#jedibrarian is a pedantic turd

[kotorswtor]

I'm streaming Mandalorian S1 for some FFXIV friends who want to get caught up on Star Wars, and man. Letting myself grieve a little again for when the show shifted from "The cosmically inconsequential adventures of a tired single dad and his weird kid, in space" to the connective tissue that's meant to make people feel obligated to Consume Content.

[maor-liath]

I was minding my own business putting art refs together on Pinterest and I blundered into a repaint of Dicksee’s Belle Dame Sans Merci with a Lavellan Inquisitor and Cullen. I can’t tell if the originating artist absolutely knows the narrative background of the painting and has a sick sense of humor, or if they aren’t aware that they’re depicting Cullen’s 100% literal worst nightmare.

[kotorswtor]

Ahsoka ep 5 is titled "The Shadow Warrior," and I would bet money on the likelihood that that's supposed to be a Kagemusha shoutout, but, well, given Kagemusha, it ends up looking like an unintended criticism of the deepfake de-aging tech that appears there instead.

I started Ahsoka with no particular expectations (The character's not my fave, I've seen some episodes of Rebels and read the Thrawn trilogy about 20 years ago), was mildly intrigued by the KotOR references and the prospect of a Star Wars that's mostly about interactions between women, but now I'm just annoyed. We're back in the territory of "the highest and best that Star Wars aspires to in the present day is a self-reference wankfest."

I have a lot of criticism, but I want to focus on the flashback. Anakin's "Your only options are 'fight' or 'die'" thesis is a non-sequitur; Other than Ahsoka's literal physical situation at the time, it doesn't answer any questions or relate to any personal or interpersonal conflicts posed by the series to date.

I feel like Filoni et al want to say something meaningful about mentorship, like "You're going to make mistakes as a mentor, just like your entire lineage did, but you have to try your best at mentorship anyway," (and Ahsoka trying to bash her relationship with the heretofore AFAIK nominally Force-sensitive Sabine into a master-padawan model is its own ball of wtf) but they sure aren't succeeding. It's 100% about the spectacle of "hey we did a muddy CGI version of stuff you saw in early-season tCW, isn't that nifty. Hey aren't you excited to see Hayden Christensen again even though we're recreating the problem of the prequels by giving a competent actor nothing of substance to do. Hey we referenced Anakin's fall again, don't you feel deeply moved by that" No.

[kotorswtor]

Tumblr just recced me a fic that used Mando’a “to ass-murder,” where “Fuck! (interjection)” was intended. So, uh. This seems like a good time to reiterate my offer to help with Mando’a translations in fic to anyone who is interested.

[kotorswtor]

I've mostly had my head in FFXIV for the last few months, and the combo of Rise of Skywalker and The Mandalorian Season 2 still have me in a "Star Wars and I are seeing other people right now" mood. I've been logging in to catch SWtOR story content when it drops, though. I just played through story mode Secrets of the Enclave. Thoughts under the RM. 

For most people, this probably will be a perfectly pleasant update leading to a presumed future expansion where we resolve the issue with Undead Malgus. Unfortunately I read Deceived, the terrible tie-in novel that explains the cinematic with the same title and some background info on said Malgus.  It features the first appearance of Terrible Jedi Aryn Leneer and the family she mentions, retired Havoc Squad operative Zeerid “Z” Korr and his daughter Arra.  I liveblogged it here back in the day, so check out this tag if you are entertained by snarky hate-reading.

Pretty much, just imagine Ellekai cold-reading Aryn, and the dialog in story mode all consisting of tense-to-borderline-hostile dialectic, and you’ve got a fair idea of what was happening in my head.

Aryn: “A lot of awful, painful things happened here, including the Council wiping the memories of people who left the Order.”

Ellekai: “It’s pertinent to mention that that procedure wasn’t routine protocol for all people who chose to exit the Order. It was deployed once ever, on a Super War Criminal presently leading a catastrophically bloody, destructive offensive against the Republic, as a last-ditch alternative to execution. It was attempted or proposed twice more, on another Super War Criminal- you know I’ve talked to both of them, right? -and a suspected mass-murderer of children respectively.  Specificity matters.”

...

Aryn: “Malgus went this way”

Ellekai: “How do you know?”

Aryn: “Because I’m a Force-Empath and you’re not”

Ellekai:

Aryn:

Ellekai: *a solid two minutes of ugly, barking laughter*

...

Aryn: “So if we find Malgus down here, I’m gonna kill him. Heh, I maybe should have mentioned that before, I guess.”

Ellekai: ...

Ellekai: “25 years, a job change, and nothing’s changed for you, has it? You haven’t learned. You’re still weaponizing other people’s good will, without their informed consent, for emotionally-incontinent, selfish, vengeful ends. You may think you loved Master Zallow, but you never listened to him.”

...

On the debrief, one of the other masters, via SpaceZoom: “In the interest of operational security, we should pause while non-members of the Jedi Order exit the conversation.”

Arn: *bows up*

Ellekai: “Due respect, Master Jedi, the issue is not that Leneer is a former Jedi, it’s that she’s a violent idiot. Specificity matters.”

[kotorswtor]

I wonder why they chose to do The Mandalorian season 1 without Mando’a. It made the jump to nu!canon in the prequels and Rebels, and it seems like a sect that’s so hardcore that they never show their unhelmeted faces (and who definitely have or had Death Watch ties) would probably also be into keeping their language and the associated cultural patrimony.

If that was a pragmatic out-of-universe choice to make things more accessible/keep people who aren’t super-mega-nerds more engaged, I can be okay with that. Same with “They are actually speaking Mando’a in the covert, we’re assuming translation convention is in effect, because a lot of people are alienated by subtitles.”

If it’s actually “no one in the Nevarro covert speaks Mando’a,” even though fluency in the language was a major point of cultural pride as late as about thirty years prior, I feel like that warrants an explanation, and I hope it gets addressed in future seasons.

[kotorswtor]

re: “AU where Padme’s pregnancy isn’t a secret and the 501st propose baby names,” I understand that in writing the prequel trilogy, Lucas and Co were like “Okay, for the sake of continuity with the OT, we need to establish that it wasn’t common knowledge that Padme was peripartum when she died, and no one can know that she was having twins.”

And I hate all of those, because the implications that naturally fall out are “Padme received zero prenatal medical care, not infrequent/inconsistent, low-tech, or incompetent prenatal care but none, and all of the space wizards around her, including her husband the Space Wizard Ubermensch, are stupid.” Also there’s an unspoken assumption in there that there would be something weird or wrong with Padme being pregnant but keeping the details of that private.

“Yeah, Senator Amidala’s going to have an amount of babies. With whom? Fuck you, that’s with whom.” 

I don’t know why “Senator Amidala, who was very pregnant, died in the chaos around the failed Jedi coup and unfortunately her about-to-be-born kids didn’t make it either” would be a less plausible story than the one we got.

[kotorswtor]

Binged the first season of The Mandalorian a couple of nights ago. Some scattershot opinions and commentary:

My favorite kinds of Star Wars stories are the small-stakes, peripheral, personal ones. So yeah, I’m enjoying Working Single Dad In Space

I think Din Djarin/Mando is pretty much the person that a lot of Star Wars fans, especially a lot of dudes, like to imagine that they’d be if they woke up in the GFFA tomorrow. Competent, fair-dealing, more humane than you’d expect on first glance...and prone to occasional splashy explosions of ultraviolence.

Given all of that, and how very easy it would be for Mando to be a one-note stoic video game protag guy, I like that subtle characterization cues let you know that a lot of his success is down to advance preparation, conscientiousness, and patience. I love that he’s a big, earnest goober (Got a major problem? Recruit the three people who were nice to me once to help). I like that when the helmet briefly comes off, it’s a regular-ass forty-something dude with terminal helmet hair to match his concussion, who’s having a *really rough day.*

Diverse cast ftw. We still live in a bizarro universe where about 80% of the people in the world are men, but the *sheer level of badass* that all the women are bringing makes me feel marginally less bad about that.

I don’t hate the fight choreography! It’s mostly sensible, economical, and supports the story rather than “Let’s stop everything cold because it’s time for the requisite twenty minutes of ineffectually flapping glowsticks around.” When things get silly, like IG-11′s spray-and-pray tactics,  it’s because you’re meant to find them silly.

This is about the first time in Star Wars that some writer has seemed to be at least passingly familiar with what a bounty hunter actually is, and how bounty hunters differ from mercenaries or assassins.  I appreciate that whereas it’s usually portrayed as this glamorous rock-star lifestyle, Mando is usually choosing between equally humdrum jobs with equally garbage pay, hustling like crazy to keep his ship flying and his extended family supplied, and spending a lot of time being ragdolled around by pissed-off wildlife, having his shit wrecked by scavengers, or being low-key harassed by shitty coworkers.

Other than the “I don’t need yet another streaming service subscription” problem, I’ve waited this long to tune in because I felt like the reality of the series couldn’t possibly compete with out-of-context Baby Yoda. I am happy to report that I enjoy both. Also I’m curious to see how much information we’ll get in future seasons given that, in a franchise where aliens who cameo in the background of crowd scenes get action figures and detailed biographies, there’s such purposeful silence about anything related to Yoda’s race

I’m loving all of the cameos, especially by other people who do unrelated Star Wars stuff. Anakin getting murdered by Savage Opress whose buddies are then roasted by an X-wing squadron consisting of several of the series producers/directors? Nice.

It’s super weird to me that Mando has no frame of reference at all for the Force or the Jedi, and that the Armorer only vaguely mentions knowing of “old songs” dealing with Mando/Jedi conflict. Mando was a child during the Clone Wars, the verd who rescues him after his parents are killed is wearing Clan Viszla/Death Watch insignia, and at least one other Viszla is part of his covert as an adult on Nevarro. So even given that this is new!canon and all of the stuff in TotJ/KotOR/SWtOR era didn’t necessarily happen, even given that at the height of the Old Republic, there were still relatively few Jedi compared to the size of the GFFA and that they didn’t travel extensively outside of Republic-member-nation space, and even given that the Empire mounted an extremely thorough, systematic disinformation campaign to convince people that the Jedi never existed/couldn’t exist, Mando logically has met people who personally fought with or against Jedi and Sith.

[kotorswtor]

While I’m in my stash for other reasons, I pulled out and compared a couple of fabrics that I think are likely candidates for Mando’s cape, just for shiggles. Protein fibers are a pain to try to photograph accurately. In reality, the left-side stuff is an umber-y off-black and the right side is true black.

Both of these are protein fibers. A lot of stuff in Star Wars costuming that we tend to process as “linen” because it’s homespun and slubby looking is actually either silk or a silk-wool blend. I suspect that’s because whereas most linens drape like a plywood board, protein fibers hang and move in a way that’s good for conveying a dramatic/heroic presence. I did a heretical thing and beat the hell out of both of these in the washing machine. Both of these fabrics are made with the short, tangled bits that you get after combing and spinning worsted wool/mohair or reeling silk, and are a way to stretch your raw-material investment further, so it makes sense that we tend to see them on Outer-Rim Dwellers in the GFFA.

Right is silk dupioni, which is usually (in its unwashed, super-shiny state) for fancy upholstery and drapery. Left is a mohair, a fiber you rarely see in the West these days outside of super high-dollar suiting. You can also get raw silk to look like that too, I’ve got some in other colors here:

My working hypothesis is that Mando’s cape is a raw silk that started off true black and was distressed down to off-black through repeated washing and UV exposure. Boba Fett’s, by contrast, is a lightweight (probably 5-7 oz) cotton canvas. This is where I remind you that nubby, irregular-textured, softly draping fabric is usually a deadass giveaway in Star Wars costuming language for “This is a good guy.”

[kotorswtor]

I feel like I need to draw attention to how often, when I answer Star Wars lore questions for people, what that actually looks like is me saying “No, you’re not stupid, the information we have on this so far is genuinely incomplete, conflicting, or just fucking asinine.”

[kotorswtor]

Being exposed to stan culture where it interacts with fandom culture is weird for a lot of reasons, but the one that always takes me aback is “Gosh, people can be really attracted to a person who has, like, a natural human skin texture, wrinkles, their own teeth, and a body that changes shape sometimes, who probably dresses directly out of the clothes dryer/laundry basket a lot...when that person is male.”

[kotorswtor]

Eyyy Mando shippers. Since Star Wars pretty explicitly runs on the Campbellian Monomyth and mythological allusions in general, lemme point you at the myth of Eros and Psyche for some general inspiration.

ie Your meetcute probably was the result of someone ordering a hit. You have a fantastically attentive, devoted partner who provides for your every need...for the low, low price of you can never see his face, ever. And as you grow closer and get to know each other, you’re going to make mistakes, some bad shit’s probably going to go down to separate you, and you’re going to need all of your smarts and persistence and courage and no small amount of luck to find each other again.

[kotorswtor]

I may eventually have to get my hands on the Kylo Ren comic series, if for no reason than that I’m curious how much prequel-era Jedi culture Luke even knew about, much less tried to reimplement in his short-lived new academy.

I feel like a lot of the weirdness in the lore, especially for people who haven’t been ass-deep in the SWEU since the 90s, is how onscreen people use “Jedi” to mean several different concepts, most of which are completely apolitical/atheological.

Dear Mando fanfic writers, there has not been a Jedi Order or a Jedi Council to tell your Force-sensitive OC that they cannot jump that cod for about 30 years as of season one. I look forward to all of the other narrative complications you can invent.

[kotorswtor]

That feel when you encounter a particular squick, and you’re like “am I feeling nauseated because I am Just Too Ace for This Ride, because I have enough practical experience to know that a thing that’s being played for sexually exciting here would be wildly unsafe in any real life context, because I have Some Thoughts about the connection between aesthetized/sexualized violence in entertainment media and real-life domestic abuse, or yes?”

[kotorswtor]

Dear Fandalorians: your Mando Thirstposting is Valid, and yeah, Pedro Pascal is in fact an attractive dude.

But please consider reserving your Pedro horniness captions/tags for footage that he’s actually featured in. That’s his voice acting, but there’s a better-than-even chance that, when the helmet’s on, you’re actually looking at Lateef Crowder Dos Santos or Brendan Wayne.

Also if I catch any of y’all posting fetishizing racial nonsense? I will literally climb into your window in the dead of night and replace your entire movie collection with shitty lo-fi VHS copies of the Star Wars Holiday Special...with the Boba Fett short missing.

[kotorswtor]

So I always say that people who pluralize Jedi as “Jedis” are my supervillain origin story

Honorable mention is “Ashoka.”