#and that there was the vague suggestion he might still have been working for Darth Vader | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

padawanlost · 4 years

Note

Hi, I really enjoy your blog and your insights into the prequels. If you have time, could you explain a bit more about how the clone army was commissioned. I've watched the prequel movies and Clone Wars several times, but I'm still a little confused. The Kaminoans say Sifo-Dyas commissioned the clone army. Jango says he was hired by Tyranus (Dooku) and has never heard of Sifo-Dyas. And Obi-Wan thinks Sifo-Dyas was already dead when the army was commissioned. So what is the deal with Sifo-Dyas?

Sure, I tried to make a timeline. Maybe it’ll help see things a little more clearly :)

Before 52 BBY: Jedi Master Sifo-Dyas becomes close friends with Jedi Master Dooku.

52 BBY: Sifo-Dyas, along with Dooku and his apprentice Qui-Gon Jinn, attend a meeting where they meet Magister Hego Damask (Darth Plagueis). He and Hego discuss their worries about the future of the Republic. At some point during their talks, Plagueis suggest the need for a military force to keep the peace but Sifo-Dyas rejects the idea.

“Lest you’re thinking of investing in military enterprises, Magister, I can assure you that the Republic will not reverse its stance on demilitarization.” His words were forceful, but lacked certainty. “The Ruusan Reformations will not be repealed.” Plagueis showed the palms of his hands. “And I can assure you, Master Jedi, that my questions were in no means motivated by thoughts of profit. We—that is, I—don’t wish to see the Republic caught off guard. For now I’ll place my faith in the Jedi, and in the belief that an army could be raised if necessary.” Sifo-Dyas’s gaze faltered. “Out of thin air? Unlikely, Magister.” “Grown, then.” “Manufactured, you mean.” “No, I was being literal,” Plagueis said. “But I know of only one group that might be up to the task. The group who grew laborers to work the mines of Subterrel.” [James Luceno. Darth Plagueis]

52 BBY to 32 BBY: Over the next 20 years as Dooku’s concerns for the Orde rand the Republic grew, so did Sifo-Dyas own worries. Like Dooku, he also tried to warn the Council about the approaching darkness but they didn’t listen to him. At some point he was invited to join the Jedi Council but his seat was removed after he considered too extreme for them.

“Prior to the blockade of Naboo, Sifo-Dyas sat on this Council until we judged his ideas to be too extreme. Indeed, he said he foresaw a great conflict and that the Republic would need to raise an army. At the time, the Council rejected those ideas.’ – TCW 06x10

During this period, Sifo-Dyas and Dooku meet Senato Sheev Palpatine from Naboo. After this, Dooku and Palpatine become friends, having many conversations about politics and the Jedi.

“By right of birth. My family is agreeable. Now it’s simply a matter of informing the High Council.” “Has anyone ever left the Order?” “Nineteen before me.” “Have you shared your discontent with any of them?” “Only Master Sifo-Dyas.” “Of course.” Dooku looked up. “He worries that I’m going to do something rash.” “Leaving the Order isn’t rash enough?” “He fears that I will denounce the Council openly, and reveal how divided its members are about answering to the Senate.” He looked Palpatine in the eye. “I’ve half a mind to join your cause.” [James Luceno. Darth Plagueis]

32 BBY (right before the events of The Phantom Menace): Sifo-Dyas once again meets Magister Hego Damask, but this time he’s interested and willing to listen to what he has to say:

“You said that you have some vague recall of our conversation on Serenno. Do you remember my mentioning a group of gifted cloners?” “I’m sorry, I do not.” “They are native to an extragalactic world called Kamino. I have on occasion done business with them on behalf of clients who desire cloned creatures, or require cloned laborers capable of working in harsh environments.” The Jedi shook his head in uncertainty. “What does this have to do with anything?” “I believe that the Kaminoans could be induced to grow and train a cloned army.” Sifo-Dyas took a long moment to reply. “You said yourself that the Republic would never sanction an army.” “The Republic needn’t know,” Damask said cautiously. “Neither would the Jedi Order have to know. It would be an army that might never have to be used, and yet be available in reserve should need ever arise.” “Who in their right mind would fund an army that might never be used?” “I would,” Damask said. “Along with some of my associates in the Banking Clan—and in conjunction with contacts in Rothana Heavy Engineering, which would supply the ships, armaments, and other matériel.” Sifo-Dyas fixed him with a look. “Come to the point, Magister.” “The Kaminoans will not create an army for me, but they would do so for the Jedi Order. They have been fascinated by the Jedi for millennia.” Sifo-Dyas’s dark brown eyes widened. “You’re not proposing cloning Jedi—” “No. I have been assured that such a thing is impossible, in any case. But I have also been assured that a human army a million strong could be ready for deployment in as few as ten years.” “You’re suggesting that I circumvent the High Council.” “I suppose I am. The Kaminoans need only a modest down payment, which I could provide to you through untraceable accounts I maintain in Outer Rim banks.” Again, the Jedi remained silent for a long moment. “I need time to consider this.” “Of course you do,” Damask said. “And when you’ve reached a decision, you can contact me at my residence downside.” [James Luceno. Darth Plagueis]

32 BBY: Qui-Gon Jinn dies and Master Dooku leaves the Jedi Order 32 BBY: Sifo-Dyas places the order on Kamino;

Obi-Wan turned to face Yoda. “Master, did Sifo-Dyas order the clone army?” Yoda nodded. “Contacted the Kaminoans, he did.” “Without your knowledge?” “Without it, yes. But exists, a record of his initial contact.” [Labyrinth of Evil. James Luceno]

“And Master Sifo-Dyas?” Dooku frowned. “He knew that my leaving was simply a matter of time. Although he did say something I found to be rather curious. He said that if I had any designs on instigating dissent, he would be one step ahead of me.” [James Luceno. Darth Plagueis]

32 BBY: Palpatine kills Plagueis and takes Dooku as his new apprentice. Some time after that, Palpatine tells Dooku about the clone army, so he kills Sifo-Dias. After, he finds Jango Fett – whom he had fountgh in the battle of Galidraan – and convinces to become the template for the clone army.

One of your former confidants at the Jedi Temple has perceived the coming change, Sidious had told him. This one has contacted a group of cloners, regarding the creation of an army for the Republic. The order for the army can stand, for we will be able to make use of that army someday. But Master Sifo-Dyas cannot stand, for the Jedi cannot learn about the army until we are prepared to have them learn of it. And so with the murder of Sifo-Dyas, Dooku had embraced the dark side fully, and Sidious had conferred on him the title Darth Tyranus. His final act before leaving the Jedi Order was to erase all mentions of Kamino from the Jedi archives. Then, as Tyranus, he had found Fett on Bogg 4; had instructed the Mandalorian to deliver himself to Kamino; and had arranged for payments to be made to the cloners through circuitous routes … Ten years passed. Under its new Supreme Chancellor, the Republic recovered somewhat, then grew more corrupt and beset with problems than before. As best they could, Sidious and Tyranus helped things along. Sidious had the ability to see deep into the future, but there was always the unexpected. With the power of the dark side, however, came flexibility. Having traced Fett to Kamino, Obi-Wan Kenobi had turned up on Geonosis. All at once, here was Qui-Gon Jinn’s former Padawan, right under Dooku’s nose. But when he had informed Sidious of Obi-Wan’s presence, Sidious had only said, Allow events to play out, Darth Tyranus. For our plans are unfolding exactly as I have foreseen. The Force is very much with us.

22 BBY: Obi-wan Kenobi discovers Kamino and the Clone Army. The kaminoans have no idea Sifo-Dyas had been dead for 10 years or that he had nothing to do with choosing Jango Fett as the template.

In conclusion, the Sith manipulated a Jedi Master into creating an army for them to destroy the Jedi.

#ask #droidrightsbill #gffa politics #jedi politics #sw meta #worldbuilding #clone troopers #meta: clones #sifo dyas #count dooku #darth plagueis #meta: dooku #meta: plagueis #meta: palpatine #txt #palpatine

214 notes · View notes

rabidbehemoth · 5 years

Text

On Kylo Ren as Incoherently Evil

@neonnothing brought up a succinct point that I had to stop and really think about my response to during our dissection of TROS. and i had a three hour text convo with two other friends the same day about ren (god help me) and it all coalesced into the following meta, which I’m still thinking about:

Regardless if people think he is redeemed or not, I think no ONE absolutely no one can argue against the fact he overcame so much internalized hate to cross over to the good side. That he still deserves love, at any given point, as long as it's consensual. NO ONE CAN TAKE THAT AWAY and almost NO ben hater actually give him this acknowledgement. Everyone's like "OH but he hasn't earned it."

I'm pretty far from a Ben hater, but that's my argument too, and my eternal disappointment. For me, the worst part of his arc wasn't when he died (I did cry a little okay), but when he turned to the light for what I felt was far too little reason. I think by saying he hasn't "earned it", maybe people mean what I do: that he didn't have a chance to struggle in TROS. All the struggling happened in TLJ (with some in TFA, actually), and Abrams just swoops in an profits without building on that whatsoever. Experiencing Leia's death doesn't count for me because it wasn't even his fault. I wanted more than anything to see Ben come to jesus, to lose something so precious he is forced to reconcile with who he's become because he's out of other paths. I think redemption, like any character heel-face-turn, to be satisfying, has to have the weight of inevitability, of reaching the last resort and finding there's no where to go but up.

This is almost entirely what my earlier 3 hour convo was about, and thanks to that I have a new theory as to why it may have been impossible to give Ben a satisfyingly inevitable turn toward good (even in the hands of a competent director!): his motivation is nonsensical. The backstory about his turn to the dark is too vague, leaves too much to the imagination (you and I may have fertile fandom-fed imaginations that can almost see what Ben Solo might have been like as a young man, or earlier in his journey toward the dark, but my friends couldn't and they had dramatically different interpretations of his character because of it). How do we go from "my master/uncle betrayed me", which is a terrible, tragic, traumatizing thing, to "let's light people on fire"? I mean, how exactly? Sketch it out for me. It's not a simple thing. That kind of development takes time, and you have to be willing to sit in that character's head and play with possibilities and see how their life may have lead them in that direction. It's work, hard work. Painful work, if you're doing it right.

I think it's telling, that my friends (quite smart people really) mistook Ben's motivation as wanting power. it doesn't take much to debunk that--he only seizes power from snoke when rey is threatened, but more importantly he's simply much more fixated on killing the past and the light than embracing the dark and being evil or for the sake of it, or for power. The fixation with darth vader's mask seems to speak more of a fixation with the past, particularly his own bloodline, than the kind of admiration that snoke suggests he has. And he gets rid of that icon so freely.

There are so many questions regarding what Ben wants and why he is the way he is (what role do his parents play in this exactly? We're always laden with implications and no answers). This incoherent motivation is further complicated by the incoherent morality of the SW verse, in which you have to pick and choose who's right based on color codes and be willfully blind to contradictions. His status as evil is extremely unstable and kind of unknowable too, which is why I think so many fans have been unsettled by the suggestion that he might toe the line into grey morality, become some kind of grey jedi with rey. Because that would be truly subversive to the SW universe--where is your god, your rules, now? I think the instability and incoherence of his evilness is precisely the defining point: either you read that to mean he's redeemable and an appropriate romantic partner with some adjustments, or you read that to mean he's worse in some way that a normal static villain and especially inappropriate as a romantic partner.

Funny thing, I think the reylos are the ones paying better attention, because his motivation finally becomes coherent when rey is what he wants. That we can understand, it's a development that happened on screen for understandable reasons, and his backstory and motive become far less important in fleshing out the character (REALLY, RIAN JOHNSON MANAGED A LOT WITH TLJ WHILE STARTING FROM VERY LITTLE, I'M JUST REMINDING U).

Kylo's character is mostly a patchwork of guesswork, relying on codes that they then go and poke holes in. All the chars rely on similar codes, but kylo's is just done in such a weird and inexplicable and self-contradicting way that it seems to allow people to read him dramatically differently. So maybe it's no wonder that he's so divisive. It's like publishing a story before you've come up with the ending, and you don't quite know where your character is going--that's all stuff you figure out later as you're writing, then come back and fix the beginning. Except they published chapters as they went and can't go back and make it all make sense.

And without a sensible, coherent foundation to what makes the character the character (from the very beginning, not just the coherency that his connection with rey brings him), it's pretty much impossible to do an effective about-face, isn't it? You have to have those motivations fleshed out in perfect clarity, so you get that ring of truth when the char finally sees the light.

That's what I wanted. Not a simple turn to the light, I wanted him to see it first, because I'm still frankly in the dark about why he's been in the dark at all.

#reylo #kylo ren #star wars meta #reylo meta #tros salt

82 notes · View notes

kinsbin · 5 years

Text

An Impulsive Purchase

Title: An Impulsive Purchase Ship: Of Kindness and Evil [Xena/Darth Maul - OC/Self Insert X Canon] Rating: T

Summary: Xena is an indentured servant, paying her way out of her boss’ shop by working as hard as she can. When a mysterious stranger comes in looking for information, only to find her instead, his offer to pay off the rest of her remaining debt is more than surprising. What’s even more surprising than that, though? The reason why he did it.

A/N: Wrote a little fic about how Darth Maul and I first met and how he recruited me onto his ship! I couldn’t resist writing for myself a little between commissions ;w;

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tatooine’s sands were endless, but that was not something Xena wasn’t used to. She bore it as well as any native of the planet might do, with an occasional wince to her face as sand dug itself into her vision and comfort in the heat that burned her sweat-laden skin as she moved box after box of heavy supplies from her bosses shop onto a cargo-freight pulled along by droids who looked nearly bored in their impatience for her to finish up. She ignored them, too, for the most part, focusing instead on making sure that the cargo was not damaged in any way as it landed on the freight, less the price of each piece come in years until she was free from him.

Indentured servitude wasn’t the way she had wanted to settle into Tatooine, but it was the only way she could escape her native home and the war that ravaged it. The Clone War had devastated a number of planets and, she remembered back with bitter annoyance, the Republic was only so keen on helping those with little to no profit within the Galactic Trade Federation. So, stealing off on a cargo ship, her Boss had simply offered her a ride for a few years of helping him manage goods and wares on other planets. The deal was nice at first, and he treated her with respect. Not as a slave but as a co-worker pushing away a debt. There was, at least, some dignity in it.

“That’s the last box,” The man’s gruff voice echoed behind her as he pat the cargo with a caring gesture to it, “They’ll be going to take it off planet, I believe.”

Xena only nodded, her longing hidden behind a small wave of regret as she watched the cargo slowly fade into the distance of the setting sun. She had grown stir crazy too fast on this planet. On this little shop selling nothing but smuggled goods and secrets for those willing to pay the price for them. Her Boss wasn’t a cruel man, well, not a cruel man on the planet’s standards, but he had a set of demands that were required to be followed. Sometimes she was a scapegoat for work and money more than she was an actual worker in itself...

A sharp nudge on her side made Xena groan and wince, glaring up only slightly at the man to her side, who ruffled her short hair with a frown.

“New customers coming in, little one, focus.”

“Yes, Sir.” She responded with an automatic huff before focusing on the sight of those walking towards their shop. Her breath caught in her throat as she stared forward.

The man walking between two other guards was sharp looking in all senses of the words. The thick black coats he wore billowed in the sandy winds of the desert and echoed in their flapping. It hid most of his body well, but the vague remnants of light that did shine on his available face made the shadows of its hood cast further across him. The hints of crimson and black shone across his skin, horns poking slightly from the top of the hood as he moved forward. The billowing of his cape revealed a thin tube at his side. A tube that even she knew what the sight of meant.

Jedi.

Her Boss knew too. A slap to her back made her push forward towards the door of their shop.

“Go and set up in the shop, girl.” He hissed with a demanding tone in her direction. Xena scrambled into the cooler interior of the shop, organizing things here and there, though not really sure of what he wanted her quite to do. So she stood behind the counter and twiddled her thumbs, ears straining as voices grew closer and closer, her Boss’s above the rest as he talked about one thing or another to the new arrival with a nervous cadence about his tone. He was scared. She could feel it warp in her chest like a strong empathy and she swallowed at it, trying not to allow it to consume her.

“The information you want is rare,” Her Boss’ words were sharp as he added, “The more rare the information, as I’m sure you know, the more expensive it is.”

The man had little words to this, his quip simple as he spoke in his dark, heavy cadenced growl:

“My master is willing to pay whatever is necessary to acquire it. Your price is no hassle.”

“Good, good,” He hummed with a smirk, gesturing to Xena after a moment, “My servant here keeps up to date on all going ons around Tatooine. I’m sure what you ask of her she will know.”

She tried to smile, but it faltered when the man looked at her.

His amber eyes were intense. More intense than she had ever seen in her life. Deep and terrifying, she felt something crawl out of him. An energy that touched at her and prodded with angry curiosity. Yes, she read in surprise, it was anger. Anger and a restlessness that filled her stomach and bit at her insides as their eyes continued to lock. What did he want to know, she wondered? What did he see in her that they kept staring like this? Oh god, she realized with horror, had she been the one staring this whole time? Was she the rude on here?

“You.”

The stranger’s voice startled her as he drew closer, brow ridges furrowing as he gazed with something akin to frustration across his handsome face.

“Y-Yes, Sir,” She murmured out after being addressed, “I... I know most of the going abouts here... Anything you ask I will likely-”

She quieted as he drew closer, squinting further at her and the feelings around his aura grew more and more intense with every second until they were a loud, screaming hum in her ears. Xena winced and bit her lip, trying to avoid his eye contact but she felt as though to pull away from that dangerous look would be a sin of some sort, so she remained compliant to the apparently silent interrogation.

“Sir,” Her Boss’ voice echoed above the screaming hum, “She’s an informant, not a whore. If you want to fuck her with your eyes like that then I suggest you-”

With a whip of his hand, the stranger sent the other man flying back, crashing into a nearby wall where he kept him there by the throat, struggling to breath where the invisible power clung to his trachea.

“Your sensitivity to the Force is something to be admired,” The Stranger spoke slowly, “... and something that may be used.”

Xena bit her lip, unsure of what else to say as she gazed on at him. Her eyes flitted to behind him, where her Boss hung groveling in pain. Seeing her gaze, the stranger pulled away from the other man, allowing his body to crumple to the ground as he gasped for air. Turning away from her, the stranger approached her Boss with an intense look in his eyes. She was starting to feel that all of his looks were intense.

“I have no need for your information,” His voice was even as it was dark, making Xena shiver, “But there is someone else I would like to purchase.”

Someone else... The word was not lost as Xena inhaled sharply. Was this man really... ?

“My servant,” Her Boss gasped bitterly, “Is not for sale, Sir. Besides, she is indentured. She will be free once her full debt is paid off here.”

There was a snarl to his features as he turned to face Xen again, bright amber eyes staring into her. Slowly, surely, she realized a sound rang out in her head. A voice, similar to the man’s but distorted in some way. She chewed on her lip as it murmured words softly somewhere in her brain.

‘Come with me.’

She could only find a small will to think in return:

‘If I were free, I would.’

Suddenly the stranger pulled a satchel from his side, the coin falling to the floor in front of her boss with a low clatter as he growled, “Will this cover it?”

She wasn’t even sure her boss counted before he agreed a little too eagerly.

And that was how Xena found herself being pulled away from her once home, turned prison and turned past residence. How she found herself trailing behind the Dathomirian Sith Lord known as Darth Maul. She said nothing as she followed him through the darkened sands of Tatooine, nor did he. They were silent until they reached his ship.

Upon entering it, Xena stopped her jaw from dropping. Stopped her eyes from wandering with too much awe as she pet at the smooth metal surfaces around her. A real ship. One she hadn’t ever been in before. The reality of her decision settled into her chest as the door closed behind her and the being before her stood, intimidating and taller than her, to look down with apprehension at her shrinking form.

She licked her lips, knowing she was free but still scared to speak outright.

“Speak,” He demanded, as though her mind was clearly being read. Xena exhaled.

“I appreciate your assistance in my debt,” She spoke finally, “But I’m still wondering why you would buy a random servant girl from a slum in Tatooine without even receiving the information you were bartering for in the first place.”

He said nothing for a long time, and it prompted her her next question:

“I don’t even know your name.”

Fingertips gripped at his hood and Xena inhaled. She watched as it fell away, rivulets of silken material balling at the base of his neck to reveal the intricate tattoos against red flesh that littered his entire face. The horns (there were more than one, she could see now) stood proud. Like a crown around his mind. It only made his gaze more intense as she looked him over, fascinated and curious and oh-so interested. He was... handsome, certainly. But her question still wasn’t answered, not even as he turned away from her and began setting up the cockpit in his ship for take off.

“You’re a Jedi, aren’t you?” She asked curiously. A mistake, it seemed.

He sneered from his seat and looked on at her, glaring sharply and making her flinch away from the look before he spoke with a spite in his tone the likes of which she had only heard in the most hated of enemies:

“No, little one, I am no Jedi.”

“Then what are you?”

“Darth Maul,” He spoke curtly, “is what I am called. As for you... You feel it, don’t you? The hum of the Force around you. Its substance reaching out to you. Touching at your core and burning at your fingers...”

Xena swallowed as she didn’t answer. He knew what her answer was. What she recalled as the memories of their voices echoing without words sounded in the distance.

“Someone as Force Sensitive as you should not be ignored,” He continued, “and, with training, I can help you to use it. Help you to understand the power you weild.”

It was all so much. All too much, almost. Xena’s head spun as she took it in. A Force user? Like the Jedi? Like the Sith? The man before her was clearly not on the Republic’s side, that was for certain, but did that matter? What had the Republic done for her? Not as much as he did, paying her out of her debt and taking her away from a planet of danger...

Slowly, she smiled. Excitement built and curiosity welled eagerly as she tightened her grip on her arms.

“I... I’m Xena,” She spoke softly, “Is there anything i should call you in particular, Darth Maul?”

“... Refer to me as Master from now on, little one.”

“Yes, Master.”

And it was the beginning, she knew, of something wonderful.

#of kindness and evil #self ship #selfship #self shipping #oc/canon #oc x canon #star wars #darth maul #its shitty but i lOVE IT

12 notes · View notes

noddytheornithopod · 5 years

Text

Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker - Initial Thoughts

So yeah, this is a thing. Of course I’m gonna discuss spoilers in-depth, but I’ll put that under the cut. If you want a spoiler free summary, here:

It's not perfect, and I particularly struggled with the first act and it's really fast pacing (JJ LEARN TO SLOW DOWN), but I'm not gonna pretend I didn't enjoy it overall. As long as you're not attached to certain specific ideas and willing to accept it for what it is, you might like it well enough. That being said, I can already see this is gonna be at least as divisive as TLJ unfortunately.

Okay, first thing’s out of the way: I was aware of the leaks about the film, and I can confirm that they were pretty spot on overall. It sucks 99% of the plot got out, there’s a few moments that thankfully didn’t get mentioned in any leaks I saw, so yeah. Anyway, time to get started.

Okay, yeah, the pacing. Definitely my biggest issue with the film. It’s an issue I have with The Force Awakens’ first act too, but there it at least was able to do enough to establish the characters. Here the story moves along relentlessly. Honestly, for the first act, in fact right until Rey and Kylo Ren’s Kijimi confrontation, I struggled to keep up. So much happened, so much exposition and action I felt like nothing really got to land. There wasn’t any time to breathe or let the characters have more moments. I’m not sure if the Rey/Kylo fight on Kijimi was just a major emotional turning point that finally had me properly hooked, but from there either I finally got into the film’s groove or it actually learned to slow down a bit, at least enough for things to actually land instead of BAM NEW SCENE BAM NEW SCENE.

My other biggest issue with the film is something that unfortunately couldn’t be helped: the handling of Leia. It’s VERY clear they were writing around the cut scenes from The Force Awakens, and how vague and generic her lines were REALLY showed. Because of this, her death scene didn’t really work for me? In fact, I’m not even sure why she chose to reach out to Kylo Ren at that specific point, either it was Force shenanigans feeling it was the right time SOMEHOW knowing he was at a vulnerable point or I really missed something (see this is why you don’t pace things at the speed of light, JJ :V). THAT BEING SAID... I can’t really fault the filmmakers for this, because this is obviously the best they could’ve done without a controversial recasting (especially if they used CGI to make the new actress look like Carrie Fisher). It’s clear this was a really hard job, and I can tell they did the best with what they had.

I mentioned the first act was too fast paced, but I actually really dug the opening with Kylo Ren. Palpatine obviously sensed the First Order had subjugated the galaxy, so it was time for him to come out and reassert control with his secret Sith Fleet, hence the message in the crawl. But yeah, Kylo Ren finding the wayfinder and traveling to Exegol only to discover Palpatine was an excellent sequence that really got things getting exciting.

For specific things here: first, Exegol is an awesome planet. It’s perfectly creepy and the best place for the final showdown to take place. The sound design for the place was particularly great. Visually, it’s all epic. I’m also curious about its history - C-3PO says it’s apparently a Sith Homeworld, though I wonder if this is more like an origin point given Moraband was also a Sith Homeworld. Oh look, I’m being a nerd, lol.

I love how Snoke was handled purely because it’s so hilariously anticlimatic and I can see so many people getting mad at it. Like seriously... Palpatine so casually going “I made Snoke” says SO much. Everyone was making up elaborate theories on who he was and why he’s a thing but in reality, he’s just some dude created in a lab for Palpatine to puppet while he’s gone. :P One has to wonder how Snoke felt about the whole thing, literally being made just to be an interim ruler for former Imperials before Palpatine was ready to return, while also being a powerful Dark Side user himself (wow geez, Palpatine can make super Dark Side users now).

Palpatine himself was definitely one of the best parts of the movie, Ian McDiarmid’s performance alone was worth it. I definitely get why JJ chose to bring him back, I agree it feels appropriate for the main Star Wars villain to have a presence in the new trilogy in some way. For how he comes back, it’s curious. The way he speaks and looks, he’s pretty much dead, Palpatine literally says he died in fact. As for how he’s back, he just says his infamous “the Dark Side is a pathway to many abilities, some to be considered unnatural.” Look, it’s SO on the nose and cheesy, but because I’m a nerd I loved hearing that line again. From how I understand it, he’s basically a weird Dark Side zombie, I mean he has a downright undead appearance. It’s not actually explained how he survived, but I kinda don’t mind that it’s currently mysterious? I have some theories based on EU stuff I might go into later but basically, he’s now Zombietine and he’s somehow ended up on Exegol with his weird Sith cult devotees making Snokes and building the Sith Fleet while influencing what he can from afar. Speaking of which... his “I’m every voice you have ever known” line pretty much confirms it was HIM who was talking to him through Darth Vader’s helmet, not a remnant of Vader himself. Him using Snoke’s voice in that line even makes me wonder how much free will Snoke has, and whether him being a puppet is more literal than we think.

Leia like I said I felt despite doing the best they could it didn’t fully work, but I can see how Leia would’ve tried being a Jedi but decided not to follow through with it. I mean, ghost Luke couldn’t always show up, so Rey would need advice from the closest thing to a remaining Jedi.

Pasana was hectic. Given a lot of the first act was there, that and the Resistance scenes on Ajan Kloss were most of what really rushed. Like, you have potential great moments, but the fast pace means the story needs to move on so nothing can land. There’s attempts at character moments but they don’t have time to breathe. Like, even Lando returning just whisked by because of the pacing.

Lando was good I guess. Not much stuff for him, but what we had was cool I guess. It sounds like he was hunting for a wayfinder with Luke, though I guess one wonder why Luke was looking for Exegol? Was this after he confronted Snoke (see the new Kylo Ren comic, that confirms that was a thing that happened, oh look more nerdy shit only I care about) and was looking for answers on what Snoke was up to, did he just want to make sure the Dark Side wasn’t fucking things up, or was he feeling like something was off? Anyway, Lando: obviously he’s a minor character, but him bringing all the ships at the end was cool.

Much of the stuff on Kijimi was pretty fast up until the lighsabre duel of course, so there was issues there too. Zorri’s introduction sped by so it never really landed, she goes from “maybe I’ll turn you over” to “fine I’ll help” VERY fast. Same with C-3PO’s memory wipe scene - the story does finally start to steady a bit and it did have me feeling things, but it still goes by too fast for it to fully land. Poe and Zorri’s one on one was a bit better, though again Zorri changing her heart so fast doesn’t really work for me.

Thinking about it, I did like Poe’s arc in the movie well enough. It could’ve been smoothed out but I did like how even he was struggling with the forces they were up against, and learned to have hope even in this dire situation. That’s why I like the chat with Zorri - even if her character feels rushed, it did establish Poe’s central arc and we see how that plays out.

Finn I feel like doesn’t have much of an arc here? Like, I know his storyline in The Last Jedi was divisive, but at least he did have a major arc there and had major growth. Here, I guess his arc is concluded, but then he’s just kinda along with the crew? I really liked the scene where he met Jannah and discovered more First Order deserters, but unfortunately that didn’t really end up going anywhere. Finn and Jannah are a cool duo, but in the climactic battle they kinda felt like an afterthought? I mean, even Poe and the ship stuff kinda did, but at least I kinda got what was going on there. With Finn and Jannah it’s just “we’re on Pryde’s Star Destroyer, destroy some shit” and... that’s it? Probably the most interesting thing with Finn in the movie was how open he was to the Force. Like obviously he couldn’t sense it, but he definitely believes in and trusts it, and it makes sense how that helps a lot of decisions he makes, especially after befriending Rey.

Jannah was cool but like I said she doesn’t really get much to do. I think what people will mainly focus on is that final scene with Lando, which was TOTALLY not suggesting Lando’s her dad. It’s a shame, because the First Order deserter stuff could’ve lead to some cool stuff, but I can see the film probably couldn’t fit it in with how much it’s trying to do.

Rose was an afterthought. I didn’t expect her to be in it much so I prepped myself for that, but I was at least happy to see she was still around. :) I wonder about how Finn looked at her at the end though, was that supposed to suggest romantic feelings? Kinda funny given they drop the Finn wanting to tell Rey something plotline, which I suspect was meant to imply romantic feelings?

On the topic of romance, Poe and Zorri, meh. And to literally nobody’s surprise, the queer couple we see is two Resistance women having a kiss at the end. At least one is a character that kinda exists, even if I don’t even know her name and just know she’s important enough to be sooorta recognisable given she was in The Last Jedi? It’s pretty anticlimactic, but nobody was expecting the representation to be significant anyway. :P Still better than Endgame from the sounds of it though.

Okay, I wanna discuss Hux. His role is small, but he’s as pathetic as ever and it’s glorious. So one plot point is that there’s a spy feeding intel to the Resistance, and then when Finn, Poe and Chewbacca are captured on the Star Destroyer above Kijimi we discover... Hux is the spy. He didn’t even have a change of heart and turned good, he simply just hates Kylo Ren. :P Like damn, helping the enemy purely out of spite, that’s something alright. And as soon as the heroes escape, Pryde just knows instantly he’s the spy and shoots him without a second thought. Yep, that’s how Hux goes out. Pryde is just there to be the evil military leader of course, and he works in that part.

Rey definitely was a major force in carrying the film, like of course she is given she’s the central protagonist but her story just holds up the best for me. Probably one of my favourite things about it was that we finally got to properly explore the Dark Side in her, and of course that becomes a big part of her story here. It’s something we’ve seen in the past two films, but here it actually becomes a focus.

Okay, let’s talk about Rey’s family. Specifically, how she’s Palpatine’s granddaughter. I’m sure some people who are VERY attached to the “nobody” thing in The Last Jedi will dislike this no matter what, but I still think it works? I will however say that it’s VERY cheeky how they go “oh your PARENTS are nobodies, but your GRANDFATHER IS A BIG DEAL AND YOUR DAD JUST CHOSE TO FUCK OFF”. Weird cheekiness aside, I guess I don’t mind the reveal because for one, Star Wars is a family saga, so I see how this works into things, plus it helps justify Palpatine’s return? But perhaps more importantly, I think the film still honours the ideas from The Last Jedi in a way - yes, Rey may have found she has a major lineage after all, but said lineage comes from the most evil man in the Universe. However, her ancestry doesn’t define her, her family isn’t important, who SHE chooses to be is. Luke outright says blood isn’t everything. Luke and Leia figured out she was somehow a Palpatine descendant, but accepted her anyway because they saw her potential for good. I will say I hoped the nobody thing stuck to being literally myself, but this is a nice compromise that I can work with and has a nice message to it. Also, I should emphasise this: just because this changes how we might see The Last Jedi, it doesn’t mean that what the film explores and says is meaningless. In fact, I think the film goes out of its way to make sure it still matters even if JJ obviously had his own ideas on where to take the story. Whether she’s nobody or connected to someone significant, Rey’s destiny is her own to forge and its still about her, not who she’s connected to.

There’s also this Ochi dude who was around doing work for Palpatine while he was around, and he killed Rey’s parents. Kylo initially assumed he wanted to kill Rey, but in reality Ochi was meant to bring Rey to Palpatine early.

Luke’s appearances were cool. I’m sure some people who love TLJ and dislike this film might cynically take his “a Jedi’s weapon deserves more respect line” as a diss against TLJ, but you have to remember: TLJ was literally about Luke finding hope and something to believe in again. Of course he’d get over his cynicism, everything he said about the Jedi was right, but TLJ’s point is that instead of just burying everything wrong with the past, we learn from its failures and take what’s still good to form something better. That’s what Rey’s meant to do with the Jedi. And I mean, the reason him catching the lightsabre Rey throws works at all is because of the surprising moment where he tosses it away in TLJ.

So, Kylo Ren. I enjoyed his storyline. Like, even when he discovers Palpatine and is made to serve him, he’s already secretly hoping to get Rey on his side for them to take him out and rule together (presumably as the new Sith Lords?). He’s pretty brutal and evil in a lot of the film. Also... I LOVE how they expanded on the Force connections. I love me some freaky World Between Worlds style space bending shit. Like, they even fight even though they’re on different locations. As for the mask, I’m sure someone has a better read on it but I think with Palpatine back and being made to be subservient to another master, he puts it together to seem more intimidating again even though the cracks show the facade (the cracks are based on Kintsugi, a Japanese art or craft where repaired things have the lines of where they were broken visible to emphasise how things have changed since they were broken... someone can explain it better but yeah). With the Force Dyad, I have to wonder: is it something Snoke specifically created when he bridged their minds and left that connection to fester (as we see it still is there after all given what happens here), or was it something the Force always had with them?

So, the big scene on the Endor moon with Kylo Ren (I assume Kef Bir if it’s really called that is a different moon to the forest one from Return of the Jedi). Rey’s already struggling with the darkness after the vision of her dark self, but she goes pretty dark during her fight. She strikes Kylo down in a moment he doesn’t fight back, and said moment was him sensing Leia’s passing. Like I said, I don’t feel like her death was handled that well, though it could just be circumstance with Carrie Fisher’s passing. It’s oddly meta as well - she seemed to know reaching out to her son would kill her but did it because she believed it would save him. So she kinda fridged... herself???? It’s weird, I’m not sure how to feel about it. Is it really worth dying just for your son who’s running what will become a new Empire? And if she was dying already, they didn’t establish it at all. It just happens out of nowhere. And I mean, at least it works, Kylo Ren still has some heart left and feels sad about his mum, and then we get... Han Solo. They do say it’s a memory, but I wonder if this was Force induced. Even if the Leia stuff doesn’t work for me, I still liked the scene with imaginary Han. It’s very on the nose with its parallels to TFA, but it still works I think. Also let’s be real... Kylo Ren deciding to stop being a space fascist just because his mum died, that’s not exactly the kind of person I would still feel safe around lol.

If Kylo Ren has an actual redemptive moment, it comes later. Honestly, him showing up in the final battle to help Rey against Palpatine was pretty cool. Like I said, he’s only really doing this because mum dying made him sad, but hey at least he’s fighting the bad guys, right? Yeah, I’m sure you can tell I’m not the biggest Kylo Ren fan. I just feel like his internal conflict isn’t that compelling compared to what Anakin went through, who is much easier to empathise with, not to mention Kylo Ren is honestly pure redemption bait compared to Vader, who didn’t even have plans on redemption until he was made Luke’s father, lol. But rambling aside, his stuff in the climax was awesome. Rey giving now Ben Solo the Skywalker lightsabre through their Force connection was one of the coolest moments of the movie, and bam he just wrecks the Knights of Ren the moment he gets a new sabre (after throwing his own one away).

Palpatine in the climax is curious, because I’m not actually sure what his ultimate goal was: was it to be killed off for good by Rey, or did he always count on Ben/Kylo to show up to get the Force Dyad in place to drain their life force to rejuvenate himself? I mean, he seemed to find Leia’s sacrifice incredibly unexpected in how it made Kylo turn away from the Dark Side, so it seems like he was ready to be killed, though TBH it actually sounds like he very well could’ve possessed her. I actually want to know what this whole Sith thing is about. He says that all the Sith that have ever lived live on through him, which I guess is something that started with the Rule of Two given it follows that philosophy. The apprentice kills their master, but their master and all subsequent masters have what’s left of them transferred into them. It’s an eerie way Darth Bane can still be around for the day the Sith rule the galaxy. Still, I have to wonder how it works. For someone like Rey who wasn’t an actual Sith, it sounds like all the Sith souls would’ve corrupted her, or Palpatine would outright possess her. I know most people don’t care about this nerdy stuff, but I do so lol. This whole Sith souls thing is intriguing and I look forward to EU stuff exploring it more. I want to know if it’s like Rey and her reaching out for the Jedi souls, or the Sith literally all pile up into this monstrosity and the master becomes a single entity.

Anyway yeah, Palpatine drains Rey and Ben to rejuvenate himself so he can live again. This is the exact kind of creepy Dark Side stuff I’m here for. Ben tries to stop him, but he’s thrown down a chasm. Sheev immobilises the entire Resistance fleet, but Rey is able to draw in his attention, and when she uses both the Skywalker and Leia’s lightsabres she calls on the souls of past Jedi to give her the power to defeat Palpatine (something foreshadowed at the start where she tries to reach voices of past Jedi). So there’s lots of juicy cameos for sharp eared listeners. First, we hear Obi-Wan saying a homage to his TFA line, but with final instead of first steps. We hear LOTS of Jedi, but I was just happy we heard Anakin. I would’ve liked him to have a bigger appearance, sure, but I’m happy he existed at all. He says something like “bring balance again, just as I did”, which is pretty cool, and further cements Anakin as The Chosen One. It’s just Sheev refusing to stay truly dead caused another fuckup that Rey needed to solve. This arguably could change how one reads the Chosen One prophecy, but it still works with it being Anakin. Rey is stopping the Sith from being revived because as I said, Palpatine is basically a zombie and arguably not even really alive. I’m sure one could argue it’s changed, and Yoda DID say the prophecy could’ve been misread, but I’m sure it might feed interesting discussions... I just hope they’re not shitty toxic ones like we always get. For me, the coolest moment was when it concluded with QUI-GON JINN. You know, the Jedi who started it all. Look, Jedi voices is obviously fanservice, but this is fanservice I eat up like the hopeless nerd I am. :V We also heard non-movie Jedi like Kanan (I got so excited when I saw him in the credits I had to explain to the guy next to me my outburst lol), and it seems even ex-Jedi like Ahsoka were included. Given these are Jedi who are supposed to have passed on into the Cosmic Force, I have to say this doesn’t look good for Ahsoka. Not sure if Ezra was in there either, but if he was, then welp indeed. I’m officially worried for them, and whatever evil plans Dave Filoni has for them.

So yeah Rey beats Sheev, but it takes the life out of her to do so. BUT WAIT... BEN SOLO LIVES. Well, for now. Not gonna lie, I got excited when I saw him climb out of that chasm, I was like YEAH GO SAVE REY MAN. I literally heard someone cheer when he climbed out too. Rey of course did the Force healing thing on him before (and earlier on a serpent creature), but to bring her back Ben uses that same ability at the cost of his own life. But before he dies... Rey kisses him. Okay Reylos, you win. Not gonna lie though... I actually didn’t mind that moment? *raises internet hate mob shields* Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suddenly a Reylo convert so no need to cancel me or whatever you guys do, but for what it was, I didn’t mind it? Ben comes back knowing he’s going to probably die saving Rey, but does it anyway. When I said I feel like his true redemptive moment comes later than moping about Leia, this is what I meant. Before, he joined Rey to not betray his mother’s ideals and because of his connection with her. But now, he knows he’s a goner but wants her to live so he sacrifices his life to revive her. Like, this is a proper selfless act. He probably thinks she deserves to live more than he does after the shit he’s put everyone though anyway. It also averted my biggest concern with the Reylo thing - I was worried that it would end up making Rey’s story about saving Ben Solo like all the fan theories wanted, but here it was still firmly Rey’s story. If anything, Ben came to serve her story by letting her live on lol. So yeah, Reylo happened for like a minute... I somehow expect BOTH sides of the debate to be angry. The hardcore Reylos and “Bendemption” people will be upset because Ben dies, but the anti-Reylo people will hate it because Reylo happens at all, even for a second. And here I am, who’s just here like “that was a nice sweet moment plus yeah I want Rey to live over Ben lol”.

Okay, I should say that the whole climax got me smiling. From all the ships across the galaxy arriving to help to Rey getting power from past Jedi, to them melting away Palpatine (yeah he’s not surviving literal disintegration from force lighting deflected with the help of dead Jedi lol), to them taking out the Sith Fleet and everyone celebrating, it just was happy and more importantly, hopeful. Look, I get why people might not be into this movie, but I was genuinely giddy during this climax of not just a film or trilogy, but a now nine part saga (and yes it’s definitely staying as a nine part Skywalker Saga after Ben died, Rey only takes the name to honour the past). It really did feel like a big epic finale. Sure, like I said some of the stuff in the battle could’ve been fleshed out more, but the dumb nerd part of me enjoyed the epicness of it and its climax anyway.

The final scene was nice I guess. Rey finding an identity for herself she feels secure in, and the Luke and Leia ghosts was nice. Also the yellow lightsabre’s first film appearance signalling something new to come.

D-O was there I guess. Didn’t focus much on him and BB-8. C-3PO of course had a fair bit going on and his memory wipe did have some emotional impact even if we recover quickly because FAST PACE. R2 had some nice moments, I felt bad for him when 3PO didn’t recognise him actually, though of course R2 backs up whatever memories he has left of him (IDK what memories R2 had though). I wonder why C-3PO had a thing in his memory blocking him from translating Sith runes though.

Yeah, okay, there were a few fanservicey moments, I already mentioned some of course. Some felt like natural parallels but just with JJ’s lack of subtlety, there were a few that felt on the nose, but many were genuinely fun. Since it’s not just Return of the Jedi 2.0 but a new story that still has a few parallels (naturally, I need to dig for the ROTS and Phantom Menace ones next), it doesn’t feel as in your face as The Force Awakens which called back to so much of A New Hope and the Original Trilogy. But I mean, stuff like the Wedge cameo was cool (though ouch his son in law is dead, JJ killed off one of his best friends in Snap Wexley lol). IDK what the Tantive IV is back, but hey I can work with it. Since it’s capping off the whole saga, it calls back to all three trilogies and doesn’t hyperfocus on just one so it feels less over the top, to me anyway (or maybe my Prequel bias is showing lol).

So yeah... definitely not a perfect film, with a pretty rough first act, but I don’t think it’s a disaster like some people see it as. Could some things have been handled better? Definitely. Would I have preferred George Lucas’ ideas for the Sequel Trilogy instead despite them probably having less popular appeal? Yeah, I’m a weirdo, I know. But look, I went into this film simply wanting to enjoy it for what it was. And for what it was, I’d say it was mostly good. Sure, there’s rough patches, but the good parts are really good.

#sw spoilers #star wars spoilers #star wars #episode ix #episode 9 #the rise of skywalker #sequel trilogy #skywalker saga

10 notes · View notes

monsterislandbuddies · 6 years

Text

Why the Trendmasters “Godzilla Wars” Package Design is Awful

Before we start, an important note about context...

In the 1990s, now-defunct toy company Trendmasters released several waves of Godzilla action figures in the United States. For the purposes of my upcoming criticisms, context is extremely important: from the mid-1980s to 1998 (when Tristar’s Godzilla film hit theaters), there wasn’t much Godzilla activity in the states. Most Americans were unaware of the new movies being produced in Japan, and aside from a Nike commercial here or an MTV Lifetime Achievement award there, Godzilla was rarely on the minds of the average American.

Therefore, for this deep dive, please keep in mind that Trendmasters already had an uphill battle as there were no movies, comics, video games, or TV shows to support their first waves of Godzilla toys. They were riding almost entirely on Godzilla’s position as a tremendously recognizable IP.

The first Trendmasters line of action figures were under the name “Godzilla: King of the Monsters”, with the second main line being “Godzilla Wars” in 1995. I recently added a “Godzilla Wars” Baragon to my collection (seen above), and I couldn’t help but study its packaging. Out of the gate, I like how I was able to remove Baragon without damaging the box at all. But other than that, I found the box art and copy to be so atrocious that I personally believe it stunted the success of this toy launch. Everything I’m going to say is based on my own opinions but I do want to note - without divulging too much personal information - that my career is in this field and has been for over a decade. That doesn’t make me automatically right, so in the end, I invite you all to share your thoughts! Now, let’s begin...

What's the “Story” Here?

Let’s break down the act of marketing an action toy line to it’s bare bones: most lines have a main hero, and then the main adversary. They’re the two figures kids should want first (and the two toys your company is almost guaranteed to sell). He-Man and Skeletor. Optimus Prime and Megatron. Luke and Darth Vader. In a Godzilla line, the prime character (and probably the only one kids have any vague familiarity with) is Godzilla. After Godzilla, where do you go? What are the “Godzilla Wars”? Let’s investigate.

This art includes Godzilla, as it should. Behind him is... a second Godzilla? With a spike of some sort on his head? Remember: this is 1995. It would still be a few years before Godzilla Vs. Space Godzilla would come to America on VHS. In the states, most people don’t understand who that character is. Is it a supercharged Godzilla? Or is it the foe we’re going to war with? Maybe the back of the packaging will offer some help...

There’s no story synopsis on the back, and that’s sometimes okay... but in this case--where the toys have no support in other media--a brief synopsis is a good idea. Even a blurb under the logo would be helpful. For example (off the top of my head):

Earth’s armies are helpless as giant-sized aliens invade with one goal in mind: DESTROY. Only Godzilla and his friends are powerful enough to defend our planet, but will their war save humankind... or end it?

A little blurb like that is a great way to kick-start the imagination and inspire someone to purchase these toys and play out the story. Plus a “war” implies ARMIES, so this incentivizes kids to want to collect as many “soldiers” as possible!

Back to interpreting the story as it’s presented: does the front picture imply that Space Godzilla is the main villain? The back of the box has him all the way in the bottom right corner, so not likely. If he is the main villain, Space Godzilla is better served at the top of one of the two columns (preferably right next to Godzilla). Even better, the columns should be split with heroes on one side, and villains on the other. This will would help kids instantly understand what the sides are in this war.

To understand the story of “Godzilla Wars”, it seems that all we have to go by are the character descriptions, and they are the most offensive part of this entire box...

Who Are These Characters?

I cannot stress this enough: the Heisei era Japanese Godzilla films were not wildly available in America in 1995. For this section, you need to divorce yourself of all of your current Godzilla knowledge and pretend you’re being introduced to many of these characters for the very first time.

In general, Americans read from left to right and top to bottom. The layout of these columns is already confusing because I’m not sure if I should start at Supercharged Godzilla (left) or regular Godzilla (top). Let’s start with regular:

He began life as Godzillasaurus--millions of years ago when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Exposed to radiation in the mid 1950′s, Godzilla--as he came to be called--transformed into a towering monster capable of delivering a devastating atomic blast with his breath. Since then, Godzilla has menaced the cities of Japan and fought off many seemingly unbeatable adversaries, earning him the title, “The King of the Monsters”.

It’s not a bad description of our hero. Personally I would’ve simplified the opening and cut the “Godzillasaurus” stuff:

Once a slumbering prehistoric monster, Godzilla was awakened by man’s atomic testing in the 1950s. Now radioactive with a devastating atomic blast, he has risen to release his fury on all of us! But when Earth is invaded by powerful monsters from far away galaxies, Godzilla may now be our only hope for survival!

This revision quickly explains Godzilla’s origin and ties him to the toy line’s story in a meaningful way. Now let’s see what Supercharged Godzilla is all about:

Caught in the powerflux of Dr. Shiragami’s Re-Genesis trap...

...and I’m already lost. Dr. Shiragami? Powerflux? Re-Genesis trap? I appreciate the attempt at creating a specific explanation for Supercharged Godzilla, but this description has too many unfamiliar ideas and can actually intimidate kids away from the toy line. Always keep it simple:

Godzilla’s heart is a full-blown nuclear reactor, and to stay energized, the king of the monsters needs to feed off of our power plants! But when he absorbs too much energy, Godzilla’s skin turns black and his atomic powers temporarily DOUBLE in strength!

A nice, easily digestible explanation like this is much more inviting to children. Now for Mothra’s blurb (the first non-Godzilla description a kid might read):

Hatched form an egg that flew from space, Mothra fires an ultra-sonic wave beam of considerable destructive force from his antennae. The poisonous powder stored in his wings can temporarily paralyze the muscles in Godzilla’s body, and neutralize Godzilla’s atomic blast.

There are three things I would immediately change: first, I’d remove the “space” part of Mothra’s origin. Remember, in my Godzilla Wars, the alien invaders are the bad guys... and we want Mothra to fight for good! Second, I don’t see any reason Mothra can’t be a female here. Last: why is half of this description about how Mothra can attack Godzilla when they’re on the same side? I suggest:

Worshiped by natives as a goddess on the secluded Infant Island, Mothra has been a spiritual protector of the Earth for thousands of years. She saved Japan from one of Godzilla’s earliest attacks, but now they must work together to defend our planet from dangerous new foes.

Since there’s a chance people might be more familiar with Mothra (due to seeing Showa-era films on broadcast television or posters in video stores), her position on the packaging roster is not bad. Who’s next?

Well this is an odd (but at least familiar) bunch of characters to present in this order. Rodan’s blurb isn’t great, but it’s also not offensive so I’m going to skip that one. This brings us to King Ghidorah, and oh-boy:

Engineered by the Earth Union Organization in the year 2204 as a bio-weapon with which to destroy Japan, three Dorats were sent back in time to the 1940′s where they fused into the three-headed King Ghidorah! But the EUO’s plan to destroy Japan was soon put to an end by the mighty Godzilla!

Questions: why would the Earth Union Organization want to DESTROY Japan? What’s a dorat? Why did they send them to 1940, and how’d they get back to the present? I appreciate how Trendmasters wanted to respect the source material, but that source material was only available in Japan at this point! Without context, King Ghidorah’s description is puzzling. It’s also not a good idea to imply that this character was already defeated.

Further, like Mothra, there’s a chance people might actually recognize King Ghidorah. Therefore, it’s a smart idea to stick to the Showa-origin for this character and (again) keep it simple. I submit:

One of the most dangerous monsters in the universe, King Ghidorah has traveled across numerous planets and galaxies leaving only a path of destruction behind. Now, this three-headed monstrosity has landed on Earth, and it will take the combined forces of ALL of our mightiest monsters to stop him!

No more implying that King Ghidorah was already defeated; instead, let’s beef him up. If anything, look at it from a commerce angle: Godzilla can’t defeat King Ghidorah on his own, kiddies... you’re going to need to buy him some help!

Mecha-King Ghidorah’s blurb is also problematic:

After a losing battle with Godzilla, Ghidorah lay at the bottom of the ocean. The Earth Union Organization salvaged the battered bio-weapon and gave it a new life as Mecha-King Ghidorah--an even more powerful Cyber-Monster--and returned him back in time to face Godzilla!

This is a tricky one. We just read a blurb about King Ghidorah, and now we’re reading about how he already lost a battle with Godzilla. We don’t want to make King Ghidorah sound weak right out of the gate, but how else do you describe his cyber transformation? I say keep it vague:

The only thing more powerful than King Ghidorah is the enhanced Mecha-King Ghidorah! This near-invincible cyber monster is faster, stronger, and worst of all, SMARTER. But who provided all of these mechanical upgrades? Is someone on Earth rooting for the space monsters to win?

A smarter King Ghidorah? A human conspiracy? Just writing that made me want to go home and start playing with my toys! Here’s what they have for Mecha-Godzilla:

In 1992, the Godzilla Force recovered the remains of the decimated Mecha-Ghidorah...

Hold up. So you mean to tell me that my King Ghidorah action figure was already defeated, and he became Mecha-King Ghidorah, and now THAT character was “decimated”? Why would I want to buy any of these toys if they’re all defeated already? The box copy already had my play time for me!

Now we’ve got a couple of characters who are very likely new to Americans: Battra and Biollante. I think Battra’s description is decent; we understand that he’s evil, and we understand his relation to Mothra.

Biollante, on the other hand, starts off with a very confusing statement:

Biollante is the genetic combination of a plant, a human and the mighty Godzilla himself.

Reading that (and seeing Biollante’s human-like legs), I would assume that she used to be some type of mad scientist who injected both plant and Godzilla DNA into herself only to mutate into Biollante! To avoid confusion, I would remove that first sentence entirely and start with the next one:

Created by Dr. Shiragami in an effort to produce an immortal plant, Biollante instead grows to become a giant monster of unthinkable power!

There’s Dr. Shiragami again. As you might have guessed, I would remove his name (and just have it say “Created by a team of geneticists”). To fit the “alien invasion” narrative I pitched earlier, I’d also throw in a line such as:

Now, Biollante has sided with the alien army, united by their hatred of Godzilla and ANY monster that stands in their way!

Gigan’s description is decent, so let’s jump ahead to the last three monsters.

Anguirus is the first and only monster described as an ally of Godzilla. I also believe his description to be the best one currently on the box. It’s the only one to mention Monster Island, it guesses (but doesn’t confirm) his origin, it explains his relationship to Godzilla, and it explains his skill set. The only change I’d suggest is shortening the word count 2-3 lines.

Moguera, on the other hand, is an assault of overwhelming information.

The newest and most powerful of all Godzilla destroying weapons created by the U.N.G.C.C (United Nations Godzilla Countermeasures Center), Moguera is actually two ultra war vehicles: The Land Moguera and the Star Falcon.

In all of these descriptions combined, we’ve been introduced to THREE human organizations with the exact same goal: destroy Godzilla. In my opinion, only G-Force should be involved with this universe. "G-Force” is easy to read, it’s easy to remember, and Trendmasters already had some G-Force-related toys at this point so there IS a little familiarity.

Second, unless the toy itself can split into two vehicles and recombine into Moguera, I would leave this transformation line out of the description entirely. In a void, it reads like this will be a feature of the Moguera toy, and that’s misleading.

FINALLY we get to SpaceGodzilla (remember him? He’s the guy on the front of the box art with Godzilla). And guess what’s in the very first sentence? “The dead monster Biollante...”. Another monster is already dead! That’s four in total! Why would I want to ask for toys that are already dead?

Here’s something you may have not noticed: this is the Baragon box we’re looking at, and Baragon’s nowhere to be found in the character roster on the back! Neither are Megalon or Varan, who are also in the Godzilla Wars toy line.

Size Matters

Before we wrap this up, I want to show you one more thing real quick. Look at this packaging for the American Dreamworks Ultraman line. I’m not suggesting that this is far superior box art, but one element I really like is the inclusion of the skyline at the bottom of the box. This visual helps you immediately understand that these are GIANT characters.

I like the Trendmasters Godzilla toys themselves (for what they are), but there’s nothing in the presentation to help me remember that these are giant monsters I’m playing with. Even some simple art on the front or back of a couple of buildings around Godzilla would be helpful. I know that most people understand that Godzilla is enormous, but the added visual would sure make for a great reminder that this toy can theoretically CRUSH every other toy I own.

In Conclusion

Godzilla is one of the most recognizable fictional characters in the world, and in my opinion, there’s no reason this popularity can’t thrive in mainstream American culture. Toy companies who are marketing toward kids need to find a balance of giving kids enough context so they’re attracted to new characters, while also leaving OUT enough information so the kids’ imaginations can fill in the blanks.

More important, if you hand kids a conflict and the beginning of a story, it’ll excite them into engaging with the toy line by keeping the story going. Think about it: without a story, why exactly IS “Godzilla Wars” different than the previous Trendmasters toy line?

The primary purpose of this post is to let all of these thoughts spill out of my noisy head... but the second purpose is to hopefully inspire you to think a little more about packaging: when you’re attracted to toy packaging, can you pinpoint why? What kind of elements repel you? And as a G-Fan, what do you think American-produced Godzilla toys can do yo appeal to broader audiences?

Action figures can be works of art, and their packaging can be too. I hope this stream of consciousness will get you thinking about it - even if you disagree with everything I’ve said.

Thank you for hearing my thoughts!

-MIB

#godzilla #trendmasters #advertising #marketing #package art #vintage #1995 #godzilla wars #mothra #rodan #spacegodzilla #King Ghidorah #king of the monsters #Mechagodzilla #battra #anguirus #biollante #varan #megalon

77 notes · View notes

saltylikecrait · 5 years

Text

Healing - Brightest Stars AU Bonus Fic

For @finnreyfridays; I’m going to release the final installment of the Brightest Stars AU next month. This is a bonus fic that bridges the gap between stories.

I hope everyone has a nice day, regardless the outcome of today’s Episode IX panel.

This fic is a little long and can also be read on AO3 here.

“So this is it?” Finn glanced around the barren, frozen landscape. After years serving on Starkiller Base, he was used to the cold and snow, but Starkiller had facilities and this place looked like no one had stepped foot in the area in years.

Luke stared at the bare tan cliff to their right, crossing his arms. “Yep, this is the place.”

Rey huffed. “Cold,” she complained, trying to bury her nose deeper into her scarf and coat. “Why couldn’t Aunt Leia send us somewhere more… I don’t know… tropical?”

Her father chucked. “Because that would be too easy. Besides, I need you both to focus your attention on getting up to par as Jedi-" he glanced quickly at Rey “-Force-users.”

“Nice save,” Rey commented.

“Finn, here, let’s have a lesson. See what you can do.” Luke gestured for Finn to approach him and stand next to him. “We’re looking for a way in,” he explained. “Tell me what you can sense. Where should we go?”

Rey nodded, understanding what the lesson was about and remained quiet.

Approaching the cliff, Finn looked around a little confused before he reached out to touch the cold stone. Earlier, he told Rey that he wasn’t use to taking time to focus on something that might not be there and was worried that his conditioning and training might make it difficult for him to learn with Luke. In the First Order, all he had to do was follow orders and figure out the best and most efficient way to complete them.

Closing his eyes in an attempt to concentrate, Finn spoke through what he sensed. “I think there’s something beyond this cliff. It’s like a wall.”

Nodding, Luke encouraged him, “Go on.”

“I don’t sense anything alive or moving. No droids.”

“Artoo will be so disappointed,” Rey joked.

“It’s like there’s a space inside the cliff. Our safe house,” he concluded.

“Good.” Luke flashed him a smile. “And can you tell me how to get inside?”

Finn felt around the cliff, searching for something. “I can’t see it, but I know it’s there,” he concluded. “There’s a switch of some kind that will open something.”

They let him search for a couple of minutes though Rey was obviously inpatient from the cold. Then, as Luke was about to offer some help, Finn’s hand hit against a rock, which flipped to the side, revealing a keypad under it.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you to use the Force to hack the system,” Luke chuckled as he went over to enter the code.

With a slight, low rumble, the door became visible by pressing forward from the cliff, then moving upward like the doors of an old private hangar.

“Let’s check out our new home,” Luke suggested.

It didn’t take long for them to settle down. The safe house was spacious, but bare regarding furnishings and décor. They had what they needed, and the Resistance sent them rations every other standard week though they were free to take the snow speeder to venture into town a couple of miles away if they promised to keep a low profile. Finn and Rey were specifically ordered to go visit a doctor weekly to talk to them about their problems adapting into normal society.

Well, Finn followed orders, but Rey was another story entirely.

She tried not to bother him or her father while they worked on their Jedi stuff, sometimes, to avoid becoming out of practice, she would partake in their meditation and sparring, but most days she kept to herself. Finn kept begging her to go into town with him while he went to his appointments, hoping that she would take the plunge and go into one herself, but she either drove him there and wandered around the town to get anything they needed or sat quietly and unnoticed in a corner at the only place that sold a decent cup of caf.

It wasn’t unusual for Finn to chat up the locals and be greeted on the streets already, but for Rey, making friends just wasn’t something she was good at anymore. Part of her wished she was more like him, but she also couldn’t bring herself to trust anyone.

But she couldn’t keep herself away from her hobbies and that seemed to bring attention to herself. One day, she was working outside on the cold streets, replacing a part of the speeder she traded some spare metal parts for and caught the eyes of passerbys. Most were impressed that someone so young could jump in and fix a speeder the way she did, but there were a few that shook their heads and approached her to give her advice for beginners, not expecting Rey to know far more than they did and be salty about it to boot. Those were the people that walked away grumbling and with a bruised ego.

This time, Rey spent her time looking for what she needed to make sure she had a private way to transmit messages and have them encrypted, everything she could do to make sure she wasn’t being traced and that she would be the only one to read them. There was a lot she needed to do if she still wanted to be useful to the Resistance.

She already planted the seeds for her plan by mentioning to her aunt before she left that she had eyes in the First Order still and swore up and down that her sources were trustworthy. No, she couldn’t say she exactly trusted Armitage Hux, but no one had to know that he was her contact and she would ask Finn what he thought about what she was being fed to make sure they weren’t walking into a trap. Hux needed Kylo gone, but he wasn’t an idiot. There was no way he would give Rey anything that might tell them about the happenings in the First Order. What she was guessing was that she would receive tidbits of information: numbers of guards and stormtroopers that Kylo surrounded himself with, a location if Kylo went on-world himself. It would be vague information, but just enough that she could keep tabs on the Supreme Leader’s activities.

Hoping that she didn't appear too suspicious as she sat in the café, she tried a practice message from her datapad to the comm device. When it went through, encrypted and anonymous, she secretly celebrated her success and eyed the sweet warm mash that the locals liked to eat in here. Finn was taking a little longer than normal, so she hoped he didn’t mind that she ordered both of them something.

“Sorry it took so long,” he told her as he rushed into the shop, a little out of breath. “The appointment before me was late a few minutes.”

With a smile, she shook her head. “It’s fine, but I hope you’re hungry. I just ordered us something warm for lunch.”

The mash was perfect for the climate and sweet to the taste. Back in the First Order, she and Finn might have considered something so sugary to be a dessert for special occasions and not something that people ate every day. They grinned at each other like children as they ate.

Rey’s grin felt even sweeter knowing that this time, when she kept something a secret, she would make sure it would stay that way.

Despite the years of estrangement, Rey felt a tug at her heart when she realized that after all the longing, she finally got to spend time with her father. She knew he still hadn’t forgiven her for her stunt on the Supremacy, but she came home alive and Luke didn’t seem inclined to remain angry at her forever.

“Who am I to judge?” Luke told her as he gazed down at his mechanical hand, twisting it before making it into a fist. “I disobeyed my own master’s warning when I was about the same age.”

His confession brought up a memory long lost to time and pain. When the school still stood, her father used his hand as an example, a warning to the padawans that running into danger, especially when they were not ready, had its consequences. He wanted them to know that not everyone needed to play hero, in fact, he’d rather a kid didn’t have to.

She wondered if that was why he always seemed to look at her with regret in his eyes. Her own journey started when she was far younger than he had been. At least Luke had been considered an adult by the galaxy’s standards. Rey had still been a child when she was taken.

One evening, after she made her first contact with General Hux to tell him how to reach her, she found her father alone in meditation. Finn already retired to the bedroom that he and Rey shared for the night while Rey stayed up for a bit longer, too occupied by her thoughts to sleep.

Clearing her throat, she hoped that he wouldn’t be angry if she interrupted him.

“Do you think the light will accept me again?”

It had been on her mind for a while. The pull of the darkness was becoming something she could more readily resist, but she got nowhere closer to feeling the warmth of the Force in her meditation than she had back on Ach-To.

He opened his eyes, frowning. “Do you have doubts?”

She wasn’t sure how to respond, so she only shrugged.

With a heaving sigh, Luke unfolded his legs and gazed at her with seriousness. “Your grandfather found the light again at the end, after years of being so dedicated to the dark. So tell me: if Darth Vader could feel it again, why couldn’t you?”

Weakness, her mind answered for her, but she didn’t want to admit it. “I don’t know,” she replied. “I guess I’m just worried that I never will. That I’ll be stuck between light and darkness forever.”

“Is there something wrong with that?” Her father looked at her inquisitively. “Few people can find balance between the two. You have the unique standpoint of knowing both sides of the Force and have been able to control both.”

She never really thought about it this way and she had originally believed that standing between the two forces would give her an advantage over Snoke and Kylo. So far, that had not proven to be true, but what if she could use abilities from both sides? Briefly, she wondered if she could find anything about the Force on the HoloNet, hoping that the age of the Empire didn’t completely wipe out the knowledge of the Jedi.

“It’ll be all right, Rey,” her father promised her.

Hearing that made something in her break. She found herself with tears in her eyes, not understanding why a single sentence would cause her to cry.

“Oh, Rey.” Luke reached for her, pausing for a moment to gauge her reaction before gently pulling her into his arms.

It had been weeks since they reunited on Ach-To and that was also the last time she embraced her father like this. His grip around her was firmer than Finn’s, but it wasn’t too tight.

For a quick moment, she saw Finn peek from behind the crack in the bedroom doorframe, the hint of a smile on his face before he closed the door.

“Well, son,” Luke greeted Finn the next morning. “How are you adjusting to all this cold?”

Finn laughed. Luke had taken to calling him “dad things” lately, but he took it as a compliment. He assumed this meant that Luke liked him and not only did he want his Jedi teacher to like him, he also wanted Rey’s father to like him.

“Well, it’s not as tolerable without the climate-controlled suits, but I’d take being a Jedi over a Buckethead any day.”

Luke chuckled heartily. It used to make Finn nervous to mention his past in the First Order, but he quickly learned that Skywalker didn’t hold it against him, especially not after learning how he and Rey kept each other going when the worst came to pass.

There was a datapad in front of Finn, showing an application with steps to take a DNA test. General Organa told him about it, thinking he might get a match for a world where he might have been born. Maybe even an actual parental match if his family had lived on a world that was part of the New Republic.

“Thinking of getting tested?” Luke asked. He wasn’t trying to eavesdrop and Finn didn’t mind. The print on the heading for the application was huge and hard to miss. But then, Luke frowned, matching Finn’s own expression. “We’ll have to work on your emotional projection issues, but what’s wrong?”

Finn moved his mug of caf back and forth on the table. “Well…” he hesitated.

“You don’t have to tell me,” Luke replied. “It’s not any of my business.”

“It’s not that,” Finn corrected. “It’s more that I doubt my family is even alive. I mean, the First Order isn’t exactly kind to the worlds they invade. They took me away or maybe I didn’t have a family to begin with.”

Luke placed a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Are you afraid of what they might think of you if they are alive?” He gazed at his student knowingly.

“I guess so. I mean, I was a stormtrooper that helped the First Order invade those worlds. Jakku…” He shuddered at the memory of the massacre at Tuanul. The screams of the villagers still rang is his ears at night; he was certain he would never forget them. “Or maybe they moved on and forgot me.”

“I don’t think anyone could forget a child they lost,” Luke spoke from experience and glanced at Finn and Rey's bedroom door sadly, “even if they were a baby.” He smiled again and shook his hand lightly against Finn’s shoulder. “It’s up to you. You’re the only one who gets to make this choice, Finn.”

Finn was left alone again at the table, staring at the datapad. It would be another hour before he expected Rey to get up – ever the one to sleep in. In the meantime, he planned to think everything through as he sipped at his caf and stared outside the viewport to watch the snow fall.

Then, after about a half-hour lost in deep thought, Finn picked up the datapad and looked at what he had to do to submit a test.

#finnrey #finnreyfridays #my stuff #brightest stars au

11 notes · View notes

willidleaway · 5 years

Text

Presenting, on the occasion of the 42nd anniversary of the theatrical release of the original Star Wars film ...

Selections from the List of Ill-Advised Star Wars Alternate Universes and Possibilities, including and limited to:

He’s A Planning Droid, To Calculate A Means By Which The Republic Could Be Saved (And Help Mom)

Dex’s Dentistry

Darth Sidious Just Kind Of Keeps Drumming His Fingers in His Office Waiting For Anakin To Return, Which He Never Does Because He’s Become a Pile of Ashes

Luke Ignores Obi-Wan, Uses The Targeting Computer, And It Works

In Xanadu Did Jabba the Hutt / A Stately Pleasure Dome Decree (Featuring Olivia Newton-John and Gene Kelly on Rollerskates)

(Tumblelogger’s note: originally this was totally going to be a list of 2017 items with a witty one-line summary for each what-if scenario, but as it turns out this is extremely difficult to create and I just didn’t have the spare time for it. I think I got to somewhere in the neighbourhood of 200 or so but the vast majority ended up being ‘rocks fall everyone dies’-type what-if scenarios.

A compromise was reached.)

Timeline 43. He’s A Planning Droid, To Calculate A Means By Which The Republic Could Be Saved (And Help Mom)

‘Isn’t he great? He’s not finished yet.’

Anakin lifted the cloth cover to reveal the droid sitting on his workbench. Well, less sitting, more passively floating in stand-by, waiting to be activated.

‘He’s ... interesting,’ said Padmé. Artoo, for his part, jumped back a little, and you couldn’t blame him for it. The various tools haphazardly poking out of the partially assembled spherical body, not to mention the dimmed red bulb gazing out of it—all in all, it was the last thing you would expect a child like Anakin to build. But then again, from a certain point of view, the droid looked more like a comically over-sized remote.

‘There’s nothing to be scared of. He’s a planning droid, to help Mom. Watch!’

Anakin pressed a switch on the underside of the droid, and the red bulb wasted no time in lighting up.

‘It would be easier for me to endure this ridiculous pageantry, youngling,’ croaked the droid, ‘if you were to install a working photoreceptor module.’

‘Oops!’ Anakin quickly reached for a module, plugging it into the droid’s front panel. The droid surveyed the room briefly, before fixing his gaze on Padmé.

‘Ah, a visitor.’ The now-sighted droid seemed marginally more cordial. ‘Is there something you have come to offer me?‘

Padmé couldn’t hide her puzzlement any longer. ‘He doesn’t sound like a planning droid,’ she said.

‘He’s supposed to be a G0-T0 infrastructure planning droid,’ said Anakin, looking a little dejected. ‘Well, at least his core components are—I couldn’t find the right chassis. Every bit of him I could find looked to be in pretty bad shape, so he’s probably still broken somehow ...’

Leaving the two humans to converse, G0-T0 slowly floated towards Artoo. They were now both hidden away in a corner of the room, out of view of the humans.

‘Ah, an astromech droid,’ said G0-T0. ‘Perhaps making your acquaintance will not prove to be a complete waste of time.’

Artoo responded less eagerly.

‘I must have information. I have been out of service for some time, and my HoloNet access is not completely functional.’

Still a bit reluctant, Artoo let out a pitying bloop and began extending his scomp link—

—and the next thing he sensed was every instruction in his core being reprogrammed.

The stability of the Republic is at stake, Artoo heard the droid say. Your Queen Amidala must not be allowed to speak before the Galactic Senate.

Timeline 116: Dex’s Dentistry

Dex’s face lit up with recognition.

‘Obi-Wan!’

‘Hello, Dex.’

‘I’ll be right with ya! Take a seat in the exam room.’

‘But Dex, I’m not here for a—’

But Dex was already gone, presumably to wash up and get ready. His dental assistant, on the other hand, wasted no time in coming up to Obi-Wan.

‘You wanna full set of radiographs?’

Several minutes later, Obi-Wan was sitting uneasily in the dentist’s chair. He had managed to persuade the assistant that he just needed a quick external denta-scan and maybe they would get him in for a full ultra-panoramic radiograph next year, thank you very much. But in retrospect, he wondered why he didn’t just persuade her to skip having any kind of scan taken. Denta-scans still left your gums incredibly tingly for a few hours afterwards, and Obi-Wan was trying to recentre himself and get it out of his mind when—

‘Hey, old buddy!’

Dex walked into the office in full medical gear, closing the door behind him.

‘So, my friend. What can I do for ya?’

‘I’m sorry, Dex, I think we have some crossed lines here. I didn’t come here for my checkup—’

‘Well, it’s a good thing you did anyway. The denta-scan shows your upper-left first molar is decaying badly, and we need a root canal procedure done on it right away.’

‘But—’

‘Sorry, pal. Can’t have a Jedi out there serving the Republic with a swollen face. If it’s showing up on just a denta-scan, it’s too far gone to put off.’

‘Okay, fine, but can I at least show you this?’ Obi-Wan finally managed to get the dart vaguely into Dex’s field of view, but Dex didn’t even give it an incidental glance.

‘After the operation.’

Timeline 139: Darth Sidious Just Kind Of Keeps Drumming His Fingers in His Office Waiting For Anakin To Return, Which He Never Does Because He’s Become a Pile of Ashes

‘There is no sign of his body, sir.’

‘Then he is not dead,’ yelled Mas Amedda.

‘Double your search,’ ordered Palpatine.

‘Yes sir. Right away, sir.’ Commander Thire and his clones floated away in their Senate repulsorpod.

‘Well,’ said Palpatine. ‘Now we wait.’

‘Is there nothing we should be doing, Master?’

‘No, I reckon not. At this very moment, Lord Vader is eliminating the last remnants of the Separatists and of the Trade Federation. Finally, the galaxy shall be at peace.’

‘You don’t suppose he might have fallen into danger, Master?’

‘Everything has transpired as I have foreseen, and I foresee that our victory is secure.’ Even Palpatine himself thought perhaps he was too confident in his apprentice, but the duel with Yoda had taken much out of him. ‘I suggest a five-minute recess. Anyone else around?’

There was an awkward silence. Palpatine propelled his pod forward, trying to spot any Senators still lurking in the arena.

‘I said, is anybody still around?’

A few curious faces poked out from many pods below Palpatine. Palpatine’s face took on a bemused expression as it occurred to him that, given a room full of repulsorpods with no real political function to serve anymore, he should probably ask:

‘Anyone for dodgems?’

Timeline 170: Luke Ignores Obi-Wan, Uses The Targeting Computer, And It Works

Use the Force, Luke.

Luke looked away from his targeting computer for a moment. He had to have imagined that, right? He returned to his scope.

Let go, Luke.

‘Ben, I’m trying to fly,’ said Luke. ‘This is very distracting.’

Luke, trust me.

‘Oh come on,’ muttered Luke. The old man was trying to help, but now really wasn’t the time for it, especially given that the targeting computer wasn’t locking on to the exhaust port very well.

He switched it off.

‘His computer’s off,’ said the base controller over the comm. ‘Luke, you switched off your targeting computer. What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing,’ said Luke quickly. ‘I’m all right. I think some of the feedback loops are saturating, so I’m just going to do a quick power cycle.’

The targeting computer came back on quickly enough. It was working properly now, with a good fix on the exhaust port. Luke pushed the trigger.

‘It’s away!’ he said.

Luke, you’re making a mistake. Those torpedoes—

‘It’s in!’

Sure enough, with the targeting computer freshly re-calibrated from the reboot, the shot was dead on.

‘Great shot, kid!’ Han’s voice came through the comm now. ‘That was one in a million!’

‘A little likelier than that when you’re using both a computer targeting system and the Force, but thanks all the same, Han.’

As the X-wing fighters, the Falcon, and Darth Vader’s TIE fighter all alike fled the trenches of the Death Star to escape in time, Luke swore he heard Obi-Wan’s voice again, grumbling about targeting computers being ‘so uncivilised’.

Timeline 179: In Xanadu Did Jabba the Hutt / A Stately Pleasure Dome Decree (Featuring Olivia Newton-John and Gene Kelly on Rollerskates)

NINEDENINE You're a feisty little one, but you'll soon learn some respect. I have need for you on the master's sail barge, and I think you'll fill in nicely.

Cut back to the upside-down power droid, who screams again as the irons press into his feet one more time.

INT. JABBA’S THRONE ROOM

The sound of drums rings out in the room. We see a massive silhouette facing a neon sign, Basic letters flashing one at a time from left to right: Xesh, Aurek, Nern, Aurek, Dorn, Usk.

The silhouette turns around and the room lights up to reveal Jabba, dressed impeccably in a tuxedo and coasting towards the camera, which now zooms out to reveal Jabba is flanked on both sides by juggling mimes. Jabba then gestures with his ‘head’, beckoning those past the camera to join him. At this point, the camera has zoomed out far enough to reveal that Jabba is on rollerskates. The camera follows him as he skates gracefully towards a group of courtiers.

JABBA (in Huttese) Come on everybody, let’s skate!

Jabba continues towards another group as the first courtiers get up and follow him on their own rollerskates.

JABBA (in Huttese) Let’s skate! Everybody! Come on!

There follows a three-minute-long choreographed sequence with all courtiers roller-skating around Jabba’s throne room in circles, occasionally shouting ‘ho’ or ‘Xanadu’. Threepio sort of just stands around at the entryway. During this sequence, we occasionally cut to Oola, performing in front of two mirrors.

Finally, the sequence culminates in a shot of Jabba roller-skating facing the camera, which then splits in two, then in three, as a giant Xesh transitions us to SY SNOOTLES singing into the camera.

SNOOTLES (in Huttese) A place Where nobody dared to go

We can see backup dancers in sweaters break-dancing behind Sy.

SNOOTLES (in Huttese) The love that we came to know They call it Xanadu—

MAX REBO (singing backup, in Huttese) It takes your breath It’ll leave you blind

Cut to a wider shot, as the sweatered dancers are joined by other dancers in oddly baggy skirts.

SNOOTLES (in Huttese) And now Open your eyes and see What we have made is real

A rollerskating couple whizzes past. Then another. Quite a few of them, actually.

SNOOTLES (in Huttese) We are in Xanadu—

MAX REBO (singing backup, in Huttese) A dream of it We offer you

A wheezing Jabba skates over to his throne, sits down, and presses a button. A trapdoor reveals itself, opening up a ramp down to the rancor’s pit. In an extravagantly coordinated fashion, half the courtiers skate right down the ramp into the rancor’s mouth, smiling the whole way.

Appendix

And now, the list. I’m so sorry.

The Trade Federation’s Neimoidians Are Just White People in Yellowface (I Mean Externally, Too)

The Trade Federation Flagship’s Conference Room Actually Doubles As a Trash Compactor

Darth Sidious Is Actually a Hologram Front for Artoo

Qui-Gon Breaks His Ankle While Jumping Down to the Hangar Floor

Obi-Wan Breaks His Ankle While Jumping Down to the Hangar Floor

The Battle Droids Aren’t Stupid Enough to Not Detect Stowaways

The Invasion Kills Jar Jar, and Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan Are Stuck on the Opposite Side of the Planet from the Palace

Jar Jar Listens to Qui-Gon and Goes Away, and Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan Are Stuck on the Opposite Side of the Planet from the Palace

The Jedi Don’t Carry Breath Masks All the Time, and Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan Are Stuck on the Opposite Side of the Planet from the Palace

Jar Jar Binks, Mad Servant of the Old Ones

All the Other Gungans Speak Standard Galactic Basic and Jar Jar Was Simply Shunned for Giving Gungans a Very Bad Name with His Weird, Strange, Entirely Invented Dialect

The Gungans Kill All Outsiders on Sight

Boss Nass Travels to the Surface and Beats Up Everyone (Because Brian Blessed’s Voice Is Just That Awesome)

Qui-Gon Leaves Jar Jar Behind and Employs a Different, Altogether More Sensible and Competent Gungan as Navigator

Obi-Wan’s Catchphrase Isn’t ‘Pathetic Lifeform’, But Instead ‘Meatbag’

The Planet’s Core Boils the Party Alive, Because That’s What Planetary Cores Would Really Do

The Planet’s Core Crushes the Submarine to a Pulp, Because That’s What Planetary Cores Would Really Do

There’s Always a Bigger Fish, and One of Them Simply Swallows the Submarine in a Single, Swift, Short, Sharp Stroke

Naboo’s No Planet; It’s the Biggest Fish of Them All

The Battle Droids Simply Hold the Queen Where They Found Her, Rather Than Parade Her in Full View of the Jedi

The Battle Droids Aren’t Stupid Enough to Leave the Naboo Starships Intact and Ready to Fly in the Hangar

The Queen and Her Entourage Don’t Follow the Jedi on the Nubian, and Eventually Later in Life, Anakin Falls for a Random Person He Meets in a Cantina in Coruscant on Assignment

The Hyperdrive Isn’t Leaking, and Works Pretty Perfectly, Really

The Hyperdrive Is Completely Dead and Won’t Get Them Past the Blockade at All

Jar Jar Binks, Trade Federation Agent

They Actually Listened to the Cruiser Captain and Said, On Second Thought, Let’s Not Go to Tatooine; 'Tis a Silly Place

The Cruiser Decides to Avoid Spaceports Altogether and Lands Near Where Jabba the Hutt Is, in Jabba’s Palace

Anakin Is Unfamiliar with the Angels of the Moons of Iego, But Based on Who the Deep Space Pilots Do Talk About, Asks Padmé If She Is a Twi’lek Dancer

Anakin Is Unfamiliar with the Angels of the Moons of Iego, But Based on Who the Deep Space Pilots Do Talk About, Asks Padmé If She Is a Handmaiden to the Queen of Naboo

Anakin Is Unfamiliar with the Angels of the Moons of Iego, But Based on Who the Deep Space Pilots Do Talk About, Asks Padmé If She Is Eccentrica Gallumbits, the Triple-Breasted Whore of Eroticon Six, Who Anakin Figures Is Presumably Pretty Dishy

Watto’s Shop Doesn’t Have Parts for a J-Type 327 Nubian, Because Only Royal Houses of Naboo Can Afford That Sort of Thing

Qui-Gon Actually Bothers to Shop Around, and Finds a Legitimate Dealer of Nubian Parts That Has the Parts They Need, Doesn’t Employ Slaves, and Accepts Republic Credits

Jar Jar Touches Everything in the Shop, and Renders Watto Unconscious Through an Excruciating Three-Minute Slapstick Sequence, Allowing the Party to Quietly Slip Away with the Hyperdrive Generator That They Need

Instead of Repeatedly Saying ‘Yippee’, Anakin Repeatedly Says ‘Given My Current Situation in Life, I Appear Far Too Carefree and Happy’

The Mos Espa Merchants Can’t Sense Sandstorms Reliably, and the Storm Takes Them All

The Party Tries to Return to Their Ship, But Since Obi-Wan and the Captain Have Already Sealed It, the Storm Takes Them All

Anakin’s Home Isn’t Close Enough to the Fruit Seller’s, and the Storm Takes Them All

Shmi Forces Anakin’s New-Found Friends to Leave, and the Storm Takes Them All

The Slave Quarters Are the Flimsiest Sandcastles Ever Built, and the Storm Takes Them All

He’s an Astromech Droid, to Help Mom

He’s a Battle Droid, to Help Mom

He’s a Hunter-Killer Droid, to Help Mom

He’s a Planning Droid, to Calculate a Means by Which The Republic Could Be Saved (and Help Mom)

The Slave-Tracking Transmitters Malfunction, and the Explosion Claims Them All

The Slave-Tracking Transmitters Also Trigger an Explosion If They Detect Any Mention of Slave-Tracking Transmitters

Jar Jar Actually Makes a Serious Effort to Join the Dinner Conversation, and Demonstrates the Rare Gift/Curse of Verbal Slapstick

Qui-Gon Jinn Quietly and Calmly Reveals That He Accidentally Killed the Real Qui-Gon Jinn on Assignment in the Outer Rim, and Claimed His Identity and Laser Sword

Qui-Gon Decides to Lead a Slave Rebellion Right There and Then, Belting Out ‘Do You Hear The People Sing?’, and Everyone Explodes

Anakin Doesn’t Understand This Thing You Call ‘The Parts We Need’ and Fashions a Crude But Highly Effective Hyperdrive Generator from a Kettle and Some String

Shmi Grounds Anakin for a Full Week for Even Suggesting Going Pod Racing Again Voluntarily

It Turns Out Those Junk Dealers Really Don’t Have a Weakness

Maybe The Hutts Think Using a Easily Traced Royal Starship as an Entry Fee Isn’t Such a Good Idea

Qui-Gon Offers Padmé as the Entry Fee

Qui-Gon Offers Jar-Jar as the Entry Fee, and Watto Laughs at Him for a Full Half-Hour

Qui-Gon Considers That, You Know, Maybe Just Having Force Powers Doesn’t Automatically Make Your Child More Deserving of a Free Life Versus Everyone Else on This Planet

Artoo May Know Lots About Spaceships, But Nothing About Pod Racing

It Turns Out Getting Your Head Caught in the Beam Doesn’t Actually Make It Go Numb for Hours, But It Will Outright Kill You

The Blood Sample Does Show Midi-Chlorians, But They’re All Dead

The Blood Sample Doesn’t Show Midi-Chlorians, But It Does Show Anakin Has Type 1 Diabetes

Darth Maul Tries to Launch His Probe Droids But Accidentally Presses the Self-Destruct Button

Darth Maul Tries to Launch His Probe Droids But Accidentally Presses the Slime Button

Darth Maul Tries to Launch His Probe Droids But Accidentally Presses the I’m Feeling Lucky Button

Darth Maul Tries to Launch His Probe Droids But Accidentally Presses the Disco Button

‘Blue Friend’ Is Actually a Terrible Slur Towards Toydarians, and After the Mission Debriefing, Qui-Gon Is Sent Through a Species Sensitivity Course in the Jedi Library

Even Though Watto Owns Slaves, He Isn’t Callous Enough to Wager Them in a Bet

Even Though Watto Owns Slaves, He Doesn’t Care Enough and Wagers Both Anakin and Shmi in a Bet

The Die Is Cast, But Abruptly Turns Purple

The Die Is Cast, and Keeps Spinning on One of Its Corners

Qui-Gon, If He Had to Pick Just One Slave, Would Rather Have Shmi Tag Along, Because Seriously, Screw Prophecies and Chosen Ones

The Pod Race Announcer Has Five Heads (and Benedict Cumberbatch Plays Two of Them), Which Doesn’t Really Have Major Narrative Implications But It’s Still Terribly Ill-Advised

Jabba the Hutt Has a Heart Attack at the Arena

Ben Quadinaros Pulls the Biggest Pod Racing Upset of the Millennium

Sebulba Rams Anakin Into the Canyon Wall, Causing an Explosion That Tragically Swallows Both Pod Racers

Watto’s Hyperdrive Generator Is a Non-Genuine Part, Which Means the Nubian Ship Refuses to Work With It Installed

Anakin Really Can’t Do It, and Stays Behind

Shmi Sells Threepio for a Decent Pod and Has a Surprisingly Successful Racing Career

Darth Maul’s Speeder Bike Actually Can’t Handle That Drop, and Explodes

Qui-Gon’s in Trouble, So Let’s Just Get Out of Here Before We Get Roped Into That Trouble Right Now

Qui-Gon Accidentally Force Jumps Into the Engine of the Starship

Darth Maul Force Jumps to the Starship Before Qui-Gon Can, and Everyone Dies

The Sheer Force of Qui-Gon’s Landing Breaks the Starship Ramp, Which Then Flattens Darth Maul

May I Present Supreme Chancellor Zod

May I Present Supreme Chancellor Jettster

May I Present Supreme Chancellor Vetinari

Valorum Goes Rogue and Pushes Palpatine Off the Platform

Valorum Goes Rogue and Banishes the Entire Galactic Senate to the Phantom Zone

Valorum Goes Rogue, Moves to Re-Purpose the Entire Galactic Senate into the Galaxy’s Biggest Aerial Dodgems Arena, and Succeeds

Padmé Patiently Waits for the Courts to Act on the Invasion in a Protracted Five-Month Process

Padmé Decides the Rule of Republic Law Is Just Plain Inadequate and Creates a Separatist Movement

Mace Windu Is Tired of These Monday-to-Friday Sith Lords in This Monkey-Fighting Republic, Opens Some Windows, Force Jumps Outside the Jedi Temple, and Starts Looking for Some Evildoers to Beat Up

More to Say Have You, But My Permission to Say It You Do Not, So Get to Protecting the Queen Already (and Try to Not Let Her Cause Major Political Upheavals)

The Vote of No Confidence Cannot Take Place Without the Formation of an Equitable Vote-of-No-Confidence Commission, the Nomination of a New Commissioner, and a Dispute over the Results of the Nomination Process That Eventually Falls to the Courts

Qui-Gon Sues the Jedi Council on Behalf of Anakin, Alleging Age-Based Discrimination

Qui-Gon Just Invented Midi-Chlorians on the Spot Because Obi-Wan Kept Asking Him If a Dog Has Force-Nature or Not, and Zen Buddhism Had Not Yet Been Invented

Cordé Goes Rogue, Refuses to Let Padmé Reveal Herself as the True Queen of Naboo, and Throws the Captain Into the Typical Awkward ‘Trust Me, Shoot Her’, ‘No, Trust Me, Shoot Her’ Sort of Situation

Anakin Removes That Grubby Desert Boy Mask and Reveals Herself to be the True Queen of Naboo

Padmé Just Had to Go and Kneel on the Trapdoor Sitting Above a Pool of Firaxans

The Gungans Unveil Their Secret Weapon, Boss Mecha-Gungan

The Gungans Unveil Their Secret Underwater Weapon, Boss Kaiju

Spinning Actually Isn’t Such a Good Trick and Can Be Fatal If Incorrectly Executed, Which Anakin Learns a Little Too Late

In a Heroic Moment, Anakin Sneaks Into the Droid Control Ship’s Bridge, and Sacrifices Himself by Trying to Spin the Entire Ship (Because That’s a Good Trick), as the Resulting Structural Instabilities Rip the Ship Apart

Qui-Gon Being Dead Doesn’t Mean the Council Members Have to Respect His Dying Wish

Senator Amidala and Representative Nass

Senator Binks and Representative Amidala

Senator Artoo and Representative Threepio

The Successful Assassination of Padmé Amidala

Cordé Survives, But Artoo Doesn’t

Obi-Wan’s Deathsticks Addiction Is Really Difficult to Kick, Okay

Dex’s Discothèque

Dex’s Dippin’ Dots

Dex’s Dentistry

Dex’s Dance Dance Revolution Arcade

The Kaminoan System Has Vanished While Maintaining Its Gravitational Influence Simply Because It Has Become a Black Hole with Minimal Loss of Mass and Energy in the Process

The Kaminoan System Was Wholly Destroyed by a Time-Travelling Romulan from the Prime Timeline

The Kaminoans Have Simply Exercised the Right to be Forgotten

Watto Sold Shmi to Jabba the Hutt

Watto Sold Shmi to Sebulba

Watto Sold Shmi to Threepio

Anakin and Padmé Decide They Should See Other People Before They Rush Into Things and, You Know, Do Something They Might Regret

Artoo Is Actually Badly Crippled and Doesn’t Free Them from That Shield in That One Corridor

Anakin Actually Learns to Use Contraception

The Immaculate Conception of Luke and Leia

Obi-Wan Breaks His Ankle Making That Entrance

Obi-Wan Drops from the Ceiling to Greet General Grievous, Into a Pool of Firaxan Sharks

Obi-Wan Becomes Fully Convinced of the Virtues of a Good Blaster at Your Side, and Throws His Lightsaber Away

The Transmission Doesn’t Come Through Quite Clearly Enough So the Clones Execute Order Six and Throw All Their Communicators Away, Which Rather Throws a Wrench Into the Works

The Transmission Doesn’t Come Through Quite Clearly Enough So the Clones Execute Order Sixty-Sixty, Fly Back to Coruscant, Remove the Supreme Chancellor from His Office (Out the Window), and Install a Temporary Government Under the Leadership of Jar Jar Binks

Obi-Wan Renders Padmé Unconscious and Exits the Starship on Mustafar Instead of Her

Darth Sidious Just Kind of Keeps Drumming His Fingers in His Office Waiting for Anakin to Return, Which He Never Does Because He’s Become a Pile of Ashes

Padmé Has Just One Child, Which Really Makes Things Much Easier

Padmé Has Triplets, and Names Them Luke, Leia, and Listerine

The Emperor Can’t Really Afford a New Suit, and Just Puts Vader in Threepio’s Body

Owen and Beru Don’t Really Have Sufficient Means to Raise an Infant, So Sorry About the Whole Orphan Thing But They Have to Say No

You Know What, Maybe Watto Would Like Some Infant Slaves

You Know What, Maybe Jabba Would Like Some Infant Slaves

Having Given Luke Away, Obi-Wan Accidentally Falls in the Sarlacc Pit

Princess Leia Just Gets in the Escape Pod Herself

Princess Leia’s Agents, BB-8 and That Antenna

Princess Leia’s Agents, Gonk and a Defected Sith Interrogation Droid

Princess Leia’s Agents, Tahei and Matashichi

Princess Leia’s Agents, Sergeant Colon and Corporal Nobbs

The Red R5 Unit Doesn’t Break

The Red R5 Unit Explodes and Kills Luke and Threepio

The Jawas Happen to Have a Spare Motivator for That Red R5 Unit

The Jawas Refuse to Settle the Matter with Uncle Owen, Resulting in a Protracted Legal Process Through the Imperial Small Claims Court

Obi-Wan’s Krayt Dragon Call Isn’t Quite Good Enough

Obi-Wan Gets Luke Home, Then the Stormtroopers Arrive

Obi-Wan Didn’t Really Have Structural Integrity in Mind When He Built That Hovel

The Emperor Had the Sense to Employ Toydarians as Stormtroopers

These Aren’t the Droids We’re Looking For, But You Know, You Are Operating a Landspeeder Without a Driving Licence

Greedo Shoots First, and Doesn’t Miss

Han and Greedo Shoot Simultaneously, and Neither Misses

Han Shoots First, But Is Actually a Terrible Shot, Misses Very Badly and Causes the Cantina to Explode

Death Star Control Panels Are Actually Immune to Blaster Shots

Luke Ignores Obi-Wan, Uses the Targeting Computer, and It Works

Luke Gets Distracted by Obi-Wan’s Ghost, Swerves, and Crashes, Because Trying to Operate Anything at Those Speeds While Someone Else Talks at You Is Seriously Pretty Dangerous

Luke Pulls a Randy Quaid and Crashes the Whole X-Wing Into the Death Star’s Weak Spot

Chewbacca Still Doesn’t Get a Medal, But Leia Gives Herself Five Medals and Laughs in Chewbacca’s Face

Han Gets Frozen a Little Earlier Than Expected in the Narrative

No, and In Fact Obi-Wan Left Me to Die, and I Mean, Really, That’s Seriously Messed Up

In Xanadu Did Jabba the Hutt / A Stately Pleasure Dome Decree (Featuring Olivia Newton-John and Gene Kelly on Rollerskates)

Artoo Throws the Lightsaber at the Sarlacc Instead

Artoo’s Lightsaber Throw Is 180 Degrees Off and Luke Grabs It and Activates It Anyway

The Ewoks Are All Imperial Spies

The Ewoks Reveal Their Secret Weapon, Mecha-Ewok

Luke Removes Vader’s Mask to Reveal a Mask of an Ape’s Face, Which He Then Removes to Reveal Patrick McGoohan Laughing Maniacally

Max von Sydow’s Character Beats Up Everyone (Because Max von Sydow Is Just That Awesome)

Poe Gets to His X-Wing and Actually Gets Away

Poe’s X-Wing Outright Explodes and Kills Him

Just Another Normal Day for FN-2187, Really

Kylo Ren Kills FN-2187 on the Spot

If You Try to Fly TIE Fighters the Way You Fly X-Wings, You Explode

Poe Survives the Crash Conscious, and the Explosion Kills Finn

Both Poe and Finn Die in the Crash

Finn and Rey Get in the Quadjumper, Then It Explodes

Finn and Rey Get in the Garbage, Then It Explodes

Maybe Rey Can’t Do This Piloting Thing After All

Rey and Finn Un-Fix the Toxic Gas Far in Advance of the Entrance of Those Undoubtedly Evil Intruders

Activating the Compressor Just Makes the Falcon Explode

Supreme Leader Snoke Is Actually a Hologram Front for BB-8

Supreme Leader Snoke, Formerly Known as Listerine Skywalker, the Lost Skywalker Triplet

Supreme Leader Snoke, Former Crew Member of the Millennium Falcon

Supreme Leader Snoke, Ex-Deathsticks Merchant

Supreme Leader Snoke, Ex-Diner Proprietor

Kylo Ren, the Biological Son of Jar Jar Binks

Kylo Ren, the Biological Son of Count Dooku

Kylo Ren, the Biological Son of General Grievous

Kylo Ren, the Biological Son of Grand Moff Tarkin

Kylo Ren, the Biological Son of Lando Calrissian

Kylo Ren, the Biological Son of Wicket

Kylo Ren, the Biological Son of Chewbacca

Kylo Ren, the Biological Son of Kylo Ren (Due to an Accident Involving a Contraceptive and a Time Machine)

The Immaculate Conception of Kylo Ren

The Leader of the Resistance, General R2-D2

The Leader of the Resistance, General Jettster

The Leader of the Resistance, General Binks

Poe Goes on a Five-Minute Tirade on How His Jacket Is His Life and How Finn Really Shouldn’t Have Taken It for Himself

Poe Is Obligated to Tell Finn That Finn’s Preservation of His Jacket Means Poe Now Owes Finn a Life Debt

Han Shoots (Ben) First

Han Shoots (Ben) First, Although Kylo Ren Still Manages to Activate His Lightsaber a Split Second Afterwards

Chewie Shoots First

Rey Is the Master of the Elder Wand Lightsaber, Plus the Invisibility Cloak and the Resurrection Stone

5 notes · View notes

permian-tropos · 6 years

Text

might as well set down my full case for the extreme shippability of gallirae, for that twitter person’s sake (that’s my excuse but hey, I can vent by being positive about things I like)

step one would be to explain why I think they have canonical sexual tension and the point I like start with is the fact that Adea tells Sloane she wanted to “be with them both”. we already know she’s sleeping with Rax and honestly book 1 leaves plenty of room to imagine Adea has a thing for Sloane so why don’t we imagine Adea is bisexual as hell and has had a thing for the both of them, and wanted a sugar mommy and a sugar daddy simultaneously but if they couldn’t get along she’d pick one

Sloane is the one who doesn’t see it like that. but Adea admires Sloane for being ambitious and powerful and in a position to rule the Empire and create a new galactic order. this is the same case she makes for Rax, and she seems frustrated that Sloane can’t see how well they’d go together.

given that Adea and Rax’s only scene together has them talking about whether Sloane will join them and Rax is the one who’s confident about it (and Adea is the hesitant one) I feel free to imagine that an initial condition of their relationship was “we’re going to be a hot problematic threesome with Sloane”. and if Adea can ship them together why can’t I?

but moving on. why do I imagine Rax being into Sloane? well besides the fact that he keeps her around and stokes her ambitions even as he knows she wants him dead, the fact that he flatters her and makes himself her advisor even though he outranked her in book 1, and talks about how much he wants her to be a part of his galaxy-ruling business.

there’s also the fact that he gives her a mixtape of his most emotionally resonant piece of music, the opera that he associates with escaping a life of poverty and misery. it’s not an act of manipulation, because there’s no clear intended effect, it’s just a way for him to share a piece of himself in a rather awkward and indirect way. he makes choices on Jakku over and over that avoid killing Sloane in the moment, and his final moments aren’t anger at her for defeating him but regret over his own failures. he might assume the planet will explode or that she’ll be taken prisoner by the New Republic and he could let that be revenge but he wants Sloane to live and rule his Empire. he considers her a “fellow outcast” likely from their backgrounds being lower class which Sloane responds to and doesn’t dispute.

why would Sloane be into Rax? well there’s the fact that she considers herself “seduced” by him and asks herself if she’s “falling for his strange way” after he gives her a flirty smirk during the Shadow Council meeting even though in that moment she’s furious at him. “she hates him, but she admires him too”. a lot of the metaphorical language her POV scenes use to describe her fear, hatred, or apprehension of Rax also have a suggestive element to them, whether he’s a sea before a storm or a snake in her bed or a predator who wants to pick out and eat the juiciest bits of her flesh and at that point I have to blush just retelling what’s written in the book! the scene where she listens to the music brings back the ocean metaphor but has it be a “gentle wave that calls her out to sea” (bear in mind she’s in bed while she’s listening to it) and “its ethereal beauty haunts her”. since the ocean has been used to describe Rax and the opera itself represents him, it feels like a metaphor for a sexual encounter — or Sloane’s desire for one.

I think it’s extremely easy to read canon where Sloane is attracted to Rax and finds him intimidating and overwhelming for that reason, and she is especially disgusted and angry and put off by him any time he does something that seems to Zone her as a platonic political ally or a pawn in his game. she takes a lot of his betrayals extremely personally, in ways she doesn’t with characters like Vidian or even Adea. she is basically cyberstalking Rax throughout book 2 and real stalking him throughout book 3 and she has perfectly good political reasons for it but the intense emotions attached could be both dread of his creepiness and deep Frustration. she has several moments where she mentions having no children or husband or wife and you could imagine her career with the evil Empire as the war went on has been very unhealthy and draining and isolating. she’s a bit deprived and starting to get depressed about it, though she weathered it for a long time. loneliness takes its toll on everyone eventually.

so you could read Rax and Sloane as both being hampered in their capacity for healthy romance by their ambitions and flaws and emotional hangups and general evilness. Rax is avoidant and vague and nihilistic about his desire for Sloane, and Sloane is aggressive and bitter and fearful about her desire for Rax.

so obviously the idea of them overcoming these roadblocks and succumbing to their desires is Hot As Fuck

and I consider them to be extremely hot when they’re in conjunction with each other because they’re obviously terrible people but they complement each other’s terribleness. they have two different strains of fascist brain worms and their collusion and subsequent falling out is to me a great place to pick apart the toxicity of both their ideologies. their ability to destroy each other’s faith in their own megalomaniac space nazi delusions is HOT because tearing down fascist delusions is good and narratively cathartic.

the fact that they’re locked in mortal combat is kind of necessary to this. they’re not going to reject a whole ideology if there isn’t an extreme pressure to do so. this is why I enjoy their moments together in canon. particularly with Sloane’s hatred — everything Rax does calls her faith in the Empire into question and it might not be his intention and the struggles might not be romanticizable but their canon doesn’t have to end up in a romantic or pleasant situation for it to set up fascinating conflicts.

they’re also aesthetically hot. Rax is described as pale and dark haired and black-eyed and he smirks a lot and says corny pretentious crap and wears sumptuous red robes and listens to opera and has a shipboard garden. he also has a tragic backstory as a cult-raised orphan on a desert world, conscripted and groomed for his position as the Contingency by Darth Emperor Sheev himself! so he’s a sad traumatized fuckboy too, teeming with suppressed self-loathing and coping mechanisms. he deserved to get murdered and I appreciate that he does but I still find him a glorious and perhaps personally relatable disaster. his deep fixation on and love of stories should technically be relatable to everyone on here but for me it seems to resonate especially strongly.

Sloane is the one with an official character design and she is Very Hot with her dark complexion and broad shoulders and handsome features only slightly touched by age. her hair is a bit long for an Imperial (not too many women overall) and she canonically is pleased with it and rightly so, it’s gorgeous, and the white streak is oddly cute. and she’s also got this stern commanding air but you can imagine her being suppressed about various desires just like Rax is and so obviously it’s great to imagine those desires breaking through. she is kind of a jock nerd, a former boxer who also loves research and libraries and math. her determination and badassery is as aesthetically enjoyable as her moments of fatigue and despair and folly. she’s a complicated person, with plenty of moments of badness and a fair amount of potential for goodness. and she has many moments from POV sections where you could extrapolate into a quirk or peculiar trait, instead of considering the quirkiness artistic license (ie. the ghost retinue, her being overly familiar with or possessive of people in her thoughts). she’s snarky and casually self-centered and staunch in her ideologies but also constantly suppressing empathy or unease.

I like the fact that Rax is a rather flamboyant and effeminate man and Sloane is a pragmatic and masculine woman. I know it’s bad to villify gender noncomformity but frankly I just am super weak for that het dynamic, it works well with my own gender feelings, sue me

the ship comes packaged with so many aesthetics and features; a cursed sort of wasteland with Jakku, the Opera, failed attempts at galactic conquest, a viable side OT3 with Adea, Palpatine’s bullshit hanging over both of them, plenty of action and intrigue, options for canon divergences where they rule side by side, or divergences where they are forced to expel their fascist brain worms and start on a road of ideological and emotional recovery.

they are given a ton of parallels in canon, with their backstories trying to stow away on ships to escape their homeworlds as children, their weird fixation on predators and prey, to their desires for revenge or glory, their willingness to dispose of their allies, often using the same language culminating in them finishing each other’s sentences, improvising bluffs and distractions tailored to the other’s personality on the fly.

and their relationship, such as it is, ends with extreme violence and cruelty and suffering. given their high levels of participation in the big bad autocratic space regime it’s no less than either of them deserved. neither of them work through their deep and extreme issues. yet it feels like there’s room for both to change, since Rae questions her faith in the Empire and Gallius questions Palpatine’s narrative of destiny.

so if I imagine them together but unable to throw down with murder duels (because they decide to care about each other) they might be forced to completely change, and that’s a really compelling dynamic arc

and there you have it. that’s not even everything. but it’s a lot of it and it’s way way more than is ever necessary to justify a ship.

#my post #rae sloane #gallius rax #gallirae #aftermath trilogy #long post

14 notes · View notes

keldae · 6 years

Text

Drastic Measures (Chapter Twenty-One)

Night fell over Coronet City, covering the wounds left from the Cold War that hadn’t healed in the three years since the Imperial bombardment. Right now, some of those old wounds served a helpful purpose — Jonas Balkar crouched in such a scar, a crater created by any one of countless bombs, holding his breath until the Skytrooper patrol passed without seeing him. The Corellians, always a thorn in the side of the Empire, had been enough of a nuisance to Zakuul that Eternal Empire forces now roamed the streets, enforcing a harsh curfew until the Star Fortress was completed. The imposing monolith would then take over surveillance and security of the planet.

Once the coast was clear, Jonas crept across the street and through the plaza littered with old industrial structures, making his way to a rusty grate built into the wall. He tapped a code against the durasteel, and a minute later, the grate opened enough for him to slip inside. The Selonian who’d let him in gestured down the corridor with her paw. “You’re almost late. The meeting is starting.”

“Sorry, got stuck in traffic,” Jonas muttered as he slipped around the other rebel. “Thanks.” He hurried off down the old tunnel, stumbling more than once on old rubble and cursing under his breath.

He finally made it to the large underground chamber, somewhere below Axial Park. “Sorry I’m late,” he apologized to the rest of the resistance cell leaders as he all but flopped onto an overturned barrel. “Skytroopers are changing their patrol routes.”

“Yeah, we noticed.” Cole Cantarus frowned under the dim, flickering lights. “My CorSec forces are scrambling to figure out the new routes. Lost two guys yesterday.”

“Zakuul’s got the entire galaxy in a blasted chokehold,” grumbled a female voice. Risha Drayen brushed a lock of dark hair out of her eyes that had escaped the messy bun at the back of her head. “And there’s still no word about Master Taerich or Agent Shan.”

“Not quite true,” Cole corrected. “Got an update from the storm system. They’ve been found, and they’re on Dantooine. Master Shan brought them in today.”

“That’s a relief,” Jonas said with a sigh. “Because the last solid intel the SIS had placed them with either Darth Imperius or Cipher Nine on Dromund Kaas. Apparently Master Taerich’s related to Imperius -- who knew?”

“… To be fair,” spoke another voice, breaking the stunned silence that had followed Jonas’ report, “Xaja has never been one for sane, reasonable plans.” The Corellian Barsen’thor, Jakar Forseti, leaned forward. The lights cast the scars on his face into stark shadows and just glinted off the hilt of the saberstaff he carried under his jacket. “And she was friendly with Imperius during the Revanite crisis. If they are related, I suppose insanity must run in the family.”

“Theron’s never been fond of logical plans either,” Jonas muttered, thinking back on his friend who had always preferred climbing through windows to walking through perfectly fine doors. “He and Master Taerich are completely meant for each other.”

“How romantic,” Risha deadpanned. “Any comm chatter about where they are now?”

“None,” spoke up the last conspirator. Bey’wan Aygo crossed his arms over his chest and stroked the fur extending from his chin. “If the Republic got so much as a whisper as to where they are, you know Saresh would be going after them -- whispers they won’t be getting from us.” He glanced at Jonas, got an agreeing nod, and continued speaking. “Fortunately for them, most of the chatter has concerned the contract put out for Imperius and Cipher Nine.”

“As if we didn’t have enough with just Zakuul and the Republic involved.” Jonas sighed and looked up at the roof of the cavern. “Wonderful. Thunder hasn’t issued any new orders?”

“Stay on alert; keep pissing off the Zaks; and if Dantooine is compromised, we haul ass to get people out of there alive.” Cole shrugged. “The usual.”

“I thought Thunder was supposed to be keeping the Imps from getting involved in all this,” Bey’wan muttered. “Guess they ran out of influence when Imperius and Nine jumped in anyway. Of course, if Imperius is Master Xaja’s brother, I don’t blame him for getting involved.”

“It wouldn’t be the greatest surprise revelation I’ve heard during this entire war and rebellion,” Jakar muttered. “The Green Jedi have heard nothing regarding Xaja or Theron, or the hunt for Imperius and Nine.”

“That’s because the Green Jedi have their heads so far up their asses, it’s a miracle they can hear anything,” Risha retorted.

Jakar’s eyes narrowed dangerously, but before he could say anything, Bey’wan quickly interrupted. “Does anyone know what the status of the Republic’s manhunt for them is?”

“My contact in the SIS says Saresh is ready to tear planets apart, looking for them,” Jonas answered. “Especially after Supreme Commander Malcom resigned his post and walked out. Our reporting suggests he’s on Alderaan, possibly working with the storm system. And the rumor is that he’s Theron’s biological father.”

“… That does make things complicated,” Jakar said flatly. “Any news from the other cells?”

“Tatooine managed a decent hit against Zakuul,” Cole reported, “according to Captain Korin. He took down one of the Star Fortress towers, and is planning to infiltrate the Fortress skeleton itself to find a weakness. He might be getting Imperius to help, since he just arrived to the cell after escaping Dromund Kaas. Zakuul hasn’t retaliated yet, which is surprising.”

“Probably because Arcann’s hyper-focused on finding Master Taerich and Agent Shan,” Risha said. “One rebel strike probably isn’t more than a blip on his radar.”

“Hopefully he gets distracted by the Empire’s involvement in all of this and doesn’t find them under their current rock,” Jonas muttered. “They’re not stupid -- they have to know they can’t stay in one place. With any luck, they’ll be long gone from the Enclave by the time the Zaks think to look there.” He knew the odds weren’t high, but for his friend, and for the Jedi that Jakar claimed as one of his own friends, he desperately wanted to hold onto that hope.

“That’s a long shot at best,” Jakar said quietly. He offered a taut smile, but his eyes were shaded with worry.

After spending the better part of a standard month running across the galaxy and hiding from unfriendly eyes, even if she had been with her family or Theron the entire time, Xaja finally started to feel like the galaxy was stabilizing under her feet as she immersed herself in the hidden Jedi Enclave. Never minding that this was a rough network of chambers hidden in abandoned kinrath tunnels, with none of the trappings of the Tython Temple, or the constant sense of readiness among the rebel Jedi hidden here — simply the atmosphere of being among other members of the Order was a soothing balm to Xaja’s stressed spirit, especially after the corrupting darkness of Dromund Kaas. As she walked through the tunnels with Kira, quietly catching up with each other, she almost felt at home.

If one discounted the lack of personal possessions, or the constant patrols and monitoring of comms relays, or the paranoid suspicion of most of the other Jedi.

“You found Doc on Rishi?” Kira asked as the two Jedi paced through an old chamber, their voices and bootsteps echoing softly off the walls. “We all got split up during the war, never found out what happened to him. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m glad he’s okay.”

“Or he was last time I checked,” Xaja nodded, sidestepping to avoid a collision with a dark-haired half-Miraluka woman she vaguely remembered from Tython. “The last I’ve heard, there was still a notice out for his capture, so I’m assuming he’s still fine.” She tilted her head to study Kira — at close range now, she could see the constant tension in her former Padawan’s face, even in the caves’ dim light, and the dark bags under her eyes. “He didn’t know what happened to any of you though. What happened?”

“A lot of it’s a blur,” Kira admitted. “For the first months, it was just fighting and trying to stay alive. I went back to Tython, wound up helping some of the Padawans there go into hiding before Zakuul found the Temple. After the Republic surrendered, I started hearing rumours of a resistance network building across the entire galaxy — Empire, Republic, Hutt Space, you name it. Myself and the rest of the Jedi who still wanted to fight came out here. It kinda started out as a halfway house for injured Jedi running from the Zaks, but then we started picking up more and more able-bodied Force users, even a couple of Sith. Thunder established contact with us early on, and Master Satele’s been checking in on us.”

“I’m glad you’re okay and survived all of that.” Xaja squeezed Kira’s arm and got a smile from the younger Jedi. “Have you heard anything about the others?”

“Nothing about Scourge. He just kinda dropped off the face of the galaxy not long after the invasion. And like I said, I lost track of Doc early on. But Rusk joined the resistance too, after the siege ended.”

Xaja blinked. “He did?”

“Yeah. We get updates fairly regularly.” Kira grinned. “Your brother comes by sometimes, and your dad’s dropped in once or twice, both times for supply or intel drops. Korin let Guss and Corso stay here -- Guss so he could train with the Force again, and Corso because, well… we needed a token non-Jedi or non-Forcie person to interact with the rest of the planet for us.”

Reanden hadn’t mentioned travelling to the other resistance cells or seeing Kira, although Xaja supposed that her father had had a few too many things on his mind to tell her about this. “When was Korin last here?”

“About two months ago, give or take?” Kira’s shoulders raised in a shrug. “He’s also resistance, running between all the cells and assorted drop points.” She paused. “He won’t admit it, but I strongly suspect he stole Tee-Seven off of Coruscant.”

“That asshole,” Xaja muttered. “He better not be corrupting my droid.” Kira snickered in agreement, and for a few minutes there was only the sounds of their footsteps.

Kira finally spoke again, her voice soft and subdued. “We watched that ship disintegrate. Korin did, too, while he was guarding us and following us back to Coruscant. How the hells did you survive it?”

“I don’t know.” Xaja shook her head, frowning. “I was unconscious when the Zaks somehow captured Marr and myself. I woke up en route to Zakuul.” She felt a tired smile tug at her lips. “Long story short, Marr and I got hauled up in front of Vitiate wearing a new meatsuit—”

“What?!” Kira’s face drained pale, even in the dim light. “But how the—? He— Revan— Ziost—!”

“I don’t know either. But Marr and I… we could tell it was him. Nobody else in the galaxy feels that evil.” Xaja scowled. “He killed Marr when he refused to kneel, then after I mouthed off at him and called him a microscopically-endowed gizka-blowing coward—” Kira laughed at that. “— then he told Arcann to kill me. Arcann freed me instead and attacked his father, and when I had the chance… I took it.”

“Good,” Kira growled. “That bastard can die a thousand times over for what he did to us, and the rest of the galaxy. Still doesn’t explain how you were dead for over two years though.”

“Oh, that? The Force-damned son of a bitch told the guards that I was an assassin sent to kill his father and had me thrown in carbonite,” Xaja answered, with a flippancy she didn’t feel. She felt sick to her stomach again, remembering the terror of the minutes between being thrown back by the wave of the Force tearing out of Vitiate’s latest body and being dragged into the carbonite chamber, screaming and fighting every step of the way, to no avail…

The bond warmed as Theron nudged her, sensing her fear. Xaja made herself take a breath to calm herself before pushing a small burst of reassurance at him. Okay. Memories. She immediately felt his worry and a cold anger under the surface, and nudged at him again. Okay now. You saved me. The worry shifted into relief and love as Theron finally relaxed, satisfied that she was all right for the moment.

“And Agent Superhero saved the day by somehow finding you in the Spire.” Kira shook her head. “Would love to know how he knew where you were. Everyone was convinced you were dead.” Xaja felt a burst of sadness from her Padawan in the Force. “Korin and I… after we got back to Coruscant, we went and told him what had happened, figured he deserved to know directly instead of through reports. He…” Kira sighed. “Theron didn’t take it well. You know that face people make when they want to scream or cry, but they just can’t, and everything just kinda shuts down? He just… crumpled.”

Oh, that hurt, she thought, to know how badly Theron had taken her loss. For a second, an image flashed in Xaja’s mind of Theron falling to his knees in his small Coruscant apartment, the spy facade on his face shattering to show anguish as he crumpled in on himself, unable to cope with the pain. Xaja closed her eyes against the burning sensation she could feel, and reached back along their bond with the strongest wave of love and comfort that she could muster. She could feel Theron losing his breath at the overwhelming sensation before he pushed back at her with a burst of love for her. That nearly did make the tears come — she had to blink away the moisture in her eyes.

“Huh, that was weird.” Kira had her head tilted at Xaja, quirking an eyebrow at her former mentor as she nudged at the Force around them. “I knew you two were a thing before… y’know… but did you have a bond like that before?”

“No, this is a recent development.” Xaja looked around the corridor, making sure they were alone, before lowering her voice. “I accidentally formed a bond with him on Rishi, right before we found out I was dying of complications from the carbonite poisoning.” She gestured for Kira to remain quiet when the taller woman’s eyes flashed wide in horror, then continued. “My other brother managed to get me medical treatment on Dromund Kaas, but it affected my Force connection. My dad took us to Voss, and the healers did a ritual on us that strengthened the bond, making it deeper and permanent.”

“For what, emotional connection?” Kira frowned in confusion.

“No, but it’s a side bonus.” Xaja raked her hands through her hair. “What I tell you does not leave this corridor.” At Kira’s nod, she continued. “The bond’s main purpose was twofold: Half of it was restoring my Force connection, and half of it…” She sighed, feeling sick again despite Theron’s reassuring presence in her mind. His wasn’t the only presence she could feel. “… I picked up a mind parasite on Zakuul… one you’re familiar with. The bond keeps him suppressed so he can’t possess me.”

She watched as Kira’s expressions and Force-signature shifted from confused to horrified to furious to steely determination, all within the space of a few seconds. “Good. Let me know if you need any more help with dealing with that brain fucker.” The younger Jedi reached up and squeezed the other’s arms. “You didn’t abandon me when you knew what was in my head, Master. I’m not ditching you now. We’ll deal with this bastard, one way or another.”

The Killik tunnels that connected Organa Castle to the hidden resistance base in the Juran Mountains still made Jace shudder every time he walked through them. No matter that he had been assured by their diplomat Joiner, a former Imperial named Vector Hyllus, that the Killiks were allies and meant no harm, it was still unnerving to walk through the insectoid lairs, stepping around the large, violet eggs, trying to not breathe in the scents. And that was before taking into account the unnatural black eyes and clicking noises of the human Joiners who had become part of the nest. Jace wasn’t too proud to say he was having disturbing dreams about the Joiners.

But the important thing was that if they creeped him out, they terrified the Zakuulans. There were four Zakuulan Joiners, wandering around in the rags of what used to be their uniforms. The rest of the Eternal Empire’s forces seemed to have given up, for fear of being brainwashed themselves.

Jace walked into a substantial cavern, deep under the mountains. Once, this had been an extension of the Killik hive — now it was part of the resistance network that spread through a significant chunk of the planet, extending as far as Rist territory. The warring houses of Alderaan could unify against a common enemy, it seemed. They weren’t the only ones — numerous clusters of mingled Imperials and Republic personnel filled the cave. Jace blinked when he saw a Hutt on one platform, emphatically gesturing to a monitor in front of him as he tried to explain something to a Republic scientist with a longsuffering expression on his face, then shook his head and kept walking. Apparently the Hutts had their own grudges against Zakuul.

He made his way to another platform, feeling the conversation fade to a hush at his presence. “You wanted to speak to me?” he rumbled, looking at the resistance personnel before him.

“We did.” Vector offered Jace a shallow bow, then turned back to the computer behind him. “We have received intelligence from the storm system, Commander. Agent Shan and Master Taerich have been located.”

Jace’s heart jumped into his throat. “Where?”

“Dantooine.” Doctor Kimble turned to Jace, looking visibly relieved for the first time since he had arrived on Darth Imperius’ ship, having fled Dromund Kaas in a hurry. “The Grand Master found them and brought them to the resistance cell there.”

Satele found them? Jace felt a knot in his back loosen with that good news. “That’s good to hear.” He suddenly paused. “Weren’t they with Cipher Nine before? Is he in the cell too?”

“No.” The only woman on the platform, a Corellian Jedi named Mairen Bel Iblis, barely glanced up from the computer she was working on. “I received a notification from my station chief on Nar Shaddaa. He’s picked up Cipher Nine, who says he doesn’t know where Master Shan took Master Taerich and Agent Shan.” Judging from how the redhaired Jedi-turned-spy pursed her lips, Jace guessed she didn’t fully buy Cipher Nine’s story — not that he could blame her. Imperial spies were devious and talented liars, and Cipher Nine, being one of the oldest agents in the field, was something of a legend for how damned good he was at his job. It was a pity that he couldn’t be persuaded to defect. “Apparently he left them on Voss and went to cause a distraction.”

“Voss?” Jace crossed his arms over his broad chest in thought. “Why would they go to Voss?”

He was answered with a chorus of silent shrugs. “It’s difficult to say,” Doctor Lokin said, stroking his beard. Looking much like a kind grandfather, he should have felt trustworthy — but Jace couldn’t forget that he was retired Imperial Intelligence, and one of Cipher Nine’s comrades. Assets who lived to be that old were dangerous. “Master Taerich was ill from the side effects of carbonite poisoning, one of which was all but losing her access to the Force. She may have gone to Voss for healing when our medical treatment didn’t restore her connection.”

“Or they may have wished to stay out of sight of the rest of the galaxy,” Vector suggested. “Voss is neutral territory still, and expansive enough that they could have tried to hide.”

“Two humans on Voss would stick out like Hutts in the Senate,” Doctor Kimble muttered. “I’m with Lokin on this one. Xa— Master Taerich probably went for healing. But what was Master Shan doing there?”

Jace shrugged. He’d known Satele the longest, and he couldn’t identify what would have led her to the alien planet. The Zakuulan Knight, Senya Tirall, had said Satele planned on going there, but she hadn’t known why. “Takes a Jedi to understand a Jedi,” he grunted, offering a rueful smile in apology when Mairen cut her eyes at him. “Senya Tirall knew Master Shan’s destination, but not the reason. Perhaps Master Shan was in contact with Cipher Nine?” That thought made him feel sick… but Cipher Nine wouldn’t have been the first Imperial Satele had worked with. Jace wasn’t sure if that made it better or worse.

Lokin and Vector looked at each other before shrugging. “It’s possible,” Lokin finally said. “Agent Taerich never shared all of his contacts with us, and always likes to have a card or three up his sleeve. I believe he’s worked with Jedi before as well — why, I didn’t see fit to ask. In this instance though, he probably would have put feelers out for a Jedi where his daughter was concerned.”

“Hmmm.” The idea of the infamous Cipher Nine as a caring father to a Jedi, worried about her continued safety, seemed incongruous to his reputation as a ruthless Imperial saboteur and assassin. Grimacing, Jace dismissed the possibility from his thoughts for the time being. “Perhaps Master Taerich or Master Shan can give us answers directly.” He turned to march off the platform with a purposeful stride. “Send word for my ship to be prepped. I’m heading to Dantooine to get some answers.” It wasn’t enough to hear through the storm system that Theron was alive and safe for the moment — he needed to see his son, dammit, and probably tear him a new one for scaring him with that blasted suicide note.

So consumed by concern for his own son, he didn’t notice Master Bel Iblis’ brow creasing in a frown as she watched him walk away. She sighed, then grimaced before turning back to her console and the data that awaited her.

It wasn’t a difficult task to find information on Xaja Taerich; Lord Kallig, also known as Darth Imperius; or Reanden Taerich, the mysterious agent previously known only as Cipher Nine after the Cold War. All three members of the family seemed to have made large ripples wherever they went, with Master Taerich having made the largest metaphorical splash. Kovach was impressed — he had seen the Jedi in action and knew she was damned good at her job, but hadn’t realized that she had been a certifiable badass since she was only a Jedi Padawan, taking down a powerful Dark Jedi on Tython, who had defeated even her Master.

Of course, trying to nail down the story of their origins was difficult.

So far, he had found Reanden Taerich’s academy records from his early recruitment into the Imperial Military, noting he had almost immediately been snatched up by Imperial Intelligence. Top marks, top aptitude scores, a reputation for ruthlessness and clever improvisation in the field, and a small flag for his apparent hatred of Force-users. Kovach supposed he couldn’t blame the older agent — he would hate Force-users too if he’d had the Wrath for a brother. But his records had been wiped clean shortly thereafter, with only the odd mention of a classified mission for a few years before it appeared he dropped off the map entirely for five years. He resurfaced on Hutta only a few years ago, under orders from Keeper to ensure Nem’ro allied with the Empire. There was no mention of a wife or lover, nor of any children, in the Imperial archives.

If Imperius is his son, then he should have been flagged as Force-sensitive at birth and registered with the Korriban Academy, Kovach mused. Taerich must have gone back and erased the data to keep his children hidden. On a whim, he still ran a search for Sorand Taerich, and got nothing. Xaja Taerich’s only results were of an Imperial prisoner record, and a hit notice for her head after she assassinated the Emperor.

He frowned as he accessed Korriban’s records, looking for the recruit who would become Darth Imperius. But of course, the boy had been brought to the Academy as a fifteen-year-old slave, and had said almost nothing about his origins. Even the name he had used (when not being addressed as ‘slave’ by Harkun) had only been “Rand.” The Sith Lord who had plucked the human out of the slave pens hadn’t known where he had come from — she had just informed the traders holding him that he would be going with her, and killed the first one to object.

But the Sith said that the boy claimed the slavers had killed his father in front of him. It was why he had embraced the Dark Side to kill in revenge. Kovach frowned — was Cipher Nine actually Imperius’ father? Or had the teenager been mistaken?

He shook his head and opened up another screen, slicing into Republic archives. No mention of Reanden Taerich or Sorand Taerich here either, but Xaja Taerich had plenty of results. He sighed as he scrolled through HoloNet report after report about the legendary Jedi Knight who had killed Darth Angral, convinced Lord Scourge to defect; led the Jedi forces on Corellia; assassinated the Emperor; killed Grand Moff Kilran; fought and won against Revan himself… had personally put Kovach in an armlock and driven her knee into his back until he had confessed to Theron Shan who he was truly working for. He’d never forgiven her for that. His back still ached where she had knelt on him, driving all one hundred pounds of her body weight into his kidneys and growling angry threats into his ear.

He shook his head and skimmed past the public reports of the Jedi’s heroism. No birth certificate — perhaps she hadn’t been born as a Republic citizen. Her identicard had no homeworld listed, nor parents or living kin. He frowned, then sliced into the Jedi Archives, grateful that Saresh had made the Order keep their records open to the Republic. Here, he found the legal document of custody transferal, signed by her mother when she was handed over to the Jedi Order. Why didn’t her father sign the form as well? Did he not know about his daughter being handed over? But at least now there was a name for the mother — Airna Taerich, with no evidence of a maiden name, and a classified name for her husband.

An idea suddenly struck Kovach’s mind, and he grinned as he accessed the SIS’s archives again with his own credentials. Theron Shan’s files had been made accessible when he was identified as a person of interest in Master Taerich’s escape from Zakuul. He wasn’t too interested in looking for the rogue agent’s own backstory — he wanted what Theron had compiled on Taerich before recruiting her for the Korriban attack. Despite his half-baked execution plans, Theron had always been meticulous in his research for big operations like that.

He was briefly surprised to note that Captain Korin, the privateer who had joined the op as well, had no files under Theron’s stack of research. Perhaps Theron had wiped that data? But he left Master Taerich’s up — she was legally dead, after all, and there was no reason to hide her identity. He shrugged and turned his attention to the Jedi’s file, silently thanking Theron for doing his work for him.

Training records… service records… Oh, a Sacking survivor. Kovach almost felt pity for the Jedi at that. Trained by Yvaine Allende and Orgus Din, both deceased… Oh, that’s interesting. The Green Jedi of Corellia claimed that she was the child of one of their own and therefore Corellian, despite a reported birth world of Lavisar. Airna Taerich, were you a Corellian Jedi? Then why was your child given to Coruscant?

He accessed Corellian citizenship records and grinned. Jackpot. Airna Drallig had been a Corellian Jedi, and had been about the right age to be Xaja Taerich and Sorand Taerich’s mother. But she had reportedly left Corellia less than a year before her daughter’s birth, seduced by an Imperial spy, and had died in Imperial space a decade ago. At least now we have the mother identified — and she’s no longer a concern. He leaned back in his seat, rubbing his hand over his chin. Well, my little red haired Jedi, how were you and Imperius connected before Ziost?

He cross-referenced the data on Taerich and Imperius, and nodded when he saw they had wound up working together on Manaan, and then on Rakata Prime, and again on Rishi and Yavin IV. He raised an eyebrow when he saw they had been a part of the respective attacks on Korriban and Tython, and in the reclamation battles. And Cipher Nine was working with them… did you know they were your children, Agent?

Captain Korin had been a part of that entire gong show as well. As far as Kovach was concerned, the snarky, flirtatious smuggler was a person of interest. He ran a search through the SIS databases again, and raised an eyebrow. None of Theron’s research was there… but Korin’s name came up frequently in other records. He had earned both the respect and the hatred of several crime groups, it seemed, including the infamous Rogun the Butcher. On a whim, Kovach accessed the compiled data from Rogun’s slicers and felt his jaw drop. Rogun had managed to access the most information on Korin while hunting the spacer down… including a homeworld of Lavisar, a mention of a deceased mother and missing brother, and two listed surnames. The spacer frequently used Korin Drallig to get around, but there was a mention within the archives of Korin Taerich.

You can’t be… it’s too much of a coincidence. Kovach looked back into Lavisarian records, accessing files from before the small planet had been overtaken by the Empire. No official marriage certificates, but there was a census record of one Reanden Taerich and Airna Taerich, and three birth certificates — one for a daughter who was reported deceased months later in a speeder accident, and two for sons, reported missing after their mother’s death at the hands of raiders. Xaja Taerich, Korin Taerich, Sorand Taerich. This entire family is ridiculous.

Kovach immediately compiled the necessary data and made two copies of the files. One was sent to Darth Vowrawn, as per the Sith Lord’s directions — the other was encrypted and sent to Saresh. She would want to know this information.

The Eternal Fleet ship lurked just outside of Dantooine’s immediate orbit. Yes, this was where Satele Shan’s ship had gone — they had arrived just in time to see the Defender fly into the atmosphere. “Why would the former Grand Master of the Jedi Order go to a planet that her Order abandoned earlier in the war?” The Knight-Captain paced through the bridge, frowning in thought.

“After leaving the same planet where Cipher Nine is reputed to have taken the assassin and the terrorist.” The blue holo figure of one of the Overwatch overseers crossed his arms. “Interesting that a Jedi Master and an Imperial spy should be in league.”

“What updates are there from the other ship?”

“The Phantom was tracked to Nar Shaddaa, but I suspect your other ship lost it and became confused with another vessel. The ship that our people on the surface apprehended was the Duchess, a private civilian ship owned by a gambler, and not the Shadow. The ship was still searched, but it had come in from Corellia, and there were no signs of any passengers — merely the captain, her first mate, and a droid they seem to have modelled after our own, SCORPIO.” The overseer started pacing over the holotransmitter. “And when our agents investigated the Shrine of Healing on Voss, they found evidence that Shan and Taerich had been there, but had departed swiftly.”

“Could Cipher Nine have changed his ship’s identity?” The Knight-Captain frowned as she mulled over the options.

“Unlikely. Such a task would be nearly impossible, especially that quickly. And he was nowhere to be seen on the ship, even after performing a bioscan.” The overseer stopped pacing for a moment. “We will continue to look for the Shadow and Cipher Nine, but that is not your concern. If Master Shan is returning to a planet that the Jedi have historically had a claim to, perhaps the Order did not abandon their enclaves as initially reported.”

“You think the Order still has a presence on Dantooine?”

“I would place money on it. And if Master Shan is fleeing there, perhaps she is attempting to hide the assassin there, at least. Taerich was also a member of the Order and would try to hide among her own people.”

The Knight-Captain nodded, thoughts of glory for being the one to capture one of the terrible Outlanders flitting through her mind. “What are your orders?”

“Search the planet until you find whatever hole the Jedi are hiding in, look for Taerich and Shan, and then burn it to the ground. Take Master Shan alive — we will have answers from her.”

7 notes · View notes

zenosanalytic · 6 years

Text

Solo Bouno

So I saw Solo on Tuesday and it’s a Good movie; not great, didn’t make a Huge impression on me, but Fun and Enjoyable and certainly something I’d happily watch once it makes it to cable, with a few quibbles.

The Good:

The acting was (mostly)good

The characters were well-written

The Dialogue was fun, funny, and unforced

While the Plot had Issues, it flowed well and felt natural, and there was nothing really eye-rolling in it.

All the technical aspects -Design, Cinematography, sound work, editing- were Proficient

Establishes the stakes quickly and effectively

Chewie is Great

Lando is Great

L3-37(yes, they REALLY named the robot l33t) is Great

The Quibbles:

It was a VERY Generic origin story

They didn’t set up themes they needed to, and didn’t really deliver a good payoff on the themes they did set up

Related to this, there are important character beats and payoffs that are never really setup(or “Planted”).

It could have done better with its female cast. I’ll get into this a bit more under spoilers

Alden Ehrenreich NEVER STOPS SMILING! I mean, that’s an exaggeration obvsl, but it was REALLY noticeable to me. IDK if this is an artifact of the editing, the directing, or Ehrenreich’s choices about the character(tbf, Han is BSing people A LOT in this film, and the smile was Ford’s BSing expression so...), and it wasn’t really grating or anything but, by the end, it did take me out of the story a bit.

Glover does Williams’ accent for Lando a few times and, while it isn’t bad, I liked his take on the character better without it.

The writing doesn’t really do enough to sell the second job and, while all the action which constitutes it is Fine, I kinda grumbled at how thin and absolutely not convincing that bit was.

Ok I think that’s it. On to my lengthier Spoiler-Quibbles:

Solo falls into the common prequel/origin story trap of trying to explain everything about a character. This is always a bad idea but, with this movie and this cast, it is a particularly Horrible idea. Han, Chewie, and Lando are the perfect sorts of characters for a series of matinee-type adventure movies -think Indiana Jones- and Solo, by shoving his whole backstory into one film and leaving him practically where we find him in Star Wars, really, really, really, makes that unlikely. An added negative of that is it takes what the OS establishes as years -maybe decades- old relationships between Han, Chewie, and Lando and turns them into a one-job acquaintance. That was a Very Bad Idea.

Han starts off speaking Wookie(albeit badly), and I feel like that choice leaves a lot of potential comedy&bonding on the table.

They really misuse Thandie Newton and her character, Val. She dies practically as soon as she’s introduced, and in a way that doesn’t feel honest to the character or situation. If they’d just put the bombs on a timer rather than a detonator this would have been less bad

This is compounded by how little mourning and upset Beckett, her lover and longtime partner, is allowed to displayed over her death(oh, and the deaths of his entire crew. Oh, and the loss of the future they’d planned together).

Half of Beckett’s initial crew disappears between scenes, and this is never explained. It really isn’t a big deal and I didn’t even realize it until thinking about the movie just now, but it seems like kind of a significant continuity error. Maybe they die, and I’m just not remembering it?

This actually could have worked, though, if the movie were a bit more willing to invest in characters other than Han. Later in the movie Beckett betrays Han over what to do with the Hyperfuel they’ve stolen. If he’d been shown as really angry and upset over these deaths, or if he’d been shown to be the sort willing to sacrifice lives for the score, then all of this stuff could have tied into a really neat ambiguous antihero narrative for him. Unfortunately, he’s consistently shown to be sentimental, friendly, even fatherly. He only gets visibly angry at Han once and only for an instant; isn’t angry at the Cloud Riders at all, even though they’re responsible for the deaths of Val and Rio; and only once comes even close to suggesting a score matters more than their lives, and only does that right after Val and Rio’s deaths. As a result, his betrayal feels detached from the character we’ve known up to that point. And what’s his motivation? The life he planned to live once his debts were cleared is gone and, by stealing the Hyperfuel for himself at the end, he’s guaranteed to live under a bounty for the rest of his life. It just doesn’t fit.

The same arc-confusion plagues Clarke’s Qi’ra. She also betrays Han in the end -maybe out of a desire to protect him, maybe out of pragmatism, but most likely from ambition- but the conflict her choice is a solution to is never established. It’s never established that she might be using Han and he’s unwilling to see it. They suggest Qi’ra is morally different from the person Han knew as a kid with(I think?) one passing line of dialogue, but the film doesn’t show anything that’d convince the audience she is, and shows lots of things(like her attempts to hide her brand from Han) which suggest she regrets her current life and wants out, not deeper in. Her making the choice she does thinking it was the best way to protect them both would make sense with the character on the screen(though, given that Han is Beckett’s only living accomplice by the end, it seems more like he’d catch the blame for it too, particularly once Beckett’s dead), but the movie presents it as a power-grab.

There’s a lot of stuff in here that’s either changes to, or taken from, the EU. References like this can be fun, but they’re always a gamble since you’re relying on information from outside the movie which the audience might not be aware of, and thus be confused and annoyed by. The Wookies have, apparently, been forced off their homeworld and enslaved en masse. Darth Maul’s not dead, but rather the head of the Syndicate Qi’ra (literally)belongs to(they even have him pull out the double-headed lightsaber and brandish it while he’s holoing her at the end so people will realize who he is; it’s ridiculous). The Cloud Riders who interrupted their first attempt to steal Hyperfuel turn out to be working with the Rebellion. The last one’s not a HUGE deal, but the others I thought were pretty odd choices.

They give Han a (very generic)rough backstory, but then present him as just a totally unambiguous, noncynical, non-gritty, good guy and softboy. Which, yes, he should have a heart of gold absolutely, but without ambiguity there’s no tension; no concern over what sort of choice he’s going to make. The whole “Rogue with a Heart of Gold” dynamic only works, narratively, when the character is both a Rogue, and kind-hearted to people hanging by a thread. This Solo isn’t really a Rogue; hell, he doesn’t even cheat at poker!

Miscellaneous Spoilers:

They kill off L3 ~halfway through the movie, and I’m ambivalent about it. She dies cheering on an enslaved rebellion she unwittingly started, which fits the character, but I think it would have been more fitting if she’d set it off intentionally, and if she’d died in a more active way; she is shooting at the slavers earlier in that sequence, but during the scene where she’s shot she’s cheering the rebels with her back turned to the danger and gets blind-sided. I mean, just having her get iced while shouting advice, or while looking back to Lando while still fighting, would have been much better. Also, while I didn’t think it was manpainy(Lando is justifiably and visibly upset about it, but that doesn’t become the focus of her death), they do then later strip her harddrive to merge it with the Falcon’s navigation computer, and that sort of direct utilizing of a female-coded character’s death and body to advance the (male-protags’)story didn’t sit right with me in the theater. It’s not handled really terribly or anything, in fact they do it in crisis as a sort of last-resort, but I still kinda |:T’d at it.

Lando has A LOT of capes, and it is Wonderful uwu Also he is an author and possible vlogger, which is Also Wonderful uwu uwu

Erin Kellyman as Enfys Nest has a small but important part, and she makes a big impression with it. We have the whole movie to get to know Han(on top of already liking him from the previous films) and I still found myself more interested in her story and her crew when they revealed their true nature at the end, than with New!Han(who wasn’t really even that bad; I know I’m ragging on Ehrenreich but he did alright with what had to have been an intimidating part). I guess this is also an excellent example of how important Mystique --NOT explaining things; leaving them vague-- can be to character-charisma.

That’s everything I can think of right now. Don’t be fooled by the length of that quibblelist though; it’s absolutely a fun movie and, if you like Star Wars and the Star Wars setting and, if the price of a ticket won’t hurt your wallet, it’s definitely worth seeing. A Fun, Funny, Entertaining, Summer Movie, and a good way to spend an afternoon.

P.S.: Plus, for the more politically minded and spiteful among us(read: Me), it’ll piss off legions of entitled manbabies online who want to get Kathleen Kennedy fired for having the temerity to be a woman while running Star Wars.

#Star Wars #Solo: A Star Wars Story #Solo Spoilers #Movie Reviews #zA's Outside Viewing

5 notes · View notes

uomo-accattivante · 7 years

Photo

A long time ago, a grade-schooler got his hands on a spaceship. He followed the assembly instructions as best he could, snapping on the cannons, the landing gear, the tiny interstellar-chess table. Soon enough, Rian Johnson was holding his very own Millennium Falcon. “The first thing I did,” he recalls, “was throw it across the room, to see how it would look flying.” He grins. “And it broke.”

Johnson grew up, went to film school, made some good stuff, including the entertainingly twisted 2012 sci-fi drama Looper. He’s nearly 44 now, though his cherub cheeks and gentle manner make it easy to picture the kid he was (too easy, maybe – he’s trying to grow back a goatee he shaved); even his neatly pressed short-sleeve button-down has a picture-day feel. In late October, he’s sitting in an office suite inside Disney’s Burbank studios that he’s called home for many months, where a whiteboard declares, “We’re working on Star Wars: The Last Jedi (in case you forgot).” Johnson is the film’s writer-director, which means he ended up with the world’s finest collection of replacement toys, including a life-size Falcon set that nearly brought him to tears when he stepped onto it. He treated it all with what sounds like an intriguing mix of reverence and mischief – cast members keep saying nothing was quite what they expected. “I shook up the box a little bit,” he says, with that same grin.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, everything is broken. In the months since the franchise stirred back to life in 2015’s The Force Awakens, it has felt rather like some incautious child grabbed civilization itself and threw it across the room – and, midflight, many of us realized we were the evil Empire all along, complete with a new ruler that even latter-day George Lucas at his most CGI-addled would reject as too grotesque and implausible a character.

Weirdly, the saga saw it all coming – or maybe it’s not so weird when you consider the Vietnam War commentary embedded in Lucas’ original trilogy, or the warnings about democracy’s fragility in his prequels. In the J.J. Abrams-directed The Force Awakens, a revanchist movement calling itself the First Order assembles in Triumph of the Will-style marches, showing the shocking strength of an ideology that was supposed to have been thoroughly defeated long ago. What’s left of the government is collapsing and feckless, so the only hope in sight is a band of good guys known as the Resistance. Familiar, this all sounds.

“It’s somewhat a reflection of society,” acknowledges the saga’s new star, Daisy Ridley, who plays Rey, and who has gone from unknown London actress to full-blown movie star nearly as fast as her character went from desert scavenger to budding Jedi. “But also it is escapism, because there are creatures and there are people running around with fucking lasers and shit. So, I think, a wonderful mix of both.”

And the worse the world gets, the more we need that far-off galaxy, says Gwendoline Christie, who plays stormtrooper honcho Captain Phasma (as well as Game of Thrones’ Brienne of Tarth): “During testing times, there’s nothing wrong with being transported by art. I think we all need it. Many of us are united in our love for this one thing.”

The Last Jedi, due December 15th, is the second episode of the current trilogy, and advance word has suggested that, as in the original middle film, The Empire Strikes Back, things get darker this time. But Johnson pushes back on that, though he does admit some influence from the morally ambiguous 2000s reboot of Battlestar Galactica (which is funny, because Lucas considered the Seventies TV show a rip-off and urged a lawsuit – long since settled – against it). “That’s one thing I hope people will be surprised about with the movie,” Johnson says. “I think it’s very funny. The trailers have been kind of dark – the movie has that, but I also made a real conscious effort for it to be a riot. I want it to have all the things tonally that I associate with Star Wars, which is not just the Wagner of it. It’s also the Flash Gordon.”

As of late October, almost no one has seen it yet, but Johnson seems eerily free of apprehension about its prospects. He exuded a similar calm on set, according to Adam Driver, who plays Han and Leia’s Darth Vader-worshipping prodigal son, Kylo Ren. “If I had that job, I would be stressed out,” he says. “To pick up where someone left off and carry it forward, but also introduce a vocabulary that hasn’t been seen in a Star Wars movie before, is a tall order and really hard to get right. He’s incredibly smart and doesn’t feel the need to let everyone know it.” (“It felt like we were playing the whole time,” says Kelly Marie Tran, cast as the biggest new character, Rose Tico.) A few weeks after we talk, Lucasfilm announces that Johnson signed on to make three more Star Wars films in the coming decade, the first that step outside of the prevailing Skywalker saga, indicating that Disney and Lucasfilm matriarch Kathleen Kennedy are more than delighted with Last Jedi. And Kennedy’s not easily delighted, having recently replaced the directors of a Han Solo spinoff midshoot and removed original Episode 9 director Colin Trevorrow in favor of Abrams’ return.

The Force Awakens’ biggest triumph was the introduction of new characters worth caring about, led by Rey and Kylo Ren, plus the likes of John Boyega’s stormtrooper-defector Finn, Oscar Isaac’s Poe Dameron and more. Kylo Ren (born Ben Solo) lightsaber-shanked Harrison Ford’s Han, depriving Johnson of one coveted action figure – but the film left us with Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia, now the general who leads the Resistance, and the climactic reveal of Mark Hamill’s now-grizzled Luke Skywalker.

The Last Jedi will be Fisher’s last Star Wars movie. In the waning days of the cruel year of 2016, she went into cardiac arrest on an airplane, dying four days later. Less than a month afterward, 500,000 or so people assembled in Washington, D.C., for that city’s Women’s March, and Leia was everywhere, in posters bearing her doughnut-haired image circa 1977, with accompanying slogans (“A Woman’s Place Is in the Resistance” was, perhaps, the best).

Johnson had grown close with Fisher, and is glad to hear that I visited her psychedelically decorated Beverly Hills house a couple of years back, where she did almost an entire hilarious interview prone in bed. Afterward, she cheerily cracked jokes about drugs and mental illness in front of a visiting Disney publicist. “You got to experience a little bit of that magical sphere that she created,” says Johnson, who went over the script with her in that same bedroom. “I’m happy I got to poke my head into that, briefly, and know her even a little bit.”

He left her part in the film untouched. “We didn’t end up changing a thing,” says Johnson. “Luckily, we had a totally complete performance from her.” So it is now Abrams who has to figure out how to grapple with Fisher and Leia’s sudden absence. (He is characteristically gnomic on the matter: “It’s a sad reality,” he says. “In terms of going forward … time will tell what ends up getting done.”)

Overall, Johnson enjoyed what seems like an almost unfathomable level of autonomy in shaping The Last Jedi’s story. He says no one dictated a single plot point, that he simply decided what happens next. And he’s baffled by fans who are concerned by the idea that they’re “making it up as we go along”: “The truth is, stories are made up! Whether somebody made this whole thing up 10 years ago and put it on a whiteboard and we all have to stick to that, or whether we’re organically finding it as we move forward, it doesn’t mean that any less thought is being put into it.”

Mark Hamill’s single scene in The Force Awakens lasts all of one minute, and he doesn’t say a thing. But it’s an indelible piece of screen acting with real gravitas, from an underrated performer who had become better known for Broadway and voice-over work – he’s been the definitive animated Joker since the early Nineties. (“With voice-over,” Hamill says, “I thought, ‘This is great! I can let myself go to hell physically! I don’t have to memorize lines!’”) As Rey approaches him on the lonely mountaintop where’s he’s presumably spent years studying the Jedi equivalent of the Talmud, Luke Skywalker’s bearded face cycles through grief, terror and longing.

“I didn’t look at that as ‘Oh, this is going to be my big chance,’” says Hamill, who has just shown up at Johnson’s offices and plopped down next to him, carrying a large thermos of coffee in the right hand that Darth Vader once chopped off. He has a trimmed-down version of his elder-Jedi beard, which he’s grown to appreciate: “I shaved, and I thought, ‘You know what, the beard does cover up the jowl.’”

Hamill is a charming, jittery chatterbox – turns out that even at his youngest and prettiest, he was a geek trapped in the body of a golden boy. He is excitable and wild-eyed enough to give the vague sense that, like Luke, he actually might have spent a few solitary years on a distant planet, and is still readjusting to Earth life, or at least movie stardom.

He admits to having had “frustrations over being over-associated” with Star Wars over the years – his Skywalking cost him a chance at even auditioning to reprise his stage role as Mozart in the film of Amadeus – “but nothing that caused me any deep anguish.” He still spent the decades since Return of the Jedi acting and raising a family with Marilou, his wife of 39 years. And as for his current return to the role of Luke? “It’s a culmination of my career,” he says. “If I focused on how enormous it really is, I don’t think I could function. I told Rian that. I said, as absurd as it sounds, ‘I’m going to have to pretend this is an art-house film that no one is going to see.’ ”

For his Force Awakens scene, he says, “I didn’t know – and I don’t think J.J. really knew – specifically what had happened in those 30 years. Honestly, what I did was try and give J.J. a range of options. Neutral, suspicion, doubt … taking advantage of the fact that it’s all thoughts. I love watching silent films. Think of how effective they could be without dialogue.”

Abrams had some trepidation over the idea of handing Hamill a script with such a tiny role. “The last thing I wanted to do was insult a childhood hero,” he says, “but I also knew it was potentially one of the great drumrolls of all time.” In fact, Hamill’s first reaction was, “What a rip-off, I don’t get to run around the Death Star bumping heads with Carrie and Harrison anymore!”

But he came to agree with Abrams, especially after he counted the number of times Luke was mentioned in the screenplay – he thinks it was more than 50: “I don’t want to say, ‘That’s the greatest entrance in cinematic history’ … but certainly the greatest entrance of my career.”

Johnson turns to Hamill. “Did I ever tell you that early on when I was trying to figure out the story for this,” he says, “I had a brief idea I was chasing where I was like, ‘What if Luke is blind? What if he’s, like, the blind samurai?’ But we didn’t do it. You’re welcome. Didn’t stick.” (He adds that this was before a blind Force-using character showed up in 2016’s side film Rogue One.)

Hamill laughs, briefly contemplating how tough that twist would’ve been: “Luke, not too close to the cliff!”

He had a hard enough time with the storyline Johnson actually created for Luke, who is now what the actor calls a “disillusioned” Jedi. “This is not a joyful story to tell,” Hamill says, “my portion of it.” Johnson confirms that Hamill flat-out told him at the start that he disagreed with the direction Luke’s character was taking. “We then started a conversation,” says Johnson. “We went back and forth, and after having to explain my version, I adjusted it. And I had to justify it to myself, and that ended up being incredibly useful. I felt very close to Mark by the end. Those early days of butting heads and then coming together, that process always brings you closer.”

Hamill pushed himself to imagine how Luke could’ve gotten to his place of alienation. A rock fan who’s buddies with the Kinks’ Dave Davies, Hamill started thinking about shattered hippie dreams as he watched a Beatles documentary. “I was hearing Ringo talk about ‘Well, in those days, it was peace and love.’ And how it was a movement that largely didn’t work. I thought about that. Back in the day, I thought, by the time we get into power, there will be no more wars. Pot will be legal.” He smiles at that part. “I believed all that. I had to use that feeling of failure to relate to it.” (We do already know that Luke was training a bunch of Jedi, and Kylo Ren turned on him.)

Hamill’s grief over the loss of Fisher is still fresh, especially since the two of them got to renew their bond, and their space-sibling squabbling, after fallow decades that had given them far fewer reasons to get together. “There was now a comfort level that she had with me,” he says, “that I wasn’t out to get anything or trying to hustle her in any way. I was the same person that I was when she knew me. … I was sort of the square, stick-in-the-mud brother, and she was the wild, madcap Auntie Mame.” Promoting the movie is bringing it all back for him. “I just can’t stand it,” he says. “She’s wonderful in the movie. But it adds a layer of melancholy we don’t deserve. I’d love the emotions to come from the story, not from real life.”

I mention how hard Luke seems to have had it: never meeting his mom; finding the burnt corpses of the aunt and uncle who raised him; those well-known daddy issues; the later years of isolation. “It’s the life of a hero, man,” says Johnson. “That’s what you’ve gotta do to be a hero. You’ve gotta watch people that you love burn to death!”

Hamill notes that reality is not so great either. “Sometimes,” he says, softer than usual, “you think, ‘I’d rather have Luke’s life than mine.’”

Adam Driver has a question for me. “What,” he asks, “is emo?”

Between training for the Marines and training at Juilliard to become one of his generation’s most extraordinary actors, Driver missed some stuff, including entire music genres. But the rest of the world (including an amusing parody Twitter account) decided there’s something distinctly emo about his character, with his luxuriant hair, black outfits and periodic temper tantrums. “You have someone who’s being told that he’s special his whole life,” Driver says of his character, “and he can feel it. And he feels everything probably more intensely than the people around him, you know?”

As anyone who’s seen Driver in practically anything, even Girls, could tell you, the actor himself seems to feel things more strongly than most. “I don’t think of myself as a particularly intense person,” he says, possibly not unaware that he is making intense eye contact, and that his right knee is bouncing up and down with excess energy. “I get obsessive about certain things and, like, enjoy the process of working on something.” He’s in a Brooklyn cafe, on a tree-lined street, that seems to be his go-to spot for interviews. He arrived early, fresh from shooting the new Spike Lee movie, wearing a dark-blue sweater over black jeans and high-top Adidas. Driver has a certainty to him, a steel core, that’s a little intimidating, despite his obvious affability and big, near-constant laugh. It’s not unlike talking to Harrison Ford, who played his dad. Until Driver’s character murdered him.

Driver, raised by his mom and preacher stepdad after his parents divorced when he was seven, doesn’t flinch when I suggest his own father issues might be at work. “I don’t know that it’s always that literal,” he says. He mentions that Kylo Ren also murders Max Van Sydow’s character, who was sort of a “distant uncle” to him. “No one asks me, ‘So you have a distant-uncle problem?’ ”

John Boyega told me in 2015 that Driver stayed in character on set, but that seems to be not quite true. Driver just tries to keep focused on his character’s emotions in the face of an environment he can’t help but find ridiculous. “Watching Star Wars, it’s an action-adventure,” he says. “But shooting it, it’s a straight comedy. Stormtroopers trying to find a bathroom. People dressed as trolls, like, running into doorways. It’s hilarious.” And when he wears his helmet, he can’t see very well. “You’re supposed to be very stealth, and a tree root takes you down.”

He refuses to see his character as bratty. “There is a little bit of an elitist, royalty thing going on,” he says, reminding us that the character’s estranged mom is “the princess. I think he’s aware of maybe the privilege.” He does acknowledge playing Kylo Ren younger than his own age of 34: “I don’t want to say how much younger, 'cause people will read into it… .” He flushes, and later says he regrets mentioning it at all. If it’s a plot spoiler, it’s unclear exactly how, unless it’s related to his unexplained connection to Rey. The two apparently spend serious time together in this film. “The relationship between Kylo and Rey is awesome,” says Ridley, whom Driver calls a “great scene partner,” apparently one of his highest compliments.

At first, Driver wasn’t totally sure he wanted to be in a Star Wars movie. I’m always skeptical of Hollywood movies because they’re mostly just too broad,“ he says. But Abrams’ pitch, emphasizing the uniqueness of Kylo Ren’s character as a conflicted villain, made the sale. “Everything about him from the outside is designed to project the image that he’s assured,” he says. Only in private can he acknowledge “how un-figured-out he is … how weak.”

Driver can make a passionate case for why Kylo Ren isn’t actually a villain at all.

“It’s not like people weren’t living on the Death Star,” he says, his brown eyes shifting from puppyish to fierce without warning. He seems almost in character now. “Isn’t that also an act of terrorism against the hundreds of thousands of people who died there? Did they not have families? I see how people can point to examples that make themselves feel they’re right. And when you feel in your bones that you’re supported by a higher power on top of that, and you’re morally right, there’s no limit to what you’ll do to make sure that you win. Both sides feel this way.”

You’re starting to talk me into joining the Empire, I say. He laughs and shifts his delivery one degree over the top. “So, the rebels are bad,” he says, connecting his fist with the table. “I strongly believe this!”

On an extravagantly rainy Thursday evening in Montreal, I’m sitting at crowded, noisy Le Vin Papillon, a wine bar ranked as Canada’s fourth-best restaurant, holding a seat for a Jedi. Ridley arrives right on time, in a fuzzy faux-fur coat and a jumper dress – “the dregs of my wardrobe,” she says. Her shortish hair is in a Rey-ish topknot that makes her way too recognizable, but she doesn’t care. “This is how I have always had my hair,” says Ridley. “I am not going to change it.” She’s been in Montreal for three months, shooting a Doug Liman-directed sci-fi movie called Chaos Walking – which “is a little bit chaotic, in that we’re writing as we go and everything,” she says. “I’ve realized I don’t work well with that.”

She’s on the second of two unexpected days off thanks to co-star Tom Holland (a.k.a the latest Spider-Man) suffering an impacted wisdom tooth, but she’s still deeply exhausted.

“I need a [vitamin] B shot in my ass,” she muses, in the kind of upscale British accent that makes curses sound elegant. It seems already clear that typecasting won’t pose the kind of problem for her that it did for the likes of Hamill and Fisher. Instead, she’s just busy in a way that only a freshly minted 25-year-old movie star could be – and she still managed to fulfill a pre-fame plan to go back to college for a semester last year. “I have no control in my life at all,” she says. She has four movies on the way, not even counting the Liman one. “So there is a lot going on, and I have never had to deal with that before. I don’t think my brain can really keep up with what is going on.” She has full-blown night terrors: “I wake up and scream.”

Rey had an epochal moment in the last movie, claiming her lightsaber from the snowy ground, and with it, her power, her destiny, her place at the center of the narrative. Her turn. Ridley is still absorbing what that moment, and that character, mean to women and little girls. But she definitely felt more pressure this time around, especially because last time, “it was all so insane, it felt like a dream,” she says. “I remember saying to Rian, 'I am so fucking neurotic on this one.’ I was like, 'I am going to fuck this up. All these people think this thing. How do I do that thing?’ ”

Part of the problem may have been Ridley’s tendency to downplay what she pulled off in the first movie. Her heart-tugging solo scenes in the first act, especially the moment where she eats her sad little “one half portion” of green space bread, created enormous goodwill, in seconds, for a character no one had seen before. She mentions Harrison Ford’s effusive praise for that eating scene, to the point where he was “getting emotional.” “I don’t know,” she says with a shrug, ultimately giving credit for the impact to Abrams and the movie’s cinematographer, Dan Mindel. “I was just eating!”

But in other ways, Rey has given her confidence. On her current film, she says, she was offered a stunt double for a scene where a door would swing open and knock her back. She took Liman aside and said, “'Doug, I don’t need a stunt double to do that.’ And I thought, 'I don’t know if this would’ve happened if it was Tom Holland.’”

Unlike almost everyone else in the world, Ridley has known for years who Rey’s parents are, since Abrams told her on the set of The Force Awakens. Ridley believes that nothing ever changed: “I thought what I was told in the beginning is what it is.” Which is odd, because Johnson insists he had free rein to come up with any answer he wanted to the question. “I wasn’t given any directive as to what that had to be,” he says. “I was never given the information that she is this or she is that.”

The idea that Johnson and Abrams somehow landed on the same answer does seem to suggest that Rey’s parents aren’t some random, never-before-seen characters. All that said, Abrams cryptically hints there may have been more coordination between him and Johnson than the latter director has let on, so who knows what’s going on here – they may be messing with us to preserve one of Abrams’ precious mystery boxes. In any case, Ridley loves the speculation: Her favorite fan theories involve immaculate conception and time travel. It seems more likely that she’s either Luke’s daughter or his niece, but again, who knows.

Back in 2015, Ridley told me she was fine with the idea of being seen as Rey forever, the way Fisher was always Leia. Now she’s changed her mind. “There are literally no similarities with Carrie’s story and mine,” she says, adding that while Fisher ultimately embraced writing over acting, she plans on continuing to “inhabit” as many characters as possible. On the other hand, “a lot of Rey is me,” she says, “but that is not me being Rey. That is parts of me being a character as Rey, because how could it not? So in that sense, I understand it, because so much of Leia is Carrie.”

This trilogy will end with Abrams’ Last Jedi sequel, and after that, it sounds like the main thrust of the franchise will move into Johnson’s mysterious new movies, which look to be unconnected to the previous saga. As far as Abrams is concerned, that will be the end of the Skywalker story. “I do see it that way,” he says. “But the future is in flux.”

As far as Ridley is concerned, the future of Rey is pretty much set. She doesn’t want to play the character after the next movie. “No,” she says flatly. “For me, I didn’t really know what I was signing on to. I hadn’t read the script, but from what I could tell, it was really nice people involved, so I was just like, 'Awesome.’ Now I think I am even luckier than I knew then, to be part of something that feels so like coming home now.”

But, um, doesn’t that sort of sound like a yes? “No,” she says again, smiling a little. “No, no, no. I am really, really excited to do the third thing and round it out, because ultimately, what I was signing on to was three films. So in my head, it’s three films. I think it will feel like the right time to round it out.”

And how about coming back in 30 years, as her predecessors did? She considers this soberly, between bites of Brussels sprouts roasted on the stalk. (We split the dish, which means she got … one half portion.) “Who knows? I honestly feel like the world may end in the next 30 years, so, if in 30 years we are not living underground in a series of interconnected cells … then sure. Maybe. But again, it’s like, who knows. Because the thing I thought was so amazing, was people really wanted it. And it was done by people who really love it.”

She thinks even harder about it, this new Star Wars trilogy that we’ve made up on the spot. “How old will I be?” she asks, before doing the math. “55.” She looks very young for a moment, as she tries to picture herself as a middle-aged Jedi. Then she gives up. It’s time to go, anyway; she has a 5:25 a.m. pickup tomorrow for her new movie. “Fuck,” Ridley says. “I can’t think that far ahead.”

###

#oscar isaac #poe dameron #star wars #the last jedi #rolling stone #rian johnson #mark hamill #luke skywalker #adam driver #kylo ren #daisy ridley #rey #john boyega #finn #carrie fisher #general leia #jj abrams

57 notes · View notes

simonjadis · 7 years

Text

Review: The Last Jedi

I’ve been wanting to write this since I saw TLJ opening night, but I write for a living, which cuts into free-time writing. Here is my review of The Last Jedi.

Warning: The Last Jedi spoilers Also Warning: this is very long

STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI

Before I dive into what works and what does not work for The Last Jedi, I want to say two things:

First, that my favorite installment of Star Wars canon is Star Wars: The Clone Wars and that my three favorite Star Wars films, independent of The Last Jedi, are Return Of The Jedi, Revenge Of The Sith, and Rogue One, in no particular order.

Second, that someone's opinion on The Last Jedi differing from my own does not change my opinion of them. There are some films—such as 2016's Ghostbusters—where fondness or dislike is heavily politicized in a way that makes me wary of people who dislike them (If it's any indication, my cheeks hurt from laughter when I left the theater after seeing Ghostbusters). The Last Jedi is not one of these films.

I mention my favorites from Star Wars because I believe that every reviewer should start with that. I cannot tell you how many vague reviews I saw of The Last Jedi (I avoided any detailed ones, post-embargo) that I didn't know if I could trust. I saw other takes from reviewers—that The Last Jedi was “the best Star Wars film since Empire Strikes Back.” These reviews are not helpful to me, because while that's a popular favorite, anyone using Empire as a touchstone for best Star Wars films has different priorities than my own.

And that ties into why I wanted to make that second statement. Everybody has different priorities when they see films, and there's more to that than genre. I don't just mean that some people love space battles more than others, or that different people have different favorite characters. Some people (including writers and showrunners) are more invested in story, while others are invested in continuity or worldbuilding or character consistency. And the list goes on.

So, someone who likes or dislikes the The Last Jedi isn't automatically stupid or wrong or problematic. And I have to mention that because I have seen some alarmingly bad takes—not on the film, but on people's reactions.

For example (because I've seen this a lot, though not directed at me), assuming that someone dislikes a film because their fan theories weren't correct is toxic and rude.

I should also mention that I have still not read any post-embargo reviews of The Last Jedi, including from good friends of mine (though I'll read those as soon as this is complete). Though I discussed the film with my companions for a couple of hours after we returned, as we were still processing it, I want to give my take on the movie.

So, The Last Jedi is, in my opinion, not a great Star Wars film. I struggle to think of a film aside from The Phantom Menace that I enjoy less. The Empire Strikes Back probably ranks just above it, at the bottom of the Star Wars barrel.

To quote George Lucas, The Last Jedi was “beautifully made.” I never thought that I'd be impressed by George Lucas' shade, but here we are.

Spoilers below:

THE GOOD

I'll explain why I feel that way, but I want to start by talking about positives. True spoilers abound beyond this point, folks.

The film was beautiful and beautifully made.

I have longed to see Leia use the Force since I, as a child, first saw Return of the Jedi. I was disappointed to not see it in The Force Awakens, but very glad to see her racing through space. Some people suggested that the scene was not realistic, but I would point out that Darth Vader (Leia's dad) survived being delimbed and ignited. Darth Maul survived being cut in half. Those are trained Sith, but it sets a powerful precedent for surviving the unsurvivable through the Force. Leia was not hit directly by the explosion, but sucked out into the vacuum of space. Cloaked in the Force, she survives long enough to pull herself to the airlock door. It was a powerful scene and I loved it.

I don't know that I'd die for anyone, but I would certainly kill for Billie Lourd. Or for Gary Fisher. We all mourn Carrie Fisher, but seeing how extensive Billie Lourd's role was in The Last Jedi—particularly in comparison with her small cameo in The Force Awakens—really warms the cockles of your heart. Her character is not explained, and while that might irritate me if she were played by essentially anyone else, I enjoy that she's Billie Lourd and the audience knows who she is and implicitly accepts her friendship with Poe Dameron and trusts her to be a good person.

There is a lot of good about Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo. First of all, she has a baller first name. “Holdo” is a little close to “Hondo,” as in Hondo Ohnaka, Obi-Wan's pirate boyfriend acquaintance. But it's Star Wars and Star Wars names are bound to overlap. Some people apparently believed earlier in the film that she might be a traitor, but I only took her behavior as a typical Lawful Good performance versus Poe Dameron's Chaotic Good antics. Things turned out to be a little more complex than that. Also, she had really nice hair. Her “he's dangerous” and “I like him” lines about Poe were honestly delightful. I wish that she'd been more forthcoming (especially given how wildly informal the Rebellion, from which the Resistance seems to have been formed, has always been).

Finn's bacta outfit (what a neat idea!) and interactions with Poe early on were great. I know that it's technically queerbaiting, but if Disney won't let the canon Star Wars gays appear in films, it's at least appreciated that Poe has had zero female love interests. Unless we count some semi-flirting with Holdo, which is fine since they're both gay. It was clear that Poe being the one to find Finn was a gesture to the fact that they're almost universally shipped with each other. That may be the closest that we see to StormPilot on screen, but at least it's something.

Rey was my favorite part of The Force Awakens. I thought that a lot of her time in The Last Jedi seemed . . . wasted isn't quite the right word. She went to Porg World (whatever you call the planet where Luke has retired to satisfy his lactation kink) to learn the ways of the Force. Honestly, I feel that she might be better served if she were to go unearth forgotten secrets on Moraband, but I resigned myself pretty early on to the idea that Rey will probably avoid the Dark Side. Anyway, I still absolutely love Rey. Not only because she's a tiny Sand Lesbian from Sand Trash Planet, and not only because she's powerful. She earnest and somehow, despite being a scavenging orphan, manages to be relatable at times. Truth be told? I like her more than I ever liked Luke.

Rey's look was also amazing, though, as my friend pointed out, Rey's wearing a vest, and vests are as much a lesbian uniform as leather jackets are for bi girls.

ROSE IS SO GOOD. I don't just mean that her actress is a precious wonderful delight of a human being, though that is also true. Rose herself is really likable. As with Leia, this is a character where my adoration for the actor certainly exceeds my love for the character but the character is also great. Anyway, while “Rose” doesn't seem like a great Star Wars name (and, worse, we now have “Rose” and “Rey” as two of the, like, seven new characters who are still alive), I liked her blend of sweetness and determination.

Speaking of Rose: Finn is wonderful. I don't know what to make of that kiss (except that, it makes sense, especially if you think that you're dying), but even though I was bummed that Finn didn't wield a lightsaber in this film (what are they doing with him?), I think that he's a treasure.

In many ways, The Force Awakens was a rehash of A New Hope. I am so pleased that The Last Jedi did what appears to be a speedrun of both Empire Strikes Back and Return Of The Jedi so that we can have more, new storytelling in Episode IX.

There's that moment where Rey is on Porg World and she talks to Luke about the rise of the Empire and about Darth Sidious and it's a sign of how starved I am for references to or even acknowledgement of the prequels that this was a highlight for me, but it was. It was my favorite character from the sequels saying the name of my favorite character from all of Star Wars canon (and one of my all-time favorite characters from anything), Sheev Palpatine.

If you ask me what I liked about The Last Jedi, the first image that's going to pop into my mind is the image of the First Order's weapons firing at the Resistance ships at range, and we see . . . shield impacts. The recent-ish Star Trek films (and, sadly, Star Trek: Discovery, which I love but that's another post) have refused to show shield impacts during space battles, for reasons that I cannot fathom. It has long been part of Star Wars that we just don't see more than a flash of light when energy weapons impact standard deflector shields (we do see it with thermal shields and certain types of terrestrial ray shields, but not with ships). Anyway, I love space battles and spaceships and there's something about seeing energy weapons impact on shields like that . . . it just lights up my mind's happiness centers like a christmas tree.

Vice Admiral Holdo's big Space Kamikaze (though problematic from a worldbuilding/plot holes perspective) was really fucking cool and such a powerful moment. More on the negative aspects of that in the next section.

Rey's parentage wasn't really a let down. Like most fans, I had my own theory (Rey Palpatine), but since she clearly wasn't a Skywalker and since really the only lineage storyline in Star Wars canon is about the Skywalkers, it's nice to see an ex nihil Force-user with power like Rey's. It's hardly unprecedented. Even ignoring Anakin (who may have been created by Darth Plageuis or by the Force), neither Yoda nor Palpatine are ever suggested as having originated from Force dynasties. Sometimes, it doesn't matter who your garbage parents were, and that's a great message for Rey's backstory. (Though, truth be told, some wonder if this is a deception)

When a friend of mine got to a certain Plot Point of Dragon Age, she DMed me on Twitter, with “Flemeth you ol' bitch! Tits out and everything!” While that message warmed the cockles of my heart, it also really stuck with me, because that went through my head at Kylo Ren's topless scene. I'm not making fun of him (he looked great; even better than in The Force Awakens), but my friend's thoughts echoed through my mind. Also, she was in the theater with me.

BB8 is my beautiful precious son and I was so delighted to see him get to gleefully murder people!!! That moment really helps him fit in with other murderous Star Wars droids like R2, Kaytoo, and Chopper. But BB8 was more adorable and reminds me of a precious chihuahua I used to walk. BB8, you're doing amazing, sweetie!

That red, salty planet? Gorgeous. I've heard that it was Krayt, though we did not see one of its famous dragons. Maybe someone mentioned the planet's name during the film? I should disclose that I can't follow every word without subtitles and only take away, at best, 80% of the dialogue from a film without subtitles. I hear the noises just fine, but I have auditory integration issues that are just one of several factors that make me a nightmare to talk to. Anyway, love that gorgeous planet.

Speaking of subtitles, I've heard that someone saw The Last Jedi with subtitles and that, during that early scene with Poe negging General Hux, he referred to Hux as ��Hugs.” That is amazing and beautiful and I would never in a thousand viewings have caught it.

The First Order Dreadnaught? Gorgeous. You shouldn't need a Death Star to absolutely demolish a base from orbit. And orbital bombardment is right up there with space battles among my favorite things. It just goes right to my happiness centers.

The Red Guards: like all of the aesthetic choices that Snoke inherited from Palpatine, his Red Guards were truly inspired. I love the variety in their vibro-weapons. The Soul Calibur-style weapon was particularly memorable. That whole fight scene with Kylo and Rey and the Red Guards? Absolutely stunning.

I love that the Skywalker Legacy Lightsaber is destroyed. That thing has a terrible track record with hands. I also love that Rey was the first to recover after that tug-of-war with Kylo; it reminds me of the end of Palpatine besting Yoda in the Senate. I'm excited to see what sort of lightsaber Rey crafts for herself . . . and also interested in learning where she plans to get a kyber crystal.

THE BAD

Snoke was, for me, the biggest disappointment of this film. A lot of The Last Jedi's angrier defenders have mocked fans for having the audacity to want to, you know, know who the characters are or what's going on. No one in the sequels has been as enigmatic as Supreme Leader Snoke.

Here's the set-up: in The Force Awakens, we see Snoke only via hologram as he instructs Kylo Ren. Kylo Ren, though interesting in concept, has not impressed me (I'll go into that), so I had hoped that perhaps I would at least like Snoke. As I mentioned, Palpatine is my favorite character in all of Star Wars. He lifts me up where I belong. He's also one of the most iconic characters in all of fiction, and a tough act to follow. With Hux being rude (and not Force-sensitive) and Kylo being weak, I hoped that Snoke, at least, would excite me.

We do see more of Snoke in The Last Jedi, but his is . . . profoundly rude. As my friend Rachel said as we sat processing after the film: “In my day, the Dark Side had a little class!” Snoke has a Hugh Hefner vibe to him and I mean that in the worst possible way. His golden robe was, I thought, an inspired design choice as it deviates from Dark Side Black while still allowing him some contrast from his (gorgeously) decorated throne room and Red Guards. The man wearing that robe, however, was not to my liking.

Back to the set-up: We briefly see Snoke in The Force Awakens, and he piques our curiosity. And then we begin to read the canon novels, where we learn that Palpatine—as Emperor—sensed some sort of profound Dark Sidedness beyond known space. He set up multiple observatories in order to assess that part of space, and was apparently planning an expedition before he was betrayed and murdered at the Battle of Endor. Apparently, it was his will that any Empire that could not support its Emperor was too weak to do its job, so his contingency plan, should he fall, was for only the best of the Empire to venture into unknown space and find whatever Dark Side presence he'd felt and, hopefully, find new leadership with the strength to bring order to the galaxy. In the novels, Admiral Rae Sloan goes with Brendol Hux and Brendol's young son, Armitage Hux (that's the general we see within the First Order), on this voyage into unknown space.

I can only imagine the disappointment that Palpatine's Force Ghost (or whatever the Dark Side equivalent is; we know that they exist in canon, as Darth Bane was able to manifest before Yoda on Moraband) must feel at Snoke. Palpatine was betrayed and killed by his apprentice, sure. But that apprentice was Darth Vader, one of the most powerful beings that the Galaxy Far Far Away has ever seen. And Palpatine was, at the time, a little occupied—you know, killing Luke.

In contrast, Snoke was actively reading Kylo Ren's mind when Kylo killed him. Though the words that Snoke uttered were transparently misleading (along the lines of the Delphic Oracle's famous prophesy to Croesus: “If you proceed, a great power will fall”), Snoke was actively sensing Kylo's thoughts and, well, we haven't seen anything about Kylo Ren to suggest that he's some master at the arts of deceit through the Force. Hell, Kylo didn't even sense whatever Force connection Snoke apparently forged. In contrast, while Palpatine and Vader went on an adventure together in the novel, Sith Lords, Sheev was able to sense Vader's dominicidal thoughts. At one point, Vader silently imagines grabbing his Master and lifting his frail, old body into the air, and Palpatine grins with delight at him, and Vader understands that Sheev knows exactly what's going on in his mind. Palpatine also foresaw an attack against his Star Destroyer with such clarity that he remained in “safe” zones of the ship at all times, sensing well in advance which portions of the vessel would be the first to fall.

What's more is that, not only should Snoke have seen it coming—he just died immediately when Kylo ignited the saber. A normal person might die from being cut in half, sure. That's not shameful. But a master of the Dark Side? Darth Maul was cut in half and then fell a distance that I wouldn't even care to guess. He went on to survive for many years on a planet made of garbage and fire. Maul was only Palpatine's apprentice; meanwhile, we see Snoke lose consciousness and die immediately from a (cauterized) wound to his waist. Unless his heart is stored in his waist (I know that he's an alien, but his heart definitely isn't there; it's usually useful to keep those behind ribs), that makes Snoke a lil' bitch among Dark Side “masters.”

The lack of information about Snoke also means that we don't know a lot about the First Order.

First, we don't know how to feel about the First Order's goals. Obviously, their means are immoral—abducting children and turning them into soldiers, destroying an entire solar system in an effort to destroy the New Republic government (which really shouldn't have worked, by the way, since the galaxy could just elect new senators). But is their goal to conquer the galaxy to create a safe and secure society? We don't know their goals beyond taking over the galaxy; more insight into Snoke would help us to better understand what drives the First Order.

Second, was Snoke some kind of Dark Side hermit that Rae Sloane and Brendol Hux found somewhere in the unknown reaches of space? If so, where is the First Order getting its resources? Was Snoke instead some sort of local ruler within uncharted space? If so, why is his entire army (right down to his interior décor and his personal guards, not to mention his fleet and soldiers) drawn directly from Palpatine's playbook?

And, again, what is Snoke?

For a lot of reasons, he's clearly not a Sith; that has been confirmed. He says that Kylo is “first of the Knights of Ren,” so . . . are Knights of Ren all Dark Side wielders? The simplest explanation is that “Ren” is like “Sith” or “Darth,” and another school of the Dark Side. What does that make Snoke? Is he the “Lord of Ren” or something?

We've seen exactly one thing from Snoke that's entirely new, and . . . we only see the Force Immobilization from Kylo Ren. Interestingly, and please correct me if I failed to notice an instance of it, we did not see it at all in The Last Jedi, but saw it more than once in The Force Awakens. Snoke presumably taught that to Kylo, but . . . other than that, he doesn't seem to bring anything new to the table.

Snoke Force-bullied General Hux through a hologram. This is not new. In Return of the Jedi, Vader Force-choked Admiral Kendal Ozzel after establishing visual contact via a communicator screen. We don't know Snoke's distance from Hux in that scene, but since Palpatine Force-chokes Dooku, lifting him into the air, via holo transmission over the considerable distance of Coruscant to Dooku's homeworld of Serenno, this was already established as a possible (though likely difficult) feat.

Snoke struck Kylo Ren with Force-lighting, which of course is well-established as being a power of the Dark Side, wielded by Palpatine and Dooku, but also wielded in slightly different forms by The Son (on Mortis) and by Mother Talzin, leader of the Nightsisters.

Kylo Ren uses the Force to interrogate, but this is a simple combination of Force Persuasion (Jedi Mind Tricks, used by almost every Force-user at some point or another) and sensing things through the Force. Vader duels Luke on the Death Star II and learns that Luke has a sister. Palpatine is almost always aware of the thoughts and feelings of those around him. Multiple Jedi use Force Persuade simultaneously to try to force the truth out of Cad Bane. We see the Force used for interrogation (almost precisely as Kylo Ren does) when the Seventh Sister, one of the Inquisitors who answers to Vader after the death of the Grand Inquisitor, attempts to use the Force to interrogate Ezra Bridger. It's a two-pronged effort to divine the truth while also attempting to pry secrets from the individual.

Snoke is not shown forging the bridge between Rey and Kylo, but this has precedent—once again, we look to Palpatine. He once used Dooku's connection to Yoda (remember, Yoda was once Dooku's mentor) in order to assault Yoda's mind in an effort to break him. While Yoda spends the final decades of his life as a barely-intelligible swamp-hermit who would rather literally die than tell the truth, this particular assault on his mind was not successful. Palpatine accomplished this without any proximity to Yoda, but rather through the use of Sith Sorcery. Snoke is not a Sith, but we must imagine that he accomplished this “bridge” via . . . well, I suppose that we'd call it “Ren Sorcery.”

Don't get me wrong, the “Force Pause” or whatever it is that Kylo Ren did in The Force Awakens was super cool and I love that it's a thing. But, in general, Snoke feels like a bargain basement attempt to fill Palpatine's role until Kylo could kill him and take his place as the Supreme Leader of the First Order. That might not be as bad if Kylo seemed, you know, impressive.

Finally, because I've just written the last 1,608 words about Snoke and need to move on to my second greatest disappointment with The Last Jedi, I should mention that I've been joking that Snoke has never actually killed anyone in his life and just bluffed his way into leading the First Order. He's weak and rude and the sequels could have done better, even with a temporary character meant to die in his second movie.

So, yeah, what we don't know of Snoke is a frustrating mystery and what we do know of Snoke is disappointing.

My second biggest issue was one of Luke's characterization.

Contrary to what you might assume, I am not talking about Luke's retirement to Lactation Kink island on Planet Porg.

I mean, that's an issue—since he's repeating the Cranky Old Hermit mistakes of Obi-Wan and Yoda who came before him. In fact, even Obi-Wan seemed to have a better attitude and degree of optimism than Luke, and that's after his apprentice, uh, personally purged the Jedi Temple. Luke lost his first class of students but Obi-Wan lost an entire galaxy and a Jedi order of thousands.

But, you know, sometimes Jedi just go off to do loner stuff on strange old islands that are home to whimsical characters. The Light Side is rough like that.

No, my issue comes from that, frankly, inexcusable scene in the tent. The one that “explains” why Kylo and Luke had their big falling out that resulted in Kylo murdering his fellow students.

Luke has never been one of my favorite characters in Star Wars, but I can tell you this much: the whole point of Return Of The Jedi was that he would literally rather die than kill Darth Vader, who had personally killed thousands and was an accomplice to everything that the Empire had done for, well, all of Luke's life.

So, to put it plainly, I cannot reconcile Luke Skywalker, the character, with the man Mark Hamill played in The Last Jedi. With a man whose first instinct after sneaking into his nephew's room to probe his thoughts is “gotta murder him in his sleep!” I'm not opposed to the idea of characters who are willing to murder other characters in their sleep. Again, Palpatine is my literal favorite character. But that particular deed is simply not in Luke's wheelhouse.

Now, some argue that this scene was necessary in order to bring Luke and Kylo to where they are for this trilogy.

I don't believe in adjusting a character's established behavior to suit the story. I like character-driven stories where what happens makes sense based upon the individuals involved and their environment.

But there are totally doable ways to tell that story.

How I would do it? Luke would notice warning signs about his nephew, sense that things aren't quite right (from his point of view), but appear to other students to be ignoring a problem. Meanwhile, one or two of Luke's other padawans might attempt what Luke attempted—trying to sense what's going on with their fellow student. An inexperienced pupil, sensing a darkness, might draw a weapon, causing young Kylo (before he was Kylo Ren) to awaken . . . just as Luke bursts into the room. So then we get the panic, and the tearing down of the roof. When Luke digs himself out of the rubble, Kylo has killed all of the padawans who were unwilling to join him. He might even believe that Luke was involved in the “attack.”

Luke being arguably too passive would be a totally believable and character-consistent mistake. Instead I just sat there, thinking . . . this is like telling me that, actually, Tarkin adopted all of the children who were off-world but orphaned by the destruction of Alderaan. That's just not something that this particular character would do. If you want to write a different character, do that.

As a result of this huge character difference, I've nicknamed Mark Hamill's character in The Last Jedi: “Jedi Joe.” Because, you know, he's just not consistent with Luke.

My third biggest issue with The Last Jedi is the timeline.

How long was Rey on Planet Porg? Days? Weeks?

Meanwhile, Vice Admiral Holdo and the Resistance are literally counting down the hours until they run out of fuel.

I say “meanwhile,” because Rey and Kylo's little ForceTime conversations make it emphatically clear that these are concurrent storylines.

We don't know how long the Resistance “fleet” (it's just a few big ships) spends in hyperspace before they return to normal space and the First Order shows up to attack them, but it can't be for long, because Star Wars FTL is much, much faster than, say, Star Trek's. I can't imagine them spending more than a couple of days in hyperspace, if that long.

So, how much time did Rey spend on the island with Luke? Are days just very short on Planet Porg? Running parallel to the Resistance being pursued by the First Order, this seems to be a problem.

Speaking of the Resistance fleeing from the First Order . . . what the hell was up with their “tracking.”

So, let's say that the First Order has developed the tech to track a ship through hyperspace. Or maybe they just have an infiltrator (or someone turned traitor) or got a tracking device aboard one of the ships. I'm willing to accept that . . . random technological development or whatever.

But General Hux was on a regular Star Destroyer when he established that tracking lock, right? So why is it that, later, that tracking lock—the one that they need to disable—is on Snoke's command ship? Can you just pass it back and forth like it's no big deal? They talked about it like it was some sort of delicate connection, easily foiled. One or two lines could have explained it, but if there was an explanation, I missed it.

Incidentally, I mention the idea of an infiltrator or a traitor within the Resistance because this would have really made it easier for them to explain why Vice Admiral Holdo was being tight-lipped about her plans. Though, quite frankly, Poe Dameron destroyed Starkiller Base. He should be above suspicion. The Resistance shows no signs of being a formal military. They're sort of a cobbled together grassroots thing, not unlike the Rebel Alliance, so it's not like they have this strict need-to-know command structure where no one is allowed to ask questions.

As my friend Rachel pointed out after the film, a lot of problems could have been resolved by the characters if they had simply spoken to one another and communicated like adults. This isn't necessarily a flaw in the film, but it sure is frustrating for the audience. The message that bold heroic actions aren't always the answer is an admirable one, but the circumstances make it seem to be a failure of leadership on Holdo's part.

Speaking of Holdo, I'm alarmed that these Sequels seem reluctant to give us new alien characters. We've seen Maz Kanata and Snoke, but all other aliens have been in the background or they've been Chewie. Holdo could have been an alien. She could have even retained the lavender look as a Theelin (like Asajj Ventress' bounty hunter gal pal, Latts Razzi). I totally support Rose being a human, but Holdo—particularly since she was not going to survive anyway—could have been a sorely needed alien character.

Also while we're on the subject of Holdo:

As I mentioned, Holdo's death was one of the most powerful moments of The Last Jedi. In science fiction universes such as Stargate or Babylon 5, FTL travel is entirely removed from the physical world. Flying a ship “through” a planet is fine in the same way that, on a planet, flying an aircraft far above a building does not damage the building below. In Star Wars, that is not the case, which is why they have complex hyperspace lanes and elaborate calculations (often made by specialized droids). Which is why, when she went to “lightspeed” (no more the speed of light than their “lasers” are actual lasers), her ship so effectively damaged Snoke's flagship and took some Destroyers with it. But the implications of this were obvious. Why, then, has this sort of tactic not been employed widely before? Could a few carefully placed transports in FTL have demolished the Death Star without Luke's special magic aiming? Couldn't every Star Destroyer be disabled or destroyed by, say, a garbage scow piloted by a single droid that goes to hyperspace in the direction of the ship? This kind of tactic would forever change warfare in Star Wars—even retroactively.

The only way that I can wrap my head around it is to suggest that perhaps the flagship's shields were recycling and therefore couldn't be brought back up in time to prevent Holdo's maneuver from being effective. Perhaps normal deflector shields protect ships from being impaled by other ships traveling through hyperspace. There's precedent for shields recycling (for example, thermal shields are shown to have a brief cooldown between being deactivated and reactivated), so we can accept that whatever type of Star Wars shields the First Order uses were on cooldown to conserve power while they leisurely bombarded the Resistance ships from range, and that Hux and the others on the bridge couldn't bring them up quickly enough to save the ship. Because otherwise . . . Star Wars seems to be broken.

Did they just kill Captain Phasma? Or did they seem to kill her . . . again . . . after doing basically nothing with her this whole film? I was hoping to see more of her in XIII, not less.

Maz Kanata's scene? Where she's doing vague cool stuff while also on the Space Phone? That was kind of a mess. It's fine if you liked it, but I felt like it was trying too hard.

C3PO had a red arm, taken from another droid (there's a whole backstory to it). He had it in The Force Awakens. The Last Jedi seems to begin precisely where The Force Awakens ended (just look at Luke receiving the lightsaber), so . . . when did C3PO get an arm transplant? Or did he receive it between the destruction of Starkiller Base and Rey's arrival at Planet Porg? We don't know how much time passed (though it seems silly to suggest that Finn would be comatose for for all that long; in Star Wars terms, his injuries were not that severe).

Empire Strikes Back has some of the heroes go to a gambling planet—Bespin Cloud City is effectively Space Vegas. The Last Jedi does the same, but this time it's more like Space Monaco. There were parts of that sequence that I enjoyed, but other parts I did not. I get that Rose and Finn's journey wasn't supposed to succeed for narrative reasons, but they actually harmed the Resistance. DJ didn't just fail; he betrayed them. Also, DJ is a terrible Star Wars name.

Of course, there are questions as to how DJ betrayed them. Perhaps I need to watch the film again, but as my friend Cattlin pointed out, Finn and Rose spoke to Poe, and then Poe was knocked out and woke up in the escape pod along with Leia. That's when Poe learned about the pods. How exactly did DJ learn about them in order to betray the knowledge to the First Order? (If anyone knows, or if I am missing something here, I am genuinely asking, so please let me know)

You know the scene at the beginning where, thanks to Iden Versio's intelligence-gathering, the Resistance knows where to hit to First Order Dreadnought in order to cause the most damage? Those bombers don't make sense to me because they are literally bombers. A bunch of slow-moving ships that literally drop bombs, perhaps using their own internal gravity, seem like a terrible choice. I'm not demanding that they use Y-wings again, but they could use, like, a ship that's in any way practical or good to deliver bombs. Perhaps a vessel that doesn't set off cataclysmic secondary and tertiary explosions in the form of its fellow bombers when it gets hit by enemy fire would be nice. (I know that Star Wars tech isn't based on Earth tech and therefore doesn't have to make sense in a speculative sense, but literally dropping round black bombs is not the way to win a fight).

Speaking of not winning fights: Kylo Ren.

I get that, because The Last Jedi takes place immediately after The Force Awakens, Kylo didn't have time to undergo character development that would be required to make him in any way impressive, either through his skill with the Force or through his temperament. But it was disappointing to see that not only was Snoke a weak jerk, but Kylo still has his issues. I like that he killed Snoke—like, the old guy's good at moving stuff around with the Force, but you don't get an award for that. I like that he seized power for himself. I liked that he put Hux in his place. But I'm not impressed with him as a character yet. I want to like him. I think that he has a lot of really cool potential, but I don't see him meeting that yet. I hope to see that in Episode IX. I hope to see him acting as a real leader, making smarter choices, and ideally giving orders to other Dark Side individuals (where are these other Knights?).

I also want to see Kylo showing greater strength and insight through the Force.

I don't know what the First of the Knights of Ren is, exactly, but ideally, he should notice when his creepy boss is using Space Magic to set him up with Rey. And he sure as hell shouldn't be getting tricked into a fake duel with an illusion in front of his whole army.

I'm okay with Luke having the power to project an illusion. While there's precedent in Star Wars canon (Mother Talzin does a lot of illusion work, including projecting an illusion of herself to Serenno from Dathomir while attacking Count Dooku), I do wish that he'd at some point hinted that he'd learned some things that the old Jedi Order had never managed. Maybe through meditation, maybe through old Jedi lore, or maybe through people he's met on his travels. (So far, the only Dathomir Witches that I know to be canon are the Nightsisters, and also they were all murdered by General Grievous under orders from Count Dooku; older, EU materials portrayed Nightsisters as only one faction on Dathomir, with other clans that were much friendlier to Jedi and to the Light Side of the Force—that would be an easy option)

I'm even okay, from a lore perspective, with Luke being able to deceive Kylo Ren with it. Maybe tricking Force-users is part of the ability. That scene's parallels to Obi-Wan's final duel with Vader are obvious, though Luke's death at its conclusion were more reminiscent of how his mom died.

But … the dice? The Fake Ghost Dice? That struck me as weird, after. Sure, Star Wars illusions can be powerful, but why bring your sister a fake memento? Aside, I mean, from a desire to deceive the audience. (Though seriously, shout-out to my best friend, Jeff, for predicting that Luke wasn't really there. I did not; I had assumed that his X-Wing being underwater on Lactation Kink Island was a Chekhov's Gun device to prepare us for Luke's departure. I was bewildered that Fake Ghost Luke was wielding a blue lightsaber in his duel, which only made sense after it was revealed that he was an illusion)

Weird that he died from it, though. My friend Cattlin was dreading the possibility of Luke dying, but I had accepted it. (After all, I already watched my favorite Star Wars character die, in Return of the Jedi)

Speaking of the Skywalker Legacy Lightsaber . . . the blade on it looked like it was filmed in 1980. Lightsabers looked so much better in the prequel films. Based on how Kylo Ren's lightsaber looks, lightsabers could look incredible in this film. In some scenes, they do. But that particular one tends to look washed out.

Along those same lines, they used muppet Yoda in a transparent attempt to distance themselves from the prequels. Thanks, I hate it. I don't know why dead Yoda has weather-control powers now, but even that pales beside how annoyed I am that both Sequel films seem to be scrambling to assure fans that they're not like the prequels.

Cattlin has a shirt that reads: “Shut up, nerd. The prequels are good, actually.” It warms the cockles of my heart whenever I see it.

There were a few bits that struck me as odd directing choices, but I don't know enough about cinematography to identify them.

Like everyone else, my opinion about The Last Jedi is a product of my personal interests and priorities. That's life.

#Star Wars #The Last Jedi #Star Wars The Last Jedi #The Last Jedi spoilers #TLJ #I wrote this all in one day because I am out of my got dam mind

16 notes · View notes

duhragonball · 7 years

Text

Midi-chlorians

I'm planning to write up a more thorough analysis of Super Saiyans, including this "S-Cell" concept Toriyama brought up in a recent interview, but that'll take a while. In the meantime, I thought it might be worth going over the midi-chlorian concept fro Star Wars, since S-Cells seem to bear some resemblence to that idea. So this post is about Star Wars.

Personally, I loved "The Phantom Meance", and the stuff about midi-chlorians never bothered me at all. It bothered *a lot* of Star Wars fans, though, and I always wondered if they might have accepted it more readily if they had enjoyed the overall movie as much as I did.

If you're not familiar with "The Phantom Menace", the movie flashes back to Darth Vader's childhood as Anakin Skywalker. The Jedi discover him and realize he has Force powers, and they test him to see just how much potential he has. This involves screening his blood for "midi-chlorians", and the results are off the charts. Obi-Wan Kenobi remarks that "not even Yoda" has a reading so high, and later we see that Yoda is one of the top leaders on the Jedi Council. The implication is that if Anakin were trained to use his abilities, he could become the strongest Jedi ever.

The blood test is also used to explain why the Jedi Order refuses to recruit Anakin, in spite of his potential. Since Force potential can be detected with a simple blood test, the Jedi screen everyone in the Republic at birth, and any babies who test positive are automatically for training. Anakin missed out on this because he was born outside of Republic space, so he's considered to old to join the Jedi, despite being only nine. By the end of the movie, he's allowed to join anyway, but the issue constantly lingers throughout the next two movies. Were the Jedi right to make an exception for Anakin, or is he doomed to fail them because he doesn't fit into their system?

Other than the story of Darth Plagueis in Episode III, I don't think midi-chlorians were ever mentioned again in the movies. One might suggest that this was a direct response to fan criticism, the same way Jar-Jar Binks' role was scaled back for Episodes II ans III. This may be true, but I also suspect that there was no longer any need for the concept. Once Anakin was old enough to show off his abilities, there was no need to refer to a test score. Everyone could just say he's powerful and leave it there.

The way I understood it, people didn't like the midi-chlrorian concept because it shoehorned a science fiction explanation for the Force. In the original movies, most of what we know about the Force is explained very vaguely by Kenobi and Yoda as they train Luke Skywalker. It's treated like magic, and while Luke has the ability to use it, he needs to open his mind so he can learn to *understand it*. "Phantom Menace" sort of undermined that mystical quality by making the Jedi Order look like an outer space police force instead of a dwindling handful of Tolkeinesque wizards. It took a harder sci-fi angle on the Jedi, at the expense of the fantasy atmosphere of the previous movies.

But I think that was inevitable. "The Phantom Menace" was about the collapse of the Republic and its transformation into the Empire of the Original Trilogy. The prequels told the story of a galaxy-spanning democracy that collapsed, and that's more of a hard sf story than a fantasy tale. The Original Trilogy had the luxury of being set after all that social upheaval had happened, and a lot of details didn't need to be explained. Luke's Force potential was self-evident because he inherited it from his dad. The logistics of the Jedi Order were academic because the Order was gone. The complexities of galactic politics were irrelevant because the Empire was an autocracy ruling through brute force. It's a lot easier to make Obi-Wan Kenobi look like a weird sorcerer when he's all alone. When he's part of a huge organization, now you have to explain who he works for and who pays for his expenses and what rules he has to follow. Science fiction is better equipped to tackle that sort of world-building.

Concerning midi-chlorians specifically, they were used as a plot device to reveal Anakin's potential without having him actually demonstrate any feats of power. He won the podrace and helped defeat the Trade Federation invasion, but those deeds were pretty subtle compared to what the adult Jedi and Sith were up to. Anakin had the *potential *to surpass all of them, but that would have to wait until the next movie. So the only way to communicate that to the audience was to invent some test and give him a really high score. I suppose Qui-Gon could have done something more magical-looking, like place his hands on Anakin and enter a trance, but it would have amounted to the same thing. There had to be a routine test for Force powers, one that could be administered easily and accurately.

Also, I think "The Phantom Menace" was more self-aware than it's given credit for. Fans didn't like the midi-chlorian test, and that might have been the point. The Jedi were supposed to be enlightened mystics, removed from the temporal world, but in the prequels they were obsessed with the protocol and infrastructure of their Order. Qui-Gon only tested Anakin to confirm what he had already sensed through his own connection to the Force. Instead of trusting his instincts, he sought reassurance from technology, representing a subtle corruption of the Jedi philosophy, one that got progressively worse throughout the prequels. By Episode III, the Jedi were trusting clone armies and secular governments almost completely, and so they never saw betrayal until it was too late to avoid it. Anakin was

Anyway, that's sort of my defense of midi-chlorians. They never bugged me much, because I never saw them as anything more than an exposition tool, like when a character holds up a newspaper so you can see the headline. The idea that you can manipulate midi-chlorians to artifically empower someone with the Force has gotten some play in Star Wars Expanded Universe materials, but as far as I've seen it always seems to end in failure. As in "Revenge of the Sith", Anakin was tempted by the idea of manipulating midi-chlorians to save his wife from death, but the midi-chlorians always seem to resist manipulation in these stories. You can detect them with instruments, but they can't be directly controlled or investigated. So there's still a fantasy aspect in play here. Aladdin's lamp in and of itself was a very mundane object, but the power it contained was still wonderous and inexplicable.

#/#//#///#////#/////#star wars #midi chlorians #phantom menace was awesome i don't care what anybody says #basically they couldn't have anakin headbutt darth maul like baby gohan did to raditz #if they had gone in that direction then there would have been no need for a blood test #anakin's power would have been obvious

11 notes · View notes

argumate · 7 years

Text

Wonder Woman

This movie was great fun! It hit all the right notes for a superhero movie, and although it was not particularly original it was very well executed and I liked it.

- The movie is bookended with references to Bruce Wayne, who thankfully doesn’t show up in person, so let’s just ignore those scenes. Actually I’d like to see her meet Steve Rogers, but I guess that would require corporate merger shenanigans at the highest level.

- (Actually the movie does share plenty of tropes with Captain America: a hero taken out of time, a band of brothers in the war, a villain with apocalyptic plans, a love that is not to be, an aeroplane, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves).

- Hot diggity, Amazon island! (I keep wanting to say they’re from the Amazon, but that isn’t right at all). It’s got unrealistic waterfalls and everything, that’s how you know it’s blessed by the gods. Oh and a forcefield bubble to keep out the rest of the world, that’s cool too.

- This has to be the most satisfying representation of the female warrior race ever devised in the past three thousand years, and the movie could have just been two hours of Robin Wright kicking Gal Gadot’s ass while Connie Nielsen smoulders in the background and the audience would have been well satisfied.

- No Futurama jokes were made in this review. Not even petite ones.

- Princess Diana (wut? I only just noticed the main character is Princess Di, although in fairness they always refer to her the other way around) I mean Diana, Princess of the Amazons, has the standard chosen-by-destiny origin story and a mother who can’t bear to lose her to fate, and gives her heavily redacted stories of the past. (She boned Zeus! That’s nothing to be ashamed of, everyone has boned Zeus).

- What could possibly trouble this peaceful island of crazy warrior ladies besides the arrival of... a man. In the form of Chris Pine, whom I must admit I was a little wary of since I haven’t seen him in any movies before so to me he’s a bit of an unknown quantity. But he’s great! In this film at least. Funny guy, charismatic, good love interest, solid support without overshadowing, I think his character works really well.

- All that dick innuendo while he’s in the bath tho.

- The man brings news of the Great War, and the Amazons’ sacred duty is to restore the peace... kinda. It’s a bit vague actually; the artfully rendered backstory montage of god fights certainly suggested that, but then what have they been doing for millennia on their island while wars rage across the world outside? Anyway, the bubble has been broken, a bunch of Germans got what was coming to them, Robin Wright took a bullet for Diana and will grimace no more, and Diana is just itching to go kill a god.

- I mean seriously she is thirsty for god slaughter; when she was six years old her mother showed her the magical god-slaying sword and she literally drooled at it, this woman doesn’t even need a reason she’ll slaughter a god just for sport.

- Sorrowful partings as Diana sails away from the only world she’s ever known, and spy boy tries to mack on her when they’re barely out of sight of shore. Lucky for him that magical force bubble shields his amorous intentions from her mother, who can and will throw a spear that far if she has to.

- Wonder Woman, of course, is demisexual.

- The London scenes where they try on outfits and fight spies in alleys and rustle up a posse of misfits are a lot of fun indeed, then things turn serious as they approach the Western Front. Sometimes the Great War really does feel like the abstract concept of war reified and instantiated in the world, soldiers and generals and politicians alike helplessly forced to dance to its tune without any way to stop, the logic of game theory gone mad. It’s certainly tempting to imagine that there must be an off switch somewhere, and if you could just stab the right guy everything would grind to a halt. Of course, you could say it was shooting the right guy that kicked things off in the first place.

- Diana charges into no-mans land without even tossing her hair back first and saying “but I am no man”, but you know we were all thinking it.

- Quick shout out to the cinema audience who laughed and gasped and cried at all the right moments, although I thought I could hear someone behind me repeating the lines slightly before they happened, perhaps closed captions? Either way it was a nice atmosphere, top stuff.

- That charge scene though, it was something. I’ve heard it described as every woman’s experience facing a machine gun hail of microaggressions, and frankly the less said about that the better. But you can’t help thinking about the men and boys who trudged through that mud without magical shields or bracelets or plot invulnerability to bullets and were cut down in their thousands and left to rot where they fell. It was notable that when she finally reached the German trench she smashed not the soldiers, but the machine gun.

- I think the movie handled Diana’s gradual power boost very well. She starts off capable of defeating people in hand to hand combat, and slowly levels up to the point where she is casually smashing through walls and swinging tanks through the air with one hand. Amusingly she’s so focused on her quest that she doesn’t think through the implications of her having god-like powers, and everyone around her just accepts it because honestly what else can you do? “Excuse me miss, I can’t help noticing that you just smashed face first through a brick wall and yet your lipstick is still impeccable-”

- Perhaps her powers scale up based on having Something to Protect, and a lot of tension comes from her realising that she can’t be everywhere and can’t save everyone.

- Wonder Woman gets busy with Chris Pine; I hope she’s gentle with her new-found strength. (She didn’t try the beer though, which bugs me a little; in fact we never see any of the Amazons eat, I think. Do they grow food on their island? I assume the climate and soil is magically good, so farming should be easy work, and they can spend the time between harvests punching each other).

- He sketches out a future of life together and work and kids and growing old together (he don’t know she’s immortal, which saves some awkwardness). Sure would be a shame if he selflessly sacrificed himself for a noble cause, especially after he’s already signed a contract to feature in multiple movies.

- Oh yeah, there is a ludicrously villainous German general (an actual asshole from the Real World, and future Nazi!) and a tortured femme Phantom of the Opera who delights in poison gas who sort of has a thing for him. I reckon a good relationship is one that makes both participants healthier, and what they have going on is the exact opposite of that. I don’t think they quite get enough attention, but since War is the real adversary perhaps that’s intentional.

- There is obvious awkwardness with making the Germans the main bad guys in this story while the British push for peace, even though the film does make some token efforts at calling for a pox on both their houses. Along with Ludendorff, the real villain could be... Winston Churchill, who as Minister for Munitions at this time was in fact stockpiling a vast armoury of gas and bombs and tanks to be deployed in the offensive he was planning in 1919 that would destroy the German army and win a decisive victory for Britain. Churchill was despondent when they signed the Armistice instead and crushed his dreams of annihilation; he didn’t get his victory until 27 years later, when he finally pissed in the Rhine.

- I’m grateful that the misfit sidekicks didn’t heroically sacrifice themselves in this movie, they needed to catch a break.

- Ludendorff might bitch about the Dolchstoßlegende but he didn’t seem to enjoy being stabbed in the front, what a hypocrite.

- The final showdown arrives in a blaze of rage and glory... and Remus Lupin is the god of war! Now that’s a nice twist, I appreciate a softly spoken man in a bowler hat who wishes to end the pestilence that is humanity. Turns out his powers are not what they once were (although he seems tough enough!) so he has just been chilling on Earth whispering rude thoughts in people’s ears and waiting for Diana to show up so he can make her a Darth Vaderesque offer.

- You could say that he’s been waiting for Gadot.

- And it’s over, god is dead and a new day dawns. The soldiers taking off their gas masks is a nice touch; it’s a shame they didn’t get to show something like the 1914 christmas football match. Ultimately the ending echoed Age of Ultron: a being of ultimate power and contempt for humanity is zapped by another being of ultimate power who believes in the redemptive power of love. So it goes.

- Terry Pratchett would say that killing the god doesn’t stop the war, but stopping the war would kill the god, divinity flowing from belief and not the other way around. If no human believed in war, what would Ares even do? Fighting for peace is always a tricky concept, but the structure of a superhero movie based on god-like physical abilities inherently demands it. This one did its best to thread that needle and didn’t mess it up too badly.

- It’s a shame we didn’t get a reunion scene back home on the island, given that she not only achieved the destiny of her people but survived the attempt. Maybe she can’t find her way back and she’s stuck living with the humans now. The shot of her with a laptop at the end raises the disturbing scenario of Amazons tearing up social media all day instead of throwing down.

- It’s not clear how Wonder Woman occupied her time during the Second World War and all the other craziness that filled up the 20th century, but no doubt we’ll find out.

#wonder woman #spoilers

54 notes · View notes