#swtlj

[reyloismyotpandiamtrash]

The ending of The Last Jedi with Broomboy using the force reminds me a lot of the opening of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians books. The page that talks about how if you think it's fiction, read on, but if you feel the familiar stirrings that this is real, stop reading and run before it's too late ... Like, Broomboy hears the stories of the Jedi and he feels them to be true, he recognizes them in himself. I love the way that Ryan Johnson and the story team/whoever is in charge of that included that particular moment at the end of the movie. Because it really draws on the theme of small humble beginnings and how greatness is not hereditary and can be found amongst even the least of us from any place and any background and I think that's a powerful and important message.

[labyrinthphanlivingafacade]

more information (x)

[hypnoticcastiel]

Star Wars TLJ: pitch meeting by ScreenRant. [spoilers ahead/HD]

[vendriin]

Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi (2017)

[socialpoison]

Remember when Anakin's saber was split in half in TLJ?

Imagine if Rey fixed it in such a way that she could split it into two half sabers, using the style she developed - with one saber in a forward grip, and one saber in a reverse grip.

[magicalshopping]

♡ Wall-E & EVE Porg Pins ♡

[aestheticstarwars]

Planning on getting back to doing requests soon!

Go ahead and request a moodboard or lock screen! I’m gonna be getting back into them soon. Thanks to all who’ve been patient with me on my hiatus.

[fireheartaw]

Happy New Year my dear Reylos! This is how I rang it in! featuring my dad yelling happy new year in the background lol

[fictionisanaddiction]

Kylo Ren moodboard

Let the past die. Kill it if you have to.

[kyloreybens]

Rian Johnson did more to create strong, complex, and interesting women with agency in Star Wars than any other director before him while JJ Abrams undid, repressed, and regressed all of them in TROS. In this I essay I will...

[mattymurdox]

I’ll always be thankful to Rian Johnson for what he did for female characters in Star Wars in TLJ.

He gave us complex women. With agency and purpose and flaws and complexity. Women who fought for what they believed in no matter what the cost was. Women that inspire me. That give me hope. Every one of the lead women in TROS were so wonderfully built and no one can take that away from us.

[shadowhellfire]

Why Star Wars is Great as told by The Last Jedi

I must with a heavy heart say that I believe The Rise of Skywalker to be a narrative failure to itself, the sequels and the franchise as a whole, a statement I once only saw come from critics of The Last Jedi and therefore leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth and the fear of being a hypocrite.

Allow me to defend my Star Wars opinions by focusing on the positives, while using people that have already said what I believe. I’ve curated a collection of video analyses and reviews focused on The Last Jedi as it is the most contentious movie in the franchise, but as the movie address the franchise itself, it acts as a perfect surrogate. I believe that if these hold as a defense for The Last Jedi, then the The Rise of Skywalker cannot be defended as a cohesive and satisfying narrative.

Short Videos

(EC Henry) The MESSAGE of The Last Jedi (SPOILERS) (EC Henry) Luke Was PERFECT in The Last Jedi Longer Videos

(CinemaWins) Everything GREAT About Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi! (FilmJoy) In Defense of The Last Jedi - Movies with Mikey (Nerrel) A Guide to The Last Jedi (for the Star Wars Fan Base) 

Enjoy the hard work of these Youtubers, and I hope they can make my case better than I ever could.

[w-r-i-t-i-n-g-z]

I sprinted down the hall of a hotel on Taris. First order soldiers where shouting behind me as I turned a corner crashing into something. I fell forward on somthing hard with a loud thud. I leaned back gazed down to see a man laying under me smirking.

The man has dark curls and brown eyes. He was wearing a white dress shirt and black dress pants with a gun holstered across the left of his body. His hands where holding the curve of my back gently, my legs either side of his hips. I pushed myself up so I was sitting on his lap with my hands on his chest. I can feel his muscle through his tight white dress shirt, his hands moving up my back gripping above my ass but below my ribs. My black curls flowing down my shoulders.

“Hi!” I smiled but before I could continue two first order soilders rounded the corner.

“Put your hands up”

As they pointed there guns towards us the man flipped me and pulled a gun out of its holster and fired two shoots directly into each soldiers head, their bodies hitting the ground.

The man turned to face me again, his left hand next to my head holding himself up, one knee between my legs and his other on the outside of my legs. He holstered his gun, his eyes running over my body.

“I’m Poe, nice to meet you” the man smiled.

“Thanks for that but I really didn’t need your help” I said pushing him off me. I stood up and straighted out my clothes. Poe stood up behind me, I turned to him and winked “see you around Poe”

[blackjack-15]

The Force of Nature and the Cackling Madman: What Hux Should Be (and What ROS Won’t Be)

Warning: two mentions of the leaked/newish pictures. They will have spoiler warnings bracketing it, along with the appropriate tags connected to the post. You’ve been warned.

INTRODUCTION

With RoS mere months away, this meta really can’t be delayed any longer before it becomes moot, so here we go!

TLJ was a lot of things — some good, some bad —  but what it wasn’t was surprising (unless you count just how shockingly bad 90% of Finn’s storyline was). This is generally a good thing in movies nowadays, where surprises come not from clever writing, but from enormous missteps in the writing or the desire to feel clever by putting in a twist that isn’t foreshadowed, or even just by breaking the rules of your universe.

Ignoring all but the main storyline — which is about Rey and Kylo Ren and their obstacles/conflicts — TLJ didn’t bring any surprises, but instead followed on the lines that TFA set up. As this is obviously the storyline that’s been hashed out from the start and is the point they’re building to, it’s thus safe to say that RoS is simply going to do the same, and follow the lines that TLJ set up.

SPOILER WARNING BEGINS

(Side note: this is why, when the absurdly stupid tuning-fork-lightsaber of Rey’s showed up in the first looks at RoS, it was immediately obvious that she was going to be able to “break” off half of it to give to Kylo when his saber is ultimately gone/self-destructs. Not only does the spoiler picture all but confirm this, but it’s also the obvious trajectory from the two fighting over a lightsaber in TLJ and breaking it in half.)

SPOILER WARNING ENDS

Anyway, with this framework in mind, and with the knowledge that every Star Wars media since the OG trilogy is in some way an adaptation of the OG trilogy, let’s examine what this means for the villain.

TERROR AND STAR WARS VILLAINS

There’s really no getting around the fact that one of the weakest facets of any Star Wars movie — yes, the OG trilogy is included here — is the villains that accompany them. A few SW video games fare a bit better in this, but most follow the movies’ path. This isn’t shocking — Star Wars is a Hero’s Journey, and in a Hero’s Journey it’s the presence of a villain, not the nature of the villain itself, that’s the important part — but it is crucial to understand.

Darth Vader is by far the most iconic and scariest villain that Star Wars movies can boast of, and for those born after 4/5/6 came out, he’s not really that scary, because those viewers go in knowing who Vader is and that he’s (at least partially) redeemed through his sacrifice. The greatest contribution that Rogue One made to that viewership is the scene with Vader at the end, where he is legitimately an object of terror as he was when 4/5/6 were first out.

This leads to a discussion of Palpatine-as-villain in RotJ, where the best that can be said for his status as terror-inducing villain is that at least he has Vader to do most of the heavy lifting for him. As a villain, Palpatine is just not scary. Maybe it’s the makeup, maybe it’s the fact that he gets thrown out like a sack of garbage to his death, maybe it’s the cold ham delivery he gives to what should be properly menacing lines.

Darth Maul’s visuals in TPM alone are scarier than all of Palpatine in RotJ, and, before it’s brought up, Palpatine is even less scary than that in the prequels, so I’m not even considering that part.

The thing that most Star Wars villains have in common (aside from Tarkin, who is my person favorite movie-verse villain) is that they’re forces of nature; they have the force and/or use lightsabers, they’re larger than life and beings of immense power and reputation, and they’re there to sort of loom over movie, causing overwhelming-yet-non-specifc terror to motivate the plot in a “avoid the bad guys” sort of way.

This is especially obvious in the prequel movies, where Darth Maul (ignoring his awesome visual effect), General Grievous, and Count Dooku are all basically meant to Stand There And Look Menacing, rather than having anything about them that’s actually interesting.

And here’s where the interesting things in the sequel trilogy begin.

WHY SMOKE SNOKE?

There was never any way that Snoke was going to live past TLJ, just like there was no way that Hux wasn’t going to survive TLJ. Remembering that the sequel trilogy is in a lot of ways an adaptation of the OG trilogy (as all Star Wars movies are), TFA was trying to get you to think of Snoke as Palpatine — an overlord that survives until the last bit of the last movie and Hux as Tarkin — the non-Force user who is Evil and all but dies b/c he’s too smug and petty.

But neither one of those things were actually true. Because that would position Kylo Ren as the Vader analogue, and all of TFA is dedicated to showing just how wrong that assumption is.

Because Kylo’s not Vader, Hux isn’t Tarkin, and Snoke isn’t Palpatine. Thus, Snoke has to die, because we can’t go into the last third of the trilogy with competing big bads (and no, Kylo and Hux don’t count there, either — Kylo isn’t a big bad at all, unless you think that the Big Bad Villain’s job is to fall for a British honeypot with a lightsaber).

I’ll admit, I was a bit smug when Snoke died and left only Hux alive and kicking out of the Three Bad Guys (as Kylo/Ben isn’t even pretending to be a bad guy anymore), because that’s what I had predicted — a fake-out with a Palpatine-style, force-of-nature villain only to reveal that the real Big Bad was with us all along — a mortal; a cackling madman: General Hux.

PLOTTING WITH PALPATINE

When spoilers first indicated that Palpatine would instead make yet another appearance in a Star Wars film, I was optimistic. Optimistic not in the “hey the Rebels will totally win” sort of way; no, optimistic in the “these kind Jedi will definitely free the slaves and not just take the kid because They Must Deal Kindly With Illegal Slavers”. AKA misplaced optimism rather than genre-savvy faith in the heroes to prevail.

Because actually bringing back Palpatine would be a stupid move all the way around, I tried to figure out why they’d advertise it and not try to hide the bad idea in a Secret Twist.

So here’s where we get the interplay between the Force of Nature and the Cackling Madman.

In a world where the Force exists, it’s easy to imagine that those without it feel rather powerless — or at least overshadowed — when near those who do wield it. Certainly, that’s true for most of Tarkin’s council, and true of Hux. 

Over and over again in TFA and TLJ, we see Hux trying to prove that he’s every inch Kylo’s Equal. Even after Snoke’s death, he uses no deference to the new Supreme Leader and repeats his commands so he can believe that the First Order soldiers are following him.

Hux’s scene in TFA where he’s commanding the troops shows Hux at his finest (and most evil); apart from any Jedi/Sith/Force influence, he is himself to a glorious extreme: the Cackling Madman.

THE CACKLING MADMAN

I don’t use this title to say that Hux is insane (though he’s clearly a bit off) but rather to show the difference between a villain like Hux and a villain like Palpatine. Unlike the Force of Nature villain, a Cackling Madman is usually present over the entire story, seen as a person rather than as a shadowy figure, and is allowed to fail and succeed at multiple times during the trajectory of the story, rather than only failing at the very end when the heroes triumph.

In short, Star Wars has never had, in the movie-verse, a Cackling Madman as the main villain. The prequels play at it for about .5 seconds with Senator Palpatine, but he’s still the Force of Nature, ultimately, just pretending to be a Good Guy.

As the sequel trilogy, is, once again, and like any other SW media, an adaptation of the OG trilogy, I was really excited for this shift in formula — it would play on audience expectation that Snoke would just be Palpatine 2.0, only to reveal — with the proper set up, as shown in TFA and TLJ — that the true villain was there all along, just unnoticed for what he was.

THE FACADE OF THE FORCE

So where would the intervention of Palpatine go in this shift from the formula?

Hux as the ultimate Big Bad would know that he would need the support of a powerful force user — or, at least, the appearance of support of a powerful force user.

And, in the Star Wars universe, you could do worse than to claim the support of (in the EU) the eternally clone-happy Emperor. Hux’s only problem is that the Emperor is dead, and thus not really up to supporting a ginger with dreams of Ultimate Power.

So any support would have to be a facade. And how is Star Wars uniquely equipped to handle facades?

We’re talking holograms, baby.

Holograms of a weakened yet still powerful Emperor — maybe missing a hand or something, a few attacks “directed” by the Emperor meeting wild success, manipulation of the Holograms to say Hux’s name and offer support of him as his Preeminent General or whatever, and Hux has the galaxy at his feet.

IMAGINE MY DISAPPOINTMENT (SPOILERS HERE AGAIN)

And then the spoiler pictures of Palpatine came out and — disappointment was prevalent, but I wasn’t surprised.

The big problem with the Sequel Trilogy is that it has one well-plotted plot line — the main plot line with Rey and Kylo/Ben — and then every other plot line is pretty much left up to the whims of the moment. It’s especially evident in Finn’s TLJ plot line, but it’s present to some extent in every other plot line throughout the two movies currently out.

What Hux should be is the danger lurking in plain sight; the villain seen but not understood, and the evil present but not accounted for. That alone would add a dimension to the Sequel Trilogy that it’s lacking right now — and lacking even more with the advent of Palpatine’s return. Not only would it acknowledge its freedom as an adaptation to play with audience expectation, but it would demonstrate something that both it and the Prequel Trilogy lack: trust in its audience.

THE ULTIMATE CONCLUSION

What RoS should be is a movie that delivers something new but still authentic to the Star Wars universe. Ultimately, that’s all it would take to please the majority of its audience, because those who are watching the ST without having seen any other Star Wars media are few and far between. 

The shame is that what RoS will be is a movie that (wrongly) doesn’t trust its audience to consume  nuanced media, and instead tries to placate them with false advertising (trying to give off the air that RoS will be a trio movie with Finn, Rey, and Poe when everyone knows it won’t be) and with the return of old characters and the descendants of old characters. It’s like adding blue flashing lights to an old snow globe and declaring that you’re recaptured lightning in a bottle.