#we finished season 2 and we’re on the book of boba get now

[raeathnos]

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[sabugabr]

Why the Clone problem in Star Wars animated media is also a Mandalorian problem, and why we have to talk about it (PART 2)

Hi! I finally finished wrapping this up, so here’s part 2 of what has already become a mini article (you can find Part 1 here, if you like!)

And for this part, it won’t be as much as a critic as part 1 was, but instead I’d like to focus more on what I consider to be a wasted potential regarding the representation of the Clones in the Star Wars animated media, from the first season of The Clone Wars till now, and why I believe it to be an extension of the Mandalorian problem I discussed in part 1 —  the good old colonialism.

Sources used, as always, will be linked at the end of this post!

PART 2: THE CLONES

Cody will never know peace

So I’d like to state that I won’t focus as much on the blatantly whitewashing aspect, for I believe it to be very clear by now. If you aren’t familiar with it, I highly recommend you search around tumblr and the internet, there are a lot of interesting articles and posts about it that explain things very didactically and in detail. The only thing you need to know to get this started is that even at the first seasons of Clone Wars (when the troopers still had this somewhat darker skin complexion and all) they were still a whitewashed version of Temuera Morrison (Jango’s actor). And from then, as we all know, they only got whiter and whiter till we get where we are now, in rage.

Look at this very ambiguously non-white but still westernized men fiercely guarding their pin-up space poster

Now look at this still westernized but slightly (sarcasm) whiter men who for some reason now have different tanning levels among them (See how Rex now has a lighter skin tone? WHEN THE HELL DID THAT HAPPEN KKKKKKK) Anyway you got the idea. So without further ado...

2.1 THE FANTASY METAPHOR

As I mentioned before in Part 1, one thing that has to be very clear if you want to follow my train of thought is that it’s impossible to consume something without attributing cultural meanings to it, or without making cultural associations. This things will naturally happen and it often can improve our connection to certain narratives, especially fantastic ones. Even if a story takes place in a fantastic/sci fi universe, with all fictional species and people and worlds and cultures, they never come from nowhere, and almost always they have some or a lot of basing in real people and cultures. And when done properly, this can help making these stories resonate in a very beautifull, meaningfull way. I actually believe this intrisic cultural associations are the things that make these stories work at all. As the brilliant american speculative/science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin says in the introduction (added in 1976) of her novel The Left Hand of Darkness, and that I was not able to chopp much because it’s absolutely genious and i’ll be leaving the link to the full text right here,

“The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrodinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future — indeed Schrodinger's most famous thought-experiment goes to show that the ‘future,’ on the quantum level, cannot be predicted — but to describe reality, the present world.

Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.”

[...] “Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!

They may use all kinds of facts to support their tissue of lies. They may describe the Marshalsea Prison, which was a real place, or the battle of Borodino, which really was fought, or the process of cloning, which really takes place in laboratories, or the deterioration of a personality, which is described in real textbooks of psychology; and so on. This weight of verifiable place-event-phenomenon-behavior makes the reader forget that he is reading a pure invention, a history that never took place anywhere but in that unlocalisable region, the author's mind. In fact, while we read a novel, we are insane —bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices, we watch the battle of Borodino with  them, we may even become Napoleon. Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.”

[...] “ In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find — if it's a good novel — that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.

The artist whose medium is fiction does this within words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words. Words can be used thus paradoxically because they have, along with a semiotic usage, a symbolic or metaphoric usage. [...]  All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life — science, all the sciences, and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook, among them. Space travel is one of these metaphors; so is an alternative society, an alternative biology; the future is another. The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.

A metaphor for what?” [1]

A metaphor for what indeed. I won’t be going into what Star Wars as a whole is a metaphor for, because I am certain that it varies from person to person, and everyone can and has the total right to take whatever they want from this story, and understand it as they see fit. That’s why it’s called the modern myth. And therefore, all I’ll be saying here is playinly my take not only on what I understand the Clones to be, but what I believe they could have meant.

2.2 SO, BOBA IS A CLONE

I don’t want to get too repetitive, but I wanted to adress it because even though I by no means intend to put Boba and the Clones in the same bag, there is one aspect about them that I find very similar and interesting, that is the persue of individuality. While the Clones have this very intrinsically connected to their narratives, in Boba’s case this appears more in his concept design. As I mentioned in Part 1, one of the things the CW staff had in mind while designing the mandalorians is that they wanted to make Boba seem unique and distinguishable from them, and honestly even in the original trilogy he stands out a lot. He is unique and memorable and that’s one of the things that draws us to him.

And as we all know, both Boba and Jango and the Clones are played by Temuera Morrison — and occasionally by the wonderful Bodie Taylor and Daniel Logan. And Temuera Morrison comes from the Maori people. And differently from the mandalorian case, where we were talking about a whole planet, in this situation we’re talking about portraying one single person, so there’s nowhere to go around his appearance and phenotypes, right? I mean, you are literally representing an actual individual, so there’s no way you could alter their looks, right?

(hahahaha wrong)

And besides that, I think that is in situations like that (when we are talking about individuals) that the actor’s perspective could really have a place to shine (just the same as how Lea was mostly written by Carrie Fisher). In this very heart-warming interview for The New York Times (which you can read full signing up for their 5-free-articles-per-month policy), Temuera Morrison talks a little bit about how he incorporated his cultural background to Boba Fett in The Mandalorian:

“I come from the Maori nation of New Zealand, the Indigenous people — we’re the Down Under Polynesians — and I wanted to bring that kind of spirit and energy, which we call wairua. I’ve been trained in my cultural dance, which we call the haka. I’ve also been trained in some of our weapons, so that’s how I was able to manipulate some of the weapons in my fight scenes and work with the gaffi stick, which my character has.” [2]

The Gaffi stick (or Gaderffii), btw, is the weapon used by the Tusken Raiders on Tatooine, and according to oceanic art expert Bruno Claessens it’s design was inspired by wooden Fijian war clubs called totokia. [3]

And I think is very clear how this background can influence one’s performance and approach to a character, and majorly how much more alive this character will feel like. Beyond that, having an actor from your culture to play and add elements to a character will higly improve your sense of connection with them (besides all the impact of seeying yourself on screen, and seeying yourself portrayed with respect). It would only make sense if the cultural elements that the actor brought when giving life to a fictional individual would’ve been kept and even deepened while expanding this role. And if you’re familiar with Star Wars Legends you’ll probably rememeber that in Legends Jango would train and raise all Clone troopers in the Mandalorian culture, so that the Clones would sing traditional war chants before battles, be fluent in Mando’a (Mandalore’s language) and some would proudly take mandalorian names for themselves. So why didn’t Filoni Inc. take that into account when they went to delve into the clones in The Clone Wars?

2.3 THE WHITE MINORITY

First of all I’d like to state that all this is 100% me conjecturing, and by no means at all I’m saying that this is what really happened. But while I was re-watching CW before The Bad Batch premiere, something came to my mind regarding the whitewashing of the Clones, and I’d like to leave that on the table.

So, you know this kind of recent movies and series that depicted like, fairies in this fictional world where fairies were very opressed, but there would be a lot of fairies played by white actors? Just like Bright and Carnival Row. If you’ve watched some of these and have some racial conscience, you’ll probably know where I’m going here. And the issue with it is that often this medias will portray real situations of racism and opression and prejudice, but all applied to white people. Like in Carnival Row, when going to work as a maid in a rich human house, our girl Cara Delevingne had to fight not to have her braids (which held a lot of significance in her culture) cut by her intolerant human mistress, because the braids were not “appropriate”. Got it? hahahaha what a joy

Look at her ethnic braids!!!

One of the reasons this happens might be to relieve a white audience of the burden of watching these stories and feeling what I like to call “white guilt”. Because, as we all know, white people were never very oppressed.  Historically speaking, white people have always been in privileged social positions, and in an exploitative relationship between two ethnic groups, white people very usually would be the exploiters  —  the opressors. So while watching situations (that every minority would know to be very real) of opression in fiction, if these situations were lived by a white actor, there would be no real-life associations, because we have no historical parameter to associate this situation with anything in real life — if you are white. Thus, there is less chance that, when consuming one of these narratives, whoever is watching will question the "truthfulness" of these situations (because it's not "real racism", see, "they're just fairies"). It's easier for a person to watch without having to step out of their comfort zone, or confront the reality of real people who actually go through things like that. There's even a chance that this might diminish empathy for these people.

Once again, not saying this is specifically the case of the Clones, majorly because one of the main feelings you have when watching CW is exactly empathy for the troopers (at least for me, honestly, the galaxy could explode, I just wanted those poor men to be happy for God’s sake). But I’ll talk more about it later.

The thing is, the whole thing with the Clones, if you think about it, it’s not pretty. If you step on little tiny bit outside the bubble of “fictional fantasy”, the concept is very outrageous. They are kept in conditions analogous to slavery, to say the least. To say the more, they were literally made in an on-demand lab to serve a purpose they are personally not a part of, for which they will neither receive any reward nor share any part of the gains. On the contrary, as we saw in The Bad Batch, as soon as the war was over and the clones were no longer useful as cannonballs, they were discarded. In the (wonderful) episode 6 of the third season of (the almost flawless) Rebels, “The Last Battle”, we're even personally introduced to the analogy that there really wasn't much difference in value between clones and droids, something that was pretty clear in Clone Wars but hadn't been said explicitly yet.

In fact, technically the Separatists can be considered to be more human than the Republic. But that's just my opinion.

So, you had this whole army of pretty much slaves. I know this is a heavy term, but these were people who were originally stripped of any sense of humanity or individuality, made literally to go to war and die in it, doing so purely in exchange for food and lodging, under the false pretense that they belonged to a glorious purpose (yes, Loki me taught that term, that was the only thing I absorbed from this series). Doing all this under extremely precarious conditions from which they had no chance of getting out, actually, getting out was tantamount to the death penalty. They were slaves. In milder terms, an oppressed minority. And again, I don't know if that was the case, but I can understand why Filoni Inc would be apprehensive about representing phenotically indigenous people in this situation. Especially since we in theory should see Anakin and Obi-Wan as the good guys.

(and here I’d like to leave a little disclaimer that I believe the whole Anakin-was-a-slave-once plot was HUGELY misused (and honestly just badly done) both in the prequels and in the animeted series  — maybe for the best, since he was, you know, white and all that, and I don’t know how the writers would have handled it, but ANYWAY — I believe this could have been further explored, particularly regarding his relationship with the Clones, and how it could have influenced his revolt against the Jedi, and manipulated to add to his anger and all that. I mean, we already HAD the fact that Anakin shared a deeper conection with his troopers than usual)

Yes, Rex, you have common trauma experiences to share. But anyway, backing to my track

As I was saying, we are to see them as good guys, and maybe that could’ve been tricky if we saw them hooping up on slavery practices. Like, idk, a “nice” sugar plantation owner? (I don’t know the correct word for it in english, but in portuguese they were called senhores de engenho) Like this guy from 12 Years a Slave?

You know, the slave owner who was “nice”. IDK, anyway  

No one will ever watch Clone Wars and make this association (I believe not, at least), of course not. But if we were to see how CW deepened the clone arcs, and see them as phenotypically indigenous, subjected to certain situations that occur in CW (yes, like Umbara), maybe some kind of association would’ve been easier to make.

I mean, come onnnn I can’t be the only one seeing it

You see, maybe not the whole 12 Years a Slave association one, but I don’t think it’s hard to see there was something there. And maybe this could’ve been even more evident if they looked non-white. Because historically, both black peoples and indigenous peoples went through processes of slavery, from which we as a society are still impacted today. And to slave a people, the first thing you have to do is strip them from their humanity. So it might be easier to see this situation and apply it to real life. And maybe that could lead to a whole lot of other questions regarding the Clones, the Republic, the Jedi, and even how chill Obi-Wan was about all this. We might come out of it, as lady Ursula Le Guin stated in the fragment above, a bit different from what we were before we watch it.

Maybe even unconsciously, Filoni Inc thought we would be more confortable watching if they just looked white (and because of colonialism and all that, but I’m adding thoughts here).

And of course I don’t like the idea of, idk, looking at Obi-Wan and thinking about Benedict Cumberbatch in 12 Years a Slave or something like that. Of course that, if the Clones were to play the same role as they did in the prequels, to obediently serve the Jedi and quietly die for them, that would have been bad, and hurtfull, and pejorative if added to all that I said here. But the thing is that Clone Wars, consciously or not, already solved that. At least to my point of view, they already managed to approach this situation in an incredible competent way, that is giving them agency.

2.4 AGENCY AND INDIVIDUALITY

So, one of the things I love most in Clone Wars is how it really feels like it’s about the Clones. Like, we have the bigger scene of Palpatine taking over, Ahsoka’s growth arc, Anakin’s turn to The Dark Side, the dawn of the Jedi and rise of the Empire and all that, but it also has this idk, vibe, of there’s actually something going on that no one in scene is talking about? And this something is the Clones. We have these episodes spread throughout the seasons, even out of chronological order, which when watched together tell a parallel story to the war, to everything I mentioned. Which is a story about individuals. Clone Wars manages to, in a (at least to me) very touching way, make the Clones be the heros. 

Can you really look me in the eye and say that Five’s story didn’t CRASH you like a full-speed train???? He may not have the same amount of screen-time as the protagonists, but his story is just as important as theirs (and to me, it might be the most meaningful one). Because he is the first to break free from the opression cicle all the Clones were trapped into. 

His story can be divided into 6 phases.

1 - First, the construction of his individuality, in other words, the reclaiming of his humanity. 

2 - Then the assimilation of understanding yourself as an individual of value, and then extending this to all his brothers, not as a unit, but as a set of individuals collectively having this same newly discovered value.

3 - This makes him realize that in the situation they find themselves in, they are not being recognized as such. This makes him question the reality of their situation.

4 - Freed from the illusion of his state, he seeks the truth about it.

5 - This then leads him to seek liberation not just for himself, but for all the Clones (it's basically Plato's Cave, and I'm not exaggerating here).

6 - And finally, precisely because he has assimilated his individuality and sought freedom for himself and his brothers, he is punished for it.

His story is all about agency. Agency, according to the Wikipedia page that is the first to appear if you type “agency” on Google, is that agency is “the abstract principle that autonomous beings, agents, are capable of acting by themselves” [4], and this abstract principle can be dissected in 7 segments:

Law - a person acting on behalf of another person

Religious -  "the privilege of choice... introduced by God"

Moral -  capacity for making moral judgments

Philosophical -  the capacity of an autonomous agent to act, relating to action theory in philosophy

Psychological -  the ability to recognize or attribute agency in humans and non-human animals

Sociological -  the ability of social actors to make independent choices, relating to action theory in sociology

Structural - ability of an individual to organize future situations and resource distribution

All of them apply here. And this is just the story of one Clone. We know there are many others throughout the series. 

Agency is what can make the world of a difference when you are telling a story about an opressed minority. Because opressed minorities do exist, and opression exists, and if you are insecure about consuming a fictional media about opressed minorities, see if they have agency might be a good place to start. So that’s why I think that everything I said before in 2.3 falls short. Because the solution already existed, and was indeed done. Honestly, making the non-agency representation of the Clones (the one we see in the prequels) to be the one played by Temuera Morrison, and then giving them agency in the version where they appear to be white, just leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

And honestly, if they were to make the Clones look like Temuera Morrison, and by that mean, take more inspiration in the Māori culture, maybe they wouldn’t even have to change much of their representation besides their facial features. As I said in part 1, I am not by any means an expert in polynesian cultures, but there was something that really got me while I was researching about it. And is the facial tattoos. More precisely, the tā moko. 

2.5  TĀ MOKO

Once again I’ll be using the Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand as source, and you can find the articles used linked at the end of this post. 

Etymologically speaking,

“The term moko traditionally applied to male facial tattooing, while kauae referred to moko on the chins of women. There were other specific terms for tattooing on other parts of the body. Eventually ‘moko’ came to be used for Māori tattooing in general.” [5]

So moko is the correct name for the characteristic tattoos we often see when we look for Māori culture. 

These ones ^. Please also look this book up, it’s beautiful. It’s written by  Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, a New Zealand academic specialising in Māori cultural issues and a lesbian activist. She’s wonderful. 

According to the Tourism NewZealand website, 

“In Māori culture, it [moko] reflects the individual's whakapapa (ancestry) and personal history. In earlier times it was an important signifier of social rank, knowledge, skill and eligibility to marry.”

“Traditionally men received moko on their faces, buttocks and thighs. Māori face tattoos are the ultimate expression of Māori identity. Māori believe the head is the most sacred part of the body, so facial tattoos have special significance.”

[...] “The main lines in a Māori tattoo are called manawa, which is the Māori word for heart.” [6]

Therefore, in the Māori culture, there’s this incredibly deep meaning attributed to the (specific of their culture) tattooing of the face. The act of tattooing the body, any part of the body, is incredibly powerful in many cultures around the globe. The adornment of the body can have different meanings for these different cultures, but all of which I've come into contact with do mean a lot. It’s one of the oldest and most beautiful human expressions of individuality and identity. 

And in the Star Wars universe, the Clones are the group that has the deeper connection to, and the best narrative regarding, tattoos. In fact, besides Hera’s father, Cham Syndulla, the Clones are the only individuals to have tattooed skin, at least that I can recall of. And they do share a deep connection to it. 

For the Clones, the tattoos (added to hairstyles) are the most meaningful way in which they can express themselves. Is what makes them distinguishable from each other to other people. Tattoos are one of the things that represent them as individuals.

And I’m not BY ANY MEANS sayin that the Clones facial tattoos = Moko. That’s not my point. But that’s one of the things I meant when I said earlier about the wasted potential of the representation of the Clones (in my point of view). Because maybe if it were their intention to base the culture of the clones after the polynesian culture, maybe if it were their intention to make the Clones actually look like Temuera Morrison, this could have meant a whole deal. More than it’d appear looking to it from outside this culture. Maybe if there were actual polynesian people in the team that designed the Clones and wrote them (or at least indigenous people, something), who knows what we could’ve had. 

Even in Hunter’s design, I noticed that if you take for example this frame of Temuera from the movie River Queen (2005), where we can have a closer look at the design of his tā moko

Speaking purely plastically (because I don’t want to get into the movie itself, just using it as example because then I can use Temuera himself as a comparison), see the lines around the contours of his mouth? Now look at Hunter’s. 

I find it interesting that they choose to design this lines coming from around his nose like that. But at this point I am stretching A LOT into plastic and semiotics, so this comparison is just a little thing that got my attention. I know that his tattoo is a skull and etc etc, I’m just poiting this out. And it even makes me a little frustrated, because they could have taken so many interesting paths in the Bad Batch designs. But instead they choose to pay homage to Rambo. And I mean, I like Rambo, I think he’s cool and all that.

Look at him doing Filipino martial arts

But then, as we say in Brasil, they had the knife and the cheese in their hands (all they had to do was cut the cheese, but they didn’t). Istead, it seems like in order to make Hunter look like Rambo, they made him even whiter??? 

2.6 SO...

Look, I love The Clone Wars. I’m crazy about it. I love the Clones, I love their stories and plots. They are great characters and one of the greatest addings ever made in the Star Wars universe. They even have, in my opinion, the best soundtrack piece to feature in a Star Wars media since John Williams’ wonderful score. It just feels to me as if their narrative core is full of bagage, and meanings, and associations that were just wiped under the carpet when they suddenly became white. It just feels to me as if, once again, they were trying to erase the person behing the trooper mask, and the people they were to represent, and the history they should evoke.

I don’t know why they were whitewashed. Maybe it was just the old due racism and colonialism. Maybe it was meant for us to not question the Jedi, or our good guys, or the real morality of this fictional universe where we were immersed. But then, was it meant for what?

The Clones were a metaphor for what? 

(spoiler: the answer still contains colonialism)

Thank you so much for reading !!!! (and congratulations for getting this far, you are a true hero)

SOURCES USED IN THIS:

[1] Ursulla K. Le Guin, 'The Left Hand of Darkness', 14th ACE print run of June, 1977

[2] Dave Itzkoff, 'Being Boba Fett: Temuera Morrison Discusses ‘The Mandalorian’', The New York Times, published Dec. 7, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/07/arts/television/the-mandalorian-boba-fett-temuera-morrison.html (accessed 15 September 2021)

[3] Bruno Claessens, 'George Lucas' "Star Wars" and Oceanic art' , Archived from the original on December 5, 2020, https://web.archive.org/web/20201205114353/http://brunoclaessens.com/2015/07/george-lucas-star-wars-and-oceanic-art/#.YEiJ-p37RhF (accessed 15 September 2021)

[4]  Wikipedia contributors, "Agency," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Agency&oldid=1037924611 (accessed September 17, 2021)

[5] Rawinia Higgins, 'Tā moko – Māori tattooing - Origins of tā moko', Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/ta-moko-maori-tattooing/page-1 (accessed 17 September 2021)

[6] Tourism New Zealand, ‘The meaning of tā moko, traditional Māori tattoos’,  The Tourism New Zealand website, https://www.newzealand.com/us/feature/ta-moko-maori-tattoo/ (accessed 17 September 2021)

[kazhan]

The Mandalorian s2 finale.

It’s time to rant about The Mandalorian.

I’m seeing a lot of people upset over The Mandalorian season 2 ending and calling it awful and I honestly think half of you guys suffer from a case of Jedi Order Hate and Drawing Hasty Conclusions.

Disclaimer: Although I loved seeing Luke in live action again and them getting it right after the mess that were the sequels, I didn’t want him to be the Jedi Grogu called. Now, this is what we got and even if I wish we’d had someone else, I still enjoyed the episode. Also I don’t want to say I hate the idea of Luke being included until I see what they do next. 

Luke stole Grogu from Din!!!!

Okay so there’s a lot to unpack here.

First of all, we’ve known since the season 1 finale that Din’s goal this season was to find Grogu’s people so he could return him to his kind. Yes, we all grew attached to the little womp rat which means none of us wanted to see him go, but it’s literally the plot: find the Jedi, give them Grogu. We all entered the season knowing it was a possibility.

Now, we’ve seen Din grow attached to Grogu, going as far as removing his helmet in front of people and breaking his code for him. We’ve seen him act as a father to Grogu and that relationship is what makes The Mandalorian so great, I think everyone agrees on this. 

Because of that, I’ve seen people say things like “what was the point of showing us that relationship if they’re going to destroy it in the finale?” and I think they completely missed the point.

They didn’t destroy their bond. They showed us how strong it is, because no matter how much Din loves Grogu, he didn’t make the selfish choice of asking him to stay. He let him go. This is another proof of how good and kind and selfless Din is. This kid became everything to him and yet, he was able to let him go, out of love for him. This is what Anakin couldn’t do, what led him to the darkside. But here’s Din Djarin, Mandalorian bounty hunter, showing us a true act of love by saying goodbye to Grogu because he’s convinced that’s what’s best for him.

Now, to the people saying that Grogu didn’t even want to go with Luke, you are so mistaken.

Ahsoka told Din in episode 5 that the choice was Grogu’s to make. Grogu made his choice on Tython when he reached out to Luke and clearly asked him to come find him. Luke wouldn’t have shown up if Grogu hadn’t told him to.

Grogu clearly made that choice again when he reacted to Luke boarding Gideon’s cruiser, when he reached out to him through the video surveillance feed, when he asked Din to get to Luke, when he asked Din his permission and finally, when he asked Luke to pick him up.

Grogu has chosen the Jedi path, again and again and again. Now, I understand being sad over this choice because it means he won’t be with Din anymore but don’t go calling Luke an asshole and a baby snatcher when it’s clear that this was Grogu’s choice.

We didn’t see or hear what Luke and Grogu “talked about” on Tython, but when Luke shows up, he already knows Grogu wants to go with him. He isn’t here to steal a kid from anyone, he’s here to train a child who asked him to. And yet, he knows Grogu needs Din’s permission to leave him and he lets them have that talk, he doesn’t intervene. Did you guys notice how Luke only picks up Grogu when he asks him to? An evil baby snatcher would have grabbed him the second Din let him go, but Luke still gave him the time to change his mind if he wanted to. 

So, no, Luke didn’t steal Grogu from Din.

Now, to the people disappointed by Grogu’s choice.

Grogu is a Temple baby. He is 50, which means he’s spent around 20 years growing up around Jedi. They were his family and he lost them all during the rise of the Empire. Do you guys imagine how traumatizing Order 66 must have been for a Force sensitive baby? Most Jedi felt their own being decimated across the galaxy and Grogu was right here at the Temple where everyone was massacred. He lost everyone he knew. We’re not sure exactly what happened to him right after Order 66 other that a Jedi saved him and hid him, but I think it’s fair to assume his life was nothing but running away from the Empire afterwards, then being captured by pirates and finally, saved by Din. We don’t know how long he stayed with Din. Weeks? Months? I’m not trying to diminish their bond here because it’s clear that they love each other, but the Jedi are Grogu’s family too. 

Can we blame him for choosing the Jedi path when he’s one of the last of his kind, already has had training and desperately needs someone to teach him how to master his abilities? 

And he wanted Din’s permission. Which means that if Din had said no, he would have stayed with him. And Luke would have respected that choice, none of you can tell me otherwise. 

So, saying that Luke and the Jedi are baby thieves is completely discarding Grogu’s choice, Din’s sacrifice and the good man Luke is. Which is, you know. Not cool. At all.

We won’t be seeing Din anymore!!! Boba is going to replace him!!!

Okay so, about Din. Guys. Bo-Katan asked him to join her to retake Mandalore once he’s done with his other duties (aka Grogu) and he said he would. 

“If you should manage to finish your quest, I would have you reconsider joining our efforts.”

[...]

“Fair enough.”

He took the Darksaber back from Moff Gideon, which gives him the right to claim the Mandalorian throne. We are not done with Din Djarin. 

Plus, he promised Grogu they’d see each other again and I’m pretty sure he meant that, but also that it was some kind of promise made to the audience as well. So we’re probably not done with Grogu either. 

Now, about Boba. I might be completely wrong here, but I’m guessing The Book of Boba Fett is a spin-off series, not season 3. Boba doesn’t consider himself Mandalorian (and I could write essays about how sad this is) so I really don’t think he’s going to become the new main character of a show named The Mandalorian. That’s Din, since the beginning, and I can totally see them expanding on the universe with all the characters they introduced, but Din will probably always be at the heart of the show. If it’s not a spin-off, then maybe we’ll get a few episodes focused on Boba before coming back to Din. I don’t know! But Boba is not here to replace Din.

Now, maybe I’ll come back to this post in december 2021 and realize how much of a fool I was, but in the meantime: I don’t know what they’re going to do, so I’m not going to scream about how bad the show was, how they ruined Din Djarin and are getting rid of the character. 

Conclusion

People being upset because watching Din say goodbye to his kid was heartbreaking are 100% valid because that was the point. The audience is supposed to feel how hard it was for Din, but we’re also supposed to understand it was necessary and how beautiful being able to let someone you love go for their own good is. 

People calling Luke a baby snatcher are definitely not valid and should stop hating on the Jedi. 

People saying Din is being replaced and hating on the show because of it… take a chill pill, wait until next year, we’ll see how it goes.

[britesparc]

Weekend Top Ten #462

Top Ten Things That Hopefully Will Actually Happen in 2021

I mean, it’s got to be better than last year, hasn’t it? Just on law of averages. I know it’s not really the greatest start. Everything’s shut again but it’s colder now. We’ve not got a handle on this thing. The idiots are still in charge. But I still feel cautiously optimistic. There is a vaccine now, at least. Trump is gone, barring some cataclysmic last-minute kerfuffle. A new lockdown is required, so hopefully however painful it is right now it’ll be the death throws of this wretched virus. Will 2021 look like 2019? No, not a chance. But maybe by summer, by autumn, we’ll be well over the hill. 2022, hopefully, will be great.

Not that I’m writing off the new year altogether! No siree. I think this is the year we turn the corner and see the road before us. I think this year can be good, and I think that – outside of pandemic and politics – there is quite a lot to look forward to.

I’m not right now talking about personal ambitions or wider, geopolitical hopes and dreams. This is all about stuff that I want to see or play or whatever. Things that don’t really have any bearing on if the world keeps spinning or we all make it through another tumultuous twelvemonth relatively unscathed. Just, y’know, stuff that’d be nice.

Cinematic Superheroes: 2020 was a bonkers year, and one of the things that was bonkers as it unfolded was how all these huge movies kept getting pushed back. As a result, there were precisely no Marvel Cinematic Universe productions released. Like, at all. Thankfully – hopefully – that will change in 2021. As well as some Disney+ stuff (see below) there’ll also be the belated release of Wonder Woman 1984, which came out around Christmas but which I’ll probably stream this month; and, lockdown permitting, we should finally see the likes of Black Widow, The Eternals, and things that were already scheduled for ’21 such as DC’s The Batman and The Suicide Squad. And y’know what? I’m even looking forward to Zack Snyder’s Justice League. Yeah, maybe some more will slip, but I’m just glad that we’re finally getting some men in tights back in our lives.

Plus all these Great Shows: just before Christmas Disney outlined its slate of upcoming releases and by Crikey it was mega. And the best part is, so many of these shows and films are imminent! In a couple of weeks WandaVision will hit Disney+, and later this year we’ll also see (I do believe) The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, maybe Loki, The Book of Boba Fett, and maaaaaybe if we’re lucky Obi-Wan Kenobi. Even outside of the other movies and things that they announced, and even if we don’t look as far ahead as 2022, Disney+ has a hell of a lineup for this year, and even if lockdown closes the cinemas, we can still enjoy a nice good stream.

Starred Up: the arrival of Star, the “grown-up” channel on Disney+, was confirmed (and confirmed to be included in the existing sub, which was nice), and recently it was announced that it will go live on February 23rd. For some reason I was expecting it later, so that’s nice. It’ll be good to see some of the smuttier Marvel movies make their return (especially Fox’s X-masterpiece, Logan), but I’m more looking forward to having all the Die Hards and Aliens in one place. Even the crap ones.

Finally, Halo Infinite: I really like Halo; it’s pretty much the reason I ever bought a console in the first place. So I was incredibly excited for Halo Infinite, and – I must confess – a bit disappointed by its reveal. A delay is fine; take your time, do a good job, try to avoid crunch. I’ve got more than enough to play. But with my pretty new Series X installed next to my shiny new 4K TV, I’d love to get into a proper new Master Chief adventure once again. And finally it’ll happen! My Big Christmas Game for 2021 is sorted.

Return of the (Lego) Jedi: speaking of Big Games for 2021… I love the Lego games from Traveller’s Tales, and it all started with Lego Star Wars. With the release of The Rise of Skywalker in 2019, I kind of assumed they’d be making a new one, and they are: The Skywalker Saga. Much delayed (I think it was meant to come out last summer originally?), but finally making its debut at some point in 2021, it promises to be a more expansive effort than any previous Lego game, and also offers a fresh look at every film in the increasingly-inaccurately-named trilogy. My youngest is really getting into Star Wars and she loves the Lego games, so this is something we can really enjoy together.

2020’s Greatest Hits: yeah, lots of great things coming out in 2021, but I gotta say one thing I’m really looking forward to is catching up on all of the things that were supposed to come out in 2020. I’ve already mentioned the likes of Black Widow, but there’s Coming 2 America (on Prime Video in March), Dune (potentially still hitting cinemas), No Time to Die (God knows), Spielberg’s West Side Story (delayed a whole year!)… even smaller-scale things like the cool-looking Freaky have been pushed right back. And whilst I’m not exactly looking forward to it, pity poor Peter Rabbit 2, knocked from an early Easter slot when the first lockdown hit, only to have its February half-term run destroyed by Lockdown III. Maybe next year, eh, Peter?

Matrix of Leadership: The Matrix turns 22 this year, shockingly enough, and last time I watched it was still absolutely brilliant in one of those hardly-ever-happens ways. The sequels I could live without, although I’ll warrant they’re still stylish with nice action, but they were a huge disappointment (moreso for me than the often-lambasted Star Wars prequels). However, I am super excited for Lana Wachowski returning to direct a fourth Matrix movie. I don’t know why, but I just think it’ll be great; there’s twenty years’ worth of “internet stuff” and “games stuff” and “comics stuff” she can use as reference or in-joke, and let’s face it, Keanu Reeves has never kicked as much ass in his life as he does in the John Wick movies, so we don’t need to worry about that. What the hell will it be about? How can you make a sequel to what felt like a pretty definitive ending? I mean, half the characters died (spoiler!). But I don’t care about that, I just want to see it (hopefully at a cinema).

One (Other) Ring to Rule Them All: I ended up spending quite a bit of time in Middle-Earth in 2020, including reading The Hobbit to my girls, Unfinished Tales, and Ian Nathan’s book about the making of Peter Jackson’s trilogy, Anything You Can Imagine. So I am, shall we say, primed for Amazon’s new TV adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s opus. The Lord of the Rings series – as I think it might still be called? – will be set a lot earlier than the more famous stories, and although there are a lot of potential hiccups and hurdles in the way, I hope the less-familiar period and setting will offer scope for a series to make its own unexpected journey, showing even those that have read The Silmarillion something they’ve not seen before. I hope they don’t try to make it into Game of Thrones, and I hope they don’t try to shoehorn in too many aspects of The Lord of the Rings (I mean, hobbits shouldn’t really feature too much into it, surely?), but the pedigree is strong and I’m very excited.

Sinful: Russell T. Davies’ last show, Years and Years, was a fascinating combination of terrifying apocalyptic sci-fi and domestic soap opera, and one of the best things that happened in 2019. His next show, It’s a Sin, is about something altogether more real but still apocalyptic: the AIDS crisis in the gay community of the 1980s. I imagine he’ll still be expertly combining soapy drama with casual gaggery and moments of utter heartbreak. Apparently this is a story very close to his heart that he’s been wanting to tell for – yes – years and years, so it’s sure to be one of the TV highlights of 2021.

The Unconfirmed: one of the great things at the start of the year is, you don’t know what you’re going to get. Sometimes you get, well, 2020. But sometimes you don’t! Sometimes you get a year in film like 1984 (Terminator! Ghostbusters! Gremlins!) or 1999 (Matrix! Fight Club! American Beauty!); sometimes you get a year in gaming like 1998 (Half-Life! Zelda! Grim Fandango!) or 2007 (Halo! BioShock! Crackdown!). What’s coming this year? Well, with the new consoles out, we’re going to finally start seeing some new games that wrestle with the hardware; not just the cross-generational likes of Halo or Horizon but some new games, some unannounced games. We’ll also, no doubt, see proper footage and trailers for stuff we do know – Hellblade, Fable, hopefully Perfect Dark. Taika Waititi’s got at least two films on the go; that’ll be good. Spielberg doesn’t usually rest on his laurels; he’s finished West Side Story, so what’s next? Bond will come out, somewhere, somehow; will we get the announcement of a new Bond? Speaking of recasting, is Jodie Whittaker really leaving Doctor Who? I’ve not been too fussed with the show the last couple of years, but I’m always rooting for her and will be sad to see her go; but does that mean we’re in for another New Doctor palaver later this year too? Will we see or hear anything of Rian Johnson’s Star Wars films or, even better, a Knives Out sequel? The new Stranger Things has got to be this year, hasn’t it? What about Star Trek – Picard season 2 and Discovery season 4 should be happening, but will we also see the Pike and Georgiou-focussed spin-offs? God knows! It’s all up in the air! And these are only the things that we know or can speculate a little bit about! But that’s what makes it so exciting.

Well, that’s it for now. As I write this, what can only be called a mob of white supremacist terrorists – idiot insurrectionists, if you will – have stormed the US Capitol. Truly terrifying scenes, given the added worry of the Twat in Chief using the crisis as some phony excuse to cling on to power. I have faith that it’ll be resolved, short-term, and that democracy – capital-D Democracy – will endure, for now. But it just goes to show how volatile everything is. The kids are being homeschooled again. London’s hospitals are teetering on the brink. There’s gunfire in the Senate. But the first Black Senator just got elected in Georgia. My wife’s playing Ooblets. Somewhere it’s sunny, somewhere else a kid’s catching snowflakes, and somewhere else again some lucky sod is getting to watch Nine to Five for the first time ever. Things are scary and often crap but on the whole I think the arc of the universe tilts ever so slightly towards Being Generally Okay.

Take care of yourselves, wear a bloody mask, and here’s to 2021 Being Generally Okay.

[opepin]

march: week 4

20: lots of cramping and gas going on lol. well, i rushed in the morning because i stayed in bed 10 minutes after my alarm rang. then the red line had some delays, but i still got to work before 9:30 am, ahah. it was a pretty chill day in the office. i ate lunch at my desk because i had a call when everyone else was eating :< craii. i ordered daniel’s bday present and also managed to print out the amazon return label. i kind of lost fuel one hour before the day ended because of my stomach and cramps, but it’s okay! it happens, haha. i got home at like 5:30 pm and then snacked a bit before doing my 45 minute cardio workout. then i made rice and headed upstairs to shower. i had to bring all of my shower and skin care stuff to the bathroom x__x; it was a nice shower though because the shower head is 2x as strong as ours for some reason. hopefully, that gets fixed too.

kevin got back and we went ot bj’s to pick up croissants. he really wanted them. we devoured two on the way back and then he went to shower while i prepped the veggies. LOL and then i made a mistake where i threw out the white ends of the chives when i wasn’t supposed to and then i took them out of the garbage (was pretty clean) and washed them like 30x times. i was going to lie to kevin about them but then i broke down and told him what happened and he couldn’t stop laughing at me. if baby brain exists does period brain exist too? LOL. kevin finished cooking and then we ate and watched an episode of ‘how to get away with murder.’ then kevin washed the dishes and we headed up to brush our teeth. kevin gamed for the rest of the night and i laid in bed nursing another tension headache until i fell asleep at like 1 am.

21: i woke up with the tension in my neck and shoulder and our shower was still getting fixed so i worked from home. we woke up to the maintenance guys’ knock on the door and they said they would come back in an hour or so because we were still in bed. so then we slept for 30 minutes more and then went upstairs to brush our teeth. the wifi in the suite still didn’t work so kevin sent me the information while he commuted to work. we ate breakfast and then stopped by the front to sign a card and drop off some money for our maintenance and cleaning staff appreciation thingy. then i headed upstairs and changed and brought my stuff to the suite to work. i recorded some videos and then caught up with phil. i got the ‘ok’ to start implementing some of my changes. i’m so excited! then i ate lunch and looked at headsets. i realized that kien and haowei are getting pro gamer headsets LOL. cole suggested the arctis 5 and i might get it. we’ll see.

i went back down to the apartment and finished editing videos and ended my day with a call. then i washed dishes, put on rice, snacked on a croissant, and did an hour workout focusing on obliques. kevin came home a bit later than expected because he was working on a problem. i went to shower while kevin cooked dinner. he got really dried out and tired while cooking so he went to shower after cooking while i watched ‘reign’ and tried catching a good tapu koko. i’m hoping to catch a tapu every other time i game LOL. i didn’t catch one at the end of the day though. we ate and watched two? episodes of ‘how to get away with murder’ and then kevin washed dishes and then we brushed our teeth together upstairs. i finished watching ‘reign’ in bed and then went to sleep at 1:15 am? kevin stayed up debating stock market things or something ahah.

22: i actually didn’t need to rush in the morning. i got dressed before brushing my teeth because i had to go upstairs to the suite to brush my teeth and then ate breakfast and i was on the train at 8:34 am! i met sultan for the first time in person and met our new front end dev, joe today. it was a really quiet office -- only the marketing team and product team were in the office. it was a productive morning. i ordered the arctis 7 in white for my headset for work and then i worked on tutorials. everyone online was busy so i just worked and listened to music. the day went by pretty quickly. we scrambled at the end of the day because of an issue that we really needed to solve together. it was fun doing that and figuring it out. i left at like 5:15 pm after cleaning up things with phil for the client and then i met kevin at the train station :) he made it just in time to get on the train!

i told him about my day and when we got back, i watched ‘jane the virgin’ while trying to catch a good tapu koko. i was close twice but one wasn’t timid nature and the other didn’t have perfect speed :< my hand was cramping so i quit and i cleaned up the bathroom. kevin made stir fry potato slivers and braised chicken with mushrooms for dinner. mmm. the potatoes were hella spicy but when we put more salt, it tasted better. we watched 3 episodes? of ‘how to get away with murder.’ there’s so much sex this season .__. LOL but we’re getting to the good part now. we stopped so i could exercise. oh, our water pressure for the shower is perfect now! it’s waay stronger. kevin took a nice long shower and after my workout, i cleaned the kitchen. i got irritated at kevin for not vacuuming when i asked him to and when he did it, it was half-heartedly. :/ but he cooked today and he just showered so i just re-vacuumed spots and swiffered the floors before showering. i was still a bit irritated but it was dumb to get mad at him for it. so i waited for him to finish up gaming and then went to sleep when he did :)

23: i almost forgot my lunch today but i went back and got on the later train because the train just left as i got on the platform ;( i shared the weird tasting totaste green tea biscuits in the office and steve’s reaction was the best. everyone else said it was alright. diego surprised me and said it tasted like olive oil and he wasn’t disgusted at all. hmmm. oh, diego came into the office without me bothering him to come in :P yay! i was pretty productive today. i had a few long meetings, but it was alright. i ended my day with a meeting that kind of went over in time so i had to jump off, pack up, and then go to the chocolate shop with cole. i got chocolate covered gummy bears and dark chocolate peanut butter cups. cole bought the gummy bears for me because of all the snacks i’ve given him -- thanks bro! T^T i made it to south station 2 minutes later than kevin -- i broke my winning streak ;( ahaha.

we got home and played pokemon and cuddled and watched tv while the rice cooked. we made super easy omurice and then continued watching tv and gaming. mmm. it felt like a friday. we stopped at around 11 pm, kevin washed the dishes, and i did 30 minutes of cardio and 30 minutes of back workout (15 minutes with dumb bells). idk if it’s gonna work because maybe the weights are too light? we’ll see. then i showered and ko’d in bed. mm i wish it was friday, but i’m also working from home tomorrow so nbd! i also caught a pretty good tapu koko! tapu lele is so hard to catch T^T my next challenge... p.s. i love talking and hanging out with everyone at t7. everyone is great and so funny. i’m so grateful.

24: my upper back was in so much pain when i woke up, ahha. kevin got up later than usual because i was still in bed (wfh). :) i got myself up eventually and then made breakfast and recorded videos. i also weighed myself in the morning and i don’t talk about this a lot but i’m so happy and proud of myself for pushing myself physically and getting to my body/health goals, BUT this morning i was 117/118 lbs and 19.7% body fat. yaaaasssss! my “previous goals” were to lose all the weight i gained (i was at like 130 lbs last year), and then get to 20% body fat. my now goal is to maintain this body fat or if i’m feeling bored, go further without changing my diet so it’s solely dependent on how hard i work out. it feels so good to eat whatever i want and stop when i know it’s too much and then work it off and get stronger. i’ve stopped being so dependent on calorie counting and just knowing what foods and portion sizes are good for me. i think i’m pretty close to having a good understanding of how much i should eat everyday and what it will do to my body. i’m getting there and i’m always learning about myself and about food of course ;D

anyway, then i ate lunch and ate some chocolate. mmm these dark chocolate peanut butter cups are the best. i talked to cole and dropped some food knowledge while he had some down time haha. phil told me to take the day easy after 3 pm because sultan and byron had off time today. so that’s what i did! i recorded 5 videos (record!) and then spent a good amount of time uploading pictures on facebook. i took a day off from exercising because my upper back was killing me. instead, i played pokemon for the rest of the day with kevin. we cuddled on the couch while watching tv and playing pokemon the rest of the night. we didn’t even cook dinner because kevin had happy hour and ate sliders and wings so i just baked some chicken nuggets. we took a break to shower and then play some more in bed and then went to sleep pretty late...like at 3:30 am or something...LOL

25: kevin woke up earlier than me and made breakfast. by “earlier” i mean like he woke up at 11 am and i got up at 1 pm LOL. it was a cloudy day so i didn’t feel like recording my 2min showcase... i skipped the meal because i felt full and we went to the movies to get tickets to see ‘logan.’ the 7:20 pm time was totally booked and same with ‘get out’ so we got tickets for ‘logan’ tomorrow at 7:20 pm. :) then we drove over to ‘oh my tea’ and i got the pudding, grass jelly, and boba milk tea drink (this is my second favorite drink there, especially for like a dessert kind of day) and kevin got the strawberry lemonade. i didn’t like his drink. Dx we devoured our drinks before we even got back home. well, kevin finished as we walked into the apartment... kevin tried making general tso’s chicken...it was a spicy af half failure -- tasted too salty and not sweet enough. the spice was too much as well...

while kevin did this, i nluu proofed our kitchen (haha i really enjoyed doing this). then i washed the fleece blankets. we ate, watched some tv, and then kevin left to go climb. i finished getting all of the pokemon in moon though!!! i just need kevin’s kartana -__-” so then i switched over to finally playing ‘bravely default.’ daniel got this game for me for my birthday like forever ago. it was hard getting into it but now i’m hooked. i watched ‘reign’ while playing this and then when kevin got back, we had a quick dinner and tv session and then i continued gaming. i stopped myself at 10 pm to do the intense 60 minute kickboxing video i found a week ago and then showered and continued gaming in bed until 3:30 am again LOL. omg, that work out killed me and reminded me that rest days should be light workout days and not “i’m not going to move anywhere for the whole day” days... the circulation in my legs and arms made me scratch everywhere and it was not pleasant but the work out felt good.

26: we woke up at 12 pm, kevin played pokemon and i played bravely default in bed until 1 pm, kevin made us breakfast, and i recorded my 2min showcase video. i hope it doesn’t turn out too bad? i don’t feel real motivated this week, but i’ll do my best to keep on schedule. then i did some internet errands, figured out our meals for this week, i started laundry, and then we went grocery shopping. we thought we were done early until kevin wanted to get fermented foods for congee and then we forgot to get vanilla mochi.... then we went in circles looking for chocolate syrup at rochebro’s and then we finally made it to bj’s where the express line was kinda long x__x; we made it back, put away all the food, transferred the wet clothing into the dryer, and then kevin realized we forgot to get garlic so he left to get garlic, i washed the dishes and prepped for dinner. luckily, the recipe was quick and we ate before heading out to see “logan.”

whyyyyyyyy?! i cried haha. it was a damn good movie and the little girl is a beast. <3 me and kevin had a semi-argument about character design for females vs male when it comes to “mutants” and things like that on the way back. i folded clothes when we got back, ate the mochi with some chocolate syrup, curled my hair, and then did the 45 minute cardio video. then i showered and brushed my teeth and got into bed. i stayed up until almost 2 am watching videos and waiting for kevin to finish watching the dota game. then kevin woke up at 2:30 am because he couldn’t sleep due to the fact that our upstairs neighbors were blasting music and talking loud af. kevin actually went upstairs and knocked on their door and no one answered... he also sent an email to deco to complain and then he fell asleep with earphones... i think he was listening to dota commentary LOLOL.