#sarc watches star wars

[captainmazzic]

Saw The Last Episode this morning so I can finally have a dash again, apologies to the dozen or so blogs I unfollowed earlier so I could cope

anyway

star wars spoilers under the cut for my hot steaming rotting carcass of an oPiNiOn

Okay so it was... an okay movie. It moved too fast and tried to do too much and introduce too many brand new characters that could have been used better, but. The parts I liked, I LOVED. The parts I didn’t... well let’s just say that Star Wars will be Star Wars, and there’s nothing I can do about that other than cherry-pick what I like and leave the rest for the vultures.

The number one thing that bothers me is mostly just... It’s kind of been a calling card of Star Wars that

1. villains can never survive their arc, and

2. any villain with a redemption arc (whatever THAT is) has to die at the end of it regardless.

The exceptions being Big Bad Clones Of the Big Bad, which might survive their first arc but ultimately all die in the end, What A Twist. That’s just... how Star Wars does things. That and its penchant for insisting that physical deformity or disability somehow always implies an inclination towards evil, and that is just utter fucking bullshit and it needs to STOP. With that and the villain death thing - mostly the villain death - it’s been like that since the OT, since the EU, since the RPGs and the comics and the novels and the video games. There’s been like, maybe two or three exceptions to the rule, and most of those are in the video games and the RPGs and so are ultimately up to user choice, but mostly those choices are often not the “official” “canon” ones anyway.

and it really bothers me, and it always has. It’s the number one reason I write fanfic, to fix the bullshit like this that they keep putting in Star Wars. Just... honestly would it have KILLED THEM to forcibly haul Hux away kicking and screaming so he could Face Justice or some other rationalizing bullshit you KNOW Poe and/or Finn is totally capable of, only for Hux to be awkwardly hanging around the perimeter of all the Celebratory Festivities at the end? That would have been liquid GOLD.

And would it have KILLED THEM to have Force Healing, like, I dunno, NOT be some sort of zero sum bullshit? That’s not how it works! That’s not how any of this works! Both Rey AND REN should have survived! It’s drawing on the Force Itself, on the entire galaxy, not just your own personal life energy! *headdesk*

But I mean. I don’t want to focus only on the shit that bothered me. There’s lots I enjoyed.

1. FORCE SENSITIVE FINN. I will die on this hill

2. THE POWER OF FRIENDSHIP oh my god I love the Finn/Poe/Rey dynamic they are PRECIOUS I honestly could watch a nine hour movie of nothing but banter and shenanigans and couch cuddles and I’d be so motherfucking HAPPY. Bonus points if Rose and Hux and Ren can just. Join in. I need a peoplepile STAT

3. TINY NEW DROID BABY oh no it’s cute

4. Finn’s hair is so fucking hot, y’all. I just. *fans self* is it warm in here?

5. Palps my man, r u ok. Like srsly. I just wanted to hold his gnarled up hands and make him take a nap, this man is Edgelord McDramaPants and I love/hate him so much. “I am all of the Sith” my dude my buddy my pal my friend, there are literally thousands of Sith standing around you, and no matter what you tell yourself you’re still like... average-powered compared to some of the Ancient Dark Edgelords of the Sith. I know you’re a megalomaniac but sit down eat a sandwich and chill, I’ll take you for a manicure

6. Speaking of thousands of Sith standing around -- FUCKING FINALLY SOME ACKNOWLEDGMENT THAT BANITE SITH ARE/WERE UTTER BULLSHIT I mean there was the Lost Tribe of the Sith and plenty of others underground and on the downlow scattered around the galaxy in old canon, but it was nice to have it up front. Can u imagine the sort of response some of my own Sith would have to an invitation/summons to a place like Exegol by the likes of Palpatine it’d be hilarious

7. Rey’s little nose scrunch will never not be adorable

8. I really. really. enjoyed the atmosphere on Exegol. I am also an Edgelord DramaDarkerton and fuck if the vibes on that world didn’t give me shivers. I love it. I love everything about it. The foggy barren landscape, the giant stark monoliths, the depths of (not quite) abandoned temples and monuments, the jagged throne, the chanting hooded figures, even the flashing lightning that threatened to trigger a seizure BUT IT DIDN’T SO I WIN AHAHAHA *cough* so yeah I love all of that and I really wanted more more moremoremoremoreMORE GIMME *grabbyhands*

9. They didn’t do much but just the fact that the Knights of Ren were there made me happy. Kinda wished they’d been more like a Ride Or Die honor guard, so WELP I guess that’s what they are now in Sarc’s Canon and that’s the only canon that mAtTeRs lolololol

10. “I’M THE SPY!” I love you, you precious, fucked up little man, come here

Anyway. It was a much better movie than The Last Jedi, imo, but there’s still a LOT that needs cherrypicking. So I’m just blithely going to say this is What Actually Happened, In The Star Wars According To Sarc:

Hux gets dragged along with Poe/Finn/Rey, whining and complaining the entire time, on a bum leg, because you KNOW Poe shot him in the leg anyway even if he planned on taking Hux with him. Because why not, right? the dickwad asked for it, after all.

Snap goes EV because he ejected at the last possible second and ends up shaken and battered but otherwise alright DO NOT TAKE HIM AWAY FROM ME TOO

The Knights of Ren recognized Ren as their rightful leader and were properly Ride Or Die with him, a man needs his honor guard after all

Ren’s Force Healing does the trick but since it’s drawing on the power of the Force itself, and not some zero-sum personal life energy shenanigans, it doesn’t make him mysteriously keel over and Die For No Reason. He just passes out and Rey has to haul his heavy ass back to the ship by herself. He doesn’t hear the end of it for months.

Reunions are both full of celebration, relief, and grief for those who have fallen, and also full of lots of awkwardness and uncomfortable glances at some of our Intrepid Villains suddenly being thrust in with all the Good Guysᵗᵐ and trying to cope. But they make it out okay in the end. Our new group of Awkward Friends hold a vigil for Luke, Leia, and Han before leaving Ajan Kloss.

And the Millennium Falcon launches out with a crew of seven. Rey, Poe, Finn, Rose, Ben, Hux, and Chewie - not quite yet entirely comfortable with each other but learning that sometimes the unlikeliest of friendships can blossom even from within the most bitter of enemies.

The end ah yes that was a good movie glad I can ignore this weird thing called canon lalalala (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

[7-wonders]

Ok i dunno if you remember but i wrote an ask about you making me watch star wars a while ago and giiiiiirrrlll i have no idea why i waited this long. Like i was convinced I wouldn’t like it and here i am with a new obsession and everything. Turns out star wars are really good and not only something “nerds” like (sarc ofc)

YEAHHHHHHHHHHHH I'm so glad you liked it!! I love Star Wars so much and I love that you gave it a chance.

[captainmazzic]

Happy Halloween.

So it’s about time I gave a real fucking update instead of just dicking around being cagey about shit. I’ve mentioned a new project repeatedly. So let’s sit down and actually talk about it, friends. Pull up a chair, grab yourself some hot cocoa and strap in. Welcome to Sarc’s emotional roller coaster.

Bear with me. This is hard to talk about for so many reasons, but mostly because I’ve been belittled and ridiculed so many times in my life for liking “cringy” things or wanting to do things that other people think are stupid or childish. I hear the voice of my father telling me to “make something of my life” and “don’t squander your talents”, I hear the voice of my mother telling me I have “so much potential” and “one day I hope you get some ambition”, I hear the voice of my ex telling me to “stop wasting time with stupid shit” and “nobody is interested in failures”. I hear old teachers telling me honor roll students should go to college and study high-demand majors and anything else would be lazy and detrimental and won’t contribute anything worthwhile to society.

It’s the same shit that prevented me for a long time from posting art online. From posting writing online. From making ocs and showing them to other people. And now it’s preventing me from starting this project, and I’m so, so tired of it.

My biggest fear right now is that once I start talking about this project I’ll lose this tiny little community of people vaguely interested in my stuff that have somehow stuck around. External validation and sharing the things I love are my primary motivations with everything I do online, and while screaming into the void is all well and good, I need feedback and interaction and community. I need it so, so badly. I wouldn’t post jack shit – ever – if I didn’t need that, to be honest.

So anyway.

When the pandemic kicked into high gear earlier this year I got laid off for a few months. It gave me a lot of time to think about who I am and where I wanted to be in life, what mattered to me, what dreams I still had and which ones had fallen by the wayside.

Some of them are huge – once upon a time I was very religious. I went through seminary, got my minister’s certification, and was slated to be an associate pastor in a mega-church and rake in a six-figure income within 3 years. But I lost my faith and couldn’t stand the idea of being disingenuous.

And there was also a time when I received a full-ride scholarship to a very prestigious university that would have spanned a 12-year program and resulted in me having several doctorates and masters degrees by the end of it, in the fields of geology, palaeontology, and cladistics. But the scholarship program that was supposed to sponsor me went bankrupt the very semester I was supposed to capitalize on it. I was still accepted into the school, but the $1.2 million price tag would have all been out of my own pocket. So obviously that didn’t happen.

Those were the “acceptable” dreams. Those were the ones that parents and teachers and the general outside world approved of and thought were worthy goals. But neither of them panned out, and all I have left are the cringy ones. Like homesteading and sustainable living (can’t start without land, can’t have land without money). Like making comic books and doing art commissions for a living (it has to be steady to support myself, and I’m far too slow an artist for things to be steady). And like… playing video games.

Ha.

What’s funny is I can already envision the eyerolls and hear the snorts of laughter. What kind of dream is that? Only a handful of famous youtubers and twitch celebrities play video games for a living, and breaking into a field like that is pretty much impossible unless you already have friends in famous places.

Yeah, but… it would be so much fun. Right?

It WOULD be fun. I don’t have to become a super popular celebrity for it to be fun, right?

I don’t have to make it my day job and rake in piles of cash for it to be fun, right?

… I don’t have to actually be successful for it to be fun… right?

… Right?

:/

… I love video games.

I’ve loved them ever since I tried and failed so many times to win The Empire Strikes Back on Atari 2600. I’ve loved them ever since I played Mortal Kombat with my cousin in his basement with the sound down super low because it was ultra-violent and I would have been in so much trouble if mom caught me playing it. I’ve loved them ever since I tried and failed to finish Strife and Hexen and Heretic without the computer crashing and rebooting to DOS. I’ve loved them ever since I had to cheat-code my way through Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II just to get past the first boss fight but then no-clipped through the wall and died anyway. I still love that game.

But I stopped playing video games for a very long time. I was intimidated out of them by an ex and a somewhat toxic friend group who were Real Gamers™. I was brought to LAN parties but not allowed to play, because I slowed down the team and didn’t know the controls. I was banned from commenting on other people’s moves or cheering people on because it was distracting and I could cost them a win. I was even kicked out of their online D&D campaigns because I couldn’t be serious enough or roleplay well enough for their standards. Even if I was playing a game on my own, I couldn’t play with anyone else in the house because I’d be ridiculed for dying a lot, or for going the wrong way, or for picking the wrong game because only certain games are “good” and most of the ones I wanted to play were “stupid” or “trash” or a “waste of time”.

That kind of thing sits with me for a very, very long time. I didn’t really play games at all for over a decade. Even after I ended up on the opposite side of the country, with a new circle of friends, I couldn’t bring myself to play much of anything.

And then I had an extended visit with a friend of mine, and he introduced me to an early version of a ridiculous little game called Minecraft. My friend was an avid gamer but also a very kind one. In the ten years before this, I had told myself that I just preferred to watch other people play games instead of playing them myself (a lie. I mean, I absolutely adore watching other people play, but I also want to play too lol), my friend saw through that and very gently encouraged me to take a stab at playing Minecraft myself. He moved his laptop over to me, and I played a whole ten minutes with him watching before my nerves failed me and I promptly died. But miraculously it wasn’t a big deal to him. It was just a game. I might have cried in relief, I don’t remember.

After my visit I shelved playing video games for like another year, despite buying a whole mess of them because other friends online loved certain titles and wanted to talk about them with me. (I never played them, just bought them. I couldn’t even handle the thought of playing by myself in my own house). But for some reason I mentioned to my brother-in-law my old visit to my Minecraft-loving friend, and he just… up and bought the game for me. My brother-in-law is also an avid gamer with a lovely and patient disposition, and he suggested I just play in creative mode and build things to start. So I did that (behind a locked door in the RV that I lived in by myself, with the lights off and the sound down low) and Minecraft was my sole video game for another several years.

Then a couple years ago another friend of mine (hi Char) introduced me to Star Wars: The Old Republic, and I fell in love. It sparked a renewed interest in video games that I thought I would never really have the opportunity to satisfy, because games were still intimidating.

Let me clarify: I… SUCK. At video games. I’m terrible at them. Learning controls is a nightmare and a tunicate evolving its own brain would learn faster than me. If I’m aiming, I can’t hit the broad side of a barn. I have the direction sense of a whirligig beetle on the back of a drunk pigeon. I die fast and I die often. I can count the number of games I’ve actually finished on one hand. Even less if we don’t count the ones I had to use cheat codes to get through. But none of that diminishes my love of experiencing them, and over this whole pandemic and quarantine thing I’ve had a lot of time to unpack and mull over my thoughts and feelings and passions about them.

… I moved my RV to a new spot literally the day before the lockdown in my state first initiated. Before this I was in a spot that had no internet other than what reception I could get on my phone, with severely limited bandwidth and patchy, unreliable service. The new spot has a steady wi-fi connection, and while upload speed is utter shit, downloading and streaming video are just this side of manageable. So I spent the first three months of the quarantine lockdown doing pretty much nothing other than watching Jacksepticeye, CrankGameplays, and Markiplier play video games on YouTube. (I honestly had no idea before this that people even did let’s plays. My internet access/speed has been shit for so long I’m totally out of the loop).

It… for fear of sounding utterly stupid yet again, it inspired me.

Like. These people really love what they’re doing. They just. Play video games and have fun with it, and I mean yeah they make money hand-over-fist doing it but the main thing is they HAVE FUN doing it. They have fun! Playing video games! In front of people! It’s wild. And the thing that REALLY got me was… they have feedback on it too. They have a COMMUNITY. They have people they can talk to about it. They have people that they can play games WITH, even, who don’t yell at them or tell them they suck every five minutes or tell them they can’t play with them because they’re worthless as teammates. They can fuck up in a game and their friends are laughing along with them on Discord instead of screaming at them to get it right or get out. They can play games by themselves in their house and then upload videos on the internet and then they can talk to other people about it! They have fun! It’s awesome! They have fun!!

I just. It meant so much to me. It meant so much to me to see these videos of these three, and then another dozen or so that I’ve followed since, play all these games and have such a good time and also be such a positive and kind and encouraging source of energy.

I know all of this is not exactly about video games specifically. It’s about coming to terms with how I’ve been treated as a person and as a friend, about how other people respect someone’s interests and passions, about how it’s okay to share your interests with other people and it’s okay to like things that other people might not care about or think are important.

And I’m so, so tired of not doing the things I love because I’m afraid of what other people will think.

So I, uh. I invested all of the stimulus money I had into a new rig and equipment like a camera, lighting, acoustic panels, all that shit. I dug out all the games I bought but never played, I made accounts on all the big gaming services like Steam and Itch.io and GoG, and I made a YouTube channel. And I’m going to be making my own let’s plays. And it will suck, and it will be cringy and awkward and badly done, and it won’t make me money or be a valid career option or be anything but another very expensive hobby, but it will be mine, and it will be something I can share with people and (hopefully) have fun with, and it will (hopefully) be an avenue for some of this positive social interaction I’m craving.

I know YouTube can be toxic and super negative and full of trolls and cancel culture fanatics and people just waiting to find something to tear you down for, but like. Come on, y’all. I’m posting this on tumblr dot com. Toxic is everywhere anyway. I just want to try, you know?

I just want to love video games again.

Someone famous that I look up to so, so much told me – without knowing that I was even listening, without even knowing that I even exist – that if I enjoy doing something, to just go for it. To just jump in and do it, and if it works then it works, and if it doesn’t, what have I actually lost?

And I’m lucky enough to have four whole offline friends that I’ve mentioned this idea to, and each of them has said encouraging things like I’d have a good voice and face and style for making let’s plays. I honestly don’t know how true that part is, but on my good days I believe them. And they also said that I should go for it, to just try.

So that’s… that’s what I’m doing, I guess. I just want to try.

I know it’s not Star Wars fanart. I know it’s not Star Wars fanfiction. I know it’s not Star Wars meta or essays or ranting about the Sith and the Jedi and the Force. I know it’s not what y’all want from me. And that’s utterly terrifying. I’m bracing myself to be alone on the internet again, because I know that when I dive headfirst into this thing, it’ll eat away into the time that I normally might be spending doing writing or art, and it’s going to be something no one else wants to see and no one signed up for. And that’s partly why it’s taken me so very, very long to get started.

The other part is more physical. Of course as soon as I decide that I’m going to put my face on a camera is when my entire face goes to shit. I’m currently waiting on a potential diagnosis for mouth cancer, while already dealing with a severe jaw infection that’s causing my teeth and gums to rot inside my mouth. They already took part of my jaw, I’m missing teeth, others are turning black, if I open my mouth even just a little it is so obvious and I look like a very, very literal zombie. I have never been more grateful that masks are socially acceptable. I have a series of twelve appointments scheduled to treat this shit now that I have dental and health insurance (goodbye paycheque), and I might qualify for reconstruction surgery too. But that doesn’t really help how I look right now.

So I just can’t bring myself to start this project just yet. I’ve been sitting on it for months now with all the other pieces in place, but I just. Can’t. Start. It’s driving me crazy, because I want to start so badly. I feel like I’m wasting time. I feel like I’ve already wasted so much time, because I haven’t even done anything else in the meantime. I haven’t done hardly any art or fanfic, nothing. My anxiety is spiking so high right now because I have all these expectations of myself, but I can’t do anything about it. I’ve been told that I could just start without a camera or wear a mask on screen, and I’ve actually done some recording doing exactly that, but I just… can’t seem to make anything I want to finalize.

It’s also frustrating because I have no way of uploading anything at home. I’ll have to go over to my partner’s house which is nearly an hour’s drive away in order to get internet good enough to upload videos, which means that upload schedules are going to be shiiiiiit and that’s also frustrating.

But. But. BUT. I want to do this.

I want to do this so badly. I want to share let’s plays and experience a love of video games with other people. I want to actually play games with other people too. I also just acquired a piano keyboard, and I want to play again on the regular because I miss it so much. I used to play piano for hours every single day, it’s so relaxing and fun, maybe I can post that too. Maybe I can post let’s draws or something, where I ask y’all what to draw and then make a video of me drawing it while bullshitting to the camera I don’t know it sounds like fun. Maybe I can post videos of my cooking because the shit I make seems to be everyone’s favourite thing on instagram, and maybe I can take my camera with me when I go to the ocean or hike up into the middle of nowhere in the mountains and film how beautiful everything is up there. Or maybe I can do none of that and just focus on one thing, I honestly have no idea what I’m doing or how to do it, but I just… I want to try. I just want to try.

I don’t know where any of this is going anymore. I’m sorry I haven’t responded to messages, or opened up commissions. I’m sorry that this isn’t what y’all wanted. I’m still going to continue drawing and writing, I’m still going to be around, I’m not going anywhere, but I have no idea how prolific I’m going to be and I have no idea even when I’ll start uploading videos, to be honest. But I just. I’m just gonna try. It might still take me a while but I’m gonna try. Wish me luck. I love y’all.

[captainmazzic]

I decided that I could use 10-15% of my tax return on something frivolous and indulgent, so I went down to my local comic book shop and purchased a few Star Wars anthologies. I got Captain Phasma’s comic (quite good), both volumes of Vader’s newest series (excellent), and the Infinities collection.

I was not expecting the Infinities collection to be my absolute favourite out of all of those, but here we are. SPOILERS below the cut, because this comic series is FANTASTIC and I want to highlight my favourite points about it.

Okay so first of all, the Infinities collection is essentially a series of AU stories set in the Original Trilogy timeline. There are four story arcs total, one each dealing with an alternate timeline for each movie, and a fourth one that is simply a comic book adaptation of the original rough draft. Each one is better than the last, but I’mma breeze over the first three just so you can get a taste of this smorgasbord of awesome before I hyperfocus on my favourite one.

So the first story deals with the “what if” storyline of if Luke had missed his shot on the first Death Star. Essentially, it detonates too early on its way down, the rebel fleet is routed, Han and Chewie hightail it out there to save their own skins, Leia gets captured, and Luke goes straight to Dagobah. In this one, we get such treats as Imperial!Leia, Blaster-wielding Imperial!C-3PO, a restored Imperial Senate, Yoda actually getting off his ass and leaving Dagobah to confront... Tarkin?, an Imperial Guard fight scene, and the whole-ass fucking Death Star ramming into goddamned-fucking-Coruscant. It’s a glorious hot mess and once I breezed by Yoda’s typical pontificating, I loved every single panel.

The second story answers what would have happened if Luke had died in the snow on Hoth. Despite the pretty sobering premise, there’s an ongoing humor point of Han thinking HE’S the next chosen one and has to train to be a Jedi, but it’s clearly Leia. Insert hilarious misunderstandings here. Boba Fett shows up unmasked in this one, and because of a single scene I’m not hopelessly shipping him with Lando. In this story, we have things like Jedi!Leia, lots of beautiful shots of Dagobah landscapes, Cloud City falling, Vader interacting directly with Jabba, Vader interacting directly with C-3PO, a trippy inside-Vader’s-head sequence, and the epic conclusion happening in Dagobah’s swamps. Leia is a constant treasure throughout this one, and it makes me sorely disappointed that we never got lightsaber-wielding Leia in the actual movies.

The third story asks what would have happened if Han Solo’s rescue from Jabba the Hutt had failed, and is by far the best of the “what if” stories. In this one, Jabba has an early demise in a massive explosion that takes his entire palace out with him. But Fett still has Solo, so our friends set off on a long chase to hunt him down. In the meantime, Yoda is whining about how magical-Force-fate isn’t doing it right, and Luke should have come back by now to complete his training. He dies mid-whine, the Emperor feels his death, and sends Vader to Dagobah. Luke also feels his death, and also ends up going to Dagobah. The rest of our heroes find Fett, Leia steals Slave I along with Solo-the-still-carbonitecicle, but by the time they thaw him out he’s permanently blind. Meanwhile Luke’s been captured by Vader, we have a ton of father-son angst and attempts at bonding, and Leia tries to go and rescue him. SHE gets captured as well, and they’re both taken before the Emperor on Death Star 2.0. There’s a scuffle, but Vader can’t bring himself to kill his kids. He loses an arm (again) and as the rebel fleet attacks all around, the Emperor disappears into the shadows and Leia insists on taking wounded Vader with them. Luke happily agrees, and they flee the scene. The next time we see our intrepid heroes, they are joined by Vader, still very Vader, but dressed in a white version of his suit. Together they plan on discovering the location of the Emperor and finishing their fight. It’s... honestly glorious. Vader has no major moment-of-regret or tear-filled turn-around, he simply thanks Leia for saving him. He just wants to be with his kids, and if that means he’s helping the rebellion then WELP looks like he’s a rebel now. It’s delightful.

But even as awesome as that story was, my favourite is still “The Star Wars”. It’s adapted directly from the very first rough-draft screenplay by Lucas, and even though it is certainly familiar, it’s definitely NOT the same story. Lightsabers are everywhere, and generic characters have white-blue ones while Important People like the main characters all have red ones. The Galactic Empire is literally just an empire that supplanted a PREVIOUS Empire. The Jedi-Bendu and the Knights of Sith are also very literally just rival warrior clans that have nothing to do with quasi-religious drivel and while they have mysterious powers the only reference we have to the Force is when they stay “May the force of others be with you all”. I just... I LOVE this aspect of this story. It makes it so much more enjoyable.

Luke Skywalker is a grizzled old Jedi who used to be a top general and then war advisor, with little in the way of posh diplomacy, and who is not shy about saying things like “War is by business”. He’s buddies with one Kane Starkiller, whose son Annikin is a teenage-ish Jedi warrior-in-training that Skywalker takes on as his Padawan. Leia is the spoiled and scrappy princess that he ends up having to protect, and while she’s kind of a disappointment in the story many of the other characters are definitely not. C-3PO and R2-D2 are in this one as well, but AJKFLSFHDS HOLY SHIT R2 TALKS, that threw me for a fucking LOOP I’ll tell you. Han Solo is a massive green alien who reminds me a little of a scaly version of Khem Val except Solo is old buddies with Skywalker. Solo gets a red lightsaber too. He big. He hot. Sarc like. 

Anyway. Darth Vader’s in this one, but he has no face-covering helmet and is instead a rather engaging man with one red eye. He’s not a Sith, though. That role goes to one Prince Valorum, who is an unfairly pretty man in black with a breath mask (most of the time).

(apologies for picture quality, I took these with my phone). It didn’t take me long to ship Vader with Valorum, but honestly Val’s got better things to do in this story. Namely, saving Annikin’s ass and breaking him out of interrogation. They even have that little “we’re not so different” moment, but it’s literally just... rather lighthearted banter while they plow their way through stormtroopers and find the princess. They rescue Leia (again) together, and end up... in a garbage masher.

(I clearly have a thing for Valorum he is my favourite in this, okay.) Their banter is adorable, they think they’re about to die, but a clan of massive Wookiees that look like hairy versions of Garrazeb Orrelios show up, the day is saved, big explosions happen, and our suave Sith Prince Valorum is standing right along with our more well-known heroes celebrating Annikin’s new status as Lord Protector.

It’s... it’s so charming. The whole story. It’s deep enough that you can get into the gritty wartime tragedies happening all around, there’s family bonding and humor and decent people confronting shitty-ass people, but it doesn’t get in over its own head and the characters are just... people. On different sides. Doing their best and doing their thing. Sometimes they’re swapping sides when it makes more sense, and there’s zero angst about it. It’s... refreshing, honestly. The romance subplot between Annikin and Leia is really contrived and kind of painful to watch, but it takes up so little of the story it can easily be ignored. It’s beautifully and expressively drawn, moves fast, and is pretty solidly put together. I really like it. I think I’m gonna go read it all again. XD

[captainmazzic]

So my neighbor thought I needed to see the Solo movie, so... yeah. I have that now. Spoilers and unpopular opinions below the cut

Ye olde opinions post: There is not much here. I didn’t like the movie. Not emphatic hate or anything, just... meh. *shrugs*

Han’s actor fell flat for me, couldn’t find him believable as Han even though you could definitely tell he’s trying so hard to match Ford’s mannerisms and quirks, and I guess that’s probably why it’s a problem. You can definitely tell he’s trying throughout the whole movie and it makes me just... not get fully immersed into the story they’re trying to tell.

Lando’s actor, on the other hand... fucking superb. Grade A caped quality he is fantastic and now I need a Lando movie instead. Particularly if that means more L3.

Did I mention L3, because I LOVE L3 OMG. NEED MORE L3. ALL L3 ALL THE TIME. AJKSLDFSHGSD

Chewie is Chewie and I approve.

The Falcon needs to be dragged out of its 1970′s interior decoration fiasco, the poor thing

Why is Woody Harrelson in a Star War

I give zero fucks about Qi’ra

Val, however. I would watch an entire movie about Val. She’s a fucking badass. Why do they always kill off the good characters. siiiiiiiiigh

I could get behind more Enfys Nest content, she’s also badass and I love every single one of her Cloud-riders’ designs.

Speaking of Cloud-Riders. A RODIAN THAT DOESN’T DIE???? IN MY STAR WARS???? IT IS FINALLY FUCKING MORE LIKELY THAN I THOUGHT. FUCKING. FINALLY. Granted she only had like three seconds of screen time but I NEED MORE. HER NAME IS CHUSSIDO AND I WANT FIVE MILLION. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGHDSKLGHDSKLGSDJ

Maul is looking fucking great. You’re doing amazing sweetie, go on with your bad self. ;A;

World-building-wise, they did a great job. Corellia is exactly how I pictured it, I loved the references to Glee Anselm, Aurra Sing, Teras Kasi, Bossk, Mynocks, etc. I loved the little glimpses of Imperials and Stormtroopers. I loved seeing actual extensive settings for little-known old Expanded Universe worlds like Vandor, Savareen, and Mimban (There were even Coway!! Although I guess we’re calling them Mimbanese now. ‘K.) I LOVED seeing Kessel and the Maw. And their explanation for the Kessel Run is reasonably close to the original that I’m satisfied. I fucking ADORED seeing that Star Destroyer just loom up out of fucking nowhere, that was literally the second best moment in the entire movie. Wow.

But..... plot-wise, everything was very lackluster for me. I didn’t care about any of the characters’ relationships to each other, aside from L3 and Lando. The first third of the movie hit all of my anxiety-induced-by-extreme-awkwardness buttons, to the point where I will honestly never watch it again. There are long moments scattered throughout the rest of the movie that also trigger those feelings, and I just.. hate it. This is definitely one of those movies where I’ll just be skipping to the good parts whenever I watch. I’ll probably get through the whole movie in like half an hour. Anyway. The attempt at making the Kessel Run was, despite the sudden appearance of a very sexy Star Destroyer, rather anticlimactic and sluggish for me. Zero sense of urgency and all that. I liked that the final showdown between entirely-forgettable-what’s-his-name and our equally-forgettable co-protagonist was a short and fairly one-sided fight. (Honestly. Teras Kasi? The dude didn’t stand a chance.) I hate drawn out or evenly-matched fights, so that one was a relief.

So to recap, the best parts were Lando, L3, all that sweet sweet EU representation, a dash of Rodian validation, and DARTH FUCKING MAUL of course.

.............Still waiting on that openly gay big-screen movie character you promised us two movies ago, Disney.