#I think it was a couple months to a year after Vader encountered him in empire strikes back.

[gch1995]

Hi! Been thinking about Luke and Vader. How do you think Luke went from wanting to die to believing there was good in Vader? What caused that change/acceptance?

I have a lot of sympathy for Anakin/Darth Vader, and I don’t think it’s fair to place blame on just him for becoming such a deeply dysfunctional and horrifying human disaster as an adult, considering how deeply compromised his agency was his entire life under a series of abusive, hypocritical, and oppressive authority figures within a dystopian galaxy’s fucked up institutions. However, that doesn’t mean Luke wouldn’t have still had absolutely every right to hate his father for hurting him, his friends, and the many other people throughout the galaxy either.

Yet, ultimately Luke didn’t hate his father, even after Darth Vader reached out to him through the force by torturing his son’s friends, stalking him, abducting him, terrorizing him, threatening him, and cutting off his hand to try to coerce him to join the dark side in Empire Strikes Back.

Why?

I think the most obvious reason is that, with a little space and time to recover from the trauma that his father put him through in his efforts to find him and recruit him to the dark side, Luke ultimately sensed the good within Anakin beneath the darkness after he revealed that he was doing all this because Luke was his son, his family, who wanted freedom from Sidious and someone better to bond with than that sadistic asshole his current master was.

Also, in spite of how awful and dangerous it was for Anakin to terrorize Luke, cut off his hand, and threaten him like that on Bespin to try to recruit him to the dark side, he intentionally goes out of his way to avoid outright killing his son by going easy on him battle, giving him chances to escape, and trying to recruit him to the dark side to bond with his son and gain freedom, rather than bringing him to the Emperor.

Yes, he’s being awful, cowardly, and selfish in his methods, but Anakin is also trying to more easily avoid the possibility of one of them getting killed by Palpatine or one another by going after his son to try to recruit him to the dark side to overthrow the Emperor because he knows his master will do worse to Luke and/or himself if he finds out the truth about his son still being alive and a Jedi.

In Empire Strikes Back, Anakin also tells Luke “Don’t make me destroy you” when his son skitters away from him in terror. Though he went about looking for Luke pretty obsessively to try to recruit him for the dark side, once his son actually refuses to be swayed to the dark side by his father on Bespin after being abducted, terrorized, and amputated by him, Anakin notably doesn’t keep hunting down Luke to try to recruit him to the dark side or personally kill him for refusing after he runs away in terror in the movie. He’s upset about it, sure, but he really never wanted for Luke to be killed or hurt long term either.

Then, you also have to examine the fact that Luke didn’t really ever view Owen and Beru Lars as his parents. Though they loved Luke, and he loved them, Owen and Beru still never encouraged Luke to view them as his parents either. They were Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen to Luke, but never mom and dad to him. Luke really wanted someone to be able to identify as his parents. Anakin, flawed as he was, was the first person in Luke’s life to identify themselves as one his parents he had been missing his whole life, which is also why he was particularly desperate to bond with his father and inspire him to turn back to the light side.

If you guys want to chime in, you can!

@abla-soso

@fanfic-lover-girl

@fanfictasia

@komikbookgeek

@yoghurtconsumer

[not-the-tie-youre-looking-for]

Something that's been bugging me for years since the Legends finale. If Zhan had been the writer for Rebels, do you think he would have had Thrawn bomb Lothal to bring Ezra out? On the one hand, from Legends Thrawn's portrayal I imagine he would without a second of hesitation. On the other, Canon Thrawn has been much more... restrained? And on a third point, there's the fact that Legends and Canon Thrawn seem like they really could be the same person just at different points of time. cnt in next

...I'm just curious if anyone else was curious if Zhan agreed with that direction taken. Which, on that note, did Zhan ever say anything about his thoughts on how Rebels handled Thrawn? Both from a writing standpoint as well as an acting and musical one (Thrawn's various leitmotifs)?

Oh man. Ohhhhhhhh maaaaan. My friend, you have asked exactly the right person this question, because not only have I wanted to talk about this multiple times before, but I also have ~receipts~. 👀

⚠️Spoiler warnings for Star Wars: Rebels, The Mandalorian, the canon Star Wars novels Thrawn, Thrawn: Alliances, Thrawn: Treason, Thrawn Ascendency: Chaos Rising, and Thrawn Ascendency: Greater Good, and the legends Star Wars novels Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, The Last Command, and Outbound Flight.⚠️

Oh man. Where to begin.

Lets start with who Thrawn is, because depending on who you ask, you're gonna get different answers—whether you're strictly a Legends fan, Dave Filoni, a guy who's only seen Thrawn in Star Wars: Rebels, Timothy Zahn, or just a writer/artist fan like me.

To Timothy Zahn, the man behind our favorite chiss, Thrawn is a character that is constant in both attitude and personality throughout all of his content. In multiple interviews, ranging from Thrawn's debut in Rebels to the latest about the writing of the Ascendancy Trilogy, Zahn states that Thrawn in canon and Thrawn in Legends are indistinguishable.

And so I present the receipts:

In a 2017 interview with The Verge on writing the first canon Thrawn book Thrawn, Zahn is asked the following question and responds as such:

How do you navigate bringing back a character who already has an extensive backstory and audience expectations, with telling a new story that fits in the new continuity?

Actually, I didn’t find that to be a problem. I’d never written Thrawn in this part of the Star Wars timeline, so it was simply a matter of bringing him into the Empire and chronicling his rise through the ranks. It’s still the same character as in the 1990s books, just a decade or two younger and in a very different military and political environment.

In another interview with The Verge in 2018 (a few months after the finale of Rebels aired) about writing Thrawn: Alliances, he repeats this sentiment twice:

Thrawn feels like if it had been written before the canonization purge a couple of years ago, or if you squinted a bit, it would serve as a perfect setup for Heir to the Empire.

Oh, I don’t think you need to squint at all. I wrote him in these two books to fit in with everything else I’d done. So if someone at Lucasfilm snapped their fingers, and suddenly all of my other books were canon, and there would be no real retrofitting that would have to go in. It would all fit together.

Thrawn: Alliances feels more at home in the new canon, especially because Thrawn has been fleshed out a bit more in Rebels. Was there any adjustments for that?

Not really. I’m getting to play with more canon characters like Vader and Padmé and Anakin, but the character himself, I still see him as the same person. He’s got goals, and he won’t necessarily share them with you, but he as long as you’re going the same direction, he’s happy to cooperate and assist along the way.

...and this is referenced again in a 2020 interview with Polygon about writing Thrawn Ascendancy: Chaos Rising:

Along with Thrawn’s appearance in Rebels, Zahn would pen a new novel, Thrawn, that chronicled the character’s early days as an Imperial officer. Zahn didn’t have to change anything with the character, telling me in 2017 that “he’s like an old friend who I understand completely.” While Heir to the Empire was no longer canon, a reader could easily read Thrawn as a precursor to that classic novel. Thrawn went on to become a major presence in Rebels, and Zahn continued to explore his origins in Thrawn: Alliances and Thrawn: Treason.

The next day, an interview with IGN was published on the same subject:

Thrawn is an especially unique case because Zahn has been able to effectively continue the work he started way back in 1991 with Heir to the Empire. That novel may not be a part of official Star Wars lore any longer, but as Zahn explained, Thrawn himself is basically the same character regardless of continuity.

[....] The closest comparison between Chaos Rising and Zahn's earlier EU work is probably 2006's Outbound Flight, which is set during the Clone Wars and details the first encounter between Thrawn and the Galactic Republic (while also retroactively laying the groundwork for elements of Heir to the Empire). That novel is no longer canon, but Zahn told us he prefers to operate as if it were. He's making a concerted effort not to retread the same ground as Outbound Flight and to avoid contradicting the events of that novel as much as possible.

So yeah. In Zahn's opinion, Legends Thrawn is Canon Thrawn is Book Thrawn, and there is no difference whatsoever between Thrawns in, say, Outbound Flight, Heir to The Empire, Alliances, and Chaos Rising. I wholeheartedly disagree, but lets move on.

Now that the books are out of the way, its time for Rebels.

In July of 2016, after the trailer announcing Thrawn's canon debut aired, Dave Filoni had the following to say about Thrawn's character in regards to Timothy Zahn:

“I was pretty adamant with a couple of people saying, ‘Listen, we need to have Tim sign off on this. This is kind of a waste of time [otherwise],'” says Filoni. “We, of course, can do what we want with a character that Lucasfilm owns, but without Tim’s okay, what does it mean? That’s not going to be good. Once we had some stuff, we wanted to do what we thought was right and make the character. Then we brought him in. We had the production fully prepared. I said, ‘Look, if there’s something that Tim says that I think is really valuable, even if it changes something dynamically, we need to be ready for that and see what we can do.’ I wanted to make sure we did this right by everybody. We brought him in and we didn’t really tell him why. We just flew him up to Lucasfilm and sat him down in a theater and said, ‘Hey, we’re bringing Thrawn into the show.’ He was like, ‘Wow.’ and I said, ‘Yeah, wow. And I’m going to show him to you right now and you let me know what you think.'”

(Before we continue, keep that first highlighted sentence in mind for future reference. I'm going to come back to that later.)

Fortunately, Timothy Zahn was delighted at the show’s approach to the Empire’s imposing blue-skinned Chiss.

“We showed him some of the scenes with him,” Dave Filoni recalls. “He looked like a kid in a candy store. I think it meant a lot to him not just because it was his character, but because you have to imagine what he went through when it was announced that everything is Legends now, not Expanded Universe. I get that and I’ve always appreciated the work that goes into the Expanded Universe… For Tim, I think it was us saying, ‘No, no, no. We really like your character. We want him to be part of the real thing. The canon universe.'”

So in 2016, before we even saw Thrawn in action beyond a trailer, we were told that Zahn gave the OK, and he was chill with the way Thrawn was created in the show. In 2017, he gave a little more of the background of this process in an interview with FANgirl Blog:

The events of Thrawn dovetail closely with Rebels and shed light on some of Thrawn’s more seemingly surprising actions on the show, like when he appears to lose his temper and yell at Lieutenant Lyste. What was it like to see Thrawn come alive onscreen? Is he how you’ve pictured him in your head?

I don’t see my characters in terms of voice or appearance, but rather as personality or attitude. That said, I very much enjoyed the way the Rebels team brought him to life, in his appearance, voice, and actions.

I also appreciated the freedom I had to tweak certain incidents, such as the one you mentioned, and give additional or alternate explanations for the viewers who may have thought those were somewhat out of character for him.

He doesn't really elaborate on this, but we can assume he had SOME creative input on Thrawn's character, and he was overall pretty happy with the choices made in the show.

But then, we have this from that earlier 2017 the Verge article:

When did you learn that Dave Filoni was intending to bring Thrawn to Rebels, and did you have any input into how the character would be handled?

[...] I didn’t have any real input into how Thrawn was going to be handled, mainly because the lead time of an animated series is so long that much of season 3 had already been finished. But I trusted Dave and the team to do the character right. After all, why bring him into Rebels if you were going to drastically change him? Having seen the entire season now, I think we can agree that my trust was completely justified.

So... he didn't have "any real input," but was satisfied with it in the end? I guess? I don't know. We're getting into some contradictions now.

The last thing I've got in regards to Rebels is an interview Zahn did with the YouTube channel Star Wars Explained after the finale aired, where he responds to the following:

“So, maybe let's jump over to Rebels for a little bit. Now that it has wrapped up, how do you feel Thrawn was represented in Star Wars: Rebels?”

“They did a really good job—they not only understood the character and how to write for him, but they also understood the meta around how you defeat him. The only way to defeat Thrawn is to throw something at him he can't control, or can't anticipate. Given perfect knowledge and control, Thrawn will always find a way to win. But they understood, this is how you defeat him, these are the things we can use against him... so his portrayal in general, is very good; he's smart, he's anticipating, he's a step ahead of everybody, he's looking at clues and picking up on them, so I was very pleased with how the Rebels team handled the character."

I think these quotes answer many of your questions, so to answer your initial question: If Zhan had been the writer for Rebels, do I think he would have had Thrawn bomb Lothal to bring Ezra out?

Yes—but ONLY because at that point, the only established™️ Thrawn content was found in Legends, where Thrawn was a ruthless and calculating warlord.

However!

I do believe that if given the chance to re-write the Star Wars: Rebels finale using his now-canon novels as a solid background TODAY, Zahn would choose to not let Thrawn bombard Lothal's Capital City.

I believe this because he made one single very interesting creative choice when writing Thrawn that completely overwrote Thrawn's pre-established Rebels character: Thrawn was not responsible for the civilian deaths on Batonn—Pryce was.

And that's that on that.

A few months ago I would have ended it there, but today, Thrawn's story is no longer just contained in the novels and Rebels, but also in that of The Mandalorian.

This is where I will proudly say I have no idea what the fuck is going on. Before The Jedi aired, I was 100% sure that the next time we saw Thrawn, it would be nowhere NEAR the Empire, because Zahn was pretty adamant in the novels that Thrawn was only in the Empire to help. His. People.

So now he's apparently doing fuck-knows-what in fuck-knows-where and is STILL associated with the Seventh Fleet and Imperial Warlords???

Huh??? Despite the fact that he held no true loyalty to the Empire or to the Emperor??? It's been months and I'm still confused as fuck. Add to the fact that Zahn also doesn't know what the fuck is going on to the equation and we get a big fat question mark with one pretty clear answer that Filoni said himself that we have to keep in mind:

"We, of course, can do what we want with a character that Lucasfilm owns."

So I don't think Zahn has much control over Thrawn as we would all like to think. We can hope he gives us the crazy Thrawn and Ezra Space Adventure™️ novel all we want, but ultimately, Thrawn's fate does not rest in his hands.

If you guys have more to add please let me know!!! This is, obviously, a topic I am very passionate about, so I'd love to hear your thoughts!

[ecoamerica]

Watch the American Climate Leadership Awards 2024 now: https://youtu.be/bWiW4Rp8vF0?feature=shared

The American Climate Leadership Awards 2024 broadcast recording is now available on ecoAmerica's YouTube channel for viewers to be inspired by active climate leaders. Watch to find out which finalist received the $50,000 grand prize! Hosted by Vanessa Hauc and featuring Bill McKibben and Katharine Hayhoe!

[padme-amitabha]

Anidala Week 2021

Day 3: Mythology/Fairy Tales or Favorite Touches

A Serpent in the Garden of Eden

This is based on Hindu mythology about two lovers named Behula and Lakhindar. Some aspects of the original story have been tweaked :)

Once upon a time, two seraphs in the kingdom of heaven fell in love – a love so deep and profound they would attract the envy of the other angels who served in the court of gods. They were Vader and Amidala, the most beautiful out of all the angels.

Vader was descended from the bloodline of the Father himself, creator of the heavens. Vader with his enormous black wings – a black as sinful as midnight – was the angel of death. He could be as beautiful or terrible as the person whose soul he intended to take with him.

Amidala was descended from the Sister, the deity of light, love and purity. She was the queen of the celestial maidens. She inspired all to follow her and was well loved by the citizens of Zion. Her soft wings were as white and pure as snow itself.

This couple’s union caused quite a stir in court and attracted the attention of everyone. The gods felt they were an excellent match and gave them their blessing to marry. They lived together in harmony for centuries and had many children including the twins Luke and Leia, who became deities of the sun and the moon. But after a while, like most immortal beings, they grew weary of living eternal life and craved adventure. They desired to be reincarnated and sent to Earth so that they could find each other and fall in love with each other all over again. The gods granted them this request.

Amidala, being the elder of the two angels, was sent to earth first as the youngest daughter in a well-off family in Theed. Four years later, Vader was sent as the son of a woman named Shmi. Shmi Skywalker was a middle-aged woman who lived on her own in a city called Mos Espa. It so happened that her family had been cursed and killed by the god of snakes and destruction, Sheev due to a grudge he bore against the Skywalkers. He had spared her since she was a child at the time, intending her to become his devotee, but the iron-willed Shmi vowed never to worship the god who had taken away her family.

Sheev, a vindictive god, was affronted by her refusal and placed a curse on her. Any child born of her would never reach adulthood. Shmi went on to have six sons and all of them died under mysterious circumstances in their infancy and Shmi suspected it was from snakebites. Which made sense, of course, since snakes were associated with the conniving god and it was said that was how he took the lives of people who incurred his wrath.

When she found herself with child again, she briefly considered giving in to Sheev. This seventh son was conceived without a Father and Shmi suspected a divine intervention. The child was born with stars in his eyes that reflected infinite wisdom. He was too aware as a child and emitted a godly aura. Shmi knew he was no ordinary human child as soon as she held him in her arms. With his unnaturally bright blue eyes and soft golden curls, he looked like an angel descended from the heavens. Shmi named him Anakin.

Shmi was fiercely protective of her boy and always kept a close eye on him. Anakin was not to step a foot out of their extremely safeguarded house. Anakin, naturally because Vader’s essence still lived inside him, was born with the desire to explore worlds and make a name for himself. But he was aware that his mother’s overprotectiveness came from the sorrows she had endured so he (mostly) remained an obedient child. He dreamed of leaving his house once he reached the age of twenty-one for that would render the curse null and void. 

As a child, he had discovered he was an excellent craftsman and a natural artist. He painted everything he had heard Shmi talk about the world beyond Mos Espa and even Tatooine. Sometimes, images would flash in his mind about a place where there was only happiness. These visions would also show him a strangely familiar face.

Anakin hadn’t seen many girls and most of the women he had encountered were his mother’s age but he knew she was the most beautiful girl in the world. He wasn’t certain she really existed and perhaps, she was just a figment of his imagination and he decided to bring her to life with a portrait. He deftly painted her big brown eyes, delicate features and soft brown hair. It proved to be his finest work.

Meanwhile, Shmi began looking for a potential bride for Anakin. She knew he was lonely and she knew she wouldn’t be around forever to look after him and Anakin had just turned twenty. He had been mostly nonchalant to the girls she had considered for him and spent an awful amount of time thinking about some fictitious girl of his dreams.

She went to Jira, the fruit seller, who lived nearby. The old woman knew every girl in vicinity and she had doted on Anakin since he was little. Shmi told herabout Anakin’s reluctance to marry.

“Don’t look so down, Shmi. I have good news for you,” Jira assured her. “I know about Anakin’s curse and it seems like we have found a solution. A month ago, I visited my sister in Theed and heard the most interesting news. The Naberries are devotes of Shiraya and on a recent visit to the temple, they have heard a prophecy about their second daughter. It is said she would never be a widow.”

Shmi rejoiced at the news. If Anakin were to wed this girl, that would secure his life. “Where can I find this girl?” she asked.

Anakin did not want to marry this girl. His mother had gushed about her countless qualities. Shmi believed she was as special as her own son.  She was well known in all of Theed for being wits, virtues and beauty. But he was growing weary of living life as a prisoner inside his own home and he longed to live a normal life. Maybe this Naberrie girl was the answer. He agreed to meet her.

All his initial reluctance faded once he saw her. It was her. The girl from his dreams.

Anakin immediately agreed to marry Padmé, who seemed just as much taken with him as he was with her.

On their wedding night, Shmi prepared a chamber for them and took every precaution to keep out any snakes that could slither in. Unfortunately, Sheev was one step ahead of her. He conspired with Watto, the builder, to sabotage their accommodation and leave a carefully concealed hole.

Anakin and Padmé were fast asleep on their wedding night, after conversing for hours about their shared visions and memories. The snake upon gazing at the couple felt a pang of regret and hesitated to bring misfortune upon the innocent young couple. Sheev then used his godly powers to compel the serpent and charmed Padmé to fall into a deep slumber. The snake caused the lamp kept next to the couple’s bed to topple and the spills of hot oil forced Padmé to wake and she found her husband bitten by the serpent. She took out the dagger she always carried with her and with she threw it at the snake, which caused its tail to be chopped in half.

Shmi rushed to her son’s side but it was too late. The poison was already in his system and within a few hours, Anakin was dead. Shmi was inconsolable with grief and so was Padmé after becoming a widow at such a young age.

As per the tradition, Anakin’s body was to be put on a raft and set to sail on the river as was done to people who died from snake bites. Padmé refused to accept his death.

All her life, she had known her husband would never die before her. She wished to be on the raft and accompany him. The people thought she had lost her mind from the grief. She waited for them to leave after the ritual and then sneaked in the raft and started sailing on the river. She prayed to the gods to not let the raft sink.

It was said if you went far enough, you would reach the heavens. And that exactly was Padmé’s intention. She would enter heaven and beg the gods to restore Anakin back to life.

The gods were impressed by her perseverance and put her through many trails along the way. Padmé, with Amidala’s essence in her, proved she was worthy and passed them all.

When she reached the heavens, the gods welcomed her.

“We are impressed by your devotion to your husband,” said Yoda, the god of wisdom.

“Then help me by bringing him back to life,” pleaded Padmé.

“It is too late,” said Sheev, ever the schemer. “You have taken too long to reach here. We can only resurrect him within 3 days of his death. You have taken a week.”

Padmé was heartbroken. She besought them to find another way for her to be reunited with her Anakin again or take her life as well.

“There is a way,” said Qui-Gon, the god of compassion, thoughtfully.

“We can make him a god again, as he was once. But he would be bound to serve another god for eternity. That is the price you must pay.”

Sheev was quick to step up and offer to be Anakin’s master and Shmi, realizing her son’s life was more important to her, allowed Anakin to be Palpatine’s apprentice.

Shaak Ti, the goddess of power, was impressed by Padmé and offered to take her in if she was willing to give up her mortal life. Padmé agreed without a second thought. Anakin was restored to life and he was euphoric on seeing his beloved at his side. He felt very fortunate on having such a capable woman as his wife. In the end, Padmé’s endurance and good faith was rewarded. The couple was welcomed back in heaven as gods, reunited after the adventure of a lifetime, and as the happiest of husbands and wives.  

[ilonga]

Got some Avatar Au Questions! So I'm assuming mustafar deviates significantly from canon, but how do obi-wan and anakin sort things out? How do obi-wan and Ahsoka escape palpatine's purge? When Anakin joins up with the rebellion, what is the reunion like for obi-wan, anakin, & Ahsoka? (The last one might be spoilery, so I completely understand if you do not want to elaborate on it)

oooh these are questions I’m super excited to answer!!

ok, to start with answering these questions, let’s first explain how Order 66 goes down in this au. 

As I already mentioned, Palpatine has some sort of team up/deal with Vaatu that allows him quite a bit of control over the spirits, and he’s been using this power to orchestrate the spirit attacks starting with Maul so long ago. As the years passed, Palpatine increased the spirit attacks and the destruction and death they caused, and used this to gain more power himself and, eventually, create an army to fight them. At the end of the AOTC-adjacent era, he, despite Padme’s fighting against it (”We have had peace with the spirits, respected them, for centuries--we must find out why they are attacking, not escalate the conflict!”), creates the Grand Army of the Four Nations to fight back against the spirits in the first Spirit War in centuries. He then conscripts nonbenders into the army and places members of Raava’s Order, benders, at the head of various battalions. 

When it comes time for Order 66, Palpatine orders the spirits to posses various nonbenders and has them attack their Generals/Commanders with intent to kill, taking most of them by surprise. Similar to canon, most of the benders are slaughtered while some manage to escape. A lot of the nonbenders are then killed/disposed of, so Palpatine doesn’t have many people who know the truth in the way (and also, he can claim that the benders killed them in their quest for power and turn the public against them even more). In addition, for benders not in battles/in the temple, Palpatine sends the Inquisitors, firebenders that he’s kidnapped and trained in secret over the years. 

Ahsoka in this au (an airbender) is a bit like Jinora from Legend of Korra; she has a strong spiritual connection and connection to the spirit world. Because of this, she’s able to save herself and Obi-wan, and save some of the nonbenders from the spirits’ possession, such as Rex and some others. In the chaos, they get separated and don’t really have time to figure out what just happened, but they both know, to an extent, that Palpatine is behind this, and that most of Raava’s Order has just been slaughtered.

Then, Obi-wan learns that Anakin killed the avatar (Shaak Ti).  

He’s betrayed, and confused, and furious, and in complete shock. He’s also mentally not in a great place; he’s just seen his friends and comrades slaughtered in cold blood. He thinks that Anakin was in on the plan to wipe them out completely (Anakin, meanwhile, doesn’t know about Order 66 and doesn’t learn about it until he wakes up after the Mustafar-adjacent battle), and had been working with Palpatine (because why else would Anakin kill Shaak Ti? How could Anakin kill Shaak Ti?). 

So he goes to confront Anakin, and in a bit of a reverse of canon, Obi-wan’s the one who’s angry and on the offensive here, and initiates the fight. It’s worth noting that Anakin’s also not in a great place mentally; aside from having just killed the Avatar, he thinks his wife and unborn children were murdered because of the Order and that the Order he’s spent years fighting for has just been trying to gain power and suppress nonbenders all along (Pong Krell, anyone?). When Obi-wan attacks him, the conclusion he draws is “Oh no, he was in on the conspiracy too. He was in on the thing with Padme too.” because why else would Obi-wan be attacking him so viciously out of nowhere? So now they’re both sure they’ve been betrayed by the other, and they’re fighting. Usually, in a fight between benders, there’s some tradition, some honor. The swords, a big part of duels according to the traditions of the Order, are used. In this fight, none of that is used. Obi-wan forgoes them entirely; it’s a very much “how could you”, emotional, blunt force, unrefined kind of fight. Obi-wan blasts water, shards of ice, waves at Anakin, Anakin dodges, responds in turn with spurts and jets of fire. Both know each other’s techniques inside and out, obviously; it’s a very even fight. At one point Obi-wan yells something adjacent to his “you were my brother” line in canon, a “how could you betray me, us, like this?”, or a “how could you?”, smthing like that, and Anakin has a split second of distraction because what is Obi-wan talking about? What happened to the Order? 

Obi-wan takes advantage of this distraction and his next hit knocks Anakin unconscious; he then freezes Anakin in a massive block of ice. He flees, then, it all being too overwhelming. He can’t bring himself to strike any kind of killing blow. He doesn’t know, then or later, if he left Anakin there hoping he would die or hoping he would survive. Years pass and Obi-wan seriously regrets the fight, especially regrets that he never found out why Anakin sided with Palpatine, or killed Shaak Ti. He realizes that there must have been something he didn’t know, and wishes he hadn’t attacked him so rashly and had at least gotten answers.

As for Anakin, Palpatine’s lackeys find him hours or maybe even days after the fight, and get him out of the ice. The time spent in the ice leaves him with frostbite and he ends up having to get three limbs amputated (his right arm and both legs). It also leaves him with permanent tremors. He gets prosthetics, which he can power with a low level-lightning type technique, and armor and a helmet, which Palpatine forces him to wear. He’s forced to wear the armor for a couple reasons; to hide his identity as a former member of Raava’s Order and a beloved hero, to hide the tremors, which Palpatine views as a sign of visible weakness, and because Palpatine enjoys the feeling of owning Anakin and the armor is a way to mark that.

Anakin physically joining the Rebellion happens right after he tries to sacrifice himself in Palpatine’s throne room so that Luke can escape, and though he manages to take out all of the guards/inquisitors and hold off Palpatine for some time, he gets blasted with a hell of a lot of lightning and fully expects to die right there. Luke goes into the Avatar state and gets them both out, and is able to do enough healing so that Anakin survives the encounter. He gets them to the Rebellion and basically? Begs Obi-wan to heal Anakin. 

“I know he’s Vader, I know what he’s done to you, to the Order, but he sacrificed himself to rescue me and he’s dying, you have to help him--”

Obi-wan, of course, does, and has been living with his regrets and missing his little brother for so long that he probably would have done it without the begging anyways, at the very least so he can finally get answers from Anakin.

So Anakin is being slowly but surely healed by Obi-wan (it probably takes him months to recover tbh), and there’s plenty of angst because Obi-wan sees the extent of the injuries he caused and guilt, and because the first time Anakin wakes up--

Well, Anakin fully expected to die, right? And now he’s not dead which makes no sense, he was ready to die (and he wakes up and he thinks, even if I’m not dead now, I’ll be dead soon enough--either the lightning will do me in or Obi-wan will, if he had any sense he’d kill me--obviously he’s not mentally in a great place but being tortured and manipulated and slowly fighting back against the Firelord for years will do that to you), but it’s also good because he’s been Blue Spirit, a double agent, for years ever since Luke revealed himself to Anakin, and this means he has a chance to give the vital information he has on the Empire’s attack plans, ship schematics, etc. 

So the first time he wakes up, when he can finally get his eyes to focus, he gets Obi-wan’s attention and basically starts babbling about attack plans, schematics, weaknesses, etc etc. And Obi-wan’s like “no, wait, you’re still weak, you need to recover, go back to sleep--” and Anakin’s like “no time, you need this information before I die--” and a stressful time is had by all. The next time he wakes up, he’s a bit less all over the place and it slowly starts to sink in that he is going to survive after all, so the urgency dies down a bit. Obi-wan gets the full story of how Palpatine manipulated him, what happened that night, etc, and Anakin gets the full story of what exactly happened during Order 66, what actually happened to Padme, what happened to his kid (kids, he has two--major shock is had). Ahsoka is the one to tell him that Palpatine was controlling the spirits all along. 

He’s surprised, of course, but also somewhat resigned. The grandfatherly veneer of Palpatine has fallen further and further away as the years have passed and his true nature has been clearer and clearer; Anakin has known for a long time that Palpatine is not the good guy (hence his personal rebellion).

Ahsoka, like in canon, manages most of the intelligence networks of the Rebellion in this au. So she’s been getting and processing Blue Spirit’s messages for years, and when she realizes it’s Anakin--well, lots of emotions all around.

Obi-wan and Anakin do mend their relationship, as do Anakin and Ahsoka. Some of the kids Anakin saved over the years are at the Rebellion and recognize him--this also helps things along. And his information as Blue Spirit has saved many lives. 

Obi-wan has been Luke’s waterbending teacher for a while, and Ahsoka has been his airbending/spirit world teacher, so eventually Anakin does take his place as Luke’s (and Leia’s!) firebending teacher.

Thanks for these asks and sorry for making the response so long!! Honestly I think I’ve been hoping for these questions, I’ve been wanting to talk about how this goes down forever :) 

shorter summary: Obi-wan encounters Anakin just after Order 66 occurred and Anakin’s killed Shaak Ti. Believing Anakin to have been in on Palpatine’s plan all along and having betrayed them all, he attacks and initiates the fight in something of a reverse of canon. Anakin, seeing Obi-wan attacking him, comes to the conclusion that Obi-wan must have been part of the Order’s conspiracy (that Palpatine has convinced him of), which he would have never believed of him but why else would Obi-wan be attacking him like this? Neither of them are in a particularly good state of mind or particularly mentally sound during the fight. Obi-wan knocks him out and freezes him in ice, then flees. Palpatine finds Anakin a sizable amount of time later, and Anakin is left with three amputated limbs (which he gets prosthetics for) and permanent tremors (which the Vader armor hides). 

Obi-wan and Ahsoa escape the purge because Ahsoka has a spiritual connection akin to Jinora’s in LOK, and is able to purge the spirits from some of the army such as Rex. In the chaos, the two are separated.

Obi-wan and Anakin reunite first, when Luke brings Anakin back to the Rebellion severely injured from the confrontation with Palpatine. He begs Obi-wan to heal him and Obi-wan agrees. It takes some time for Anakin to move past the fact that he’s not dead, but eventually, he and Obi-wan communicate, they both get the full story of what happened twenty years ago, and their relationship starts to mend. It’s faster once Obi-wan and the Rebellion realize that Darth Vader and Blue Spirit (the Imperial double agent whose information had saved so many) are one and the same. Same with Ahsoka, although it’s a quicker fix for her and Anakin’s relationship since she only found out about his actions secondhand, from Obi-wan, and it makes so much more sense once he gets his side of the story, and because she’s the one who’s been processing his info as Blue Spirit. 

hope you liked!!

[imjustjeremy]

Caltrilla AU idea (please someone write it)

Just got a spark of the moment idea while I was making my Caltrilla illustration. What do you guys think about a reverse-role AU with Cal and Trilla? (Dunno if someone has posted something like this before, I haven’t seen any).

Cal was discovered because Jaro broke down when he was captured or something, like Cere. Or Cal found his way somehow to where Trilla and Cere along with the younglings were hiding and joins them after his master was killed. The Empire again captures Cere and she confesses and Cal or Trilla somehow learn about the Empire coming for them. They try to escape but Cal is captured in the process and forces Trilla to continue without him and protect the younglins.

Later in the Fortress Inquisitorius Cal learns about the truth of how the Empire found them. Instead of being killed he’s tortured and conditioned to become an Inquisitor because despite being a padawan he’s strong in the force and has the unusual ability of psychometry. At the end of his “training” Cal has already turn to the dark side (the Second Brother has been born) and confronts Cere (dunno how long Cere and Trilla were in hiding or how long Trilla or Cere were in the Fortress but let’s say that it was a couple of months so Cal could create some sort of trusting bond with Cere and Trilla while he was with them). Just like in the game Cere is enraged about what has been done to Cal and uses the dark side and escapes, leaving Cal behind.

Years go by and Trilla’s been in hiding along with the younglings (or she left them in some place safe while she went to look for her master because she never felt her death but can’t find her because Cere has cut herself off the force and doesn’t know where to look). Something happens and Trilla is forced to use her powers and is discovered hence the Second Brother is sent to kill her. Again Cere appears and saves her.

When they’re safe and Cere and Trilla get down to talking Trilla asks about Cal and Cere tells her that he died, Trilla is sad but continues to listen to Cere. Then tells her about her plan and Trilla is the one to help Cere instead of Cal.

That’s as far as I’ve gotten with the idea :v Mainly how Cal became an Inquisitor instead of Trilla. I think the events and encounters of the game would be the same in some aspects but it obviously would be differences. I think Cal could be an even more ruthless Inquisitor than Trilla was because: 1. He was in the early stages of his Jedi training so he wasn’t as “refined” as the other Inquisitors and Vader surely exploited that during his “training.” That combined with the fact that he was around 11-12 during Order 66 and lived his next years being taught the ways of the dark side would make him more dangerous. 2. His psychometry was a power feared by the Jedi for a reason. Vader soon realizes the powers/potential of this young boy and trains him in a ruthless way. Interrogation, killing, torture, manipulation, you name it. Cal was taught how to use his powers for the worst and that’s how he got his place among the Inquisitors as the Second Brother.

I got really hyped about this AU but I’m no author so if anyone is interested (please I beg you) feel free to write this little idea. I would be happy to throw some more ideas for the events of the game (if anyone is interested let me know and I’ll be happy to do so) but I think this post is long enough already. Also I would love to make some illustrations about the AU.

[phosphorescent-naidheachd]

From a Certain Point of View

Or, how Ben Kenobi’s boldfaced lie prevarication saved the Galaxy (but not in the way he thought it would).

(See Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four)

Part Five: Epilogue

When Sidious dies, Jedi and other Force Sensitives across the galaxy sense it, even if they don’t all know precisely what it is that they’re feeling. The Force reverberates with the death of so powerful a being – with the shattering of so many significant shatterpoints. A heavy, oppressive cloud has lifted. The Force hasn’t felt this way since… longer than some of them even remember. The older among them do remember the days when the Force was lighter and their foresight clearer, but even they hadn’t realized how bad things had gotten until the fog of the Dark was gone.

Padme, with her low midichlorian count, is not particularly attuned to the Force, but she feels it too. Somewhere deep in her bones, she knows that something has changed. And Padme has always trusted her instincts.

So when Anakin bursts into her office in the Senate and announces that he just killed Chancellor Palpatine -- oh, and that Palpatine was a Sith Lord who orchestrated the entire war, by the way -- she isn’t quite as shocked as she probably should be.

(Which is not, of course, the same thing as not being shocked at all. Because Palpatine? A Sith Lord? She’d been concerned about the executive powers he was accruing and the policies he was putting into place, of course, but...)

“Are you all right?” he asks, dropping to his knees in front of her chair.

“Me?” she says. “I’m fine, Ani. I’m not the one who just fought a Sith! We need to get you to a medic.”

“Only if you get looked over too,” he says. He hesitates then adds, “Is there anything you, uh, wanted to tell me?”

He gestures awkwardly in her direction with his flesh hand.

Padme stares at him.

“I’m sorry?” she says, eyeing him worriedly.

Who knows what kind of damage he might have sustained in his encounter with Palpatine.

“You know,” he says. “Any, um, family news?”

“My family is fine, last I heard,” she says slowly. “Ani, what’s going on?”

He takes a deep breath.

“Padme, how is the baby doing?”

She stares at him. 

“What baby?”

There is a choking sound near the door.

...which, she realizes in retrospect, they never closed after Anakin barged in like a gundark. 

“An excellent question. Is there anything,” a particularly exhausted-looking Obi-Wan Kenobi says dryly, one eyebrow arched, “that the two of you would like to tell me?”

An Hour Later...

Silence falls once Anakin has finished his story.

One of Obi-Wan’s few comforts is that Padme looks nearly as shellshocked as he feels. At least he wasn’t the only one Anakin has been keeping in the dark...

“Let me see if I understood this correctly,” Obi-Wan says, folding his arms over his chest. “Not satisfied with just conducting an affair so indiscreet that every padawan and half the initiates in the Coruscant Temple knew about it, the two of you decided to get married. While Anakin was still a padawan himself, no less. Then, shortly after the beginning of the War, your son from the future arrived to warn you about a student of mine that was going to bring about the fall of the Republic and the Jedi, only to vanish into thin air partway through his explanation of events. Instead of talking this fantastical tale through with me, as would have been sensible, your response was to maintain absolute secrecy, cling to my side like lichen to rock, prevent me from spending any time with younglings, and to steal Ahsoka as your padawan to prevent her from becoming my student and thus this Darth Vader. Is that correct?”

“...that about sums it up,” Anakin says, only a little shamefaced.

“Ah, good,” Obi-Wan says. He belatedly realizes that he is stroking his beard with one hand -- an unfortunate tell of his. “I’d hate to have missed any other revelations.”

Padme looks ready to drop her head into her hands. Obi-Wan can sympathize. 

“So you’re sure you aren’t pregnant?” Anakin asks, turning his attention back to her.

“Yes, Anakin,” she repeats with supreme patience. “I’m sure.”

“Maybe we should get you checked out, just in case,” he says.

Padme sighs.

“Trust me,” she says waspishly, “I am absolutely, without a doubt, not pregnant. I’m on my moonsblood right now and you are not helping my mood.”

Anakin freezes, the expression on his face resembling nothing more than an ash-rabbit trapped by a predator. He turns his head in Obi-Wan’s direction, eyes pleading.

Obi-Wan shakes his head. 

(He’s learned many things over the years, and key among them is to never get involved in a couple’s marital spat.)

And yet...

Obi-Wan sighs internally and begins to speak. “I hate to interrupt, but do we know if Mas Amedda was aware of Palpatine’s true identity? With Palpatine dead, the Chancellorship will fall into his hands, along with its manifold new powers.”

Padme frowns, lacing her fingers through one another atop the desk.

“Several of us in the Senate have long suspected him of corruption,” she says, “but we’ve never been able to tie him to anything. Every time we think we’ve finally caught him, he slithers away again. Bail -- Senator Organa -- thinks Amedda might have someone from Intelligence in his pocket, but now I wonder... Whether he was aware of Palpatine’s identity or not, I can not imagine Amedda didn’t do some of Palpatine’s dirty work. We’d need actual proof before we could oust him from his position, though...”

“And if he has any brains, one of the first things he’ll do upon learning of Palpatine’s exposure -- and his own newly gained authority -- is erase any evidence that might incriminate him,” Obi-Wan agrees.

Force, this is such a mess.

He pinches the bridge of his nose as the headache building behind his eyes continues to grow.

“And if Palpatine planned everything,” Padme continues,“he must have had allies. Many, many allies -- witting and unwitting. How deep does this go? ...We need allies and we need to figure out how we’re going to spin this. Quickly, before the press gets word. Tell me, what did you do with the Chancellor’s body? Did you attack any of his Security on the way in -- No, you can’t have done, they would have raised the alarm long before now. -- Do we know if he had any other appointments this afternoon? For that matter, who else knows about this?”

Her eyes, sharp and intelligent, pin him in place.

Reluctantly, he says, “We left the Chancellor’s body in his office where he fell. No one other than Palpatine was harmed, to my knowledge. Anakin simply walked in without an appointment -- the guards are used to that -- and I snuck in through a window. I’m afraid I have no notion of whether he had any other appointments later in the day. Anakin, was his secretary there when you entered?”

Anakin shakes his head. 

“I think she was on her lunch break,” he says.

“Well, that’s something at least,” Padme mutters. “And the rest?”

“Cody knows,” Anakin says promptly. “So does Ahsoka.” 

“The Chancellor’s personal chef knows as well,” Obi-Wan says. “It’s possible that any of them have told someone else. I... have not yet had an opportunity to brief the Council on this matter as someone ran off to your office the second I confirmed Palpatine’s death. I barely had time to lock the office door behind him before following.”

Padme lets out a low groan.

“I,” she says, “am calling for backup.”

Anakin makes as though to move, only to be halted by a gesture from Padme.

“You,” she says, “are going to stay right there. I’ll ask them to bring a med-droid while they’re at it.”

“Then perhaps --” Obi-Wan begins delicately.

“And you,” Padme says. “You aren’t going anywhere either. The two of you have done enough for the moment.”

“I was merely going to suggest that someone inform Ahsoka of our whereabouts,” Obi-Wan says. “It wouldn’t do for her to panic and barge into the Chancellor’s office, lightsaber in hand.”

“...that is a fair point,” Padme says, sounding almost insultingly surprised.

“Then while we’re at it,” Obi-Wan says, “Might I suggest that one of us contact the Council and request a representative’s presence at your planned meeting? Everything will go more smoothly if we are all on the same page.”

“Of course,” Padme says with a gracious nod.

Obi-Wan has just lifted his comlink from his belt to make the call when a terrible thought occurs to him.

And really, if he hadn’t been so tired -- if this entire day hadn’t been one galaxy-shattering revelation after another, interspersed with frantic planning and fighting -- he would have thought of this much earlier.

“Padme,” Obi-Wan says slowly. “By any chance, do you know if the interior of your office is under any forms of surveillance?”

“...oh fuck.”

Mace Windu was having a fairly pleasant day, all things considered. For the first time in months, he wasn’t in a war zone. The Sithbegotten headache he’d received earlier today had finally gone away. The Force felt tangibly lighter, shatterpoints were showing futures brighter and clearer than any he’d seen in well over a decade, and he even had a cup of Sapir tea in front of him.

Yes, Mace Windu was having a good day. 

‘Was’ is the key word here.

The second he received an urgent comm from Obi-Wan Kenobi asking for him to come to Senator Amidala’s office in the Senate ASAP, however, he knew his day was about to descend into all nine Corellian hells.

It’s Kenobi, after all -- the man has a positive talent for attracting chaos. And where Kenobi is, Skywalker is rarely far behind.

The question isn’t whether Mace’s headache is about to return, the question is only how bad it’s going to be when it does.

So when he enters Senator Amidala’s office to find not only Kenobi, Amidala, and Skywalker, but also Tano and Senators Organa, Mothma, Danu, and Tills, he can feel his temples start to throb anew.

Then he hears Skywalker’s story.

Mace closes his eyes briefly and takes a deep, calming breath.

...he hates it when he’s right about these things.

The meeting feels like it lasts forever. Once they’ve decided how to handle Palpatine’s death, talk turns to the current intra-political environment in the Senate and how that might affect any brokering of a peace agreement with the remaining Separatist leadership. Which then leads into even more political discussions. 

Anakin is bored stiff.

In the end, the meeting only breaks up because Bail reminds them that it will look suspicious if they remain holed up together for too long -- especially once news of the Chancellor’s death spreads.

Unfortunately, however, it appears that Anakin’s trials for the day have just begun. The rest of the day involves enough politics and long-winded debates given in double-speak that he’s begun to seriously consider ‘accidentally’ injuring himself just to have an excuse to escape.

Something in his face must have given his thoughts away, because Obi-Wan lays a hand on his arm and shakes his head.

“If you think this is bad,” Obi-Wan whispers, sounding far too amused for a man listening to yet another piece of circuitous sophistry from a puffed-up planetary representative, “you should be grateful you haven’t been on the Council long yet.”

It... can get worse then this?

Anakin shudders.

By the time they leave for the evening, Anakin can’t decide which he wants more -- to eat something, to sleep for twelve hours straight, or to hit something hard.

Padme, in his private opinion, looks almost as disappointed as she does smug when she informs him that she never had occasion to use her blasters today.

.........he can sympathize with the former. 

Politics are enough to make anyone violent.

Irritating politicians aside, confronting and disposing of Palpatine is not enough. Not for that kind of intimate betrayal.

It will never be enough, he knows, not even if he kills every last one of Palpatine’s stooges. Their blood will not wash away all the blood that has been shed in this stupid, pointless war; their deaths will not bring the other dead back to life or restore him to a world where his trust remains unbroken.

Damn if it wouldn’t make him feel better, though.

But not for long, that annoying voice in his head that sounds like Obi-Wan reminds him. It would only be a temporary distraction; you’d still have to deal with everything eventually. Besides, vengeance is not the Jedi way.

...sometimes Anakin really wishes he hadn’t spent so much time meditating with Obi-Wan.

Padawan Ahsoka Tano is tired. It has been a long, tense day. A long week, really. A long past few years.

She’s looking forward to lying down on Master Obi-Wan’s couch and passing out.

(Ever since she became Anakin’s padawan, the two of them have been on the front lines more often than not, so he’s never bothered to get them their own set of rooms. Ahsoka doesn’t mind -- there’s something kind of cozy about sharing an apartment with both of her Masters. ...She suspects that Anakin and Master Obi-Wan feel the same way, even if they’ll never say as much.)

So naturally, when they enter Master Obi-Wan’s apartment, someone is already sitting there.

She doesn’t recognize him, but Anakin certainly seems to.

“Luke?” he says incredulously. “How -- why --?”

The boy -- man, really -- shrugs.

He seems only slightly sheepish to have been caught breaking into their apartment. 

“Surprise?” he says, running a gloved hand through floppy blond hair.

The conversation that follows is perhaps the weirdest one Ahsoka has ever been a part of... and that’s saying something, considering who she works with on a daily basis.

Every now and then, Skyguy cuts Luke off, throwing her a nervous glance.

...Now that she stops to think about it, this usually happens when the subject of this new Sith, Darth Vader, comes up. 

It’s super irritating. Ahsoka isn’t some untried youngling! She’s fought in countless battles. She even helped to take down a Sith Lord; she hardly needs shielding from a mere discussion about one! 

Anakin has just sent her into the kitchenette to make some tea -- which, if you ask her, is a totally transparent excuse to get her out of the way so he can talk to this Luke person in private -- when there’s a faint rap at the apartment door.

Glad to escape the tedium of tea-making, Ahsoka dashes back into the living room.

It’s probably just as well that she did, because Anakin and Luke are so absorbed in their Top Secret conversation that she doesn’t think they even saw her come through, let alone heard the knock.

She glances through the peephole.

Ah, it’s Master Obi-Wan.

Since it’s his apartment, Obi-Wan doesn’t need to knock, but he’s done so ever since that one time he walked in on her making out with Barriss.

(In retrospect, the living room really wasn’t the best place for that. Even Barriss, usually so unflappable, couldn’t look him straight in the eye for a solid week afterwards without remembering the short talk they’d both received about the importance of using protection, exercising discretion, and remembering their priorities as Jedi.)

Shaking away the memory, she opens the door. 

“Thank you, Ahsoka,” Master Obi-Wan says. “...is that Tarine I smell?”

“Yeah... Good nose,” she replies. “Want any? I’m already making some for Skyguy and his visitor.” 

“Oh? Is this visitor anyone I know?” he asks, arching a brow quizzically.

“Some guy named Luke,” Ahsoka says with a shrug, stepping back to let him in. “He claims he’s from the future and that he’s met Skyguy before.”

“Really,” Master Obi-Wan says.

His eyes sharpen as he steps through the door and peers around her.

“So that is Luke,” he murmurs.

Luke freezes in his place on the couch, then his head snaps up. 

He gapes.

“Ben?” he says, moving forward. “Ben Kenobi? Gosh, you look different.”

“Have we met before?” Master Obi-Wan asks.

Luke’s eyes seem to laugh at some private joke. Smiling faintly, he says,

“Oh yes... from a certain point of view.”

THE END

[brokenmusicboxwolfe]

Quick  catch up, including tonight and motel viewing during the trip....

Kong: Skull Island- As the Vietnam war ends an organization ( focused on hunting giant creaturesafter some historical encounters) sets out to a storm shrouded unexplored island with the help of the US military. Bombs get dropped to aide in “mapping” but instead it stirs up trouble. A very familiar pissed off giant ape smashes all the helicopters leaving two groups trying to reach their escape point. One group, containing a mercenary with a heart of gold and an anti-war photo journalist among others, meet up with a fella that’s been stuck on the island since WWII living with mysterious locals. He clues them in that Kong is actually the protector of humans, protecting the world from giant lizard creatures that keep crawling out from beneath the earth. Meanwhile the other group, headed by a military officer with no eagerness for peacetime, are making it their mission to kill Kong. Maybe that’s not such a good idea....

It’s a good old fashioned silly B movie on a blockbuster CGI extravaganza budget, Apocalypse Now with lots of kaiju battles. It’s loads of fun, well if you have any affection for giant monster movies anyway. Or if while watching Platoon you every wanted a giant spider creature to show up.  It’s pretty clearly aiming to kick off a franchise with that kaiju hunting organization, but for once I don’t mind the obviousness of the money grubbing. I enjoyed it’s dumb ol’ self too much! 

Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows- It’s a solid, straightforward documentary about the creator/creative force behind classic horror films released by RKO (Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, etc). Since I like the films in question I found it interesting.

Nocturnal Animals- Your standard issue dissatisfied immaculate, cynical artist rich gal gets a manuscript from her ex just as her equally coldly “sophisticated” current hubby is having an affair. The manuscript is the story of a man whose wife and daughter are brutally raped and murdered when the family encounters those psychopathic hicks that upper scale urban folks think are just waitin’ to pounce the second you are out of cell phone range. He sets out to see that the evil crazies responsible pay. This story serves as a hook for the hipper than thou city gal to reflect in her former relationship and get a kind of pay back. Loathesome, unsympathetic people in a hermetically austere privileged world crossed with a nasty and bleak story within a story creating an artfully stylishly filmed and well acted peice of snob crap where I want to smack everyone involved with a really big stick!

An Affair to Remember- Another movie where I want to hit everyone! A couple of charming stars play a couple who fall in love when they meet on a trip, but their romances is complicated by both being engaged to others. Surprise, it turns out their soon to be exes are astoundingly understanding. So how get a problem for the love  birds to face? 

Well, for starters they decide to to see or speak to each other for six months to test their affections, and if they meet at the selected time and place it means twu wuv. She gets hit by a car crossing the street and looses the use of her legs, but idiot girl thinks it’s better her beloved think he was rejected by her rather than know of her condition. 

Apparently being unable to walk is a fate worse than death, or some crap. She was a singer, but apparently being unable to walk means you have to give up singing professionally and instead rely on the charity of a preist to get you a job teaching singing to young children who warble all cutsey at the poor audience. Yes, not being able to walk makes you a thing to be pitied, unable to go spend a night on the town after your still pals ex takes you out to the theater, because apparently you have to walk to eat out or something. Oh, and that nice guy ex is rich and doesn’t just keep encouraging you tell your hurt twu wuv, but also offers to pay for magic cure all surgery. But no, you won’t take the help. You will only get the surgery when you save out of your meager salary, and you will only tell your twu wuv once you can walk.

She is an idiot!!

Well acted, well filmed, and I REALLY got disgusted with this bullshit. It isn’t romantic, but insulting to people who do have ambulatory issues and demonstrates a kind of martyr delusion selfishness on the part of the so called heroine!

Ransom!- The son of a rich business man gets kidnapped. Rather than pay the ransom he declares on tv he will offer up that same amount of money for the kidnappers dead or alive if the child is not returned. Fair enough. 

But he also believes forcably sedating his distraught wife, keeping her locked up in her bedroom under constant supervision in a drugged up haze, refusing to tell her anything about what is happening, and not allowing her any say at all in her decisions about her son’s fate is fair too. So to do the people around him, complying with his manly right to do what the hell he likes about the hysterical wife, never mind the fact she might not be so damned hysterical if she were treated with a bit of respect!

We are not supposed to question this, probably no more than in that (also 1950s) remake of The Man Who Knew To Much when the bastard hero husband forcably drugs his wife before telling her about their son’s kidnapping. It’s just background, expected, a demonstration of how women are these naturally hysterical creatures that the paternalistic society needs to “take care of” by taking away their mental faculties through sedation. 

I sooooo do not want to time travel to the ‘50s!

Experiment in Terror- Ok, I did enjoy this one. I’d also seen it before.

A woman that works in a bank is ambushed by a man in her own home. She never sees his face as he threatens not only her life but the life of her teenage sister if she doesn’t cooperate with his robbery plan. Despite her valid fear she contacts the authorities. While the the FBI attempt to hunt the baddie down, he continues to haunt her. When he abducts the sister it looks like the heroins will be forced to actually do what he wants, despite being smart enough to realize he will probably kill them both anyway....

It really is an excellent thriller. The heroine’s fear never keeps her from being smart, the FBI agent is determined but knows he might fail to protect her, no romance is shoehorned in, and the villian is truly unnerving.  Now they gave the baddie asthma as creepy way to signal his presence, but since my father was asthmatic that wouldn’t be enough to find him disturbing. (Though there was that one time when I was 6 and Pop was coming down the stairs in the dark that for a few moments freaked me out Darth Vader was there...) No, he’s creepy because of the sick pleasure he takes in tormenting his target. This isn’t just about the money for him: he’s having fun. And golly, it’s Ross Martin who played the lovable Artie in one of my fave shows, The Wild Wild West, as the sicko! It’s a one of those movies that if you come across it late night you always remember it, but if you rewatch it years later you aren’t disappointed.

[gloriousgwendolinechristie]

Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the Definitive Preview

VANITY FAIR – Star Wars devotees who can’t wait for December need look no further. With exclusive access to writer-director Rian Johnson, plus interviews with Mark Hamill, Daisy Ridley, and others, V.F. presents the ultimate sneak peek at The Last Jedi—and Carrie Fisher’s lasting legacy.

  I. “We’re Going Back?”

  The first trip to Skellig Michael was wondrous: an hour-long boat ride to a craggy, green island off the coast of Ireland’s County Kerry, and then a hike up hundreds of stone steps to a scenic cliff where, a thousand years earlier, medieval Christian monks had paced and prayed. This is where Mark Hamill reprised his role as Luke Skywalker for the first time since 1983, standing opposite Daisy Ridley, whose character, Rey, was the protagonist of The Force Awakens, J. J. Abrams’s resumption of George Lucas’s Star Wars movie saga. The opening sentence of the film’s scrolling-text “crawl,” a hallmark of the series, was “Luke Skywalker has vanished.” Atop Skellig Michael, at the picture’s very end, after an arduous journey by Rey, came the big payoff: a cloaked, solitary figure unhooding himself to reveal an older, bearded Luke, who wordlessly, inscrutably regarded the tremulous Rey as she presented to him the lightsaber he had lost (along with his right hand) in a long-ago duel with Darth Vader, his father turned adversary. It was movie magic: a scene that, though filmed in 2014 and presented in theaters in 2015, is already etched in cinematic history.

  The second trip to Skellig Michael? Maybe less of a thrill for an aging Jedi. Contrary to what one might have reasonably expected, that Abrams would have kept rolling in ’14, recording some dialogue between Luke and Rey in order to get a jump on the saga’s next installment—especially given that Skellig Michael is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, with access limited to the summer months, and only when the weather is cooperative—once Hamill and Ridley had nailed their epic staredown, that was a wrap. It fell to Abrams’s successor, Rian Johnson, the director of The Last Jedi, the eighth movie in the saga, which opens this December, to painstakingly re-stage the clifftop scene, with the two actors retaking their places more than a year later.

  “When I read the script for Episode VIII, I went, ‘Oh my God, we’re going back?’ Because I said I was never going back,” Hamill told me when I sat down with him recently at his home in Malibu. He wondered, in vain, if they could drop him in by chopper this time, “which is so clueless of me, because there’s no landing pad, and it would mar the beauty of it all,” he said. Hamill is a youthful 65 but a sexagenarian nevertheless; whereas the fit young members of the crew were given 45 minutes to get up to the now iconic Rey-Luke meeting spot—carrying heavy equipment—Hamill was allotted an hour and a half, “and I had to stop every 10, 15 minutes to rest.”

  None of this was offered up in the form of complaint. Hamill just happens to be a rambling, expansive talker—in his own way, as endearingly offbeat a character as his friend and on-screen twin sister, Carrie Fisher, who passed away suddenly and tragically last December. Like Fisher, Hamill was put on a diet-and-exercise regimen after he was reconscripted into the Star Wars franchise. (Harrison Ford was under less obligation, having retained his leading-man shape because he never stopped being a leading man.) Over a spartan snack plate of carrot sticks and hummus, the man behind Luke held forth at length on this subject.

  “You just cut out all the things you love,” he said. “Something as basic as bread and butter, which I used to start every meal with. Sugar. No more candy bars. No more stops at In-N-Out. It’s really just a general awareness, because in the old days I’d go, ‘Well, I’m not that hungry, but oh, here’s a box of Wheat Thins,’ and you don’t put the Wheat Thins in the same category as Lay’s potato chips, and yet I would sort of idly, absentmindedly eat these things while watching Turner Classic Movies, and ‘Oh, I ate the whole box!’ ”

  Hamill had been dieting and training for 50 weeks before he learned, via the Episode VII script he finally received from Abrams, that he would not appear in the movie until its last scene, and in a nonspeaking part at that. On this, too, he has a lot of thoughts. Though he grants that the delayed-gratification reveal of Luke was a narrative masterstroke, he’d have done things differently if he’d had his druthers. Han Solo’s death scene, for example. Why couldn’t Luke have made his first appearance around then? In the finished film, the witnesses to Han’s death, at the hands of his own son, the brooding dark-side convert Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), are his longtime Wookiee co-pilot, Chewbacca, and the upstart Resistance fighters Rey and Finn (John Boyega).

“Now, remember, one of the plots in the earlier films was the telepathic communication between my sister and me,” Hamill said. “So I thought, Carrie will sense that Han is in danger and try to contact me. And she won’t succeed, and, in frustration, she’ll go herself. Then we’re in the situation where all three of us are together, which is one of my favorite things in the original film, when we were on the Death Star. It’s just got a fun dynamic to it. So I thought it would have been more effective, and I still feel this way, though it’s just my opinion, that Leia would make it as far as she can, and, right when she is apprehended, maybe even facing death—Ba-boom! I come in and blow the guy away and the two of us go to where Han is facing off with his son, but we’re too late. The reason that’s important is that we witness his death, which carries enormous personal resonance into the next picture. As it is, Chewie’s there, and how much can you get out of [passable Chewbacca wail] ‘Nyaaarghhh!’ and two people who have known Han for, what, 20 minutes?”

  Still, Hamill recognizes that the popular response to The Force Awakens—its stirring ending in particular—was overwhelmingly positive, his misgivings be damned. “As I said to J.J.,” he recalled, “I’ve never been more happy to be wrong.”

  Besides, holding back Luke in VII means that Hamill gets a lot more screen time in VIII. And dialogue. This time, at last, Luke Skywalker talks.

  II. A Long Way from Tosche Station

  Rian Johnson, a sandy-haired, baby-faced 43-year-old Californian heretofore best known among cinéastes for his time-bending 2012 science-fiction film, Looper, is not only the director of Episode VIII but also its sole credited screenwriter. (Episode VII was written by Abrams, Lawrence Kasdan, and Michael Arndt.) Earlier this spring, in a screening room in the Frank G. Wells Building at Walt Disney Studios, in Burbank, California, Johnson described to me the approach he took to writing The Last Jedi, the second film of the Rey-centered trilogy. “J.J. and Larry and Michael set everybody up in a really evocative way in VII and started them on a trajectory. I guess I saw it as the job of this middle chapter to challenge all of those characters—let’s see what happens if we knock the stool out from under them,” he said.

  As it is, none of the main characters in The Force Awakens emerged from that picture in what can be described as a triumphal state. John Boyega’s Finn had been gravely wounded in a lightsaber duel with Kylo Ren. In a telephone interview from China, where he was filming Pacific Rim: Uprising, Boyega told me that, as teased in The Last Jedi’s first trailer, his character, Finn, begins the new movie in a “bacta suit,” a sort of regenerative immersion tank that, in the Star Wars galaxy, heals damaged tissue. Adam Driver, alluding both to Finn’s state and the scar seen on his own face in the trailer, told me, “I feel like almost everyone is in that rehabilitation state. You know, I don’t think that patricide is all that it’s cracked up to be. Maybe that’s where Kylo Ren is starting from. His external scar is probably as much an internal one.”

  Johnson was surprised at how much leeway he was given to cook up the action.

  But Johnson, in drawing up his screenplay, decided to raise the stakes further. “I started by writing the names of each of the characters,” he said, “and thinking, What’s the hardest thing they could be faced with?”

  At the top of Johnson’s list: Luke Skywalker. When he was last glimpsed in Lucas’s original trilogy, at the end of 1983’s Return of the Jedi, Luke was basking in victory and familial warmth, reveling with Princess Leia Organa, Han Solo, and their rebel compatriots at a celebratory Ewok dance party. Turning away for a moment from the festivities, he saw smiling apparitions of his two departed Jedi mentors, Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi, along with his late father, Anakin Skywalker, restored to his unscarred, un-Vadered form after redeeming himself in death, sacrificing his own life to save his son’s and slay the evil Emperor Palpatine.

  You’d have expected Luke to have shortly thereafter found a nice girl and settled into a contented existence on a tidy planet with good schools and dual sunsets, no more than a couple of parsecs from the Organa-Solos and their little boy, Ben. But no. Leia and Han’s romance didn’t last, and something heavy went down with twin bro. The result: the cloak, the hood, and monastic isolation of the damaged, Leonard-Cohen-at-Mount-Baldy variety.

  So what happened to Luke? What we know from The Force Awakens is that he had been running some sort of Jedi academy when “one boy, an apprentice, turned against him, destroyed it all.” These are the words that Han Solo, prior to his death scene, offers to Rey and Finn—the inference being that the boy was Han and Leia’s son, and Luke’s nephew, Ben, the future Kylo Ren. “People that knew him best,” Han says of Luke, “think he went looking for the first Jedi temple.”

  That part of Luke’s legend, Johnson confirmed, is accurate. The site of Rey’s Force Awakens encounter with Luke is Ahch-To, the temple’s home planet, which bears a striking resemblance to southwestern coastal Ireland. Though their time on Skellig Michael was brief, the Last Jedi crew returned to the area for additional shooting on the Dingle Peninsula, a ragged spear of land that juts out into the North Atlantic. There, Johnson said, the set builders “duplicated the beehive-shaped huts where the monks lived on Skellig and made a kind of little Jedi village out of them.” Luke, it transpires, has been living in this village among an indigenous race of caretaker creatures whom Johnson is loath to describe in any more detail, except to say that they are “not Ewoks.”

  That Luke is so changed a person presented Johnson with rich narrative opportunities. The Last Jedi is to a large extent about the relationship between Luke and Rey, but Johnson cautions against any “one-to-one correlation” between, say, Yoda’s tutelage of young Luke in The Empire Strikes Back and old Luke’s tutelage of Rey. “There’s a training element to it,” he said, “but it’s not exactly what you would expect.” This being the spoiler-averse world of Lucasfilm, the production company behind the Star Wars movies, that’s about as specific as the director is willing to get. (No, he won’t tell you if Luke is related to Rey, or, for that matter, what species the super-villain Supreme Leader Snoke happens to be, or which character the title The Last Jedi refers to.)

  But Johnson was happy to talk about Hamill’s performance, which, he said, “shows a very different side of the Luke character.” In the original Star Wars trilogy, Luke was the de facto straight man, playing off Ford’s rascally Han and Fisher’s tart, poised Leia, not to mention the droid comedy tandem of C-3PO and R2-D2. Hamill? He was cast for his sincere mien and Bicentennial-era dreamboat looks—part Peter Cetera, part Osmond brother. He still catches grief, he noted, for one particularly clunky line reading in the first movie, when Luke responds to his Uncle Owen’s order to polish up their newly purchased droids by complaining, “But I was going into Tosche Station to pick up some power converters!” Though his approach to the line was, he swears, deliberate—“I distinctly remember thinking, I’ve got to make this as whiny and juvenile as I can,” he said—Hamill admitted that his greenness as an actor left him with “somewhere to go later, where I wouldn’t make those kinds of choices.”

  In his years out of the spotlight, Hamill has flourished as a voice actor, most notably playing the Joker in a series of animated Batman TV shows, films, and video games. He performs the part with a demented brio and an arsenal of evil laughs ranging from Richard Widmark manic to Vincent Price broad—a far cry from the gee-whiz wholesomeness for which he is best remembered.

  Oscar Isaac, at 38 the senior member of the core cast’s “new kids” (Driver is 33, and Ridley and Boyega are in their mid-20s), is old enough to remember as a child revering Luke Skywalker. “So to be there, and to watch Mark revisit Luke, particularly in these scenes we were shooting towards the end of the film, was bizarre and jaw-dropping,” he told me. “It’s like when you see an old band re-unite and go on the road, and they don’t quite hit those high notes anymore—though in this situation it’s completely the opposite. It’s the fulfillment of where your imagination would take you when you imagine where Luke would go, or what he’s become.”

  III. Significant New Figures

  On the Disney campus, I sat in on a postproduction meeting in which Johnson was reviewing some scenes from The Last Jedi. Teams from Industrial Light & Magic, Lucasfilm’s visual-effects division, were videoconferencing in from London, San Francisco, and Vancouver. On a big screen, Poe Dameron, Isaac’s heroic X-wing fighter pilot, was back in action, coaching a gunner named Paige, a new character played by a Vietnamese actress named Veronica Ngo. Another scene featured General Hux, the nefarious First Order commander played with spittle-flecked relish by Domhnall Gleeson.

  Johnson loved what he was seeing but noted the presence of some “schmutz”—smudges around the edges—on the starcraft window that Hux was looking out of. “I don’t know, does the First Order not keep its windows clean?” he asked. “Did you guys play it that way before?”

  He raised the question more deferentially than critically (and Ben Morris, the movie’s London-based VFX supervisor, said it would be no problem to de-schmutzify the pane). Until The Last Jedi, Johnson had never overseen a picture with a budget above $30 million. But the director betrayed no sign of being overwhelmed. He is a gifted filmmaker whose previous movies, especially Brick (his 2005 debut) and Looper, are visually distinctive and intricately plotted, the assured work of a cinema-drunk U.S.C. film-school grad who, in preparation for Episode VIII, steeped himself in World War II movies like Henry King’s Twelve O’Clock High and “funky 60s samurai stuff” like Kihachi Okamoto’s Kill! and Hideo Gosha’s Three Outlaw Samurai.

  The anointment of Johnson as Episode VIII’s overseer is emblematic of the direction in which Kathleen Kennedy has taken Lucasfilm since she assumed the presidency of the company, in 2012, the same year that George Lucas, who had personally recruited her to take his place, sold the company to Disney. Though she reached out to Abrams, a proven wrangler of blockbuster series (Mission: Impossible, Star Trek), to initiate the current Star Wars trilogy, Kennedy has since picked filmmakers whose résumés are less important than whether or not she is a fan of their work.

  Kennedy cut her teeth as a Steven Spielberg protégée—in the early 80s, when she was not yet out of her 20s, he entrusted her with producing E.T.—and now she, too, is keen on giving relative unknowns their big chance. Johnson was someone she’d had her eye on for years, she told me, admiring “how deliberate he is in his storytelling and the way he moves the camera.” The final film of the trilogy, due in 2019 and for the moment assigned the simple working title Episode IX, will be directed by Colin Trevorrow, who did not yet have the big-budget feature Jurassic World under his belt when he crossed Kennedy’s radar; he came to her attention via his first feature, the 2012 indie comedy Safety Not Guaranteed, and a recommendation from her friend Brad Bird, the Pixar auteur.

  Part of what makes Lucasfilm’s new system work is that Kennedy has set up a formidable support structure for her filmmakers. Upon her arrival, she put together a story department at Lucasfilm’s San Francisco headquarters, overseen by Kiri Hart, a development executive and former screenwriter she has long worked with. The story group, which numbers 11 people, maintains the narrative continuity and integrity of all the Star Wars properties that exist across various platforms: animation, video games, novels, comic books, and, most important, movies. “The whole team reads each draft of the screenplay as it evolves,” Hart explained to me, “and we try, as much as we can, to smooth out anything that isn’t connecting.”

  What the story group does not do, Hart said, is impose plot-point mandates on the filmmakers. Johnson told me he was surprised at how much leeway he was given to cook up the action of Episode VIII from scratch. “The pre-set was Episode VII, and that was kind of it,” he said. If anything, Johnson wanted more give-and-take with the Lucasfilm team, so he moved up to San Francisco for about six weeks during his writing process, taking an office two doors down from Hart’s and meeting with the full group twice a week.

  Among Johnson’s inventions for The Last Jedi are three significant new figures: a “shady character” of unclear allegiances, played by Benicio Del Toro, who goes unnamed in the film but is called DJ by the filmmakers (“You’ll see—there’s a reason why we call him DJ,” Johnson said); a prominent officer in the Resistance named Vice Admiral Holdo, played by Laura Dern; and a maintenance worker for the Resistance named Rose Tico, who is played by a young actress named Kelly Marie Tran (and who is the sister of Paige, the character I witnessed in the scene with Poe Dameron). Tran’s is the largest new part, and her plotline involves a mission behind enemy lines with Boyega’s Finn, the stormtrooper turned Resistance warrior.

  Rose and Finn’s adventure takes them to, among other places, another Johnson innovation: a glittering casino city called Canto Bight, “a Star Wars Monte Carlo–type environment, a little James Bond–ish, a little To Catch a Thief,” the director said. “It was an interesting challenge, portraying luxury and wealth in this universe.” So much of the Star Wars aesthetic is rooted in sandy desolation and scrapyard blight; it appealed to Johnson to carve out a corner of the galaxy that is the complete opposite. “I was thinking, O.K., let’s go ultra-glamour. Let’s create a playground, basically, for rich assholes,” he said.

  Canto Bight is also where viewers will get their multi-species fix of gnarled aliens and other grotesque creatures, a comic-relief staple of Star Wars movies since Luke Skywalker first met Han Solo amid the cankerous and snouty inhabitants of the Mos Eisley cantina. The Last Jedi is dark enough as it is, so Johnson has made a point of infusing the movie with levity. “I didn’t want this to be a dirge, a heavy-osity movie,” he said. “So one thing I’ve tried really hard to do is keep the humor in there, to maintain the feeling, amid all the heavy operatic moments, that you’re on a fun ride.”

  IV. Sister Carrie

  Daisy Ridley has her own tale to tell of Skellig Michael. Part of the reason she looks so convincingly weary at the conclusion of Episode VII is, she said, “that I had just vomited. I had adrenal exhaustion, and I was very, very sick.”

  The second time up the cliff, she was in good health and pleased to be re-united with Hamill. But the overall making of Episode VIII proved more psychologically fraught. “When I was doing Episode VII, I was kind of being washed along in a torrent of excitement and unexpectedness,” she said. “When we came around to do the next one, it was a bit more scary, because I knew the expectations, and I understood more what Star Wars means to people. It felt like more of a responsibility.”

  The conflation of real-life and character narratives is not lost on Hamill.

  Fortunately for Ridley, she had become acquainted with a woman who knew a thing or two about such issues. There was no human being on earth better equipped to shepherd Ridley through what she was experiencing, as both the star of a movie franchise and a feminist model to young girls, than Carrie Fisher. “Carrie lived her life the way she wanted to, never apologizing for anything, which is something I’m still learning,” Ridley said. “ ‘Embarrassed’ is the wrong word, but there were times through it all when I felt like I was … shrinking. And she told me never to shrink away from it—that it should be enjoyed.”

  This is a common refrain among the new generation of Star Wars actors: that Fisher was the one who taught them how to deal. Boyega recalled that when there was a backlash against his appearance in the first Force Awakens teaser trailer, released in November 2014—the sight of a black man in stormtrooper armor drew ire from racists and doctrinaire Star Wars traditionalists—Fisher counseled him not to take it to heart. “I remember—and forgive me, I’m going to drop the f-bomb, but that’s just Carrie—she said, ‘Ah, boohoo, who fuckin’ cares? You just do you,’ ” he said. “Words like that give you strength. I bore witness in a million ways to her sharing her wisdom with Daisy too.”

  Fisher had a bigger role to play in The Last Jedi—General Leia Organa logs significantly more screen time in Episode VIII than she did in VII. Isaac, who filmed several scenes with Fisher, said that, like Hamill, she delivered a rich performance, giving her all as an actor, rather than treating Leia’s part as an exercise in feel-good sentimentalism. “We did this scene where Carrie has to slap me,” he said. “I think we did 27 takes in all, and Carrie leaned into it every time, man. She loved hitting me. Rian found such a wonderful way of working with her, and I think she really relished it.”

  For his part, Johnson quickly formed a deep bond with Fisher as a fellow writer, spending long hours with her at the eccentric compound she shared with her mother, Debbie Reynolds, in the Coldwater Canyon section of Beverly Hills. “After I had a draft, I would sit down with her when I was working on re-writing,” he said. “Sitting with her on her bed, in her insane bedroom with all this crazy modern art around us, TCM on the TV, a constant stream of Coca-Cola, and Gary the dog slobbering at her feet.” (For visuals on this characteristic state of affairs chez Fisher, I highly recommend Alexis Bloom and Fisher Stevens’s HBO documentary, Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds.)

  Fisher completed her part in Episode VIII late last summer, when principal photography on the film wrapped. “She was having a blast,” said Kennedy. “The minute she finished, she grabbed me and said, ‘I’d better be at the forefront of IX!’ Because Harrison was front and center on VII, and Mark is front and center on VIII. She thought IX would be her movie. And it would have been.”

  When I was conducting the interviews for this story, the Star Wars family was still mourning Fisher’s unexpected death, which occurred on December 27, 2016, four days after she suffered a heart attack on a flight home to Los Angeles from London, and just a day before Reynolds suffered a fatal stroke. (The Star Wars “family” includes family in the literal sense: Fisher’s daughter, the actress Billie Lourd, appears as a Resistance lieutenant in both The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi.) Fisher had celebrated her 60th birthday just two months earlier.

  “Out of everyone, Carrie was the one I really became friends with and expected to have in my life for years and years,” said Johnson. “I last saw her in November, at the birthday party that she threw at her house. In a way, it was the perfect final, encapsulating image of Carrie—receiving all her friends in the bedroom, with Debbie holding court in the living room.”

  Fisher’s death doesn’t change anything about The Last Jedi except make it more poignant: the film farewell of both the actress and the character. But it does change Episode IX, for which, as Fisher hoped, a central role for Leia had been planned. Kennedy, Trevorrow, and the Lucasfilm team have been compelled to swing from grieving into pragmatic mode, working out how to reconceive the next film in the saga, which is scheduled to start shooting in January.

  One option that is not on the table is to reanimate Fisher’s Leia via C.G.I., as was briefly done in Rogue One, last year’s stand-alone, non-trilogy Star Wars film, created when she was alive. More extensively in that film, Grand Moff Tarkin, a character played by the late Peter Cushing in the first Star Wars movie, was brought back to life using C.G.I. jiggery-pokery and motion-capture technology that involved the use of an actor who physically resembles Cushing. Plus, Lucasfilm had the Cushing family’s consent. However, said Kennedy, “we don’t have any intention of beginning a trend of re-creating actors who are gone.”

  V. A Disturbance in the Force

  Mark Hamill, for all of his agreeable loquaciousness, winced when I brought up Fisher’s death.

  “I can’t say that phrase, what you just said: Carrie’s name and then the d-word,” he said. “Because I think of her in the present tense. Maybe it’s a form of denial, but she’s so vibrant in my mind, and so vital a part of the family, that I can’t imagine it without her. It’s just so untimely, and I’m so angry.”

  Their 40-year relationship truly was sibling-like, Hamill said, rife with affection and squabbles, though their earliest time together mirrored, to some degree, Luke and Leia’s uncertain early dynamic in the movies. In The Empire Strikes Back, the film before the film in which they learn that they are twins, Leia plants a big smackeroo squarely on Luke’s lips—not far off, Hamill said, from their reality as young co-stars. Working on the first Star Wars movie, “we were really attracted to each other. We got to the point where we were having our make-out sessions—and then we pulled back,” Hamill said. “A great way to cool any amorous feelings is laughter, and Carrie had this sort of Auntie Mame desire to find humor in everything. We also realized that, if we did this, everything would fundamentally change. It’s the When Harry Met Sally plot—can we still be friends after intimacy? Wisely, we avoided that.” (Hamill has been married to his wife, Marilou, since 1978.)

  Ridley says, “Carrie lived her life the way she wanted to, never apologizing.”

  Working together on the new trilogy gave Hamill and Fisher a chance to rekindle their benignly rancorous brother-sister dynamic. Both were staying in London, commuting distance from Pinewood Studios, where most of the non-location scenes of Star Wars movies are filmed. They held a competition to see who could get to a million Twitter followers first. (Hamill won; “I told Carrie, ‘Part of your problem is you write in these impenetrable emojis.’ Her tweets looked like rebus puzzles.”)

  And, being the ages they were, they discussed mortality. “We got to talking about one of our favorite scenes in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which is when Tom and Huck go to their own funeral, and they’re up in the balcony, hearing their own eulogies,” Hamill said. “So then I said, ‘Look, if I go first, just promise me you’ll heckle my funeral.’ And she went, ‘Absolutely, if you’ll do the same for me.’ ”

  The constant conflation of the Star Wars cast’s real-life and character narratives is not lost on Hamill, who inadvertently caused a kerfuffle last year during an appearance at the Oxford Union Society, when he described Daisy Ridley as “roughly my daughter’s age, and that’s how I relate to her.” As he knows from experience, sometimes the conflation is quite valid. Losing Fisher really has been like losing a sister.

  Which speaks to the emotional resonance that has powered the saga from the start. “When you look at the stories themselves, they’re about personal tragedies and losses and triumphs,” Hamill said. “It’s all part and parcel of the same thing.”

  Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the Definitive Preview was originally published on Glorious Gwendoline

[starwarsbookshelf]

Han Solo’s Life After Meeting the SkyTwins

Han: Alright, Imma go pay off the crime boss that I owe money to because I like not having to look over my shoulder worried that I’ll get shot in the back.

Luke: I’m going to go on a suicide mission because its the Right Thing to Do.

Han:…

Han:…Kriff, can’t let the kid get blasted to pieces. C’mon Chewie, lets go take on Darth Vader for him.

***

A Couple Years Later

Han: Hey, remember that crime boss I owe money to? Since y’all seem to be pretty settled here, I’m gonna go deal with that situation considering we had a recent encounter where a bounty hunter he sent after me nearly got us all killed.

Leia: You self-centered- scruffy-(please don’t go!)

Random Rebel: Sir, Commander Skywalker, the original Desert ChildTM is missing in the sub-arctic wasteland outside. He will surely die and we can’t send anyone else out because they also will surely die.

Han: Chewie! Hold my stuff. I’m gonna go find him!

***

A Couple Days Later

Han: Finally! I can go pay my debts and be a free man!

Random Rebel 2: Captain Solo, sir! The Princess needs someone to evacuate her! She is the last person left and the Imperials are literally right around the corner!

Han: Leia! Get on the kriffing ship and let’s go!

***

About a month later? Two months?

Han: Look, Princess, I’ll get you back to the Rebellion and then I’m outta here.

Darth Vader: Hello, Children.

Han: I shall shoot at the insanely powerful Sith dude. Because Leia still has nightmares about the time he interrogated her and if I can distract him than maybe he’ll leave her alone!

***

And this is just a sampling from one movie! (mostly)

Look, I’m not saying that there is a Rebel meme about Han being the SkyTwins’ bodyguard but that is totally what I’m saying.

Like I said too, this is just one movie (plus 30 seconds of another), leaving aside all the other movies and the comics and EU materials and literally every single one of the countless times Han has dropped everything to keep these kids safe.

And there are still people who think Han is a self-centered scoundrel who wouldn’t know loyalty and commitment if it danced naked in front of him. *throws significant look at Disney*

[brandonewing1985-blog]

Sunday Night ShowDown! - Episode 02 - Sting vs Big Van Vader

Welcome to the second edition of “Sunday Night Showdown!”. This will be a weekly series that will highlight a selected match from any wrestling federation, past or present, to review and dissect for you great wrestling fans across the globe. These episodes will be uploaded every Sunday night on Tumblr, then shared via my personal Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages.

This week’s edition of Sunday Night ShowDown features one of the most historic rivalries in all of World Championship Wrestling (WCW). “The Franchise” of WCW, the man who has gone by many nicknames, looks, and personas over the years. The Man Called “Sting” in the early 1990’s went head-to-head with a 450 pound “Mastodon” from the cold Rocky Mountains: “Big Van Vader”. Today, we will highlight one of their greatest match-ups of all-time. The event was Starrcade 1992: Featuring Battle Bowl. Sting and Big Van Vader were participating in a special “King of Cable” tournament over the past several weeks on WCW Saturday Night. As fate would have it, both men would reach the finals and compete against each to determine who would walk away victorious with the “King of Cable” trophy.

BACKGROUND

Sting and Big Van Vader began their rivalry in April 1992. Sting and “Ravishing” Rick Rude were cooling down, as their rivalry between Sting, Rude and The Dangerous Alliance was coming to a close. During a WCW World Heavyweight Championship Match, Sting would defend against Big Van Vader. Sting won the battle, but lost the war. During the course of the match, Vader would deliver a Big Splash, cracking and breaking the ribs of Sting, in addition to a ruptured spleen injury. This one move would cause the “Stinger” to be out of action for the next couple of months.

Sting recovered in time for their rematch which was set for July 12 1992 at “The Great American Bash” for the WCW World Heavyweight Championship. Sting gave it his all, but Vader came ready and prepared to take down the champion. Big Van Vader would defeat Sting with the Power Bomb to become the new WCW World Heavyweight Champion.

During this time, Vader would continue his on/off reign as WCW World Champion, while Sting would move on to feud with Cactus Jack and Jake “The Snake” Roberts over the next few months. When the “King of Cable” Tournament was announced by WCW, it was highly likely that Sting and Big Van Vader would cross paths one more time. Sting would defeat Flyin’ Brian Pillman and “Ravishing” Rick Rude to reach the finals, while Big Van Vader defeated Tony Atlas and “The Natural” Dustin Rhodes.

The table was set now for Starrcade 1992, as both men were ready to do battle in one of the most breathtaking, hard-hitting battles in WCW history.

CLICK HERE - Sting vs Big Van Vader (Starrcade 1992)

We have Jim Ross and Jesse “The Body” Ventura providing commentary. Starrcade 1992 took place at the historic “Omni” in Atlanta, Georgia.  We kick off this classic encounter with the “Stinger” delivering a series of right hands to Big Van Vader, as the big man no sells the punches and screams: “No Pain!”. Vader takes control of the match and scoop slams Sting hard to the mat, not once but twice. Vader goes on the offensive and drops Sting across the top rope with not one but two Military Press Drops, throat first. Vader shows off his raw power as Sting exits the ring to recuperate and regroup.

Sting enters the ring and then gets irish whipped off the ropes. Sting counters and hits a Rolling Spin Kick, almost in a somersault like variation, on Vader to stun the big man. Sting then hits Big Van Vader with a huge Release German Suplex, followed up by a big clothesline to send Vader out to the arena floor. He hit Vader so hard that it ripped the head gear off Vader’s face!

With Vader outside the ring, Sting dives over the top rope and connects with a Cross Body Block. Sting pounds his chest and howls to the crowd, as he and Vader shortly thereafter reenter the ring. Vader regains the advantage and hits a series of rights and lefts to the head and body of Sting, knocking the face paint off Sting’s face. Sting attempts to get the upper hand, as he dodges a Corner Splash from Vader, then goes for a Stinger Splash but misses, as Vader hits Sting with a Big Boot to the face.

Sting would battle back and hit a huge DDT on Vader. He then physically picks Vader up and sets him up on the top turnbuckle, climbs the ropes and attempts a Superplex but instead hits a Top Rope DDT variation, then goes for the cover for a near fall.

Sting applies the Scorpion Deathlock but Vader is able to power out of the submission hold. Both men exit the ring. Sting misses another Stinger Splash, this time he hits the steel railing very hard. Vader and Sting eventually make their way back inside the ring, as Vader hits a Short-Arm Clothesline. From here, Vader connects with a Big Body Splash in the corner, then a hard clothesline to Sting, goes for the cover and gets a two count.

Vader continues to pummel away at Sting with a series of right hands, then a Belly-to-Back Suplex. Vader then hits a Big Splash off the ropes for only a two count. Vader wears down Sting even further as he applies a Reverse Chinlock. After several minutes have gone by, Sting and Vader emerge to their feet from the rest hold. Vader goes in for a clothesline, but Sting counters into a backslide pin attempt for a two count.

Sting bounces off the ropes and hits a Sunset Flip Pin, but he cannot bring Vader down. Vader attempts a Seated Splash but Sting rolls out of the way to prevent from being squashed. Vader goes in for a side headlock, but Sting reverses this into a Belly-to-Back Suplex. Big Van Vader goes in for a series of rights and lefts to the head of Sting. Sting covers up and tells Vader to keep the punches coming, as he wants to wear Vader down to the point in which Vader basically punches himself out and becomes winded (see Ali vs Forearm, “Rope-A-Dope”).

Vader picks up Sting to the top rope for a Superplex attempt, but Sting counters and punches Vader sending him off the top rope to the mat. Sting falls to the mat as well from pure exhaustion. Both men slowly get back up to their feet, as Vader goes in for another series of punches to the Stinger. Sting continues to beg Vader to come after him with everything he’s got. As Vader starts to wear down, his punches get weaker and weaker. Sting takes advantage and catches Vader with a couple of Discus Punches, knocking the 450 pound monster to the mat.

Sting hits a Samoan Drop on Vader, then follows up with a Diving Body Splash off the top rope for a near fall. Vader’s manager, the legendary Harley Race, gets involved and distracts Sting. Vader takes advantage of the distraction and attacks Sting from behind. Vader capitalizes and connects with a Chokeslam, then a Diving Body Splash from the top turnbuckle.

Big Van Vader goes in one more time for the Diving Body Splash. As Vader attempts the splash, Sting rises to his feet and catches Vader coming off the ropes and powerslams him down to the mat, covering Vader for the pin fall and the victory!

What did you think of the match? Let me know in the comments below or submit your thoughts on my Twitter or Facebook page at the links below. Thank you for reading and for watching the match. I will see you all next week for “Sunday Night ShowDown!”. Also, don’t forget to like and follow my pages for access to my latest writings and ongoing updates!

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