#also this is ambiguously about various people who I am deeply deeply fond of and wish I could do more for

[swinging-stars-from-satellites]

in which I swear, which is both unusual and emphatic

dog spelled backwards is God and maybe somewhere along the line that means something

and I keep thinking if not saying "I would do anything for you"

so say screw you to insincerity the world is made out of details

there's no world in which I don't love you and no place I'm without you

and if I'm talking to a dog then fuck it quite honestly I'm going to love as much as I want to

no fear in life no shame in loving

glitter on the dance floor spinning around in the time that we have and the place that we are

nothing here but the good even when the lights go down

~ L. T.

[corpsebrigadier]

For the character meme: Fave FFVII character, whoever that is?

Right. So. My favorite FFVII character is Hojo. I'm one of those people who moved from being way too into Vincent Valentine to being way too into Hojo doing terrible things to Vincent Valentine to just being into Hojo because he's cooler anyway. I will note, however, that I have not played through any game connected to FFVII that isn't the original PSX version of it with all its ambiguities and translation quirks. I watched Advent Children while very drunk once, and at one point, I had a significant other who played through a lot of Dirge of Cerberus while I was trying to sleep and/or ignore them. What I have absorbed about the Compilation as regards Hojo is patchy and unreliable, and I freely ignore it anyway in favor of my fond memories of late 90s Internet theories as to what was going on in Vincent's flashbacks. Everything I write here is going to be from that frame of reference.

So yeah, also just cutting this for (relatively non-explicit) Hojo-typical content:

OTP for them: I still very much approve of Hojo doing terrible things to Vincent, even all these years later. I've also approve of him actually having an affectionate dimension to his inescapably messed up relationship with Lucrecia. I further approve of almost any conceivable entanglement involving the three of them, so long as its deeply toxic and results in something heartbreaking and/or horrific. So... sort of a Hojo/Vincent/Lucrecia OT3? Kind of? I just want all three of them to be very unhappy together!

BROTP for them: I like the idea of a Hojo being very cordial and chummy with Gast in a relatively sincere way until the chips are down and he feels it's time for murder and baby thievery.

Other ships: I think that beyond the Hojo/Vincent/Lucrecia constellation of misery, people either want to ship Hojo with experimental subjects who don't deserve Hojo happening to them, or they want to ship him with his various sketchy ShinRa co-workers. Despite my enthusiasm for mad science and horror, I honestly like the latter more. ShinRa is filled with so many awful people who are awful in such markedly different ways, and I love ships where different sorts of awfuls blend with one another. An ideal combo of "person who doesn't deserve Hojo happening to them" and "sketchy ShinRa co-worker" is probably Reeve, come to think of it, although I've never really seen any fic for this completely horrible idea for a roboticist/biologist combo. Also, there's always Hojo/JENOVA, if you're into that (I am).

What kind of fic I’d write about them: God. I feel like the Compilation makes canon review too arduous a task for me to write anything that's actually a thoughtful character study at this point. (He apparently downloaded himself onto the Internet in DoC? What?) I suppose I would just write something terrible involving medical horror and/or tentacles.

A favorite canon moment: I have a sneaking suspicion that it might not be presented as a moment of genuine panic and vulnerability in later installments, but I like it in the flashbacks where he is clearly clutching his head, not knowing what to do before he decided to shoot Vincent. I also really enjoy his final act of warped paternal devotion at the tower.

Color that reminds me of them: JENOVA green.

Song that reminds me of them: I have... a lot of mad scientist song mixes. For reasons. (Actually just because mad science narratives are my favorite part of studying Victorian lit.) As such, I have a lot of songs that could possibly be Hojoesque. Possibly "Birth" by The Faint?

A random AU I think up on the spot for them: Gast + Ifalna + Aeris stay on with ShinRa; Hojo + Lucrecia + Sephiroth end up on the run. It would be neat in particular if general personalities were retained, such that Gast is a well-intentioned guy who has convinced himself that allowing his family to be experimental subjects is somehow a noble undertaking, and Hojo is still awful, but now awful after having gone rogue early.

A headcanon about them: I definitely decided at some point that he's a chain smoker, although this was possibly so he could put a cigarette out on Vincent in a melodramatic instance of sadism while working him over.

Anything else: Hojo was probably a starting point for my love of mad science, sad science, and bad science. So... in a way, very indirectly, you might consider him a formative step in launching my academic career. A lot of my early work was about nineteenth-century genre fiction and neuroscience.

[unexpectedreylo]

Closing Arguments For Reylo

After it seems like we’ve spent a year anticipating this movie--from the film wrap in February to the teaser trailer in April to the Vanity Fair stuff in June to the D23 trailer at the end of August to the Road To TROS stuff to this final trailer and the onslaught of press for the film--we’re finally in the home stretch.  

Who will live?  Who will die?  Will Reylo ride off into the sunset, a HEA at last for a Star Wars couple, will it end in tragedy or worse yet, will it end in a vague incoherent muddle?  After all, no fairy tale ends with “they lived ambiguously ever after.”

I think we’re all going to be nervous sitting in the theater come Dec. 18-20 because whether we believe “leaks” or not, we’re just not going to know for sure until we see the film.  I’m almost as nervous about their misusing/under-using Adam in this film as I am about the filmmakers blowing Reylo.

Yet of all of the sequel films, I’m the most confident about this one going in.  This is the last film in this story and it���s not going to end with the message that the Skywalker family was somehow a mistake or some curse upon the galaxy that needed to be eliminated, while the few positive aspects about the Skywalkers are handed off to Rey because she’s such a nice girl.  It’s not going to end like Romeo and Juliet.  It’s not going to end without redemption for Kylo Ren/Ben Solo.  The final chapter in the series is not only going to redeem him but everyone else who screwed up before him.  It’s going to end this conflict and a Jedi Order 2.0 is going to arise.  There will be a big party at the end.  It will give you cavities and possibly blood sugar spikes.  

As far as I’m concerned, Rey and Ben being together--in LOVE--is an integral part of that happy ending.  Cinderella gets her prince.  Beauty finds true love with the man who had been the Beast.  Anastasia marries Christian Grey and has a baby.  There’s just no such thing as a heroine who cheerfully ends up without her lover and in spite of what a lot of people think, Star Wars spends far more time utilizing traditional storytelling tropes (though in new ways) than subverting them.  Like I wrote in my piece about gothic romances, the woman gets the man, the manor, and the money.  Rey walks into TROS already with the metaphorical substitutes for the manor (the Falcon) and the money (the objects associated with the Skywalker family).  She’s already in with her potential mother-in-law.  All she needs is for Ben to show up to the metaphorical/literal wedding.

And everything is pointing toward that happening.  I’m not saying TROS will end with Ben and Rey in a wedding or Rey waddling about preggers.  Maybe it will end that way, maybe it won’t.  But it will at minimum pair them together a la Han and Leia at the end of ROTJ.  

First, let’s take on the only legitimate, in-universe obstacles to Rey and Ben being in a romantic relationship.  No, I don’t mean that they could be related.  What I do mean is that there are two things that would prohibit romance:  one is obvious...no Bendemption.  But I’m certain it is going to happen.  The other is the old school Jedi prohibition against forming attachments, including romantic relationships.  Many fans expect this deeply unpopular rule to be cast aside.  But in the name of fairness, it bears pointing out that so far, this deeply unpopular rule hasn’t been cast aside in the movies.  Sure there was a bit in the TLJ novel implying Luke wasn’t fond of this deeply unpopular rule but on the other hand, he lived it.  Generalissima Leia did lots of other things but never became a Jedi herself.  Maybe she was too busy.  Or maybe she’d rather bonk Han to her heart’s content than become a space nun.  There’s been some recent news that Leia was originally set to finally take up the Jedi mantle in the last ST film, something that obviously changed after Carrie’s passing in 2016.  Note that this would have been after Leia had become a widow.  Several months ago I’d listened to a podcast containing an interview with former Lucasfilm employee J.W. Rinzler.  He revealed that while the expanded universe was allowed to go nuts with Jedi romances and marriages, Lucas kept grumbling that “Jedi aren’t supposed to marry!”  He disliked Mara Jade partially for this reason.

Of every argument against Reylo happening that is the one that no one seems to take seriously yet it’s far more likely to be an issue than a sudden revelation of Rey Skywalker-Solo.  The question is were Chris Terrio and J.J. Abrams willing to say, “Hey George, your rule sucks so we’re gonna throw it out” to Lucas’s eternal annoyance?  Or, is the coupling of Rey and Ben supposed to have happened all along, even in Lucas’s drafts?  Are Rey and Ben a glaring exception to the rule?

My argument is that they are going to be an exception.  Reylo is not just about hot people hooking up, it’s about mystical forces coming together in a union that will bring the peace and stability that has evaded the galaxy since the Clone Wars.  In other words, it’s a divine marriage.  Ben and Rey are not ordinary Force users.  They are extraordinary among the extraordinary.  We already know Ben’s tremendous raw power comes from being literally the great-grandson of the Force itself.  Rey I’m sure is something very similar, a demigoddess of sorts.  Ben and Rey will demonstrate one can love deeply without it corrupting into selfishness, possessiveness, obsession, and everything else that led Anakin into believing killing his comrades to save Padmé was a really good idea.

Okay, let’s look at some hard evidence.

What’s the one word that keeps coming up over and over again with Rey and Kylo/Ben?

Intimacy.

Or some variation thereof:

“At the premiere I heard somebody in the balcony say, “Yesssss!” You can see Adam was training hardcore throughout the whole process. It’s fun but it also has a specific purpose, which is the increasing feeling of uncomfortable intimacy. That was sticking with the theme of trying to give Rey the hardest thing you could possibly give her, which would be unavoidable intimate conversation with this person that she wants to just hate. This was just one more way of upping that ante.”--Rian Johnson, Los Angeles Times, December 18, 2017

“It’s all about those Force connection scenes. The keyword being intimacy. And the idea that this was a way to just, why not step that up?(...)And so it was just another way of kind of disrobing Kylo literally and figuratively a little bit more, and pushing that sense of these conversations becoming increasingly more intimate.”--Rian Johnson, People magazine Dec. 23, 2017

“They just had this horrific fight, but Rian wanted this incredible intimacy and this cascading, twinkling waterfall of sparks from the fight before.”--Ben Morris, ILM Visual Effects Supervisor, Collider Dec. 25, 2017

“Even to the point where Adam flew to Ireland just to be off camera for Daisy’s stuff, which was essential because they’re such intimate conversations.”--Rian Johnson, People magazine Jan. 6, 2018

“That came about first and foremost from wanting a sense of intimacy”--Rian Johnson, Force of Sound Documentary Feb. 20, 2018

“And have it, you’re in their heads with just that intimacy.”--Matthew Wood, Supervising Sound Editor, Skywalker Sound Feb. 20, 2018

“Having a big sound there just didn’t have the intimacy that the scene demanded. It can be so hard to get the balance right to where the audience is feeling the same thing as the characters.”--Michael Semanic, Re-recording mixer Skywalker Sound, Postperspective Feb. 21, 2018

“But we fall back on romance because it's the best analogue we have. Rey and Kylo's relationship is more intimate than that. They've literally been in each other's minds. Rey's seen his deepest fears; he's seen the past she's buried. None of us have had that experience.”

“My point is romance may not be the endpoint of that. (Though it may be.) The analogue may be misleading, because it's an analogue. Their connection is deeper and stranger and far more complicated. I think TFA/TLJ covers those complications wonderfully, with Ep IX promising more.”--Jason Fry on Twitter Nov. 26, 2018

“At times it’s more intimate, sometimes less intimate.”--Adam Driver, Entertainment Weekly, December 2019

Relationships that are intimate aren’t necessarily romantic or sexual in nature but in modern parlance, it’s often used as a euphemism for a romantic or sexual relationship, or for sex itself i.e. “Tyler and Kaitlyn weren’t intimate until they got married.”  Because of that, it would be hella weird if they described a familial or friendly relationship in this way.  If I didn’t want my audience to believe there’s anything that could possibly be sexual happening between my characters--especially between an eligible attractive man and an eligible attractive woman--I would avoid using the term “intimate.”

If that doesn’t sell it for you, consider these statements:

“It’s the closest thing we’ll ever get to a sex scene in Star Wars”--Rian Johnson re the hand touch in TLJ.  (Who the hell says that about cousins?  Or just friends?)

“it is certainly true there is a romantic drama...”--Rian Johnson, some Japanese interview from 2017.   (By the way this was misquoted into stating there was no romance in TLJ at all.)

“I (Rian) disagreed with John (Williams) twice regarding the score. For example, there's a scene where Kylo Ren and Rey touch hands, before they are interrupted by Luke Skywalker. When John wrote the score (for this scene), he was very protective of Rey's character, exactly as is Luke. Kylo ('s presence) was menacing, musically speaking. It's a valid point of view, but I didn't think of the scene like that. I wanted it to stay on Rey's POV: I wanted that we could believe in this romance.”--Rian Johnson, Classica magazine April 25, 2019 (Note: this is an interview from English to French then translated here and here back to English but the word “romance” is the same in both languages.)

The above statements and various others we’ve all seen over the years are helpful to explain what we’ve seen in the past two films:  they’re building toward something.

On one level, the filmmakers are building toward another alliance between our space children, like what they had in TLJ.  It’s obvious that they will need to team up to defeat Palpatine because who else could?  It’s also obvious that they are key to the Force being in balance.  There has been interesting speculation on Twitter about how those forces will come together and the symbolism of a marriage by uniting mystical objects.

But being Force buddies in a tag team match against Palpatine isn’t quite high enough stakes.  Nor is “might makes right” the message of Star Wars.  These two have to be willing to fight for each other, to the death if necessary.  They have to have something to live for as well.  They have to have the secret sauce that Darth Sidious doesn’t have.  And what I’m talking about is love.  Not just the compassionate love of agape (that’s what Anakin was talking about in AOTC but he meant it differently of course) or the friendship love of philia but also the powerful, creative love of eros.  It’s basically what was happening in the throne room scene in TLJ.  They were fighting for each other and the future they saw when they touched hands.  Come on, nobody is going to do any of that just to find an apprentice or to convince someone to join an insurrection you barely spent any time with yourself.

A divine marriage between the two most powerful Force users will end the war and herald in a new age.   Either they are a new incarnation of the Prime Jedi or they will become the mother and father to this incarnation.

Plus they will kiss and get in a lot of nookie.  The end.

Credits:  r/starwarsspeculation, @reylo-evidence-collection, r/starwarscantina, @reylo5 (Instagram),

[laylainalaska]

The Mandalorian

I also posted this on Dreamwidth; crossposting here.

I'm finding that this is one of those shows that I like more and more as it settles more deeply into my head. It may not have ended up being something I want to write a lot of fanfic about, but I truly enjoyed this show and I enjoy having it as part of my mental landscape. Fic rec: Pressure Valve by seascribe. 4300 words, mature-rated, Mando/Cara fuckbuddies/friendship fic with sex and feels. This fic is a delicious combination of blowing-off-steam sex and gradual emotional intimacy and conflicting social norms; it is nothing like a typical romance arc and is very them. A not-at-all comprehensive and fairly spoilery list of things I liked about this show under the readmore:

CARA CARA CARAAAAA. ♥ See also my Cara Dune love letter here.

The grimy, make-do, decades-post-revolution atmosphere of the show. I love that the post-revolution Republic is kind of a mess. I love that Werner Herzog's speech about wanting to resurrect the Empire because at least they made the trains run on time to bring back order is actually valid -- and also wrong, and I think the show makes it clear that he's wrong, but I also felt like it was an accurate portrayal of why someone might continue to think that way, rather than just having the neo-Imperial faction as cartoon baddies; of course it sounds good if you never experienced the bad side of it, and now you're living in this violent shithole world where the over-stretched new Republic can't really get much done.

And I also loved that we got a sympathetic character who fought on the Imperial side, and found out his reasons for doing that, and got to see his interactions with someone (Cara) who fought and bled on the Rebel side. And then there are most of the other main cast, who just don't really have a stake in it one way or the other.

In general, I really loved how lived-in this world felt. I loved the dirty armor on the Stormtroopers, the fact that we saw villages and farms and mended, make-do tech. I was talking elsewhere about how this felt like the first movie in the franchise, in the best way - the fact that it's not as slick and shiny as we've come to expect from Star Wars. It's a little bit rambling, a little bit messy. We saw kids and families and livestock as well as mercs and bounty hunters, and neat little bits of repurposed tech like the fishing robot in the fish-drug village. This version of the Star Wars universe wasn't as polished as the movie 'verse, but I loved it for that, because it felt like a place where people live.

I love that none of these people are supermodel pretty and most of them are over 40. They look like the washed-up remnants of a revolution who are still kicking around in the messy post-revolution world. And when we finally find out what Mando looks like under the helmet, he's not a squinty-eyed Clint Eastwood but just an ordinary guy. They're all just ordinary people, and not even ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events, but just people doing their best in a bunch of bad situations. They're the extras in some other, more Hollywood-esque movie, given their own story.

I love that this is a 'verse where people bleed and die, and the heroes do things like stab people in the face, because that's the kind of universe they live in and the kind of people they are. (I do have Feelings and Thoughts about the relative weight given to various deaths - the disposability of the Stormtroopers, for example. But that's a side tangent. In general, I like that this is an Everyone Can Die universe; the victories are sweeter for it.)

BABY YODA. I really appreciate that, even though he's not really like a normal baby in that he almost never cries or needs to be changed or fed, the question of Where Is The Baby and Who Is Taking Care of the Baby was central to the show, and was usually attended to. I also really appreciated the background element of people who were very much not baby people being competent and not sitcom-inadequate at taking care of a baby if it was thrust into their arms and left there.

I appreciate this show making me feel so many things about a guy who is 99.9% represented by a goddamn helmet. I also like the slow burn on Mando as a character (I was talking to sheron about this, actually) - episode 4 is the one that tipped me over into love for both the show and the hero, and part of that is because, for me at least, that's the point when you really catch onto how lonely and isolated he is, and how he's slowly, very slowly, rebuilding connections to other people after the absolute hell he's been through. The PTSD flashbacks were nicely done too, I think.

Side note of A+ for ethnically accurate casting with his parents and young!Mando.

I also really enjoyed the general theme of antagonists or at least ambiguous allies becoming actual allies. Carl Weathers' character got a very nice arc. (I also have fond memories of that actor from a different show back in the 90s.)

I am there for season two and I hope it doesn't break my heart. ♥