theladyfulcrum - Tumblr blog

[theladyfulcrum]

I was thinking about how people do things all the time in honor of celebrities that mean a lot to them, and it made me wonder– how much was Anakin himself responsible for sparks of rebellion? How many kids that adored him grew up to lay down their lives with their last thoughts being about him, their Jedi war hero, who they believe died to defend what they're fighting for now? How many times did the words "for Skywalker" create shifts in heroism– both the small sparks, and the hugely consequential flames?

I just think a lot about how Vader never escaped the size of Anakin's heart, and the ripples sent across the stars by everything he was.

[theladyfulcrum]

a duet in a galaxy far, far away

[theladyfulcrum]

Come here children. Come here. Sit down. Take my hands. Listen.

Here’s what we are not going to do. We are not going to let them unravel us and leave us in a heap of bawling bodies. They want us to sob until our eyes fall out and we rupture our abdominal organs because they’re heartless and sadistic and part of STAR WARS—shhh, steady—but we are going to remain CALM. Call it denial, call it call it bargaining, call it what you will, but he’s not gone.

Deep breaths, all together now. Crying is cathartic and necessary for coping with the emotional abuse we endure at the hands of Filoni et al., but don’t cry from lost hope. I’m serious. Was it among the worst things we could have possibly been forced to watch? Has a good majority of the fandom been mulling where the hell we are supposed to find the will to go on after that? Of course. But they’ll be back. And Tech will be, too.

Hush, child. Listen to me.

There was a reason he fell into cloud-cover. He could have been falling into anything. Water can be lethal from that height, yes, but let’s all just remember what Hunter pulled in War-Mantle with falling OUT OF A SHIP and down a LITERAL MOUNTAIN and surviving that with JUST HIS KNIFE. HIS KNIFE, KIDS. Tech accepted what he was doing, and he was okay with dying if that was what this meant, but he’s Tech. Once he fell from view he did whatever he could to increase his odds of getting out of it alive. Trust.

Speaking of falling from view— we know the Clone Wars rules. No body, no confirmed death. Forget that— we know the STAR WARS rules. Even if someone gets SLICED IN HALF before your VERY EYES and FALLS AN INDETERMINABLE-BUT-DEFINITELY-NOT-SURVIVABLE DISTANCE, they STILL aren’t dead. Further still, if you had put the two scenes in front of me with no context, I would have said Echo’s death in an EXPLOSION of FIRE seemed more final and certain that Tech falling away from us. And no, I don’t care about the argument that it’s a kId’S ShOW so they wouldn’t show us the body. Go watch Colt’s death and get back to me. Or you know, pretty much any Clone Wars episode.

BUT THE GOGGLES, you wail. I know, dear heart, I know. I see the cracks in them every time I close my eyes. But Hemlock getting his hands on those isn’t confirmation of anything other than what we already know— no matter where he wound up, Tech is having a Very Bad Time™️. Whether he lost them on the extremely unpleasant way down or whether he’s being experimented on in critical condition is hardly a nicer thing to know, but we’ll take just about anything right now if it means we’ll see our boy again, won’t we?

Shhh, I’m not through. We also have that scene with Phee. If it had been a true goodbye, if Tech had shown an ounce of the development he had with Omega about differences in emotional processing and communication, you’d have seen my soul depart through the atmosphere. But no. That scene’s entire purpose was to be unresolved. Was it just to make us incurably sad in retrospect? Maybe. But my gut says no— there’s more he needs to say to her.

On that note, the same goes for Tech and Crosshair. I refuse to believe we’ll never see them together again. I don’t have anything stronger than my refusal, but my feelings on this are rock solid. There’s also the important issue of THE Bad Batch theme— you know how they’ve established a precedent of not using it unless the whole Batch is together? Collectively, we’re going to refuse to believe they’re going to break that now. And there’s too much love for that theme to never hear it again.

Finally, beloveds, we come to our old favorite: story analysis. You know I’m insufferable about this, but listen. If we look at screenwriting, if we look at story structure, if we look at BEATS, this is the old “DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL” for the Batch (and us obviously). It’s the ALL IS LOST. The EVERYTHING IS AWFUL AND THE HEROES ARE AT THEIR LOWEST LOW. It’s the classic “oh my god this second installment is EMOTIONAL TORTURE HOW COULD THEY DO THIS TO ME” that we can point to in novels, shows, and film series again and again. It’s the ESB ending, it’s the Catching Fire ending, it’s the Rebels S2 AHSOKA IS D E A D AND ANAKIN KILLED HER ending. S3 will open as they enter Act III, where they use what they’ve learned to move upwards toward the finale of this particular story arc. Doesn’t that sound like something nice to cling to?

There now. If I’m wrong, I’ll give you all the choice of k!lling me first or tossing me alive out of a plane with no *hard swallow* parachute, jet pack, or functional grappling gun. But I truly believe you won’t have to.

In the year or two we have to wait, cry for his absence, cry for the Batch being more fractured and farther apart than they ever have been, cry for Hunter feeling like he’s failed everyone he loves, cry for all of it, but not because you’ve lost hope that all might not be lost.

Tech will be back.

[theladyfulcrum]

Rex, to Cody: where have you been??

Cody, knocking back a shot: emotional hell.

[theladyfulcrum]

idk about the rest of you but i personally could watch hayden and ewan run around with lightsabers for another 10 seasons

[theladyfulcrum]

yeah so I am not okay

inspo

[theladyfulcrum]

bawling again

he’s out there somewhere…

[theladyfulcrum]

Boba Fett in Star Wars: Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983) Din Djarin in The Book of Boba Fett (2022)

[theladyfulcrum]

Being a Star Wars fan is exhausting. There’s a sense of entitlement to being heard in the fanbase at large that results in attacks on every single element of every piece of SW media as if the actual war is here on earth. If you love it more than you hate on it, you’re expected to be able to defend and justify what you love. And then you’re mocked anyway. You can’t just love something without random passerby informing you why that thing sucks. You can’t just be a fan- you have to prove you’ve always been a fan, that you hate the right things at the right times, that you fit into the carefully outlined rules of hating the majority of what Star Wars has to offer in the name of being someone’s definition of a proper fan.

As a Star Wars fan you have to hear about why your favorite characters are overrated, or why someone hopes they die, or why they didn’t deserve the attention they got from the story. You have to be bullied and stand your ground, again and again, just to preserve any of the happiness this universe makes you feel. You have to watch those bullies turn on the creators of the movies and shows and characters you love, and the actors that bring them to life, and you have to worry about what such a response means for the continuation of a story that means so much to you. “But that story shouldn’t matter to anyone,” they say. “It wasn’t the story I wanted.”

Listen. No one has the right to tell you what you can enjoy. If you love something, don’t let anyone make you afraid of loving it wholeheartedly. Ignore them. If something meant a lot to you, even if it seems like it meant a lot to just you, it has all the value it needs to have. If something moved you, or helped you through, or gave you a means of coping with how much life sucks out of you, it did what a story is meant to do. And that’s beautiful. It doesn’t matter what anyone else says about it.

And yes, I’m writing this as a reminder for myself just as much as anyone else.

[theladyfulcrum]

[theladyfulcrum]

"I've accepted the truth that you were once Anakin Skywalker, my father.”

[theladyfulcrum]

We don’t talk often enough about how Han, a nobody with a last name given to him arbitrarily because he also had nobody, because he was alone in the galaxy, can be credited with being the reason the galaxy was saved— not just once, but twice. First by being the only one on an entire base brave enough to risk death rather than see Luke die alone on Hoth (and thus being the only reason Luke Skywalker even lived to be trained, much less to turn Vader and defeat the Emperor); then again by loving his son unconditionally, even after everything, and being the kind of man it takes to tell him so, and mean it. Because Han Solo knew what it was to be alone, and he had a heart that wanted to be sure Luke and Ben knew they weren’t.

We talk about the Skywalkers saving the galaxy. But let’s talk more about the heart of Han Solo.

[theladyfulcrum]

🥺🥺🥺

Eyes

[theladyfulcrum]

Then there’s Ahsoka. We’ve theorized about her making an appearance in Kenobi— if it’s not clone wars flashbacks, she’ll be 27 or so, and she’ll already have been Fulcrum for about a decade. If she learns about Obi-Wan or the twins, no one tells her the truth, because we know she doesn’t see it until several years later. And I would almost rather not see her with Obi-Wan one last time than to see him not be able to tell her the truth. Can you imagine the pain in his eyes? The struggle of deciding whether she needs to know what Anakin became, or if he should allow time and her own path to decide for him? And of course he would do anything to spare her from what broke him— the pain that made the words “he died about the same time your father did” ring true. How could he do that to her, after everything? He couldn’t.

[theladyfulcrum]

“Yeah kid, I’m okay.”

But the look in his eyes. You can literally see him saying “but you? You almost weren’t. And I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself after that.”

[theladyfulcrum]

sergeant-hunter’s 1k celebration

> for @vanilla-chip-101 ‘s request

make me choose: rex or howzer

[theladyfulcrum]

How long did they spend painting these? How much of their happy, chaotic chatter echoed off the walls and around corridors and through barracks because she was really coming back? Because their commander—their adopted sister, their fearless little spitfire, their most trusted friend beside General Skywalker himself, the one they would all be proud to die for without the slightest hesitation—was really coming back? How much happiness did her name alone bring back into the air after a long, tired war? And just how much did they associate everything she was with the hope that maybe, just maybe, there could be good in the end? That if her light could come back to them, then maybe, just maybe, light could return to the galaxy, too?