luther and his progeny: 500 years of Protestantism and its Consequences for Church, State and Society, and Removing the Blindfold: 19th Century Catholics and the Myth of Modern Freedom.

The Roman Forum was set up in 1968 by Dietrich von Hildrebrand in order to defend Humanae Vitae and then expanded as other aspects of the Church’s teaching and practice came under attack. As a young man, Rao became closely involved with the project, and in 1991 it was entrusted to his direction. Observing a sometimes narrow vision among traditionally minded Catholics, Rao sought to expand the program by systematically introducing people to the whole of the Church’s tradition history, culture, philosophy and theology.

LifeSiteNews sat down with Dr. Rao at the conclusion of its annual summer symposium on the Gardone Riviera, to discuss the connection between the interwar period and the Church in the current day.

LifeSite: Dr. Rao, in your final lecture at the Roman Forum you made an interesting connection between the interwar period and the ideas that were prevalent then, and the current day.

Dr. Rao: Yes, well let me start with the incident I mentioned about being at a Mass for the commemoration of a murdered carabinieri [an Italian police officer] in 1992 — a Novus Ordo Mass. The priest said Mass properly but it was all very participatory, with everyone applauding one another and being called up to give testimonies of one sort or another, and the person sitting next to me, in Italian, said to me: “Just like the fascists.”And I didn’t know what he was talking about.

Afterwards, he said to me that the priest who had said the Mass had been a very, very fervent fascist in the fascist period. He said the whole democratic spirit of fascism — in the sense of everyone having to be part of a unified community where they were all front-line soldiers transferred to the peace time community — is something that always reminded him of the new Mass.

I was intrigued by this, so I started doing some research, and I discovered a particular historian named John Hellman from McGill University in Montreal. He had written on subjects that revealed the truth of this comment to me. For example, he has one book called Emmanuel Mounier and the New Catholic Left. He has another one called The Knight Monks of Uriage.

I started reading and following up and then realized that the whole spirit that then — I would argue — took possession of the Church in the 1960s, and a lot of the very figures that were involved with guiding commissions to put into practice the decisions of the Council, were people who were connected with movements and ideas from the 1920s and 1930s that were very much steeped in the idea of the importance of energy and will and strength, in a way that made fascism attractive to them — never nazism because it was racist — but fascism in its central theme that all fascists emphasize, which is the importance of the will, of the leader or the leading elements of society and the need to encourage the energy and cultivate and bring to perfection the energy of the people that the leader is guiding.

What that ended up doing was demonstrating, as I did more and more research into it, that all kinds of problems of missionaries, and problems within what’s called “specialized Catholic action” i.e. how do you deal with youth? How do you deal with young laborers in factories? How do you deal with young students? and problems within the liturgical movement, which brought in ties with the ecumenical movement. These problems were very much dealt with and interpreted and answers given by varied representatives of what is very broadly referred to as personalism and the new theology, who were then very active in Vatican II and very influential in shaping men other than themselves who were active in Vatican II.

What was their main theme?

That what had to be done in order successfully to convert the population of the world to Catholicism was to abandon what they argued was a too individualist and a too intellectual, doctrine-tied understanding of what becoming a Catholic involved, in order to understand what the vital energy of different groups was all about. And they popularized the terms “milieu” and “mystique” in this regard.

So they claimed that what the fascists were doing was understanding that there is an energy in a people, or in the German term “folk”, and that what was necessary was to dive into that energy and then guide that energy to its perfection. But what they did was to give this a Catholic interpretation, so that your job — in order to make the world Catholic — was to find out what the youth mystique was, what the young working mystique was, what the young student mystique was, what the mystique of a given parish was, what the mystique of a given people that you wanted to convert, like the Chinese or the Muslims, was all about, and then not approach this with some kind of doctrine and desire to make these people change, but to recognize that their very strength and energy and vitality and successful resistance to your conversion activities was a sign that the Holy Spirit was manifesting itself in these people, and that what you had to do rather than convert them by having them accept doctrine and a certain way of worshipping God, was to yourself dive into this milieu or mystique, hear what they had to say, and then accept this as the voice of the Holy Spirit in your time. And hence the concern about listening to the “signs of the times.”

Then, when you might counter this argument saying that the very many milieu or mystiques that you were supposed to be diving into were contradictory to one another, you had to recognize that you can’t understand the workings of the Holy Spirit but they were all “converging” to one ultimate goal — and this is Teilhard de Chardin’s argument — and that when it emerged you would understand why the Holy Spirit wanted you to accept these.

And it involved the mystique or milieu in the way it then penetrated other milieu of fascism and of Marxism, and of many other phenomena. And in order to be able to move these people in a Catholic direction you would then have to develop liturgies that would respond to these difference mystiques. The only thing is that in the 20s and 30s they were held back from developing this too far because of the fact that there was a strong authority in the Church, and what ended up happening is that, in the course of the Second World War and then the breaking down of basic structures, particularly in France due to France’s defeat, their ideas managed to get more and more of a hold on people. The only thing is that their original fascist interest faded away because they saw energy and strength and vitality in the forces that defeated fascism. Fascism’s greatest failing is that it lost. If it had not lost, it would have been something that would have continued being interesting.

So they switched and they moved down the Marxist direction, and with the aid of Jacques Maritain and his appreciation of pluralism in America as a means of organizing things politically and socially that allowed different milieu to be able to have freedom, they were able to understand that attack on authority that the American system offered, enabled a kind of anarchy, if you could allow this kind of vision to penetrate into the life of the Church. It allowed a kind of anarchy whereby the message of the milieu could come to the fore, and the people who claimed to understand where this was headed would then be able to develop the teaching of the given milieu and then the liturgies that were needed to suit these different milieu in a way that would allow the Holy Spirit finally to come to fruition.

And ironically they could utilize the anti-authority thrust of the whole American pluralist vision to attack anybody who wanted to demand Church authority to control movements down this direction. Ironically they could then attack that by claiming it was fascist in character, in a way that would appropriate the opprobrium that fell upon fascism because of the Nazi experience which they never did share, and then frighten people into silence lest they be identified as fascists, and then enable all of the prophetic figures who were supposedly diving into these different milieu in order to bring them to fruition, to answer the demand of the Holy Spirit to do their work. And everything that’s developed since — it was already developing but has developed still more since the Council in terms of Third World theology and liberation theology and a demand for liturgies and for changes in Catholic doctrine and morals to fit the needs of particular milieu, such as the “LGBT” milieu and every other kind — is connected in a line that you can demonstrate with names, with specific individuals from the 1960s and then onward back to the 20s and 30s. That’s in a nutshell what happens here.

Who was involved in this movement?

To give a particular name in this regard, the Dominican Marie-Dominique Chenu, one of the supporters of the New Theology [Nouvelle Théologie], is a classic example. In the late 1930s, he was promoting various ideas of this sort. In 1941 and 1942, he was connected with the main school that was promoting these ideas at a place called Uriage, outside Grenoble in France, that was supported by the Pétain government. They then broke, like they all did, with Vichy once it was occupied by the Germans and was again involved in the racist policies that they had no interest in. They then moved down a friendlier attitude towards Marxism and then also all of these various Third World developments. They taught people – I'm talking about Chenu – who became active in the liberation theology movements, in Third World theology movements, and the like. And there is name after name after name of the same sort.

You said that this movement sought to identify the new workings of the Holy Spirit in various milieu, even contradictory ones. How do proponents of this vision reconcile it with Tradition?

They can’t.

So what does Tradition mean for them?

Tradition is an ever evolving phenomenon until you “converge,” I suppose, using Teilhard’s term, at the “Omega Point. ” For example, one writer named Emile Poulat, who wrote a history of the worker-priest movement, is in effect a kind of continuer of this whole vision, and he makes the work of the Church, and what you have to do to teach and guide people, analogous to the movement of the Israelites out of Egypt into the promised land, so that any questioning of this would require your wandering in the desert. You just have to accept it.

I mentioned in the lecture I gave that one of the elements that plays a role in developing these arguments are certain strains of Russian Orthodox thought that were very active and influential in Maritain’s circles in France in particular, and then in London and Oxford, which argued against the supposedly exaggerated intellectual, doctrinal position of the Roman Church, the need for trust in the Holy Spirit. There’s no way, ultimately, of judging whether this is really the Holy Spirit or not, so that a man like Jacques Maritain, who on a practical level plays with a lot of these themes, on a philosophical level can never go down that same direction. I mentioned in my lecture that he had a critique of a more radical position of a man like Emmanuel Mounier because he said that since they remove intellectual categories from this whole thing, they are ultimately spiritually barren before any Ramakrishna.

What I also argued was that I don’t believe Maritain would have ever accepted the kinds of ideas I’ve just mentioned as such. Nor would Paul VI ultimately, because they are too tied to the whole Christian doctrinal position. But on a practical level, with their withdrawal from the use of authority and then their opening to pluralism, they created precisely the kinds conditions in which these anarchic milieu — and then the prophetic witnesses supposedly — to the Spirit of the milieu could create a million kinds of Catholic theology with a million kinds of liturgies responding to it, attacking anybody who referred to anything that happened before the Second Vatican Council as an “enemy of the Holy Spirit” and a fascist. I don’t mean this as a joke. There is lurking behind their arguments that if you bring up anything that took place before the Council, there is something in your spirit leading to Auschwitz.

The Vatican is hosting a Synod on Youth in October. At a recent press conference to present its working document [Instrumentum laboris], synod organizers described the new document as “the moment of convergence in listening to all the components of the Church and also to different voices that do not belong to it.” These voices, they said, included those of young Catholics, non-Catholics, Muslims, atheists, and so-called “LGBT youth.” How should people see and understand this in light of what you have said?

That this is in continuity with something of what is ultimately at the basis of the fascist spirit. I think that in one way or another all of the manifestations of modernity have this character to them: all of them are involved in a dismantling of reason and the value of reason. They are all of them a dismantling of definitive faith that’s made alive through grace that’s tied to a specific historic event and what flows from that specific historic event — the Incarnation and then the Passion and the Resurrection. It involves hiding its past because of its refusal to allow anyone to investigate history and investigate ideas, and shouting louder than other people. I read some quotations in my lecture from people connected with this school that existed for a couple of years at Uriage, where all of these various influences had their impact. DeLubac was there at the school. The ideas of people like Yves Congar, who was not at the school, were present. The ideas of Teilhard were influential, and Mounier was very much involved in this school until political problems removed him from it.

I cited certain quotations involving an attack against Christian doctrine, an attack on Christian practices and devotion that sounded exactly like certain very nasty attacks on Christian devotionalism and practices coming from very high sources indeed this day. Exactly the same.

And while I’m talking about that, in that regard — and this is after being pointed down this direction by various other people— I personally think that the attacks on Pope Francis as somehow being a Marxist are misplaced. I think he’s a fascist. He’s a Peronist and he’s got that same mentality. The only thing is that the only way you would know what fascism really means as opposed to how people use that term in order to just belittle whoever they don’t like, is by studying history and ideas, and that’s what’s not allowed you by this. You’re against the Holy Spirit if you do that.

And the solution?

Return to tradition. It’s either the victory of raw will power and force — dictatorial force — or it’s a return to the tradition, which means a return to faith, grace and reason together. How that will happen I have no idea.