#but also this is fictional and anakin is thriving under it | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

vashti-lives · 2 years

Text

Book of Boba Fett feels like Star Wars in the best ways and Disney in the worst ways. Pretty long rant under the cut.

TL;DR-- Leia the Huttslayer should be the reason there aren’t slaves on Tatooine anymore.

I want to like the Book of Boba Fett SO BAD. There’s so much about it that I find charming and compelling and fun. I like the fact that Boba Fett apparently loves space dogs of all shapes. I actually really like the way they’ve structured Boba’s growth so that we see the result of it and what caused it side by side. I fucking love Fennec Shand. I even like some of the dumb shit like the unruly gang of cyborg youths and the fact that Tatooine apparently just has a thriving body mod subculture. This is hilarious and interesting to me. The evil wookie makes me laugh every time he’s on screen.

Even shit that feels stupid to me like the slapstick tiny robot kitchen chase scene also feels EXTREMELY STAR WARS. Like, Star Wars is often dumb you guys! Its literally called Star Wars which is an objectively stupid name for this franchise.

But god the bad parts of this show are just SO BAD. I’m still fucking mad about the Tuskans. Like, ONCE AGAIN if they had just let some of the Tuskans live the bit where Boba killed the speeder gang would feel so much more meaningful. At that point it wouldn’t just be revenge it would be Boba doing what he can to protect whats left of his former tribe. This would have so much more impact and would literally have required no changes to this episode. It would have also made the fact that in the end the Tuskans were just a plot device to spur Boba on his quest for Found Family(tm) much less infuriating.

I also just... cannot get over the elephant in the room that is slavery. One of Tatooine’s most important defining features is that it has relied on a heavily slave based economy. Its actually a huge element of the politics of the prequel movies and their related spin offs because they go to a lot of work to establish that the republic is not invested in ridding the outer rim of slavery and the jedi are effectively a branch of the republic and also only have like 10,000 members meaning that they also cannot just go around getting rid of slavery. This eventually creates a rift between Anakin and the Jedi Order that Palpatine exploits the fucking hell out of as a means of getting him to fall to the dark side. Slavery on Tatooine is an extremely important load baring element of world building.

So like... just deleting it from the narrative is SO FUCKING DISTRACTING???? And I get it-- in 2022 fictionalized slavery is super uncomfortable and Disney does not want to be associated with it. But I feel like there were better ways to deal with it that maybe wouldn’t have been perfect but IMO still would have been better than what they did.

Like honestly a cool bit of mythologizing of the OT would have been if Leia fucking strangling Jabba the Hutt on his own thrown with her own chains in front of a shit ton of people actually incited a massive slave revolt. Like, there’s a power vacuum with Jabba dead and everyone knows a slave did it and suddenly there’s a lot more question about where all the power is. Given how weak Bib Fortuna was it makes sense to me that as power structures crumbled slavery because a much less viable resource, especially if you make the argument that the New Republic was less willing to turn a blind eye to it than the Empire was.

This would also explain why Bib Fortuna was allowed to take over in the first place and why the twins didn’t push that hard to take Jabba’s place once Boba Fett showed up. If Tatooine had a successful slave revolt it would scare the fuck out of the Hutts and possibly make them feel like if they retake Tatooine there’s a chance the rebellion of the slaves would spread to other parts of their greater territory.

This isn’t perfect but I think slipping this here and there into the exposition would make a big difference and make the story feel SO MUCH LESS AWKWARD. Plus I really like the idea that the cyborg subculture consists largely of freed slaves who delight in owning their own bodies and doing whatever the fuck they want to them as a means of gaining power and showing autonomy. It would have been really cool world building!

#the book of boba fett #ugh i'm still mad its still on probation #this show is almost good in a way that is absolutely infuriating

7 notes · View notes

wazafam · 3 years

Link

In the video game movie subgenre, 2014's Street Fighter: Assassins' Fist is by far the best ever made. Video game movies are notoriously regarded with more disdain than appreciation among moviegoers and gamers alike, the latter in particular usually very reticent about getting their hopes up when one is on the way. Street Fighter itself has been right at the center of the poor reputation of video game movies with its first two cinematic outings, which makes Assassin's Fist that much more of a diamond in the rough.

Born out of the 2010 short film Street Fighter: Legacy, Assassin's Fist first debuted as a web series in May of 2014 before hitting home media as a complete movie. Written by Joey Ansah and Christian Howard and directed by Ansah, Assassin's Fist also saw Ansah portray the villainous Akuma, with Howard playing Ken Masters, and Mike Moh in the role of Ryu (replacing Jon Foo from Legacy). Assassin's Fist was subsequently followed up by the 2016 interquel Street Fighter: Resurrection, and despite grand plans for a Street Fighter: World Warrior series to fully bring the franchise to life, with Suicide Squad director David Ayer to helm the pilot and Ansah even having Scott Adkins as his first choice for Guile, a lack of studio movement led to the rights reverting to Capcom and World Warrior falling into limbo.

RELATED: Avatar: The Last Airbender's Street Fighter Cameo Explained

That's nothing short of a crying shame, given that Assassin's Fist set the stage for the planned story to grow and thrive in the complete opposite trajectory from where the reputation of video game movies currently sits. Ansah has also commented that a need to maintain creative control as showrunner on World Warrior is partly what led to a stall in movement in the series, and given how Assassin's Fist turned out in contrast to other video game movies, and past Street Fighter films in particular, he was anything but unjustified in standing his ground. Their poor reputation notwithstanding, video game movies aren't dying out, as last year's Sonic the Hedgehog, the reboot of Mortal Kombat, and the forthcoming Resident Evil reboot show. Yet despite the success of those films, Assassin's Fist stands apart for a number of reasons.

Street Fighter may be one of the longest-running and most popular video game franchises ever created, but as a cinematic property, it was damaged goods at best before 2010. As one of the first major films based on a video game, 1994's Jean-Claude Van Damme-led Street Fighter was an absurd, campy romp, though it admittedly has amassed a sizeable fan base for those very qualities. Raul Julia's ridiculously unhinged portrayal of M. Bison is as quotable today as it was when audiences first heard him proclaim Blanka to be "A beast born of my own genius!" and even that's just scratching the surface of how much scenery Julia chewed playing the dictator. Street Fighter may have been a trainwreck in adapting its namesake, but no action movie whose villain proclaims "You come here prepared to fight a madman, and instead you found a god?" will want for entertainment value.

Fifteen years later, the Street Fighter brand took another black eye with 2009's Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li, which had the opposite problem of being a dull, boring slog through chaotically edited fight scenes and a misguided attempt to use the dark-and-gritty approach on a property with such fantastical elements. No longer was M. Bison a Psycho Power-wielding, muscled up would-be dictator, but an Irish crime boss in a suit and tie played by Neal McDonough. Meanwhile, the titular Chun Li, played by Smallville's Kristin Kreuk, was a generic blank slate heroine who only donned her trademark ox horns and blue outfit from the games once in a fight scene that made poor use of the character's spinning bird-kick, in addition to a vast array of other problems. If nothing else, Street Fighter at least made a worldwide haul of just shy of $100 million, while The Legend of Chun Li only scraped together $12.8 million worldwide. With its first outing going down in history as The Room of video game movies and its second bombing on an epic scale, Street Fighter didn't seem to have strong prospects in movie form.

That perception changed overnight with the sudden arrival of the short film "Street Fighter: Legacy" in May 2010. In just three minutes, Legacy did what many believed to be impossible and delivered a genuinely great live-action take on Street Fighter, and the internet wasted no time in fervently asking when a feature-length expansion of the short was coming. Four years later, it finally arrived in the form of Street Fighter: Assassin's Fist, which had become more appreciated as an epic video game web series prior to the film's release. When it came to its cinematic track record, Street Fighter had nowhere to go but up, but Assassin's Fist was simply a great movie all-around, and the embrace it received boils down to several crucial elements it brought to the table.

Among the many problems that befell Street Fighter and The Legend of Chun Li was the effort both made to split the difference between bringing realism to their action scenes and still making use of the outlandish special moves from the games, with both failing in different ways. The special moves that made it into Street Fighter were more visual homages than the techniques themselves, with Ken's approximation of a Shoryuken and M. Bison's tech-based Psycho Crusher lacking the impact they had in the games. Legend of Chun Li brought more wire-fu into the mix while showing Chun Li developing her Kikoken under Gen's training, but the execution was consistently off, with Chun Li's Kikokens more resembling special effects thrown into a fight scene than a weapon of combat being unleashed.

When it came to Assassin's Fist, by the end of the movie, it'd be easy to believe that one could travel to Japan and actually train in Ansatsuken. Though Assassin's Fist had great action scenes, it was, first and foremost, a martial arts film, taking viewers in-depth into the fundamentals of Ansatsuken alongside Ken and Ryu and presenting the fictional martial art as matter-of-factly as actual kung fu or karate. More importantly, it made the superhuman side of their fighting skills seem realistic in a way that even many Street Fighter fans were stunned by.

Techniques like Shoryukens, Hadoukens, and Tatsumaki-sempukyakus were presented not as superpowers, but as legitimate fighting techniques based in chi (or qi). Though Street Fighter devotees were more familiar with this, it came across as more palpable since Assassin's Fist had presented the training in a fictional and highly ostentatious martial art with the same reverence as one would expect from, for example, the Kickboxer or Best of the Best movies. By the time of Ken and Ryu's climactic sparring match, in which they are permitted to wield the Hado-based techniques of Ansatsuken, viewers were invested in the time and effort the characters had poured into mastering the highest levels of their art. As impressive as it was for Assassin's Fist to portray a martial art like Ansatsuken as something that could be real, it also connected with viewers from another, equally deep angle.

RELATED: Max Cloud Is Scott Adkins Street Fighter (In A Good Way)

Being born out of a gaming franchise with a much more abstract story structure than Mortal Kombat or Tekken, Assassin's Fist was a martial arts epic to the core and one about the tragedy of aggression and excessive ambition leading practitioners astray. Not unlike the light and dark sides of the Force in Star Wars and Anakin Skywalker's fall to the latter, Assassin's Fist centered on the divergent methods of Ansatsuken training: Mu No Hado and the more aggressive Satsui No Hado. At first selling Ken and Ryu on the former as the "purer" method of developing skill in Hado techniques, Akira Koieyama's Gouken swiftly begs Ken to avoid Satsui No Hado and to keep it hidden from Ryu. Gouken has good reason to fear his young students being seduced by the power of Satsui No Hado and its quicker path to generating Hado, seeing firsthand what it did to his brother Goki thirty years earlier.

Played by Gaku Space in flashbacks, Goki's embrace of Satsui No Hado transformed an already unstable rising martial artist with a violent streak into a soulless killing machine. In contrast to Ken and Ryu's exciting and upbeat training montages, Goki's training in the wilderness after his exile from Gotetsu's dojo is more akin to a demonic kind of viral infection. Lumbering out of his cavern home (and now played by Joey Ansah), Satsui No Hado makes Goki into one of the most formidable fighters on Earth, but at the cost of his humanity, transforming him into the murderous Akuma, whose only goal is to slay all who could challenge him as the world's true master of Ansatsuken. Though Togo Igawa's Gotetsu is defeated when Akuma returns, he dies with some happiness, knowing that he trained a student who succeeded in fully mastering the power of Satsui No Hado.

As Ken and Ryu progress in the Street Fighter movie and Ryu shows signs of being overcome by Satsui No Hado, Gouken's knows his brother's inevitable challenge will come soon, leading him to send his young students on their warrior's pilgrimage and prepare to fight his brother to the death at last to spare Ryu Akuma's deadly pursuit. Alongside Ken's longstanding issues with his father and Ryu's troubled inner spirit, Assassin's Fist's story was one of what it really means to become a warrior. To Gouken, the greatest opponent one can ever face is themselves, and to Akuma, being able to defeat all challengers is the be-all and end-all of Ansatsuken. Though he imparts his vast wisdom to Ken and Ryu, Gouken could not pull his brother back from the darkness. Assassin's Fist ends as their final confrontation is about to commence with Gouken all the while hoping that Ryu can fight off the demons that his brother could not.

What finally sealed the deal on the success of Assassin's Fist was the fact that it was able to work on multiple levels for practically any demographic, and not just as one of the best fighting games. Gamers and Street Fighter fans had reason to cheer for a gaming franchise that had seemed all but impossible to do well in live-action hitting the bull's eye in Assassin's Fist. For general martial arts fans, Assassin's Fist also held worth in treating a fictional martial art with the same care as one would accord real-world fighting styles, emphasizing the training as the centerpiece of the story. Just as importantly, it connected with its audience on an emotional level, whether invested in it as a video game player, a martial arts practitioner, or simply a general viewer.

In two and a half hours, Street Fighter: Assassin's Fist rescued the Street Fighter movie franchise with an excellent story and characters that resonated with viewers regardless of their experience or lack thereof with the games, and outstanding training and action sequences that felt real in a way that would've seemed impossible for a martial art involving fireballs and thirty-foot uppercuts. One can only hope that the Street Fighter: World Warrior series gets pulled off the shelf and greenlit. As a follow-up to the greatness of Street Fighter: Assassin's Fist with the same creative team involved, one can only imagine how much it would bring to the world of video game adaptations by the end of season 1.

NEXT: Mortal Kombat 2021 Proves That Street Fighter Reboot Should Be Revived

Why Street Fighter: Assassin's Fist Is The Best Video Game Movie from https://ift.tt/3eS5gnc

#Blogger

3 notes · View notes

gooddame · 4 years

Note

Do you like or dislike Reylo Rey/ben, not a stan or anti or anything, just curious :)

My answer to reylo and gaslighting concepts is found in the Jakku starship graveyard.

But come on people... It's BEN and REY...it's BEY.

I will say that there's a lot of writing concepts and follow through I don't agree with on both character's but their depictions and actors were well chosen.

The idea that you're 'nothing' is only one another person or circumstance can place in your mind...

********************************

Rey, as a person, had strikes against her from the womb like most people of her biological gender do.

X- poverty striken

X- woman/underestimated

X- alone

Rey hustled, she worked, starved, slept and lived in fear and loss for the biggest part of her life thinking 'Maybe they'll (her parents/anyone) come back, or not but I'm here and alive and I'll wait'.

As most of us come from nothing and make what we are so it was nice to see an inkling of representation because that is what Rey did; showed that a lot of the population on the screen.

People who have nothing but the things they hold dear and the five dollars for the next three meals.

Rey fought for everything she had, what she didn't know she learned. She had to prove her worth and her right to be where she was every freaking day/hour/second of her life and was still kind and noble and true.

Her concept was the makings of a great person who was flawed and broken but so freaking nice and helpful and determined, not just a written hero.

SOMEONE you could admire irl.

She did what we hope we would do, stay hopeful and fight on even in the hardest moments when her heart ached and there was not a thing to cure it. She found a family, however fleeting and a ship she grew to love as her home and she learned about herself. Period.

The power Ben had, Rey did not need. NOR DESIRE. Why? She had her own. (AND IT WAS STRONGER THAN HIS, JS.)

**SHE WAS NEVER NOTHING.**

She was always someone, Rey simply wasn't on the same or a similar path to being who Ben was(according to the ENTIRE galaxy).

I say that, but I'll also say this, just as Ben failed the galaxy by being Kylo. The galaxy failed Ben by not just letting him be Ben.

Ben was always someone to somebody (including people he'd never met or would meet.) He was like the prince of the freakin' galaxy.

A prized possession like Anakin (his personal hero/grandfather) was to Obi-wan(crazy old Ben).

Which let's be honest, someone dropped the ball on all the parental talks about Darth Vader and the serious misconceptions.

Nobody is perfect but somehow Ben was meant to be.

His mother, the general.

His father spending his life consumed with finding his prized Millennium Falcon.

And his Uncle Luke, righteous as ever.

And why?

Ben was a SKYWALKER. A JEDI. A SOLO. A SAVIOR.

FROM THE MOMENT BEN SOLO WAS AN IDEA... HE WAS ALSO A CONCEPT.

Ben had to live up to himself and failed according to family which we have all felt too and he more than hated it.

It's cliche (and more truth than fiction) but, the more expectations you thrust on MOST kids, the more they crack under the pressure.

You go and teach them how to think for themselves, fend for themselves, go to summer camp with Uncle Luke and learn about the force.

It's all exciting but then, the rules. Suddenly its all right and wrong and say 'No there's restrictions' when you control your power you can use it.

Sooner or later doing things you're not supposed to sounds amazing. Like 'Let's join a utilitarian cult and kill some good people like my grandpa! Yeah!'

Sometimes regret happens, sometimes people thrive in it and sometimes both.

*Someone really should have just rolled tape on Darth Vader's regret and it would have saved the galaxy so much trouble.*

#jenn is an inconvient dork #this is long #this is not the answer you seek #maybe?#sw #gooddame shares #gooddame writes #gooddame

3 notes · View notes