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gffa · 3 years

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FUTURE LUCASFILM PROJECTS REVEALED GET READY FOR PATTY JENKINS’ ROGUE SQUADRON FILM, AN AHSOKA TANO LIVE-ACTION SERIES, THE RETURN OF HAYDEN CHRISTENSEN AND MUCH, MUCH MORE. Today at The Walt Disney Company’s Investor Day event, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy announced a staggering number of new films, series, and surprises that will expand the Star Wars galaxy like never before.

Rogue Squadron The next Star Wars feature film will be Rogue Squadron — directed by Patty Jenkins (Wonder Woman franchise). The story will introduce a new generation of starfighter pilots as they earn their wings and risk their lives in a boundary-pushing, high-speed thrill-ride, and move the saga into the future era of the galaxy. “It’s been a lifelong dream as a filmmaker to one day make a great fighter pilot film,” said Jenkins. “As the daughter of a great fighter pilot myself, some of the best memories of my life are of seeing my father’s squadron take off in their F4s every morning, and hearing and feeling the awe-inspiring power and grace. When he passed away in service to this country it ignited a burning desire to one day channel all of those emotions into one great film. When the perfect story arrived in combination with another true love of mine, the incomparable world of Star Wars, I knew I’d finally found my next film. I’m extremely honored and excited to take it on, and grateful to Lucasfilm, Disney, and the fans for extending that thrill to me.” “Patty has established herself as one of the top directors working in the film industry today,” said Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy. “She’s a visionary who knows how to strike the balance between action and heart, and I can’t wait to see what she does in the Star Wars galaxy.” Lock S-foils in attack position: Rogue Squadron arrives in theaters Christmas 2023.

Untitled Taika Waititi Film A brand-new Star Wars feature with acclaimed filmmaker and Academy Award-winner Taika Waititi is in development. “Taika’s approach to Star Wars will be fresh, unexpected, and…unique,” said Kennedy. “His enormous talent and sense of humor will ensure that audiences are in for an unforgettable ride.”

Obi-Wan Kenobi Last August at D23 Expo, Lucasfilm announced the return of Ewan McGregor in the iconic role of Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi for a special event series on Disney+. Officially titled Obi-Wan Kenobi, the series begins 10 years after the dramatic events of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith where he faced his greatest defeat, the downfall and corruption of his best friend and Jedi apprentice, Anakin Skywalker turned evil Sith Lord Darth Vader. The series is directed by Deborah Chow, who helmed memorable episodes of The Mandalorian Season 1. This will truly be a day long remembered, as it was confirmed that Hayden Christensen will be returning as Darth Vader. “This will be the rematch of the century,” Kennedy said. “It was such an incredible journey playing Anakin Skywalker,” said Christensen. “Of course, Anakin and Obi-Wan weren’t on the greatest of terms when we last saw them… It will be interesting to see what an amazing director like Deborah Chow has in store for us all. I’m excited to work with Ewan again. It feels good to be back.”

Ahsoka After making her long awaited live-action debut in The Mandalorian, Ahsoka Tano’s story, written by Dave Filoni, will continue in a limited series starring Rosario Dawson and executive produced by Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau. Rangers of the New Republic Set within the timeline of The Mandalorian, this new live-action series from executive producers Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni will intersect with future stories and culminate into a climactic story event.

Lando Everyone’s favorite scoundrel Lando Calrissian will return in a brand-new event series for Disney+. Justin Simien, creator of the critically-acclaimed Dear White People and a huge Star Wars fan, is developing the story.

Andor Andor, a tense nail-biting spy thriller created by Tony Gilroy, is set to arrive on Disney+ in 2022. Diego Luna, reprising the role of rebel spy Cassian Andor from Rogue One, will be joined by a fantastic new cast that includes Stellan Skarsgard, Adria Arjona, Fiona Shaw, Denise Gough, Kyle Soller, and Genevieve O’Reilly as Mon Mothma. Production kicked off three weeks ago in London.

The Acolyte Leslye Headland, Emmy Award-nominated creator of the mind-bending series Russian Doll, brings a new Star Wars series to Disney+ with The Acolyte. The Acolyte is a mystery-thriller that will take the audience into a galaxy of shadowy secrets and emerging dark side powers in the final days of the High Republic era.

Star Wars: The Bad Batch The series follows the elite and experimental clones of the Bad Batch (first introduced in The Clone Wars) as they find their way in a rapidly changing galaxy in the immediate aftermath of the Clone War. Members of Bad Batch — a unique squad of clones who vary genetically from their brothers in the Clone Army — each possess a singular exceptional skill which makes them extraordinarily effective soldiers and a formidable crew. In the post-Clone War era, they will take on daring mercenary missions as they struggle to stay afloat and find new purpose. The animated series will arrive exclusively on Disney+.

Star Wars: Visions Presenting all-new, creative takes on the galaxy far, far away, Star Wars: Visions will be a series of animated short films celebrating Star Wars through the lens of the world’s best anime creators. The anthology collection will bring 10 fantastic visions from several of the leading Japanese anime studios, offering a fresh and diverse cultural perspective to Star Wars.

A Droid Story As Lucasfilm continues to develop new stories, the intersection of animation and visual effects offers new opportunities to explore. Lucasfilm Animation will be teaming up with Lucasfilm’s visual effects team, Industrial Light & Magic, to develop a special Star Wars adventure for Disney+, A Droid Story. This epic journey will introduce us to a new hero, guided by legendary duo R2-D2 and C-3PO.

#obi wan kenobi #anakin skywalker #ahsoka tano #high republic #news #disney investor day #bad batch #cassian andor #lando calrissian #rogue squadron

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rosaliestark01 · 3 years

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I saw ur requests are open. Could you write a shy peter Parker x shy reader where they both one day decided to confess and it’s a lot of stuttering and blushing and rambling nonsense and Ned and mj get so fed up that they just push their heads together or something so they kiss and once they do it’s even more tomato blushing and rambling.

Thank youuu❤️❤️❤️

A Little Push

Peter Parker x Reader

Summary: All you and Peter need is a little push to get you on the right track.

Warnings: Maybe one baddish word?

A/N: for @thollandlover

"I'm going to try to ask him out today," you state. Peter Parker sat a few tables away with Ned and MJ. You couldn't help the rush of adoration you felt as he animatedly spoke to Ned about something. The two of you have talked countless times, but the way his face lights up with his hands flying everywhere never failed to put a smile on your face.

Your friends, Bailey and Daniel, absent-mindedly nod their heads as they pick at their lunches. The food wasn't that bad, but you had other things to worry about, like how you would build up the nerve to approach Peter.

"You said that yesterday," Cindy sighed as she pushed her lunch away. Gwen quickly nods in agreement.

"And last week."

"There was also that time you-" Harry begins, but you quickly interrupt him before he says anything you might regret.

"I know, but I'm really going to do it this time." Your friends look skeptical at you while you fold your hand in your lap at the realization that this may be your last chance before the summer break. Finals have already started, and the last day of school is on Friday. You sneak a glance at Peter, only to quickly turn away as you found that he was already staring in your direction.

"Do you think he saw that?" Your eyes widen as you look at your friends who are trying to cover up their amusement.

"Judging by the fact that he looks like a tomato, I'd say yes," Harry laughs. A slight blush creeps up your cheeks as you think of what to do about it.

"I think I should go talk to him," you finally tell them as you rub your hands on your thighs in an attempt to feel less nervous. You stand up, but Harry grabs your arm before you make it very far, prompting you to look at him.

"Remember, direct eye contact is a form of dominance," He states dramatically. "Show him you mean business."

"I'm trying to ask him out, not scare him away," you huff and Harry rolls his eyes at you.

"I'm just trying to give you some advice," he snarks before patting you on the head. "You do you."

"Okay. I'm going to go now," you state confidently, but you don't move an inch. "Can you come with me?"

"No." Harry sighed when he noticed your pout before saying, "Those people are selling popsicles, and I want one."

"Alright," you mumble. "I've got this."

You turn away from your friends and begin to walk towards Peter's table. Halfway through, you turn to look towards your friends, but they all pretended not to have noticed you.

"Hey, Y/N," MJ says. "We missed you on the trip."

One thing is for sure, and that is that you might never have developed feelings for Peter if it weren't for your friendship with MJ. Often, she'd invite you to hang out with her, Peter, and Ned, which led to you and Peter finding out that you had a few things in common. Then, somewhere along the line, you began to see Peter in a new light.

"My cousin was getting married, and, I guess it was kind of lucky, you know, with the whole Mysterio thing going on."

"Yeah," she sighed, obviously not wanting to talk about what when down during their trip.

"Peter-" You start, but Peter cuts you off.

"Y/N-" The two of you look at each other, and you try hard not to let that damn flush crept up your face again. Awkwardly, Peter continues, "I was wondering-I was wondering if maybe you- do you-Maybe you should go first."

You mentally curse yourself for thinking that this was a good idea. In all honesty, you never really thought you'd make it this far.

"Um... Peter, I wanted to ask if..." You pause, realizing you have no idea what you're saying. "The theater is showing Return of the Jedi on Friday."

"Yeah, I think they are," Peter states. You try to keep your face neutral as you realize that he misunderstood you. "If you're not sure, I can check their website if you want."

"What I mean is- Do you plan on going?" You ask, having a hard time keeping your voice level as well.

"Ned and I were going to see it, but you can come to if you want." Peter's whole face lit up, but you're sure that it had more to do with the fact that you were talking about Star Wars than the idea of you joining him... and Ned.

"Uh.. actually, my cousin is getting married on Friday, and I have to be there, you know," Ned blurted. For some reason, MJ looked amused while Peter furrowed his eyebrows.

"I thought your cousin was already-" It hit you that Ned probably knew why you were here.

"I don't want to intrude," You state, realizing that Peter might not want to be alone in a theater with you. If it was obvious to Ned that you like Peter, then it was obvious to Peter too.

"No, it's okay." Peter quickly insisted. "You could never intrude."

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah, unless you don't want to go."

"I do." 'It's just that..."

"For goodness sake!" MJ cried. She shoved your head toward Peter's while Ned did the same to Peter towards you. It took you a second to realize that your lips were literally touching Peter's, and you immediately pulled away.

"I'm so sorry!" Your eyes had widened in horror. What would he think of you now?!

"I didn't mean to do that." Peter stammered, "Ned- He pushed my head, and- I mean, It-It wasn't that bad. Right?"

"Peter-" Did he just say it wasn't that bad?

"Oh, god. You thought it was bad, didn't you?" Peter jumped to his feet and began pacing with his head in his hands. "That's not how it was supposed to happen."

"Peter, I thought-" You began, but he cut you off again.

"I had a plan, and now I ruined everything-"

You bit your lip nervously as you realize what you're about to do, but it's the only way you could think of to get his attention. You rise to your feet and pull Peter's lips back to yours. This kiss was better than the last, and it was nice that Peter seemed to melt into it. After a second, you pulled away to look at Peter.

"I thought it was nice," you murmured. Peter's eyes were wide, but he seemed to nod in agreement.

"You- You did?" He stuttered.

"Yeah. I came over here to ask if you wanted to see Star Wars with me." As you explain, a look of realization seemed to wash over him. "You know, on- on a date."

"A date? With me? You and me?"

"Yes?" You ask, suddenly becoming unsure.

"I'd love to go on a date with you," Peter beams, and you couldn't help but smile too.

"Not bad, Y/N. Not bad at all," Harry Osborn clapped from the other side of the cafeteria. You and Peter seemed to both realize everyone was watching you. "I told you the eye contact thing works."

#peter parker x reader #peter parker x y/n #peter parker x you #peter parker fluff #peter parker imagine #peter parker fic #peter parker is precious #peter parker #spider-man x yn #spider man x reader #spider man x you #fluff #possibly the fluffiest fluff I have ever written and I'm more than okay with that

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yessoupy · 4 years

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the @imetyouonljpodcast episode this week gave me lots of thoughts and feelings about star wars. more like, reminded me of all my thoughts and feelings around my first fandom. thus, I decided to write my own journey into and throughout star wars fandom, and what it means to me. buckle up, this story spans decades.

my very first memory of anything star wars-related is a yoda puppet that my grandmother had. it had to be from the original run of the movies, because I was maybe 4 in my first memory of it, and i was born in '86. my sisters and I loved it, and one of our cousins was deathly scared of it so we'd chase him around the house with it.

my second memory of star wars was going to the movie store with my dad and sisters and seeing our favorite yoda on the cover of a VHS. "yoda yoda yoda! daddy, it's yoda!!! can we get it?" we were holding up the display cover for return of the jedi. dad said no, we couldn't get that one yet because we had to watch them in order. so we rented a new hope and all I remember was falling asleep while artoo and threepio were trundling across the tatooine desert sands. at five I guess I was too young.

in early 1997 the special editions of the original trilogy were aired in theaters and I was in 4th grade. dad took us to see one of them (I think empire, at some point we'd finally finished a new hope). at school that grading period I sat next to a boy named mark and he noticed I was drawing little x-wing silhouettes on my paper. "you like star wars too?" he asked. when I said yes, he declared that because of my name, he was going to call me skywalker. that's the name on the back of my high school letter jacket.

in fall of 1998 I started the 6th grade and I came home from school one day to a hardbound book my mom had checked out for me from the library. heir to the empire by timothy zahn. mom pointed out where it said on the cover it was a trilogy, and I could get the other books when I finished this one. she hadn't found the young jedi knights series for me. she'd checked out a GROWN-UP star wars book.

in spring of 1999 the phantom menace came out and my parents' friend took me to see it on opening day because neither of them were free and I HAD to go that day. later on that year she took me to a star wars exhibit at the museum of fine arts. that was also the first time I saw a monet and a renoir. the exhibit had costumes (real costumes!!!) from the original trilogy and the newest prequel. I bought a book about the myth of star wars in the museum gift shop.

I read every expanded universe book our local library had, which was a lot. I had a lot to catch up on, too, since heir to the empire had been published in 1992. you never saw me at school without a star wars book. I read while walking in the hallways, even. in 6th grade I read during lunch, since I was in varsity orchestra with 7th and 8th graders and was terribly shy. they'd tell me I should socialize at lunch, not read my books, but... I wanted to read. I had a lot to learn. I have a lot to know.

I was in 7th grade when I read vector prime, the first in the new series. my first class of the day was science, and the boy I had a crush on was in that class. we had DEAR time at the beginning of that class - drop everything and read. not a hardship for me. that day, I read the part of the book where chewbacca was killed. I looked up, astonished. heartbroken. I locked eyes with the boy I liked. he nodded at the book and I showed him the cover. he nodded sympathetically. "they killed chewie," I whispered. he said "I know."

I wrote original characters in star wars fan fiction when I was about 13. I had an internet friend named rachel who lived in brisbane. then there was dave and 'roswell' who gave me ideas for my story. I loved being able to talk about the wide world of star wars with other people. we used aol instant messenger and email. my username in those days had 'skywalker' in it. I am pretty sure we met in an aol chatroom. I didn't find much of use on the official star wars site and I have probably visited it fewer than 10 times since 1999.

I read those books all through middle and high school. they were my christmas presents and my birthday presents. I moved into our family beach house after college. it sounds really nice but I didn't have running water because it was the summer after Ike hit. I would go to the used book store on 23rd street and buy a stack of star wars books and read them while I waiting for calls to interview for a teaching position. weekends I'd go into town to stay at a friend's house and help her with wedding stuff. I'd shower there, too. that's where my new stash of star wars books started, with me catching up on the legacy of the force series I hadn't read in college and then finishing up through the fate of the jedi as those came out. I felt that I had grown up with these characters. I remembered when kyp was just an orphan han rescued, when jacen and jaina were five years old, when corran horn had no wife, no kids, and was just finding out who his family was. I had capital o opinions about what color lightsaber i would have and why (silver; bc corran), I knew the geography of the galaxy and where everyone was from and my favorite planet was dathomir because women ruled it. I knew all of these characters' histories and motivations and the difficult decisions they'd made and had to live with. I loved them.

i never ventured into the online fandom space for star wars, even after I'd found other online fandom spaces, because I didn't feel like there was anything anyone could add to it for me. I was satisfied with all I'd gotten. sure, favorite characters had been killed (after chewie, the one who stung most was Mara, luke's wife), but people die. and in such a long-running series spanning so many years and trillions of miles of space... you come to expect it.

people would ask me ALL THE TIME when the sequels were coming out and I said never. then, disney bought star wars. initially I was excited (tears of joy happy) to have sequels confirmed. my mind raced, imagining a trilogy centered on the events surrounding jacen's descent to the dark side. the original actors would be the right age for that. who could play jacen?

then, the announcement came that the canon was now 'legends' and they wouldn't be taking any of it into account when writing the sequels BUT that didn't mean we wouldn't see old canon favorites. they announced adam driver as the villain and I thought "jacen." I held onto the idea that this knowledge I had, these years of knowing these stories, would still be worth something. that I'd be able to add new information to my mental bookshelves and maps. that my universe would expand further.

the force awakens was a bitter disappointment. I was upset from the crawl, leia's title making it clear to me that she wasn't chief of state, she wasn't the mother to three children, han wasn't her husband, and all of her history I'd grown to love really was gone. what I saw was the older version of a woman I'd met when she was 18 and hadn't seen her since her early twenties. I didn't know her.

I didn't know the galaxy, either. starting with the new jedi order series, a map of the galaxy was included in the front of each book with the planets named so you knew where everything was happening. the new galaxy was bare. it was small and knowable. while the hosnian prime system was destroyed in the movie, I'd never known it, and all the planets I DID know were similarly blasted out of memory. where was dathomir and its fierce warrior witches? if their planets were gone so were their people.

as the movie trudged on, a retelling of a new hope, I kept thinking, "at least let his name be jacen." I hung my hopes on this sith character being han and leia's son and sharing that name of the boy I'd known and the man who'd grown up to turn to the dark side. at that first shout of 'BEN!' I was angry. Ben?? that was the name of LUKE'S son! that was MARA'S child! Ben??? with three letters jacen solo and ben skywalker were also dead to the galaxy.

I know, I know. I should get over it. I AM thankful for poe dameron. the x-wing books were always my favorite. poe was familiar to me the way other new characters weren't. he was part of the new republic navy. I knew what that was. he flew an x-wing. I knew what that was.l and what company manufactured them. he was from yavin IV, I knew where that was and what it looked like. finn was a stormtrooper, yes, but the empire had not stolen children to be raised as stormtroopers. they were recruited like any other position. his story wasn't real to me, it wasn't something I could easily accept. and the idea that the new republic just LET the first order rise? leia's new republic would NEVER. but leia wasn't chief of state in this universe. leia hadn't had that power.

I read a lot of articles about the force awakens and the reactions to it, and never saw myself in any of them. the star wars fanboys whom I'd never known were painted as being angry because their fan knowledge was useless and "boo-hoo poor widdle fanboys" they would be mocked, rightfully. but that's why I was angry, ultimately. everyone I knew and loved was dead. worse, they'd never existed. "what do you think will happen?" some unsuspecting coworker would ask. I'd shrug, but inside I was yelling "who the fuck knows! my favorite characters don't exist anymore. nothing I know as this person you know as SKYWALKER means anything anymore."

it only got worse from there. One day I spent four hours figuring out how far the casino planet was from the drifting ships in the last jedi and doing math to figure out how long it would REALLY take to get there, using old canon star wars physics. I couldn't suspend my disbelief during that movie. everything was wrong. (the other space physics quibble I had was from TFA when poe is using comms while in hyperspace, and dropping out on a command and not... when nav told him to?? you'd fly right through a star!! were they HOVERING in hyperspace? none of it made sense.) I knew too much and too little to enjoy it.

TROS was a narrative mess already retconning new canon and I decided that I would only keep what I liked about the new canon (poe and his family) and pretend the old canon is all there is. one day I'll write the story of poe being part of the storied rogue squadron being sent by leia's new republic to put down the fascist upstarts at the edge of the unknown regions. one day.

one more quick story -- i met my college friend’s three kids for the first time when the oldest was 6. i’d sent a toy lightsaber as a gift when he was born, because i believe every child should get their first lightsaber from a skywalker, and his father had shown him the movies when he turned 4. when i walked into the house i said hello and he said, “i have some questions about star wars.”

we sat on the couch with the tfa visual dictionary, a book he’d gotten out of the library. every question he had was an excellent question, and i couldn’t answer any of them. “why does his lightsaber look like that? and why does he have the extra blades?”

“well, kiddo, let’s see what it says here about how lightsabers are made. i used to know all about it, but they changed everything on me.”

---

what i love about star wars since disney bought it:

poe dameron, cassian andor (and all of rogue one, i got over the fact that the movie wouldn’t be about rogue squadron it was PERFECT), solo (a fucking DELIGHT), the mandalorian, and i’m sure the cassian andor live action will be amazing and i’ll love it.

#star wars #fandom thoughts #i've just spent SO MUCH of my life being a star wars fan #and being perfectly happy to describe myself as such #edit i tried a read more but it didn't work so sorrryyyyyyyy

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santalsaburablog · 4 years

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Adventures of Santal. Chapter 2: The first meeting.

Anything bad can happen will happen.

The changes begin! While the Sabur clan is enjoying a quiet life on Ryloth, something is about to happen in the galaxy that can change not only one planet, but the whole world. And in the life of young Santal Shan, irreversible metamorphosis will soon begin. As a result, she will have to change her lifestyle and take a new path. But for what, depends only on the girl herself.

Ryloth is a harsh, rocky planet, home to the Twi'lek. It is located in the outer Ring on the Corellian way and is the beginning of the death wind corridor. There is no day-night rotation on the planet, because the rotations around its axis and around the sun are synchronized, and the planet is constantly facing the sun with one side, while the other is in darkness. The illuminated side is called "Bright lands". However, the landscape also has jungles, plateaus, valleys, and volcanoes, and the atmosphere is breathable for both Twi'lek and humans. The equator covers a forest populated by dangerous predators. Given the diverse and dangerous landscape, Twi'leks live in underground caves.

Kala'uun is a large underground city on Ryloth, located among the Five lonely mountains, one of the two capitals of the planet. Like all cities on Ryloth, it is located on the twilight terminator that separates day from night. The city is home to a major spaceport, which is the center of interplanetary trade of the Twi'lek. To protect the city from heat storms and the Twi'leks who lived in the area, the only tunnel leading to the city is blocked by a massive stone block. It is there, between the upper and lowest levels, that the sabura clan resides. Nobi and Elina. For three years now, they have been raising their adopted child, Santal, who was very attached to them.

This family once lived in another settlement, which was very far from their current home. At the very edge of the Bright lands. But then, after saving up some money, they moved. And soon the daughter of Elina's friend, Adira Shan, appeared in their lives.

They met a long time ago, when Elina was still a very young girl. Then letanka studied at a dance school, and then wanted to get a job — to perform in the theater. But it so happened that she ran into scammers who decided to sell her to a familiar gangster-Hutt. As a result, Elina was trapped, forced to dance in a revealing outfit in front of criminals and other scum of society. It is inconceivable how humiliating it was for a letanka from a simple but decent family! Fortunately, it only lasted a few months. Then Adira and Bastian were on a mission for the Order, and by chance they crossed paths with that Hutt and saw Elina chained up. And then released, freeing the girl from slavery. So we became friends. After this incident, letanka became very careful, found a husband, Nobi, and started doing housework. I forgot about my career as a dancer.

When the sabura clan learned of their friends ' deaths, they were heartbroken. Young, talented and full of strength Jedi were defeated by some mercenaries. It's just not fair! That's why they were surprised when a newborn baby was found in the rescue capsule. By establishing the trajectory, they found out that this capsule was from the exploded ship "New hope". Elina realized that the Shang dynasty was not dead. And, fearing that the villains would find out, she and her husband moved to Kala'uun.

Santal grew up cheerful, curious and good-natured. By the time she was four years old, she was a pretty girl, with features more like her mother's than her father's. Her hair was a cold brown, and her eyes were brown and honey-colored. The future beauty is simple! Elina, looking at the growing up of the foster child, sometimes cried quietly in private, because she remembered.

***

Santal couldn't sleep. Every five minutes she would jump up and look out the window at the sky, then walk around the room and lie down again. I can't sleep. She had been dreaming for two weeks. Very unusual dreams. And all terrible.

For example, how different creatures brandishing swords of different colors, mostly green and blue, were shot by some soldiers in white uniforms. Or I dreamed of her house. There was a terrible fire. My aunt and uncle are screaming for help. She tries to help and... at this moment wakes up, pulling herself out of the nightmare, not wanting to see the ending.

Once Santal tried to tell Elina, but she said it was just a nightmare, no need to worry. But she was uneasy. What if this dream is a harbinger of trouble? Adira had once mentioned the Concept of Seeing the force to her. Maybe her girl had it. But she's only three years old. Isn't it early? How could she, insensitive to The force, know that? Letanka did not fool the girl and therefore asked not to be taken seriously.

Two weeks after the first nightmare, Santal was still looking out the window, thinking. About everything. About parents, dreams and dreams. And also about how beautiful the world is. When she was older, Santal wanted to leave Ryloth and explore other planets and even make a discovery. It doesn't matter which one. In short, the plans were colossal.

Suddenly, she saw a strange white light in the distance. Santal immediately wondered what it might be. A fallen star? An asteroid? A signal for help? Or does someone just have a light on? Oh, there are even two of them. And they are declining. What is it, after all?

The girl was bursting with curiosity. Maybe we should take a look. Nothing terrible will happen if she goes out of the window at night and looks at the street. Just look. And then go home. Without stopping anywhere.

Santal climbed up on the windowsill and dropped to the ground quietly. Looking around, the girl found the lights and ran in a straight line. Especially since the lights are still on and are about to land. It was impossible to miss the chance. What if she opens something?

The white lights turned out to be the ordinary lights of a starship. But Santal didn't know that was what it was called. Having satisfied her curiosity, the girl was about to run home, when the above feeling came with a vengeance. This time, the ship itself aroused Santal's interest.

A more cautious or older child would have turned and run. But the girl really wanted to know what kind of unusual ship it was. And he seemed to her simply huge for his small stature.

Then suddenly the door opened, and out came a creature of an inhuman race with long legs and arms. Having never seen anything like it before, Santal felt both surprise, delight, and fear at the menacing appearance of the creature with its red, creepy eyes and blue skin. The man calmly walked down the ramp and closed the door. Ads: Hide

The girl moaned softly. She didn't know what to do. Follow the man or wait for him to return and explore the ship on the sly. Santal planned to do this: if the first option, then by sneaking and hiding, she would look a little and run home before they missed her. The second option: wait, and when the mysterious stranger returns, together with him, while he does not see, explore the ship. The main thing is to remain unnoticed. After a moment's thought, Santal decided to follow the man until he was completely out of sight.

For about half an hour, the girl, hiding behind objects, watched the unusual creature. I must admit, Santal really enjoyed playing spy. It was very exciting! Finally, the man brought the curious woman to the warehouse. Then she could see him better. Her skin looked more blue than blue in the light. Red eyes without pupils looked creepy. And a big hat that really fit his head without ears and nose. But what really struck Santal was the small hoses attached to her cheeks. Or pipes, it is unclear. Why would he want them? Maybe he has health problems? And I wonder how he wears it? Does it hurt? Isn't it hard? Probably not. Otherwise, I wouldn't wear it. And how does everything fit on it?

another guy with a hood on his head came up to the man in the hat. It's not even clear if it's a man or a woman.

"You're late." "Sounds like a man after all."

"I wanted to make sure I wasn't followed." Or you didn't bring your friends.

— Intelligently. Oh, well. Show me what you brought. But not here.

Inside, the ship seemed even more exciting. Long corridors, lots of rooms. The Hatter led them both into a dim room. Santal carefully hid behind the crate. Fortunately, the darkness accompanied the disguise.

"You didn't open it, did you?" "what is it?" asked the cowl — man, when the Hatter provided him with a small chest, slightly shorter than the girl, and green in color.

"I don't open anything unless I've been warned." I'm a professional! the blue — skinned man snapped.

Santal shivered and lifted her head, hoping to see what was in the box. The two began to discuss something unknown to the girl.

During the conversation, the customer opened it and fished out a rectangular object, poked with his fingers. There were some strange pictures, squiggles. The man with the big smile stared for a long time, and then laughed maliciously. Then, after examining the interior of the box, he said:

"You did a great job, bounty hunter. Any complications?

Santal did not understand: behind the heads? It turns out that someone lost their head, and this Hatter helped them find it. But this one's got a good head. And what does the pictures have to do with it? Anything else you want? Blue smiled helpfully.

— No. The money was transferred to your account. I'll contact you if I need you again. The hooded man turned and headed back.

Santal started to follow them, but suddenly she wanted to see what else was in the trunk. No time. The girl could barely keep up with the men on tiptoe. And then my eyes started to close. Sleep hunting. No! We must go home! She's already been up too long. Visiting is good, but at home is better. Wanting to get home as soon as possible, the girl revealed herself when the customer had already left. But she forgot about the Hatter! When I realized it, it was too late.

"You didn't know that, but when people spy on me, I take it personally.

Santal jumped in surprise. The blue man with the hat and the pipes was looking at her. The face might have shown some negative emotions, but the eyes... they made it seem like the man was always angry. The girl cringed in fright. Her gut told her not to look at him. The

Man sat down on his haunches, which made him seem smaller. Santal was a little emboldened and tried to justify herself:

— V-you… You are... from VIN-n-Ni-I-te. I won't tell anyone. I didn't understand him at all. The girl was on the point of bursting into tears, and she would have done so if it hadn't been for the stranger who had startled her with his appearance.

The Hunter reached out and lightly touched the girl's cheek.

She stood paralyzed with fear. I was afraid to move. A blue hand gently ran the pads of her fingers over the soft skin and lifted her chin slightly. After examining Santal, the man abruptly grabbed her by the scruff of the neck. The girl immediately began to struggle.

"What are you doing?" Let me go!

The Hatter did not react at first, but suddenly stopped abruptly and raised it at eye level.

"Did you think I was going to let you go, baby, after you found out something that didn't concern you?" You're a witness.

As the man dragged Santal down the corridor, She tried to bite him a couple of times. Going into a compartment, the hunter put the girl behind bars and locked her up. Santal tried to pull away, but where would she go? Exhausted, Santal slid to the floor and fell asleep.

She woke up, as it seemed to her, in half an hour. Then she found herself lying on a cold, hard floor. In some place in the shape of a rectangle with bars from the ceiling to the floor. The entire ceiling was streaked with the same long, cold lines. Well, she didn't know the words "cage" or "prison cell"at that time!

Santal began to slowly come to life. What happened to her? Oh Yes, she saw the lights, decided to look, the man in the hat, the conversation… Oh, my God! The girl raised her head and was horrified by what had happened overnight. This couldn't have happened! This is all unreal! She's only a three-year-old girl! She wouldn't have thought of that! This is a dream!

From fear, the girl even forgot for a while that she wanted to look at the lights. It seemed to her now that someone had been controlling her mind. But when the puzzle came together and the picture became clear, I was completely upset.

"Did you sleep well, child?" A familiar, deep, mechanical voice interrupted his thoughts.

Santal squinted in the dim light. That blue-skinned guy again.

— Not very. Look, uncle, I don't know why you brought me here, but this isn't a funny joke. Please let me go home.

The blueskin made a sympathetic face.

"I'm sorry, little girl, but you've been following me and my client. I don't like that. And you can easily tell your parents what you saw. And then they would quickly tell you where to go. He added to himself: "And I would have been put on the wanted list."

Santal shouted. "And I don't remember well!" I promise not to tell anyone! Forgive me and let me go. I won't tell anyone! There were tears in the girl's eyes.

"What's the difference?" the Hatter grinned. "You can tell it from memory, and the adults will understand.

— Yes, I... I'm a little girl! I still didn't understand. Please let me go! I want to go home! the Man took out a jar and opened it. An unpleasant smell reached the girl's nose. Santal grimaced. The man took a sip and only then answered:

— No problem. He smiled nastily. He moved closer to the girl, squatted down, and flicked her nose. "Now be a good boy and don't make any noise. It still won't help. He left, patting the child's cheek with a blue hand.

Santal was perplexed and upset at the same time. I even tried to take offense. Fail. Such an affectionate, but harmful uncle. But maybe he would let her go. I'm sure all his talk is just a joke. An adult uncle wanted to scare a little girl. But Santal sabura won't give in! She had exposed him! It won't be long before she's released. And if she gives the address, they'll take her home. Her aunt always told her to do this if she got lost: go to someone you thought you could trust and give her the address. That's it! And this blueskin didn't seem so scary to the girl anymore. Although the appearance of the baby was a little scary at first, but she quickly got used to it. The girl's spirits rose at the thought.

But at that moment, a slight shaking started. It was obvious that the ship was beginning to rise. Well, that's right! She's going home now! As soon as the uncle comes, she will give her address. And my aunt won't even know that her adopted niece was out at night. Although the girl was once warned not to go anywhere alone, not to talk to strangers, immediately run away. And don't turn your back. Except that Santal didn't remember exactly when it was. The words were somehow left in my memory. And anyway, when she saw the lights, she thought for a moment that nothing would happen if she just broke the rule once. So it happened.

And the ship rose higher and higher. Santal have sick feeling in my stomach. It became uneasy: a suspicion crept in that she would not get home. If it wasn't, the man would have already asked for her address or just dropped her off. Any minute now. And he hesitates. So... everything he said wasn't a joke! A terrible thought shot through the girl's mind. Oddly enough, in such situations, the brain of people begins to think smartly. Santal's brain was no exception: "What is it? What to do? What to do? We need to get out of here! Let me get hit, but only to get away! I'm the only one scared. Mom».

The girl curled up and wept bitterly. And why did she go? I'd be home and asleep right now. Sleeping? Sleeping?! Of course! What if she had managed to fall asleep at home and was having an amazing dream? But how do I check it? Idea! Santal closed her eyes tightly and froze for a few minutes. It is not known how much time passed, but when the girl opened her eyes, nothing changed. Same floor, iron bars.

He heard the steps. The girl started. The man with the hat came in.

"Aren't you hungry?" Almost morning.

Of course, the girl is used to having her aunt feed her Breakfast every morning. But in this situation, something told me that you can't take food from someone you just met. So she shook her head.

"I'd take another hour's NAP if I were you." We have a long way to go.

"Where to?"

The man didn't answer and started to leave. Santal felt very ill. A strange man is going to take her definitely not home, to a completely different place, and most importantly — it is unclear why.

— No! the girl screamed. "Don't! Bring me home! Please! — I wanted to cry, but for some reason I was afraid to become a laughing stock.

Her screams had no effect on her uncle, judging by the expression on his face. Instead he turned around and said with a smile:

"I'll sell it to the highest bidder, and good bye."

— No! Santal didn't know the meaning of the first word and wasn't going to find out. It was obvious that it was something evil.

And then something happened that had never happened to the girl before. Santal stretched out her arms, and some unknown force hurled the man against the wall. He slid to the floor. Sabura stared at her hands in shock. As she watched, either the blow was weak, or the blueskin was hardy, but he quickly stood up and looked at the girl strangely. She looked into his eyes and decided. Something's about to happen. Maybe he'll punish her.

"Looks like I'm getting more than I bargained for," the man said, more to himself than to Santal, who was terrified.

Three questions kept running through my mind: what would happen to her? What just happened? Suddenly , my vision began to blur, and the world around me began to turn into a mosaic. Santal felt stiff, unable to move. After a few seconds, everything was gone. The girl began to fall into an unknown abyss…

#cad bane #cad bane x oc

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muninn--huginn · 3 years

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In an effort to chronicle my half-baked ideas and unfinished projects of 2020, here is the first of 6 essays I worked on over the course of the year. This one is on Star Wars, and musing on one of the larger faults I found in Episodes 7-9.

Full essay under the read more, as well.

The Star Wars sequel films are filled to the brim with nostalgia for the original series. You could see this back in 2015 when The Force Awakens released into theaters and was immediately hit with the critique that it was too derivative of the first Star Wars film, A New Hope. That film followed a similar plotline of a gang of quirky outcasts and rebels facing off against a fascistic military force led by a black-clad helmeted force user with a modulated voice, all while attempting to sabotage a planet-destroying superweapon. You could look at these two films lined up, and they would almost match beat for story beat, with the only real differences lying in the details.

There was already a significant amount of trepidation surrounding Disney’s foray into the Star Wars universe after purchasing the franchise in 2012. Many fans were already upset they had decanonized most of the fiction taking place outside of the original films, removing decades of stories and characters that many considered as real the original trilogy. The Force Awakens was perceived to be merely cashing in on the original classics’ reliability, which had been mainstays of pop culture for generations already, without taking any real risks. After all, what was the point of destroying literal decades of media if this was all they were going to do with it? Generally, how audiences felt about the series came down to what you wanted from Star Wars, more of what was already known and beloved, or something entirely new.

The Last Jedi, the follow-up movie in the sequel series, did much of the opposite from The Force Awakens. The Last Jedi was more concerned about conversing with the Star Wars legacy, with much of its plot and character arcs hinging on ending or moving on from not just the themes of the series as set up by The Force Awakens, but more so what fans expected out of the new trilogy. As opposed to repeating the same story beats, The Last Jedi refuted or prematurely resolved plot threads that seemed to be pointing at a larger trilogy long story when they were set up in the previous installment.

Once again, the new Star Wars film polarized the audience based on how they felt about the original series. While the film ruminated on themes and expectations that many Star Wars fans had coming into the film (for better or worse), The Last Jedi was still trapped circling this nostalgia towards the franchise. And it became most apparent with the way Disney was handling Star Wars as a whole. In between these larger tentpole films were smaller stories, Rogue One and Solo, which mostly explained the backstories or explanations of events and characters that happened offscreen in the original trilogy. While each film had noteworthy aspects in their own rights, there’s a question of why we needed to know precisely how the rebels got ahold of the Deathstar plans or how Han Solo got his name and the Millennium Falcon. Sure, there might be kind of cool factor in learning these bits of trivia, but rarely does answering a “Well, how did they get there?” question that never needed an answer in the original films do anything of value for the story you’re telling.

But it’s with the final film in the sequel trilogy, The Rise of Skywalker, that this obsession with navel-gazing nostalgia hits its absolute peak. Whereas The Last Jedi at least questioned the legacy of the films, The Rise of Skywalker marinated in it. While there are many examples to showcase this, the biggest is how the two films deal with legacy and family. The series’ main protagonist, Rey, was established in The Force Awakens to have a mysterious past and a lineage that would be uncovered throughout the sequel trilogy. The Last Jedi ended that thread by answering that her family ultimately meant nothing and wasn’t an intrinsic part of her character. The thematic conclusion of this revelation being that destiny and heritage doesn’t mean anything and that anyone is capable of great things, no matter how humble their beginnings.

Rise of Skywalker has no time for that nonsense. The movie immediately goes to work undoing much of the thematic groundwork set up in The Last Jedi in favor of attempting to resuscitate the overturned or completed character arcs established in The Force Awakens. So now, not only is family and destiny a driving force in this story again, but it’s the only thing that matters. Sure, maybe anyone can wield the force, but only those from the bloodlines of Skywalker and Palpatine decide the fate of the galaxy. Oh, you remember Palpatine, right? The bad guy from Return of the Jedi who gets thrown down a shaft by Darth Vader? Well, he’s been alive the whole time, orchestrating the events of the entire sequel trilogy from behind the curtains. Why create a new villain or establish one of the villains that fits the story we’ve been building over four years as the final antagonist of the trilogy, when I guess we can just shove in an old character that fans will geek out about. New things bad, old things we like are good!

But regardless of refocusing on a plot about the original Star Wars story and characters, or in a conversation and exploring what that relation needs to be, Star Wars seems eternally obsessed with itself. One of the best things about Star Wars is how simple and intimate it’s original story is, but nonetheless feels like it takes place in a full lived in universe. The tech looks grimy, and there’s always a sense of history. It’s no wonder that people want to know every detail about side characters like Boba Fett or Willrow Hood or even Nien Nunb. But with time and build up to a cultural behemoth, Star Wars seems reluctant to shake off this shackle to the past and grow beyond its own nostalgia.

#writing #essay #star wars #analysis #long post

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ooops-i-arted · 4 years

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May I ask about your thoughts on Rise of Skywalker?

You may indeed because I have Feelings and need Catharsis. I’ll just start with general thoughts and put specific spoilers under the cut.

Edit: I had a cut but it did not work?? Spoilers are marked in bold!!

I mean, it exceeded my expectations. Of course, my expectations were “It can’t be worse than TLJ, right? Who am I kidding, of course it could be” so…take that with a grain of salt. I wasn’t bored out of my mind like I was during TLJ at least.

It felt like watching fanfiction tbh. Like someone watched The Force Awakens and couldn’t wait for the rest so wrote their own Episode 8 and 9, but you can’t find where they posted the Episode 8 so you just have to go off context clues. And it’s uh, typical fanfic quality but it’s still vaguely interesting enough to keep your attention even though it’s not your ideal standard of fic.

Also there is a plot hole/ass pull/that’s not how the Force works moment literally every ten minutes. Like it loops around from being annoying to incredible to straight up ballsy. If you are annoyed by that sort of thing, hoo boy, prepare yourself now because you’re gonna need it.

Look I feel mostly okay/somewhat positively right now but that’s because I want to try and get something positive out of it. I wanted more from it than I got. It was not good and I know it. We deserved better. Rey and Finn deserved better. Han and Luke and Leia deserved better. Kylo deserved worse.

John Williams did not have to go that hard with the soundtrack but he did and that’s why he’s the best composer ever. It’s stunning and more than we deserve.

--SPOILERS AHEAD, DO NOT READ IF YOU DO NOT WANT SPECIFIC SPOILERS--

So when I said “straight up ballsy” with ass pulls I mean literally the first thing you see is “Palpatine’s not dead!” and then they never really explain it. It’s incredible. You have literal billions you could spend on budget and like….you write typical fanfic quality work. Like I can’t even be mad, it just so incredulous I just get stuck in the wow stage and can’t move on to annoyance let alone anger yet.

At least they don’t do my boy Palpatine dirty. He’s there. He’s evil. He’s the biggest ham in the galaxy. He says “Do it!” I am a simple girl with simple wants and this, at least, satisfied me.

The new trio actually ACTS AS A TRIO!!! It’s honestly what made parts of this movie watchable. Rey, Finn, and Poe are friends and they trust each other and they work together. They don’t always agree but they are a team.

I for one love Threepio’s endless bitching and he gets lots of good lines. ALSO HE DOESN’T DIE, THANK THE FORCE. HE’S OKAY AT THE END!

You know who else doesn’t die?? Lando and Chewie!! I was very concerned but they make it!

There’s no Mando cameo that I saw so I like to think that Mando is happily raising baby Yoda safely somewhere were he can eat lots of frogs. Aunt Cara and Grandpa Kuiil visit on weekends. (Alternatively, Mando got Lando’s call and just answered “Can’t you see the baby on board sign, do I look like I can go into battle???” then hands the baby a real toy that isn’t a choking hazard.)

Finn does not train as a Jedi because no reason but is blatantly Force-sensitive, operating on “a feeling” several times like Jedi are explicitly shown to do in other films. John Boyega and Finn deserved so much better.

Especially because every single Rey/Finn scene is Finn supporting Rey, believing in her, helping her even though she’s struggling mentally a huge amount through the entire film. There is so much friendship and trust there (and definitely a strong case for Finnrey) and it’s awesome.

It especially contrasts the fact that every single scene between Rey and Kylo is rapey, creepy, assault-y. Rey is literally being assaulted by Kylo mentally and physically.

If you’re reading spoilers I assume you want to know…. there is a Reylo kiss. A dry, bland, chemistry-less Reylo kiss that was so forgettable I couldn’t even be that mad about it, because the film acts like it never happened after.

But I’m still mad because I will never, as long as I live, remember refusing to hope or believe that the new films would have a girl be the main character. And I’ll never ever forget looking up at the big screen on TFA night, in my Rey costume, watching her pick up that lightsaber and be the hero! There was a Jedi on the screen who looked like me! A Jedi who was a girl just like me! And if I, a grown-ass 26-year-old woman felt that way, can you imagine how little girls watching that movie must’ve felt?? And now those same little girls watched Rey kiss the man who continuously stalked, harassed, and abused her. Fuck whoever approved that. May every Lego find your feet.

But I refuse to let the trilogy take Rey from me. I love her, and if nothing else, she is the protagonist again. She’s driven and proactive. She wants to do the right thing but struggles to do it and it’s very human of her. She may have incredible power but she doubts herself and wants to check herself. But at the same time she also has kickass fight moves, is daring and badass. So I got that, at least. I adore her and she deserved so much better.

(Don’t get me wrong, Finn did too and I am definitely mad little black boys don’t get to see themselves as a Jedi hero onscreen, but Rey is really personal to me.)

Kylo is awful. They don’t have the balls to make him a full villain but his ~redemption~ is weak and not really justified. Every time he comes on screen he just drains any interest out of the film. And he takes FOREVER to finally die.

The whole theater burst into laughter at his death scene though. It wasn’t tragic at all, it was stupid. Vindication tastes so sweet.

The worst thing though is that Leia dies to save him. This greasy-ass womp rat is literally the reason the OT trio is dead. They all died because of him. Disney threw away Han, Leia, and Luke and all we got was fucking Kylo Ren.

Also they retcon “Leia trained as a Jedi the whole time!” but she puts away her saber because she had a vision about it being involved in the death of her son. So not only does Leia die for Kylo, we never see her as a Jedi because of him either.

Although Leia training Rey was actually really cool, as was her having a saber. (You know what would’ve been cooler? Besides the Thrawn trilogy? Actually seeing her as a Jedi.)

I don’t have a problem with Rey taking on the Skywalker name personally. If Han, Luke, and Leia were in-character the whole time they totally would’ve adopted her and raised her to grow beyond her roots as Palpatine’s grandchild. And she was positively impacted by Luke and Leia Skywalker so it felt like a spiritual adoption to me? But ymmv and I’m definitely biased. As I mentioned before, Rey has a special place in my heart and I’d originally hoped she’d be a Skywalker or Solo.

The worst part of this movie is that is that Palpatine has, presumably, canonically fucked.

Although honestly I don’t buy that, it seems way more likely he cloned himself and raised one as his son (”Hmm, that Jango had the right idea”) because we know how much he loves cloning.

Tl;dr I watched it once and that was Enough. I’ll buy the soundtrack for sure, and a Black Series RoS Rey to go with my other two Reys, but probably not the DVD. I’ve seen it and it’s time to return to obsessing over the Mandalorian and Baby Yoda again.

#this got more ranty and longer than i intended whoops #spoilers #rise of skywalker spoilers #ros spoilers #star wars spoilers #asks #professor audial #rise of skywalker

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metalgearkong · 4 years

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Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker - Review

12/20/19 ** Spoilers

Directed by JJ Abrams (Lucasfilm / Disney)

Among the current social media and the 24 hour advertisement cycle, if you wanted, its possible to piece together much of the plot of this movie, or any big blockbuster these days. Its for this reason I avoided every single piece of media about Star Wars: Episode IX The Rise of Skywalker before I saw it. Even when bombarded with Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TV ads, and movie previews, I successfully dodged all snippets of the movie in order to be as surprised as possible once I sat down to see it. That night was tonight, and it’s felt like a long and arduous two years since The Last Jedi. Once again I have deeply mixed feelings about a new Star Wars movie, but I enjoyed myself more in The Rise of the Skywalker than I did in The Last Jedi, but not necessarily for shakesperian reasons.

The fans were worried about how The Rise of Skywalker would turn out, and as release day approached, reviews were already negative. I accidentally saw a Rottentomatoes critics score in the mid 20′s, and several videos were already uploaded to YouTube giving away that broad opinion of this film. This concerned me, as even critics liked The Last Jedi, which is one of my least favorite Star Wars movies. I let all of the negativity brush off me like a blaster bolt on Beskar armor. I went into The Rise of Skywalker rooting for it and looking to find every positive it could bring being the ninth main installment of the Star Wars saga. I was also ready for this trilogy to be over so everyone whining online could move on and obsess over something else. In an odd, semi-genuine, and semi-ironic way, I had tons of fun in The Rise of Skywalker, even acknowledging its horribly messy and rushed script.

Each of these Star Wars movies to me is like how a new chapter in the Bible would feel for a Christian, and the theater is my house of worship. The series’ trademark title blasted onto the screen among roaring trumpets, and I was ready. My auditorium applauded as the Star Wars logo shrunk to the background and the opening crawl appeared at the bottom of the screen. Seeing a new Star Wars movie in the theaters is always a holiday for me. Each film is a new addition to the lore of my favorite movie universe of all time, pulling from years as a kid before I can even remember the first time I saw it (thank you parents). This movie had me grinning from ear to ear, bringing out that inner child in me that Star Wars always used to do, something The Force Awakens partially did, and what The Last Jedi failed to do completely.

JJ Abrams continues his pension for fast paced scenes, but somehow still containing a ton of charm. We finally get to see Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), Finn (John Boyega), Chewie (Joonas Suotamo), C-3PO (Anthony Daniels) all working together on the same mission. The characters have a ton of charisma between them, and it inspires me to think of the potential for them having been together more often in this trilogy. I enjoyed their quips and didn’t think it got out of control or relied too much on bathos. The first half of this movie moves like a racetrack, as our heroes move from one location to another pursued by the First Order enough to almost make me dizzy. This would turn out to be a running issue with the movie, and if JJ Abrams and the editor would have let each scene go a little slower and last a little longer, it would have been more appreciated.

Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) is the Supreme Leader of the First Order, having murdered and usurped Snoke (Andy Serkis) in the last film, and is on a personal quest to track down what may be the resurrection of Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid). The movie opens on this note, and having none of it spoiled ahead of time for me, found it to be intriguing and exciting. The Emperor is one of the best and most fleshed out characters in Star Wars, and I was curious to learn how he resurrected. Unfortunately the movie barely gives an explanation and we are simply left with the spectacle of what I call Necro Palpatine. However we do have it explained that Snoke was a mere puppet of Palpatine in some capacity, but we aren’t told to what extent, or any other kind of logical backstory. It both answers and raises more questions simultaneously, about both dark lords.

The Rise of Skywalker also goes out of its way in several places to help explain some of the more controversial elements of the prior film, and I appreciated it as a fan of the series who felt toyed with in The Last Jedi. It’s obviously a wink wink to the audience, but I’d much rather have it than not. Greatest of all was Luke (Mark Hamill) being redeemed, as he admitted he was not only wrong to go hide on the island, but toss his father’s lightsaber over his shoulder. The movie also tries to shoe-in more explanation of what Luke was doing after his Jedi Academy was destroyed, which included trying to find the Sith Wayfinder along with Lando Carissian (Billy Dee Williams). It’s not a great explanation of why Luke disappeared, and I wish this was clearly the plan from the beginning of the trilogy. The Wayfinder is basically a key to get to Exegol where Palpatine is hiding. It becomes Rey (Daisy Ridley) and her friend’s mission to find the Wayfinder, through various means and mcguffins.

John Williams and the London Symphony Orchestra returns one final time scoring a Star Wars movie. I heard a dozen of his old tracks throughout the film and I had fun naming as many as I could. For how much I love his leitmotifs and listen to his music ad noaseam, whether its giving me an emotional rush during a run or driving on the highway, I couldn’t recall any new music heard in this film. The first thing I did when I got home from the movie was try to download the soundtrack from Spotify but it wasn’t available yet. I still give this movie a big thumbs up for its soundtrack because although it isn’t new, the way Williams’ music is used and where it’s placed gave me goosebumps every time. Hearing Rey’s theme in just the right moments made me happy, and identifying other leitmotifs and variations of them were great to hear.

The acting all around was excellent for a Star Wars movie. Daisy Ridley as Rey is as great as she’s ever been, and the same goes to Adam Driver as Kylo Ren. All the side characters and comic relief did a good job as well. The banter between Finn, Poe, and C-3PO was a treat as well. Tony Daniels continues to be one of my favorite actors in all of Star Wars for conveying as much personality as he does without facial expressions and very limited movement. McDiarmid as Necro Palpatine gets very little screen time, but he’s hamming it up as the evil Emperor he’s always been, and I loved every second of it. I also deeply appreciate that the movie seemed to rely on puppets again, and one of the stand out side characters was a tiny engineer named Babu Frik (Shirley Henderson) who should have had more time in the movie.

The only “yikes” moment I felt was any time we saw Leia. It’s such a tragedy that Carrie Fisher passed away so unexpectedly, and least of all not able to finish this Star Wars trilogy. I listened to her audiobook The Princess Diarist and she seemed so excited, yet nervous, to be yet again the role that made her famous, and to complete episodes 7, 8, and 9. Her face seems to be animated on a stand-in actress, and her only lines were from old footage that was never used in Episode VII or VIII. This means Leia has very little to say in this movie, and probably had a lot less to do in the plot than she deserved to. The CGI simply wasn’t convincing for me and is the only aspect of the movie that put a lump in my throat for all the wrong reasons. On the flip side, Han Solo’s cameo was a terrific scene that also had me teary-eyed. It was a great call back to The Force Awakens, and served a purpose for Kylo Ren’s character. Harrison Ford did a perfect job, and it was just the sort of scene I didn’t know I wanted.

While much The Rise of Skywalker feels hastily cobbled together, and relies on way too many conveniences for the plot to keep moving, I found it to be a very satisfying time. You know that feeling when you’re extremely tired and almost feel drunk, and everything seems hilarious and flippant? That’s how I felt during this entire thing. I could see ridiculous script elements that either contradict or ruin lore left and right, but I think something inside me was just so happy to finally get this trilogy over with. I let the fan service envelop me even if it didn’t make sense or feel justified. Yes Rey is still a Mary Sue, yes we still got an underwhelming lightsaber duel (that she wins), yes there are too many characters, yes the plot and details can be nonsensical, yes this movie needed way more time to bake in the oven. But unlike a Jedi’s weapon, this movie may not be elegant, but it is a cathartic and satisfying experience, which is all I every hoped it would be. Now can we all take a breath and move on?

6/10

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gillzilla · 4 years

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A Treatise on the aTROSity, Including How Hope Came to Me in the Form of The Lego Movie 2, Knives Out, and Little Women

I will start out by saying that I have never made a real, detailed post on Tumblr, mainly because social media kind of scares me. But the Reylo community's amazing kindness, strength, openness, and willingness to speak the truth in their writing over the last week and a half is honestly what has gotten me through the heartbreak and depression caused by the stabbing in the chest that was this movie. I am one of the people who loves Kylo/Ben Solo because I have mental health conditions and an abuse/trauma history within my family, which is also why the holidays are hard for me, so a big thanks to the people in charge of the story for TROS for making it even harder this year. After a week and a half of legitimate mourning for the butchering of the themes of Star Wars and of all the characters, but particularly the sequel trilogy characters, I am ready to add my two cents to all that has already been written about this movie.

First off, I have not been a Star Wars fan for my whole life. My parents tried to introduce me to the original trilogy as a kid by taking me to see A New Hope in the movie theater for the 20th anniversary screening in 1997. I fell asleep for most of it and was terrified by the trash compactor scene, so you could say the movie did not resonate with me. It actually wasn't until Phantom Menace came out that I started to get attached to Star Wars. So many older fans love to shit on that movie, and it certainly has many flaws, but a lot of us who were around the same age as Anakin when that movie came out and are now adults have started to speak up about how the movie was a gateway into Star Wars for us. Anakin gave me a window into the Star Wars universe that I could understand and relate to. I could relate to Anakin being a kind-hearted kid who wanted to help others and just wanted adults he could look up to, and I liked the podracing scenes. As with every single other sci-fi/fantasy hero's journey story that I loved as a kid, I empathized with and related to a male hero. Now, the wooden dialogue/acting/directing of Attack of the Clones and the tragic ending of Revenge of the Sith that left me so emotionally devastated that I vividly remember calling my friend to tell her I was so depressed I couldn't focus on studying for my eighth grade English final, kind of took me out of Star Wars again. There had been a spark there, but at that point I figured, eh, I guess it's not really for me after all.

I didn't rediscover Star Wars until the end of the first semester of my freshman year of college. This was a very difficult time in my life, as I was in what I would now consider to be a mental health crisis that unfortunately lasted for five years because I was too ashamed and uneducated about mental health to seek out help. I was very, very lonely during that time. It was close to finals week and I was sick, so as I sat in my dorm room I decided, why not pop in those DVDs of the original trilogy that I got at Costco last month. After watching them, I remember thinking, "Why have I not been watching these my whole life???" The original trilogy hooked me after that point and I started watching the movies every year around Christmas in commemoration of my rediscovery of them.

I was just as surprised as anyone when I found out that Disney bought Lucasfilm and that they were going to make a sequel trilogy. I had thought there would never be any more Star Wars, so I was overjoyed, though tentative, because I knew that though I loved Star Wars, it also had a tendency to make missteps that were somewhat endemic to sci-fi/fantasy hero's journey stories, such as poorly written dialogue, emphasis on ridiculous plot points that took away from the deeper overall themes, lack of diverse characters, and objectification/misogyny against female characters (I do not like watching Return of the Jedi because I hate, HATE the Jabba's palace stuff for what they did to Leia, honestly they gave Leia nothing interesting to do in that whole movie basically, but that's a whole nother essay).

So I went into The Force Awakens not really knowing what to expect. But oh my god, was I blown away. I am not lying when I say that I cried for at least an hour after the scene where Rey and Kylo are both reaching out for the legacy saber and it goes to Rey as the music swells, oh my god. I FINALLY realized what it meant to feel seen in the stories that I loved. My whole life I had been attached to and empathizing with male heroes, because they were pretty much the only heroes out there. To see Rey as this amazing female heroine who was not objectified and was a compelling character with an intriguing backstory that I related to as a child with a trauma history who often grew up feeling lonely, and to see that she was going to be the main Jedi in this new trilogy, I was overjoyed. It gave me hope. And then, on top of that, we got Adam Driver. Need I say any more. So many people have written about what an absolutely incredible actor Adam is, and I swear he is the only actor who could have pulled off the role of Kylo/Ben. The first time I saw TFA I didn't catch all the nuances of the character and his dynamic with Rey, but something about him really intrigued me (and made me want to watch everything Adam had ever been in). My love for TFA led me to start investing time in the online Star Wars fandom, which I never considered myself to be a part of previously, as the fandom had always reeked of being a "no girls allowed" type of zone. I found out about amazing, female-led podcasts that I started listening to every week and whose hosts I value just as much as my friends. I also started following the Reylo fandom on Tumblr. Learning more about the mythology behind the sequel trilogy, including how the creators were writing Rey's story as a heroine's journey and her and Kylo/Ben as dual protagonists, added so much to my understanding of what was going on in the storytelling and gave me the words to describe why I was connecting with these stories so much. I can honestly say that Star Wars and the Reylo fandom generally have been instrumental in helping me to get through the last four years, which have been a very difficult and isolating period in my life.

And now I'm up to TROS. As so many have said, the vast majority of it is a steaming pile of trash. People have done such an amazing job of breaking down why this story and how it treated its characters and retconned the beautiful story and themes that Rian gave us in TLJ was so painful for us. Many have pointed out that this movie is a result of catering to the most toxic portion of the Star Wars fandom, the "dudebros." Going further, I want to state that, whether consciously or not on the part of the cis, straight, white, male writers/director/CEO of Disney, this movie is a reassertion of masculinist ideologies. I want to clarify that when I talk about "masculinist" vs. feminist ideologies, I am talking about how our society and culture defines "masculine" vs. "feminine" ideas, traits, etc. Gender has nothing to with biological determinism and is socially and culturally constructed. Masculinist ideologies include beliefs such as extreme individualism, competition, "us vs. them" dichotomies, and power and value being defined based on hierarchy, which necessitates the use of violence to perpetuate the hierarchy. Feminist ideologies include valuing community and collaboration, connection and empathy, the idea that every person has inherent worth regardless of their productivity, actions, mistakes, class, race, sexuality, etc., respect for all people, and an abolishing of hierarchies. Masculinist ideologies are those of the white supremacist hetero-patriarchy, which, as we can see playing out in various ways all over the world, has been rearing its head in a very obvious and ugly fashion the past few years (though of course it has been around for wayyyyy longer than that).

Anyone who has been reading the fantastic analyses of TROS by those in the Reylo community can likely see how TLJ and even the story as it was set up in TFA were communicating feminist ideologies. One big example of this is Kylo Ren/Ben himself as a character. As so many have eloquently described, this is a complex character that commits atrocities, but is shown to be a victim of immense abuse and trauma that was failed by everyone in his family when he needed them most. This is a character that, had he been able to have the full and well-written redemption arc that he deserved, would have had an extremely moving story of how toxic masculinity and masculinist ideology is destroying boys and men by keeping them from being full people who can express all of their emotions, be vulnerable, and be open to love and connection. Reylo resonates so much with me not because it is about Rey supposedly doing all the work to change Kylo in some sort of toxic, co-dependent way, but because Rey and Kylo/Ben were always equals to each other. They both pushed each other to be better, more whole people. The wonderful work that folks have put into analyzing the mythology behind the feminine and masculine symbolism in TFA and TLJ (again, to clarify, "masculine" and "feminine" being culturally defined terms), and even the more obvious original goal of the sequel trilogy for the force to finally be balanced by Rey and Ben themselves becoming balanced between dark and light all relate to these gender issues. Balancing the dark and light sides of the force is also about balancing the "masculine" and "feminine" aspects within themselves.

This is a beautiful message that has so many real world implications. In our world, for lack of a better term, everything "feminine" is basically shat on. Patriarchy hates anything "feminine." This is how sexism plays out, but it also has to do with the ideologies that we believe in, down to our basic understandings of empathy and whether or not people have inherent value. The world would certainly be a better place if the "masculine" and "feminine" were better balanced, specifically if "feminine," and feminist, ideologies were more valued. This is what makes TROS feel like a stab directly in the heart. This was a trilogy that clearly did have feminist messages, regardless of DLF's bullshitting about Star Wars being "for everyone." Star Wars has always been progressive, the original trilogy is about rebels taking on fascists for god's sake. DLF's pandering to the most toxic part of the fandom for TROS is therefore representative of a much larger cultural, social, and political battle that is going on around the world right now. We are at a turning point for humanity in which we are starting to face the devastation that has occurred due to masculinist ideologies being the most highly regarded and utilized by those in power, but those in power are also trying to maintain their power by strongly reasserting those ideologies. So I would argue that this is not just about one movie that I and many other people didn't like. This movie is a small representation of a much larger battle that we're fighting.

Now, that reassertion of masculinist ideology that was the stabbing in the heart of watching TROS has made me super, duper depressed for the past week or so because, as others have pointed out, it communicated to me that no matter how hard we fight, the white supremacist hetero-patriarchy will reassert itself and win in the end. It even re-triggered the pain I've felt over the past few years since our current president came into office in the U.S. However, as I near the end of this long treatise I would like to share the stories that gave me hope over these past few days. I re-watched The Lego Movie 2 the other day, and that story gave me hope. The "bad guy" in that story is a literal embodiment of toxic masculinity/masculinist ideology, and it ends with the male hero realizing that he doesn't need to sacrifice his humanity and connections to other people to be a hero, or even just to be a man. How to Train Your Dragon 3 also told a story about a male hero/leader that rejects masculinist ideology. Additionally, I was given hope by Rian's amazing movie, Knives Out, which I went to see solely because people on Tumblr recommended it (thank you folks!). Rian had a clear theme and vision for this story that was about exposing and dissecting what I would call "toxic whiteness," and what it does to a family and those around them. And lastly, I saw Greta Gerwig's incredible adaptation of Little Women today, and that gave me hope because one of its main themes is about the struggle that (cis, heterosexual) women have in asserting themselves as full humans with talents, dreams and goals for their lives outside of being in romantic relationships, but also wanting to have romantic relationships at the same time. As has been said by so many, "STRONG" WOMEN CAN FALL IN LOVE AND HAVE ROMANTIC/SEXUAL RELATIONSHIPS. Feminism is about giving all people the chance to be fully human, and for heterosexual women that includes being able to have a relationship with a man and still be valued and respected for everything that we are outside of that relationship. The above mentioned stories, and others (She-Ra, Dragon Prince, AtLA & Legend of Korra, I'm sure there are others) give me hope that there are creators out there that are communicating feminist themes, even in big-budget movies that lots of people go to see. We need more of this. Tied to this is that THE HEROINE'S JOURNEY OF THE SEQUEL TRILOGY SHOULD HAVE BEEN WRITTEN/DIRECTED BY A WOMAN/WOMEN. Folks, we need the opportunities to tell our own stories. All of the diverse folks out there, if you are a creator, please keep on creating! We need you out there and we value all of the beautiful, integral work that you do!

So in sum, I'm not going to let what happened with TROS ruin my love of Star Wars or of the sequel trilogy. The story belongs to the fans now, and there are so many of us out there to care for it. You better be sure that I will never stop speaking up about how wronged we were by TROS, that is the hill I will die on. But I am not giving up hope and I hope that you will also join me in not giving up hope. As Poe stated so well in TLJ (with one minor adjustment), "We are the spark that will light the fire that will burn the [patriarchy] down." End of treatise.

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therealchrisclem · 4 years

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Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker thoughts

I have seen Star Wars: Episode 9 - Rise of Skywalker. I wasn’t going to share my opinion, but it’s not everyday I get to go to a press screening for one of the most anticipated films ever made (of course, hype being what it is, doesn’t mean as much as it did in 1999), so why not try to get some of my thoughts across?

A few things first - I’m not a critic. I was told a long time ago you can either be someone that does things or someone that criticizes them, but in order to treat either with the respect it deserves, you need to delineate that line clearly. I still work on my scripts and writing packet, I don’t see my self becoming an actual cultural critic of any kind in the future. This is just my views on this film as a guy who loves movies and really, really loves Star Wars. Secondly, Lucasfilm and Disney asked us not to spoil any of the movie, and while I don’t think that’s possible in a macro sense (do you honestly think the good guys lose?), I will try to respect their marketing wishes. There are some things in this movie that were incredibly shocking. Not enough of them for my taste though.

Finally, I liked The Last Jedi. Was it flawed? Yes. Did the humor in it fit with the rest of the series? No. The humor coming from actual jokes is about as far away from George Lucas comedy like Jar Jar and farting space camels as you can get. It’s actually one of the biggest reasons why I think some fans didn’t think it was really “star wars-y.” Despite it’s issues, that movie introduced new concepts and themes and pushed the series forward in a way that The Force Awakens (which I liked better overall) didn’t, and the spin-offs Rogue One (which I thought was great but unnecessary) and Solo (which I hated more than any other Star Wars movie I saw in theaters, even Attack of the Clones) didn’t. I waited my whole life for new Star Wars because I wanted new Star Wars, not retreads playing in the OT’s bathwater.

A side-note for a second: I used to always leave my takes on the big blockbuster movies I saw on Facebook. I realized, while ruminating on this movie during the afternoon that I stopped doing that a few years ago. Looking back, it was The Last Jedi that caused that break. I argued so much with friends and family over that movie that I must have decided at some point it wasn’t even worth sharing my opinions on social media. In terms of big budget cinema (I said it) I can’t think of anything as divisive. At least when it came to Batman V Superman, it was so overwhelmingly negative that I don’t remember the lovers of that movie feeling the need to justify it. Or maybe it’s just that social media is overwhelmingly toxic or that our culture in general is sick. I dunno, I’m not writing a Sociology thesis paper here. Back to Rise of Skywalker:

My sister Abby informed me last week that I was going to get to go to this press screening as my brother-in-law Leo’s plus one (he works in the industry) as an early Christmas gift. I was so excited and happy, I couldn’t believe how lucky I was to get to see the conclusion of my favorite movie series of all time over two days before paying audiences got to! I was pretty much buzzing on a tibana gas high all week. This is why I moved to LA! (Yes, I know that Tibana gas doesn’t get you high. Spice does. Let me mangle these EU references like Solo.)

The El Capitan Theater in Hollywood is a historical building I’ve always wanted to see a movie at, and what could be better to see than the END OF THE SKY-WALKER SAGA? (Well, Avengers: Endgame*, for starters.) Despite how small and cramped the seats were (humans my size did not exist in the 1930s), my anticipation couldn’t have been higher. I even had my complimentary bucket of popcorn and my free Coke Zero Sugar like the paid off Disney shill I am. The theater darkened, the Lucasfilm logo shone, and we were taken back to a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…

I’m just gonna get blunt here. It’s impossible for me to say Rise of Skywalker is anything other than a disappointment. I have felt upset and angry after seeing a Star Wars movie (Solo). I have tried to convince myself I loved what I just watched after seeing a Star Wars movie (The Phantom Menace). I have never felt as indifferent about what I’ve seen after I left a Star Wars movie as I did today. And this was something I was really, really, looking forward to.

I promised no spoilers, so here’s my best attempt: The movie is at least 2 movies in one, crammed together at a breakneck pace that is basically held together by the charisma of the actors and the beauty of the special effects shots. The movie looks and feels like a proper Star Wars. I just can’t think of a time where I left a two and a half hour movie and thought it could have used 15 minutes more of exposition. It’s not like it doesn’t make sense, but nothing’s explained and you’re either on board or not. There’s an important character moment that gets brought up repeatedly and never resolved or mentioned after the climax starts. Things happen and exist and this movie doesn’t have the time to tell you why. The pacing is a mess. It is a ton of movie. Hope your eyes are able to keep up. There are also lots of groan-inducing moments and scenes that aren’t enough to ruin the movie but definitely pushed my goodwill to the breaking point.

If you hated The Last Jedi, I have a feeling you’ll be much happier with this. It turns that entire movie into a steaming pile of bantha poo-doo. There are still some things from that movie that resurface, but this movie does a better job honoring the prequels than it does it’s direct fore-bearer. (Seriously, this movie does some heavy lifting to make sure the prequels are connected to the rest of the series in a way George Lucas himself never bothered to do. Despite hating a lot of the prequels, it’s pretty cool.)

And that’s not to say it’s all bad! The action is so, so great, the effects are on another level, the stuff that is good is really good! There are iconic shots throughout that I could have seen on a poster hanging on my ten-year-old bedroom wall. The classic iconography is exalted in Rise of Skywalker. Once it switches from the “first movie” to a Force Awakens-style redux of Return of the Jedi, it’s pretty awesome. I love BB-8, and more that will have to wait for spoiler talk.

It’s never boring or hard to watch either. Plus, having John Williams finish out this series ensures it always sounds like Star Wars. What a gem.

So that’s it.

A mixed bag.

After all the hype, after all this time, after all the money Disney spent devouring our childhoods and pop culture, that’s all this movie is. Honestly, I was hoping for a lot more. And maybe that will reveal itself when I see it again Thursday night. Even if it doesn’t, I’m still happy it exists. This sequel trilogy (for all its faults) is more than I could have ever hoped for as a child.

I can’t wait until everyone sees it and we can talk about the plot and argue about the movie online until we all hate each other again.

*This movie’s pacing made me appreciate the work the Russo brothers did on Infinity war and Endgame so much. It was a harder task than this movie, and they did it so easily I forgot what a near impossible task that must have been. Honestly, the MCU is really the Star Wars of our time. Don’t shoot me.

#StarWars RiseOfSkywalker

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kunoichi-ume · 5 years

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May Drabbles, Day 22

Prompt: “Running seems to be all you’re good at”

Characters: (future) Republic Trooper Jurr Jiin and a brief cameo by Jedi Master Vukosh

Word Count: 1987

Jurr scrolled through the list of requirements for enlistment in the Republic Army and forced herself not to frown. She had been trying to get better at schooling her emotions, mostly to hide her almost constant state of fear and confusion, because she needed to be able to hide her condition, but the further down this list she got the more she felt her heart sinking.

It wasn’t the physical requirements that concerned her as much as it was the mental skills test. She had started physical training not long after she had realized that elisting was the only way for her to escape the medical facility that felt more like a prison than a home. Not that she had any idea what home meant, it was just one of those words she heard from time to time. It was where the other patients all went when they left, something she had only recently been able to retain.

Her memory had stabilized in the last few years, less mid day resets and total losses, but she was still missing large swaths of time. Like those developmental years of growing up, when she should have been learning and growing as a person. Doing all those things people do to become successful adults.

Those were a complete blank instead of the springboard into life they should have been.

Instead she was, well, she had no idea how old she actually was just a rough estimate that she was about sixteen, and couldn’t even tell someone how to tie a knot. She could do it, muscle memory seemed to be the only thing she could count on in her fucked up life, but if someone asked her to describe the process from memory along she wouldn’t be able to.

Jurr could run, jump, do push ups and pull ups and every other physical requirement the military had but there was two major hiccups.

They required a general education certificate. If Jurr had ever attended school, she didn’t know it and certainly had not finished or earned any proof of such. Then there was the test, one that covered what they claimed was “general knowledge” but might as well be a very obscure dialect of, well, any language other than Basic.

Dropping the datapad on her bed, Jurr let her head fall heavily against the wall behind her. “Face it Jurr,” she muttered to herself, “running seems to be all you’re good at.”

It was like all the air had gone out of her, she felt so defeated. This was her one and only chance to get out of these endless halls, to see the outside world. The facility had an indoor garden but the planet was buried in snow and ice. In theory Jurr knew she had been outside the hospital, it wasn’t where her injury happened after all, but since her arrival she hadn’t stepped foot outside that she could remember.

The white walls and endless hallways, exam rooms and surgery theaters - as far as Jurr knew that was the extent of the whole galaxy. All she would ever know, for however much her broken mind would be able to hold on to.

With a frustrated growl she pushed herself out of the bed. It was like something snapped inside her as she looked around the small room, walls covered in posters and reminders about her condition and daily routines. She couldn’t do this. Not anymore. This wasn’t a life, being a living experiment for the researchers, being alone all the time, and she couldn’t face another day of it.

Shoving the few things she couldn’t leave behind into a bag didn’t take long, there was little she thought of as being ‘hers’. Really anything she had belonged to the facility, but they wouldn’t miss a few sets of patient pants and shirts or even the datapad that she relied so much on. Not as much as they would miss fiddling with her brain.

Jurr slung the bag over her shoulder and left her room. It was a testament to how much no one noticed her or cared that no one stopped or questioned her on the way. She tried to ignore how much that hurt, it was an old familiar pain even when she couldn’t really remember having felt it before.

Despite having never been outside the hospital, Jurr managed to find the way out easier than she expected. It was like the bright, glowing signs directing her toward the exit were calling her, urging her to continue. When she could see the final door, Jurr grinned and laughed as she started to run down the hall.

This was it. Finally. She was taking her own life into her hands and was going to make something of it. Even if she failed it would be better than staying here. She hit the door at a run, crashing through it before slipping and falling hard.

Jurr gasped as she pushed herself out of the cold material she had fallen into. It was wet as well as cold, soaking her thin clothing through to the bone. Shivering she sat up and looked around. As quick as the snow, what she assumed to be snow, sapped the warmth from her body all the hope she had felt at the idea of leaving was gone.

There was nothing out here. Just ice and snow for as far as she could see.

“It’s not fair,” she said, voice carried away by the frigid breeze, “I can’t even run away.”

Defeated, Jurr sat down against the door and pulled her knees to her chest. Distantly she knew if she stayed out there too long she’d get sick, which would mean more procedures and medications, but couldn’t bring herself to care.

Jurr lost track of time as the cold seeped into her, chilling her inside and out. It was until her datapad started chiming that she was shaken from her stupor. Hands trembling from the chill, she pulled out the device and turned the screen on before frowning at the notification.

There was a new message for her but Jurr never got messages. She didn’t know anyone who would write to her.

Curious and half-sure it would be an automated spam message, she opened the file. A video autoplayed before she could stop it.

“What’s new JJ?”

The boy in the video said those words and the oddest thing happened. The anxiety in her chest relaxed and she felt warm despite the cold around her. Moving the pad closer to her face, she studied the boy intently with her eye. He was the strangest person she had ever seen. Purple hair and more facial implants than even she had, at least visible ones but his eyes were kind. So was his smile.

Jurr didn’t know who this was, but she liked him

“I don’t have long so I hope you don’t mind a video instead of a letter,” he continued as she settled back against the wall to listen. “I just wanted to check in with you, make sure you’re okay. I… I miss you and I know you’d hit me for it but I worry.”

Whoever he was, he was right. Jurr did want to smack him for that but she also kind of wanted to hug him. It was like somehow he had known she wasn’t okay. That was insane of course, there was no way this random guy could know how she felt. No one did.

Didn’t stop it from feeling like it.

Something from behind the boy caught his attention and he looked over his shoulder before frowning at the camera. “Sorry it’s short but I gotta run JJ. I’ll visit as soon as I can. Take care of yourself sis!”

Jurr stared at the datapad in shock as he winked out of existance. He called her sis but that couldn’t be right? Could it? Frantically Jurr accessed her inbox properly, not just the pop up that showed the new message. There were letters and videos there, all from the same address. Checking another video confirmed it was all from the same strange person who called her “JJ” and “sis” but no where was his name revealed to her. Hoping that somewhere he would have said his name, she started reading and watching each message in her inbox starting from the newest one.

It wasn’t until the datapad was warning her about it’s low battery that she realized her fingers were starting to turn blue and she needed to go back inside, whether she wanted to or not.

Sighing Jurr pushed to her feet, wincing at the numb feeling in her limbs. She stumbled when she tried to take a step, barely catching herself on the door before it swung open and she spilled inside and onto the floor. This time when she tried to push to her feet, she couldn’t. Her limbs had decided not to respond to her any longer but she was oddly okay with that. She was tired, more than she had noticed before trying to get up, and now was as good a place as any to nap.

She was on the verge of sleep when she heard someone shouting from down the hall. Jurr tried to tell them to be quiet but everything went dark before she could.

Warmth was the first thing Jurr noticed as she started to wake up. That and the beeping of a heart monitor that sped up as she realized she didn’t know where she was. Forcing her eye open she lifted a hand to touch the left side of her face, panicking when she realized she could only see out of one eye. Instead of the blinded eye she expected to find there was a metal plate.

Tracing the piece of metal, she tried to pull it off of her face. Her breathing had started coming in short, quick gasps as the heart monitor sang shrilly.

Suddenly hands on on her, forcing her to stop praying at the plate from her blind spot.

“No!” Jurr cried, “it’s covering my eye, get it off! Get it off me!”

“Jurr stop it!” A firm voice commanded, cutting through her panic as she froze. Turning she saw a large man looking at her with a sad expression. She wasn’t sure what he was, but with the large horn like growths on his head he couldn’t be human. “You need to relax child.”

Jurr frowned, and whispered, “but I can’t see.”

Returning her frown, he approached slowly and stopped at the side of her bed. “You only have one eye Jurr,” he said, his voice careful like he was speaking to a frightened animal.

Swallowing hard, Jurr dropped her hands and tried to process what he had told her. It didn’t seem possible but when she tried to search her memory for an image of her face she couldn’t recall anything prior to waking up.

Looking back up, intent on asking the man if he could explain how she got here, Jurr noticed him holding a datapad out to her.

“I took the liberty of getting this charged while you slept, take some time to read the notes and it should help you understand what is going on.” The man smiled kindly, inclining his head slightly before leaving the room.

Still confused, Jurr settled back against the curtains and turned the pad on. The first screen it displayed was a infographic of some sort “Uncle Zam Wants YOU For The Republic Military!” It proclaimed boldly across the a picture of a man more strange looking than the one that left, with a ring of small horns circling his head like a crown.

Curious she scrolled down the graphic to read the details on it before smiling. “The Military huh? That could be fun,” she said, thinking outloud. “Wonder what it takes to get in?”

#Swtor #OC: Jurr Jiin #My Writing #May Drabbles '19 #whydidwedothis

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uomo-accattivante · 5 years

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Oscar Isaac in the role of painter Paul Gauguin is trouble you see coming from a mile away—the kind you live to regret falling for anyway.

He’s a holier-than-thou painting bro with a “slightly misanthropic” streak (Isaac’s generous wording), eyes glinting with disgust in his first close-up. Pipe in one hand, book in another, dressed all black save for an elegant red scarf, he slams a table and shames the Impressionists gathered around him: “They call themselves artists but behave like bureaucrats,” he huffs after a theatrical exit. “Each of them is a little tyrant.”

From a few tables away, another painter, Vincent van Gogh, watches in awe. He runs into the street after Gauguin like a puppy dog.

Within a year, a reluctant Gauguin would move in with van Gogh in a small town in the south of France, in the hope of fostering an artists’ retreat away from stifling Paris. Eight emotionally turbulent weeks later, van Gogh would lop off his left ear with a razor, distraught that his dearest friend planned to leave him for good. He enclosed the bloody cartilage in wrapping marked “remember me,” intending to have it delivered to Gauguin by a frightened brothel madam as a bizarre mea culpa. The two never spoke again.

Or so the last two years of Vincent van Gogh’s life unspool in Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate, itself a kind of lush, post-Impressionistic memoir of the Dutchman’s tormented time in Arles, France. (Not to mention artistically fruitful time: Van Gogh churned out 200 paintings and 100 watercolors and sketches before the ear fiasco landed him in an insane asylum.)

Isaac plays Gauguin like an irresistibly bad boyfriend, a bemused air of condescension at times wafting straight into the audience: “Why’re you being so dramatic?” he scoffs directly into the camera, inflicting a first-person sensation of van Gogh’s insult and pain.

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Yet in the painter’s artistic restlessness, Isaac, 37, sees himself: “That desire to want to do something new, to want to push the boundaries, to not just settle for the same old thing and get so caught up with the minutia of what everyone thinks is fashionable in the moment.” He talks about “staying true to your own idea of what’s great.” He talks about “finding something honest.”

From another actor, the sentiment might border on banal. But Oscar Isaac—Guatemalan-born, Juilliard-trained and, in his four years since breaking through as film’s most promising new leading man, christened superlatives from “this generation’s Al Pacino” to the “best dang actor of his generation”—might really have reason to mean what he says. He’s crawling out the other end of a life-altering two years, one that’s encompassed personal highs, like getting married and becoming a father, and an acutely painful low: losing a parent.

He basked in another Star Wars premiere, mined Hamlet for every dimension of human experience, and weathered the worst notices of his career with Life Itself. Through it all, he says, he’s spent a lot of time in his head—reevaluating who he is, what he wants, and what matters most.

Right now, he’s aiming for a year-long break from work, his first in a decade, after wrapping next December’s Star Wars: Episode IX. “I’m excited to, like Gauguin, kind of step away from the whole thing for a bit and focus on things that are a bit more real and that matter to me,” he says.

Until then, he’s just trying “to keep moving forward as positively as I can,” easing into an altered reality. “You’re just never the same,” he says quietly. “On a cellular level, you’re a completely different person.”

When we talk, Isaac is in New York for one day to promote and attend the New York Film Festival premiere of At Eternity’s Gate. Then it’s back on a plane to London, where Pinewood Studios and Star Wars await.

Episode IX, the last of Disney’s new Skywalker trilogy, will see Isaac reprise the role of dashing Resistance pilot Poe Dameron, whose close relationship with Carrie Fisher’s General Leia evokes joy but also melancholy after Fisher’s untimely passing.

Each film was planned in part as a celebration and send-off to each of the original trilogy’s most beloved heroes: in The Force Awakens, Han Solo (Harrison Ford); in The Last Jedi, Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill); Fisher, meanwhile, had hoped to save Leia’s spotlight for last but passed unexpectedly long before filming began. Director J.J. Abrams, returning to close the trilogy he opened with Episode VII, has since said that unseen footage of Fisher from that previous film will ensure the General appears, however briefly.

For his part, Isaac promises the still-untitled ninth film will pay appropriate homage to Leia—and to Fisher’s sense of fun. “The story deals with that quite a bit,” he says. “It’s a strange thing to be on the set and to be speaking of Leia and having Carrie not be around. There’s definitely some pain in that.” Still, he says, compared to the first two installments, “there’s a looseness and an energy to the way that we’re shooting this that feels very different.”

“It’s been really fun being back with J.J., with all of us working in a really close way. I just feel like there’s an element of almost senioritis, you know?” he laughs. “Since everything just feels way looser and people aren’t taking it quite as seriously, but still just having a lot of fun. I think that that energy is gonna translate to a really great movie.”

Fisher’s absence is felt keenly on set, Isaac says. As if to reassure us both, however, he reiterates: “It deals with the amazing character that Carrie created in a really beautiful way.”

Two months after Fisher’s death, Isaac’s mother, Eugenia, passed away after an illness. A month after that, the actor married his girlfriend, the Danish documentarian Elvira Lind. Another month later, the couple welcomed their first son, named Eugene to honor the little boy’s grandmother. Work offered a way for a reeling Isaac to process.

There was his earth-shaking run at Hamlet, in which Isaac starred as the titular prince in mourning at New York’s Public Theater. And then there was writer-director Dan Fogelman’s Life Itself, a film met with reviews that near-unanimously recoiled from its “cheesy,” “overwrought” structure, filled with what one critic called the genuine emotion of “a damage-control ExxonMobil commercial.”

The reaction surprised Isaac. “I thought it was some of my strongest work,” he says. “Especially at that moment in my life. This guy is dealing with grief and, for me, it was a really honest way of trying to understand those emotions and to create a character who was also going through just incomprehensible grief.” He’s proud of the performance—and, in a strange way, heartened by the sour critical response.

“To be honest,” he says brightly, “there was something really comforting about it.” That the work “for me, meant something and for others, didn’t at all, it just made the whole thing not matter so much in a great way.”

“I was able to explore something and come out the other end and feel like I grew as an actor,” he explains. “That matters to me a lot. And the response to that, you know, it’s interesting of course, but it was a great example for me of how it really doesn’t dictate how I then feel about what I did.”

He thinks for a moment of performances and projects that, conversely, embarrassed him—ones that to his shock, boasted “really great notices” in the end. “You just never know, you know? It’s completely out of my control.”

Isaac is an encouraging listener in conversation, doling out interested yeahs and uh-huhs, and often warm, self-deprecating laughter. When I broach a particularly personal subject, he seems to sit up—somehow, suddenly more present. It’s about his last name.

Óscar Isaac Hernández Estrada dropped both surnames before enrolling at Juilliard in 2001. He’d run into several Óscar Hernándezes at auditions by that point, and taken note of the stereotypes casting directors seemed to have in mind for them—gangsters, drug dealers, the works. So he made a change, not unlike many actors do.

Whether Óscar Hernández might have had a crack at the astonishingly diverse roles Oscar Isaac has inhabited, we’ll never know. But given Hollywood’s limiting tendencies, it’s less likely he might have played an English king for Ridley Scott in 2010’s Robin Hood, three years before his breakthrough role as a cantankerous folk singer in Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis. He was an Armenian genocide survivor in last year’s The Promise, an Israeli secret agent in August’s Operation Finale, and now, he’s the Frenchman Paul Gauguin.

Star Wars’ Poe Dameron, meanwhile, or the mysterious tech billionaire in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, or the army commando in his second Garland mind-twist, Annihilation, specify no ethnicities at all. It’s the dream: to be hailed as a great actor, period, and not a “great Latino actor” first. To be appreciated for your talent, and seen as “other” rarely at all.

There’s a crawl space between those distinctions, though, where another anxiety lives. The one that makes you wonder: Am I “representing” as loudly as I should? Am I obligated to do so in my work? If I don’t, what does that make me? Questions for when you grew up in Miami, or another Latino-dominant place, reckoning with how you’re perceived in a spotlight outside of it. Isaac listens attentively. Then for several unbroken minutes, talks it out with himself.

He rewinds to yesterday, when he boarded a plane from London on which an air steward addressed him repeatedly as “señor,” unbidden. “It was just a little weird. So I started calling him ‘señor’ as well. I was like, thank you, señor!” Isaac recalls, cracking up. “But then at the same time, I had that thought. I was like, but no, I should really, you know, be proud of being a señor, I guess?”

“I think for a lot of immigrants, the idea is that you don’t always just want to be thought of as other. Like, I don’t want him to be just calling me ‘señor.’ Why?” he asks, more of the steward than himself. “Because I look like I do, so I’m not a mystery anymore? It did bring up all those kinds of questions.”

He grew up in the United States, he explains; his family came over from Guatemala City when Isaac was 5 months old. “I’m most definitely Latino. That’s who I am. But at the same time, for an actor it’s like, I want to be hired not because of what I can represent, but because of what I can create, how I can transform, and the power of what I create.”

Still, Isaac has eyes and ears and exists in the year 2018 with the rest of us. “I’m not an idiot,” he adds. “And I know that we live in a politically charged time. There’s so much terrible language, particularly right now, being used against Latinos as a kind of political weapon.” He recognizes, too, the necessity “for people to see people that look like them, because that’s a very inspiring thing.”

As a kid, Isaac looked up to Raúl Juliá, the Puerto Rican-born actor and Broadway star whose breakthrough movie role came as Gomez Addams of the ’90s Addams Family films. “But I looked up to him particularly because he was a Latino that wasn’t being pigeonholed just in Latino parts,” Isaac adds.

“I do think there is a separation between the artist and the art form, between a craftsperson and the craft,” he says, applying the difference in this context to himself. He calls it “that double thing,” as apt a term as any for that peculiar, precise tension: “Like yes, I am who I am, I came from where I come from. But my interest isn’t just in showing people stuff about myself, because I don’t find me to be all that interesting.”

“What is more interesting to me is the work that I’m able to do, and all that time that I spent learning how to do Shakespeare and how to break down plays and try to create a character and do accents,” he says. “That, for me, is what’s fun.”

But it’s always that “double thing”—reconciling two pulls and finding a way not to get torn up. He wants American Latinos “to know, to be proud that there is someone from there that is out and doing work and being recognized not just for being a Latino that’s been able to do that.” On the other hand, he’s “just like any artist who’s out there doing something. I feel like that’s…” He pauses. “That’s also something to be proud of, you know?”

Isaac’s focus lands on me again. “And I think for you too, you’re a writer and that’s what you do. Your identity is also part of that, but I think that you want the work to stand on its own, too.” His sister is “an incredible scientist. She’s at the forefront of climate change and particularly how it affects Latino communities and low-income areas. And she is a Latina scientist, but she’s a scientist, you know? She’s a great scientist without the qualifier of where she’s from. And that’s also very important.”

Paul Gauguin’s life after van Gogh’s death by gunshot at 37 revealed more repugnant depths than his dick-ish insensitivity.

He defected from Paris again, this time to the South Pacific, determined to break from the staid art scene once and for all. He “married” three adolescent brides, two of them 14 years old and the other 13, infecting each girl with syphilis and settling into a private compound he dubbed Maison de Jouir, or “House of Orgasms.” “Pretty gnarly, nasty stuff,” Isaac concedes, though he withholds judgment of the man in his performance onscreen.

To do so might have made his Gauguin—alluring, haughty, insufferable, brilliant—“not quite as complex.” Opposite Willem Dafoe’s divinely wounded depiction of van Gogh, however, he found room to play. “It was interesting to ask, well, what’s the kind of person that would feel that he’s entitled to do those kinds of things?” The man onscreen is an asshole, to be sure, but hardly paints the word “sociopath” onto a canvas. He’s simply human: “I think that anyone has at least the capacity to do” what Gauguin did, Isaac reasons.

The actor has had more than one reason to think on a person’s capacity to do terrible things in the last year. Two men he’s worked with—his Show Me a Hero director, Paul Haggis, and X-Men: Apocalypse helmer Bryan Singer—were both accused of sexual assault in the last year, part of a torrent of unmasked misconduct Hollywood’s Me Too movement brought to national attention.

“It’s a tricky thing,” Isaac says, “because you get offered jobs all the time and, I guess, what’s required now? What kind of background checks can someone do beforehand? There isn’t a ton.” (Just ask Olivia Munn.) “Especially as an actor, to make sure that the people you’re working with, surrounding yourself with, haven’t done something in their past that I guess will make you seem somehow like you’re propping up bad behavior.”

Carefully, he expresses reservations about the phenomenon of the last year. “People don’t feel like they’re getting justice through any kind of legal system, so they take it to the streets,” he ventures. “It’s basically street justice. You have no other option. And what happens when you take it to the streets is that damage occurs, and sometimes people get taken down, things get destroyed that you feel like maybe shouldn’t have.”

“But some of it had to happen, and hopefully now there’ll be more of a system in place to take these things seriously,” he says. “It seems like it is starting to happen more, but then you see things like, how can this person get away with it? How can that person? It just boggles the mind.”

He pulls back again, remembering what’s out of his control.

Tomorrow, he’ll be back in an X-Wing suit, as Poe struggles to accept the same truth. In a year, he’ll be home in New York with his wife and young son, focusing on matters more “real” than Hollywood, its artists, and its art. Whatever he chooses whenever he returns, he’ll be ready—for the critics, the questions, for this new reality.

“All I can do is just do what means something to me,” he says. “You just have to find something honest.” One expects he will.

###

#oscar isaac #paul gauguin #at eternity's gate #poe dameron #star wars #carrie fisher #episode ix #episode 9 #operation finale #life itself #inside llewyn davis #hamlet #robin hood #the promise #ex machina #annihilation #show me a hero #x men: apocalypse #interview

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norcumii · 5 years

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Reblogged from the prior tumbl, originally posted 02/04/2016. Question submitted by @makiruz. Slightly reformatted to avoid a readmore cut and whatnot.

In Full of Sith, they always ask new guests how they got into Star Wars. And you know? That's a good question, how did you got into Star Wars?

HEH. Oooh, that’s a bit of a loaded question. So I’ll give you the short answer, which I suspect would fit the thing you mentioned what I haven’t heard of; and then because I’m a wordy bastard what overshares, the long answer which is more accurate and has content warnings for self harm and suicide.

SHORT ANSWER

It was the 80’s. I was young, in single digits, though I couldn’t tell you exactly what age. I was already dealing with an irregular sleep cycle, though all I knew was I had a flashlight, a pile of books near/on my bed, and a thick pound puppies duvet to read under.

I don’t know if I was in my room or on my way to/from the bathroom, but I could hear my parents watching something downstairs. Swooshy noises, a shrill screee, and some thwoom bzzts.

Of course I went downstairs.

I don’t know if it was episode 5 or 6. I’ve a fondness for 6, but carbonite left a HUGE fucking impression on me, and my parents have always approved of muppets, so Yoda.

I knew I loved it. I didn’t have any toys, though I think somewhere there was a print edition of A New Hope running around. I do recall multiple sleepovers at my grandmother’s place – a tiny house on acres and acres of woods – and she’d sometimes pull out Return of the Jedi and we’d watch it together on her tiny TV. Later on I’d be in bed, staring out at woods and trees that I knew, but seemed huge to a little kid, and I’d dream of Ewoks.

RotJ was Gram’s favorite, and for many years mine, too.

I like Ewoks.

VERY LONG ANSWER

TW: mental illness, depression, self harm, suicide, abuse

In late elementary, early middle school, my brother and I were basically reading ANYTHING we could get our hands on. He sometimes dove into books that didn’t interest me, so I’d read the first of something and then be bored and he’d keep going.

Star Wars EU was one of those. It was too grim for me. I think I didn’t run into any of the really good writers. It was all Han and Luke and Leia on the covers, so take that for what you will. There also was no Wookiepeia, so I was depending heavily on the writers’ abilities to convey things to someone very visual, yet pretty impatient with descriptions, so it never took.

I was in high school when The Phantom Menace came out. Mine honorable brother was off at college, so it was with great excitement on my part, and bemused tolerance on my parents’, that they and I went off to the theater.

On the one hand, I was dazzled.

On the other, there was Jar Jar. There was the fact that I hadn’t been impressed with the re-release of the OT – Han shot first. FITE ME. There was the fact that TPM didn’t feel like Star Wars, which was darker and grittier and…simpler to me.

So I wrote it off. Packed Star Wars away as “one of those things” that I’d been into, but felt like I was moving past. I was obsessed with Gargoyles, I was looking at going to college, and I would keep m’damn ewoks without needing to try to extend that vision with gungans.

College sucked. I went in, not sure if I wanted to go into English, for writing, or Psych, because I had always been what I’d now call The Mom Friend. I met a nice guy who tried, but things never really clicked between us, and there was an interesting bit that he was mad about Star Wars and insisted that I read the Rogue Squadron books.

That was a Good Decision. Dating him, not so much.

I had a huge assortment of Life Issues. Got into an abusive relationship that would end up lasting 14 years. Transferred schools. Got the fucking Psych degree, though literally only by the grace of a professor who didn’t want to see the kid not graduate just ‘cause she couldn’t numbers and I did go in and try. Talked to him and still couldn’t with the maths but the effort was there to bump me a few points above failing.

I was burnt out. I was depressed. I tried killing myself a few times – not very good at it, as you can see. Took up self-harm as a coping mechanism. Failed in the still never successful search for a decent therapist in Pittsburgh. Got a job slinging food, because needed some kind of income, and people without pressure was nice. The keeping on a schedule thing failed, leading to an average of 4 hours sleep a night. Losing contact with family and friends because I couldn’t stand the pressure of “how are you?” and “what’s going on in your life?” Clinging to Warcraft because repetitively farming was better than clawing open my back or neck again, and the people there were ok with some rando dropping out of sight on a dime, and only a persistent few had the grace and spirit to make it past some serious defensive issues of mine.

I stopped writing. Stopped caring about Gargoyles, stopped being able to see into that AU I’d made for myself of a crazy clan and the weird human who survived cancer with them.

Stopped going on IM, for the same reasons I stopped talking to people.

I still kept track of some folks via LiveJournal. A handful of the Gargoyles folks who were determined, gods know why and thank you, since I know several are here on the tumbles and I genuinely love you to bits.

I quit my job after five years, because enough was enough between the fact that it had all the hallmarks of an abusive relationship and I was fucking tired of being a manager without any actual authority, and the endless hamster wheel of hiring and people quitting because it was a nice, but highly dysfunctional place.

I missed the customers, though. Several of them are here too, and it’s kinda funny ‘cause I know in at least one case I talked to them about Star Wars. I still hope they’re not too shellshocked that I kinda went down the rabbit hole pretty deep.

Started getting more sleep. Not less anxiety, not less depressed. Tried out a few depression medications, with very mixed results.

Then one day @dogmatix came into the LJ area I still hung out in. Enthusiastically recommending to all and sundry that if there is even a shred of interest in Star Wars, THERE IS THIS THING YOU SHOULD READ.

She drew a Wookiee. That was a character?

I’d always liked Wookiees.

And I needed something to read.

Star Wars was one of those things, from back in the day before things went to shit. Low investment, since if I didn’t like it or didn’t care, then eh. Whatevs. Dogmatix was one of the Gargs holdouts still in my circle (or whatever it is that I was hovering at the edges of), and in the past I’d liked her recommendations more often than I disliked them.

I’m also endlessly weak to her art.

Wookiee.

So I did that thing. That so many of us here have done. It took me about 2 weeks to get through Re-Entry. It had trouble taking root in the depression, but Obi-Wan going crackers was something I could empathize with and appreciate.

There was the hope that had been missing from the EU novels I’d tried reading back in the day.

There was Wookieepedia, which meant I could stop and see what a Nautolan was. I had tabs open for DAYS so when someone named Adi or Gallia who were apparently the same person? I could see who that was. I got stupidly distressed that Abella didn’t have an entry, until I twigged and checked for a Chitanook, and holy shit I could never tell what character was going to crop up as canon, obscure EU character, or home brewed.

I honestly expected to set it aside, get updates as they happened, and gradually step away because that’s how things were going at the time.

But I still needed something to read, to stave off empty hours when my brain was too full of screaming.

On Ebon Wings. I’d loved The Crow when I’d seen it back in high school, and that story tapped into the powerful visuals and the lovely message I’d adored and in ways I still don’t quite understand it somehow validated that I could be mad and still be ok. Maybe. Maybe not now, but someday.

Maybe.

So I gave in and got a Tumbl. I’d been a stubborn holdout, regularly checking the same half dozen feeds daily because dammit, I don’t wanna go through the trouble and I was close to giving up on LJ and another journaly thing? That was stupid. But I wanted to follow Flamethrower and Dogmatix, and it made it infinitely easier to follow several blogs (and oh GODS one of those is a mutual and holy fuck I swear I screamed the day that happened and it’s still a high to realize).

Dogmatix wrote Möbius and Accidental Timeshare, wherein Venge goes universe hopping. That’s also a weakness of mine.

I’d been kvetching IRL about the treadmill and wanting something to watch, and someone mentioned in Dogmatix’s feed The Clone Wars – which conveniently was on Netflix. So I figured what the hell. I was disinclined to like clones – ‘cause yeesh, they’re the reason the Jedi all died, and yeah, ok, the Order was SERIOUSLY FUCKED UP, but.

I still had never seen Episodes 2 or 3.

I turned on the Clone Wars movie, and within ten minutes I nearly fell off the back of the treadmill due to crying.

THIS was the Star Wars of my youth. THIS was what I remembered. A little grim. Lots of quips.

That sound. Lightsabers igniting. A-wings rumbling overhead. Blasterfire, and that music.

I had to stop and calm down and for the first time in ages WRITE [, because I just had to ramble about how it all hit me in the feels]. I had no idea I’d missed this.

By the end of the movie I’d decided ok, I wanted more. Wasn’t sold on these clone fellas, and damned if I could tell one set of armor from another (this is ALSO due to the treadmill screen being calibrated to be a compromise of a very short person – me – and a very tall person, which means neither person gets a decent view but that’s not what the treadmill tv is for).

I’d been told there was an order to the episodes, but I didn’t care. Continuity is for those who think about the future, and I was still regularly suicidal.

So the first episode I watched was Yoda romping around a planet, playing with droids while three clone troopers tried to babysit his mad little ass.

They had me, all in one episode. I loved these guys. They had individuality, I could tell them apart by the voices (which is sometimes just as important to me as visuals) even if I couldn’t name them, and the personalities –

They were loyal. Their primary concern was old batty Yoda which I had adored as a child because MUPPETS. They were willing to die to keep him safe and there was this lovely reciprocity in taking care of each other and all of them, clones and Jedi alike were doomed to extinction and I don’t think I knew yet HOW the clones were except they weren’t in the OT so there was shit going down.

Tragic figures, loyal found family, incredible voice acting, Batty Old Yoda who OH YEAH FUCKING KICKED SO MUCH ASS I COULD NEVER GET ENOUGH.

I wanted to keep those three clones. I was willing to keep them all.

Final blow, that knocked me into the fandom so hard I’ll be surprised if I ever leave?

THIS.

The origins of Balance. This is the post that started a simple notion, to try to write something when I’d gone….anywhere from 7 to 10 years of not writing A SINGLE. DAMNED. THING of substance – and that was after thinking I might try to get a degree related to it.

Darth Wraith was a tentative idea. I was scared @deadcatwithaflamethrower would be irked I wanted to play in her sandbox (oh my gods I was inserting myself into a conversation with her this amazing person who wrote blindingly well and so damn much and how the FUCK was I daring to speak up about a silly half DREAM I’d had because once again I couldn’t sleep).

Then, because I was trying to break out of the depression, the cycles of mental ill health, and if I was on this tumbls thing, fuck it, I’d try the IM thing again.

I’d been gone long enough that pretty much no one on my contact list was still there. That…was ok. There wasn’t the pressure.

And Dogmatix popped on, asking if I wanted to share details about this Sith Qui-Gon thing.

I had A SCENE. ONE. SCENE. And she was spinning it off into this EPIC, which at first I was gleeful because she had neat ideas and I couldn’t wait to see what she would do with it and then wait, she’s not talking about writing it herself, this is more about something WE could work on.

Thank gods it was IM, because I had a little panic about commitment to a project when I regularly was sure I wasn’t going to see tomorrow and if I didn’t wake up one morning that’d be MORE than ok.

Still. There was that itch. The visuals in my brain. The characters I’d started to like in Flamethrower’s universe, which had formed my mental voices for them.

The only sound in my head for so long was just screaming.

Writing down that scene in Knock On Effect, where Venge meets Wraith – that felt good. It never changed much from the first draft to what was posted. The rest grew, and quickly. It was clear if we were doing this, then there were multiple stories, spanning in universe years.

And then there were spinoffs. Wonderful ideas and plots spiraling away from this one notion, and gods I wanted to write about those glorious clones.

How’d I get into Star Wars?

Chance. One strange little step at a time, and a bunch of miracles and horrors that kept me bleeding but not dying. Damn good fic. The kindness of friends. The generosity of strangers.

The tragedy of a once great order of space monks, and their allies-forced-to-be-betrayers clones.

One little picture, of Qui-Gon Jinn with Sith eyes.

#tumblageddon #reviving from the purge #star wars #tw #self harm #suicide #depression #mental illness #abuse #emotional #Norcumi has Opinions again #deadcatwithaflamethrower #dogmatix #i did not expect to cry when writing this #star wars saved my life #literally

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permian-tropos · 6 years

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The Last Jedi and Immersion

Forget the specific arguments about why people disliked TLJ for a minute. For every argument, you can point to another plot element in another SW film that does much the same. Eventually I’ve just heard people say, “it just made me feel awful, what can I say, how can I like a movie that made me feel awful? I couldn’t engage with it. Obviously all these problems I have with it are problems with the film.” Seems pretty legit.

Overall, People who hate TLJ seem unable to suspend disbelief. It’s “not their Star Wars”. But I don’t think this isn’t a problem coming from the facts about what happens in the plot, to the characters (since so many things that people disliked are things people have suspended disbelief for in other circumstances). I think this is something caused by the overall aesthetic tone of the film.

This could mean the film has bad acting, bad cinematography, bad editing, and so on, and I’ve seen people try to argue that. But only Star Wars fans have tried to argue this in large numbers. Bad filmmaking should be apparent to anyone with a background in film studies or film appreciation. But this is a movie that mainstream and independent critics generally had a good reaction too. It was also a movie that got good reactions from the general audience. Not everyone has a Rotten Tomatoes account, but polls of audience members as they were leaving theaters gave it something like an 89% approval rating, iirc. So… what the heck. How can only Star Wars fans be experts on film?

They’re not — but they’re something like experts on Star Wars film. Star Wars is their (our?) standard for what a good Star Wars movie is. This is even more specific than judging a movie by its genre — for a space opera film, The Last Jedi is really freaking good (sorry that’s just blatantly true). But it’s not being judged as space opera.

There are elements to the genre “Star Wars” that are highly specific and I don’t even think that’s a bad thing. I’m a big Star Trek fan, and I’m not a fan of things using the Star Trek property that don’t keep to its genre. Because I think it’s a good genre. But I think TLJ does something really funky clever with a foundational aspect of the Star Wars genre. I think it’s a good movie because it evokes reactions that are not all positive and are also not unintended. It’s a cunning little bastard.

Punch it, Chewie, let’s do more of this hardcore meta shit:

Star Wars is supposed to be inviting you in. It’s an immersive experience. The fact that it’s full of all this aesthetic detail, the reason why things like the cantina scene are so iconic, is because it doesn’t just serve to move the characters’ arcs along, or the plot. It introduces you to a setting that could be explored from a lot of angles. It’s a place you could imagine experiencing for yourself. That’s why I think the prequels have been rehabilitated after all these years — because they’re full of settings with details that spark the imagination. And one thing I think people felt disappointed by with TLJ is that it is very tight and sparse with its settings. Even when it comes to its parallel movie, Empire, this is distinct. In Empire, the settings are not just places where things happen, but they’re locations where you know tons of other things happened you never saw. The Hoth base was built and manned by tons of Rebels. Dagobah might not be settled, but it’s full of weird alien creatures you just know are lurking somewhere in the swamp. Bespin is a whole city. And even isolated asteroids might have giant worms in them. Now, Empire got mixed reception when it came out. And it’s also a lot more sparing with its settings. If you think about all the other movies (ie. come up with examples for yourself this is already too long), they’re far more inviting. They tantalize you with things that aren’t really conveying plot, or are maybe overcomplicated or weird, but that you’re happy to have the protagonists interact with because it’s just a cool place. You want to imagine having your own adventure there.

But TLJ has locations that are intensely focused on the plot purpose they serve — Ahch-To is a small island with just a few residents, the Resistance fleet is claustrophobic and dwindling, Crait is visually similar to Hoth but it’s not a fully manned base, it’s abandoned, and once its broken down equipment is used, it’s abandoned again. Snoke doesn’t have a whole castle to lurk in, he’s got a minimalist throne room on a big ship, and those Imperial/Order vessels can spark some imagination, but they have kind of repetitive architecture, and everyone dresses the same. They don’t feel as big as they are. The only location that has that kind of expansiveness is Canto Bight, and the movie deliberately denies you the wonder and excitement you’re usually supposed to have. Finn is in awe of all this ostentatious wealth, and Rose immediately shuts that down. Even the fact that they get busted by the po-po for parking wrong is so exclusionary. You’re not allowed to enjoy this, first of all it’s full of evil rich fuckos, second of all you’re not welcome here, you’re riffraff and you’ll be spotted instantly. The only people we can project onto for our own adventures are — and this is VERY VERY INTENTIONAL please remember this for later — the slave kids.

The Last Jedi is not being willfully ignorant about what people enjoy in their Star Wars. It’s paring down that feeling of adventure on purpose. Everything is bare and small and contained. You don’t have a place to slide your original Star Wars character in. You can’t join up. You are excluded. If you want be Luke’s padawan, too bad, his academy is gone and you never even saw much of it besides a burning building. And he hides on this tiny island until Rey comes along, and shortly after, he dies. If you want to be playing the craps table at Canto Bight, too bad, they’re all gross oligarchs, there aren’t even any familiar aliens in the crowd, and none of the patrons of the city get any characterization. Only DJ, and he’s deeply underwhelming and ordinary, like he wandered in from the wrong movie. If you want to be with the First Order, too bad, they all look like asshole chumps. They don’t get to look cool in this one, unlike in TFA, where Hux’s super fascist speech and the enormous scale of Starkiller Base were at least sort of thrillingly evil. I had First Order OCs after I saw TFA. I imagined them on SKB in this remote sector, having fascinating adventures. There was room for them. Not anymore! If you want to be with the Resistance in TLJ — too bad! Most of them die! You don’t want to be on one of those ships, as they’re being blown out of the void. There are so few people left at the end of the film that they all fit inside the Falcon. And you know you’re not on the Falcon with them. A lot of people were instinctively, deeply perturbed by how many Resistance members died, the fact that it’s just a few people left. And you know what, I wouldn’t be surprised if a big factor in this is because it doesn’t feel like Star Wars. Star Wars has always had settings and organizations and factions that you can imagine immersing yourself in, that’s kind of its biggest appeal. But this movie doesn’t let you in.

THAT’S FUCKING BRILLANT

What would you say is the central conflict the main characters from TFA goes through in this movie? — they struggle to feel like they belong. And by main characters, I mean Rey and Finn. Rey and Finn were the main characters that in TFA we got to journey alongside as they faced strange new worlds and people. They are the outsiders to this universe. Rey never left the barren Jakku until TFA. Finn had never left the confining, dehumanizing ranks of the First Order. We wanted to see more of the galaxy through their eyes.

But in TLJ, Rey struggles to feel like she has a place in this universe, and makes some bad decisions while pursuing a heroic destiny. And Finn doesn’t feel at home with the Resistance; he only wants to find Rey, and then later save the fleet so that Rey can return safely.

The fact that the movie conveys that feeling of not belonging, of being locked out, of being an outsider, of not having a place in it all, by subverting the most common Star Wars experience of feeling included and swept up in the magic, is REALLY REALLY AMAZING. People feel horrible from this film, they feel like it betrayed them, they feel like it isn’t Their Star Wars, they feel like they’ve been shut out. And that’s incredible, because it’s exactly the angst that the characters were enduring. It puts you through what they went through. You have to feel that alienation. And people who loved Rey and Finn are not less invested in those characters after the film. They’re really fucking invested, that’s why they’re super pissed that it felt like Rey and Finn weren’t treated right. The movie didn’t kill people’s investment. It heightened it deeply — and that was a negative emotion! It felt awful! And it was a deeply powerful aesthetic experience. Which is good art.

But remember the fact that the only people you can project onto are the Canto Bight slave kids? They’re the only group that is vaguely defined enough that you could imagine being a kid and being one of them.

Why do you think, having painfully restricted you, the viewer, to this one tiny group, the movie ends on them? Why does it end showing these kids retelling the events of the film with cute handmade toys in a language you don’t understand, so you can imagine them saying anything? Why does it end with one of the kids walking out onto a shallow incline pointing up at the stars, like the slope of the opening crawl of Star Wars, call his broom with the Force, and wistfully watching a ship jump into lightspeed?

The Last Jedi shuts you out the whole way through until that final scene. You aren’t invited to join, just as the characters are grappling with their sense of place and purpose (arguably Luke also grapples with this, and he used to be our POV protagonist too). But then it finally, FINALLY, invites you back. It makes you wait the whole fucking movie to see a place where you belong. And it shows you a completely random little kid using the Force.

That’s you. You’re Broom Boy. You have something special and wonderful inside you, and you are important, but you don’t know it yet, and the universe doesn’t know it yet. You are latent. You aren’t ready yet, but your time is coming.

But the thing is, this ending doesn’t fully resolve the anxiety of being shut out. It doesn’t make you feel like you love this movie. Every aesthetic choice leading up until this point hasn’t felt like Star Wars. One scene isn’t going to change how you see this film. But this isn’t the last film of the trilogy. The next film will be about closure, and resolution — for the characters, but also for your anxiety. You will be invited back in (I hope). The Last Jedi doesn’t position itself so you know exactly why you felt wrong about this whole affair. It just induces that feeling in you, to prepare you for Episode 9. Because you are definitely going to buy a ticket for Episode 9. There are people who expect Ep9 will somehow rebuke TLJ, and undo everything it does. I sincerely hope it doesn’t. That would be undermining the flow of a whole trilogy. But if it gives you this feeling of belonging again, that doesn’t mean TLJ was a mistake. Maybe if TLJ was exciting and satisfying and pleasing without a hint of anxiety, it would sort of fizzle out by the time Episode 9 comes around. I think we’re supposed to be agitated and angrily hungry for more.

#my post #the last jedi #more FUCKIN G META OH MY GOD SHUT UP ME

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screenandcinema · 2 years

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The Taming of the Fantastic Beasts

In 2013, two years after the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part Two, came a bombshell announcement, Warner Bros. would be producing a new film series set in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter with author J.K. Rowling making her screenwriting debut. In 2014, word came out that the Fantastic Beasts series would be a trilogy, Then in 2016, a month before Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them from director David Yates (who helmed the final four Harry Potter films) hit theaters Rowling announced the story would encompass five films instead of three. The first film went on to gross $234 million domestically with a total of $814 million worldwide. Domestically, the box office of Fantastic Beasts trailed all eight Harry Potter films, and worldwide it only outgrossed one Harry Potter film 2004′s Prisoner of Azkaban which only earned $797 million worldwide.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is an interesting case study on how to launch a pre-planned franchise. It’s possible that Warner Bros. was uneasy with the idea of guaranteeing a pentalogy of films about wizards not named Harry Potter in the 1920s and 1930s because the first film is amazingly self-contained. There is no big cliffhanger or questions left unanswered or villains on the loose by the film’s end. If Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them bombed at the box office and the future films were canceled, there would be no dangling threads left to irk moviegoers - unlike those waiting for the fourth Divergent film that is never coming. Sure, there are a couple of name drops or illusions to future characters, the mention of Dumbledore, the photo of Leta Lestrange, the acknowledgment of Newt’s “war hero” brother, that set up part two (and beyond). But altogether the movie tells a single story and does so efficiently.

The sequel, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (almost directed by David Yates) builds upon the first film, and feels more like what you’d expect from the first film in an extended series, not to mention creates more ties to the Harry Potter series. Jude Law joins the series as Dumbledore, Johnny Depp who plated Gellert Grindelwald in a short sequence at the end of the first film sees his role expanded, and audiences even return to Hogwarts in the film. The sequel begins to undo some of the standalone aspects of the first film, Jacob whose memory is wiped at the end of the first film suddenly remembers, and Credence who exploded during the climax of Fantastic Beasts is somehow alive and working at a circus in Paris. The sequel feels strangely unplanned and contrarian to its predecessor (think The Last Jedi to The Rise of Skywalker), yet J.K. Rowling is the only credited screenwriter on both films.

The Crimes of Grindelwald is the opposite of Fantastic Beasts, it doesn’t feel self-contained in the least as it sets the stage for the actual plot of the series (a Global Wizarding War between Grindelwald and Dumbledore during World War II), while quickly rehashing (quite effectively) the important events of Fantastic Beasts in case you hadn’t seen it. The film also quickly introduces some new characters to the mix, Newt’s assistant Bunty, and an American professor (via a small moving black and white photo in a book) who look to have expanded roles in future installments. The film also has a central mystery that is solved, unsolved, and solved again very quickly in its third act.

When The Crimes of Grindelwald was released in 2018, the reviews were far worst than its predecessor and the Potter films. And the box office was just as bad, grossing only $159.5 million domestically and $654.8 million worldwide, almost a third less than Fantastic Beasts domestically, and almost 20% down worldwide. I remember leaving the film having rather enjoyed it, but was more excited for what future films could bring to the series than I was for what I had just seen.

That box office likely gave Warner Bros. pause too. A third film in the series wasn’t greenlit until November 2019 (a year after The Crimes of Grindelwald was released), with a release date set for November 2021. Filming was set to begin in March 2020, but we all know what happened then. On the first day of filming for director David Yates, principal photography on the threequel was delayed until September 2020. There are two big changes between the first two Fantastic Beasts and the third one. The first is that after receiving solo screenwriting credit on the first two films, J.K. Rowling now shares the credit on this film with Steve Kloves, who wrote seven of the eight Harry Potter films (sorry Order of the Phoenix). What difference that will make is unknown but is a welcome change to the series (especially since Rowling is not the voice anyone wants to hear anymore).

The second change was, that after shooting only one scene in the film, Johnny Depp announced that at the request of Warner Bros., he would not be reprising his role as Grindelwald due to the negative publicity surrounding the actor at the time. Mads Mikkelsen was hired to take over the role of the dark wizard in the film and there is no word as of yet if the change in the character’s on-screen appearance will be explained in the film. Mikkelsen’s Grindelwald (from the trailers at least) looks more in line with the young Grindelwald and old Grindelwald seen in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 1 (Jamie Campbell Bower who played young Grindelwald reprised the role in The Crimes of Grindelwald) then Depp’s portrayal of the wizard with pale skin, white hair, and mad mix-matched eyes.

In anticipation of this month’s release of the third film, now titled Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, I decided to revisit the first two films of the series, back-to-back. I had only seen Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them twice before, once in theaters and once again before the sequel came out, and I hadn’t seen The Crimes of Grindelwald since I saw it in theaters in 2018. I felt a new appreciation for the first two films on the second (and third) watch. As much as Crimes of Grindelwald rewrites Fantastic Beasts it does it more so as a starting point. It is clear that The Crimes of Grindelwald, as I said before, is the first film of the series and that Fantastic Beasts acts as a prologue of sorts, setting the stage and the characters.

My biggest revelation was that the fantastic beasts themselves are the weakest part of the Fantastic Beasts series. Newt Scamander, the main character of the series, is a magizoologist, so these magical animals and creatures are presented as an important part of the series, but they really aren’t, they are just there to be seen and help our heroes out of dyer situations. The war between Grindelwald and Dumbledore, two friends (and more), who now are diametrically opposed, set against the backdrop of a Europe about to be engulfed in war yet again is what pulls me into the story.

With The Secrets of Dumbledore set to release next week, the ultimate question in my mind is what is next for the Fantastic Beasts series and the Wizarding World as a whole. Early reviews for the threequel have been positive (with a ton of praise for the decision to replace Depp with Mikkelsen), but honestly, it all comes down to box office. The new film isn’t expected to match the opening weekend haul of its predecessors ($74 million and $62 million) due to the changes in theatrical expectations these days, but there are still goals to be hit. Some estimates put its opening at between $45-55 million for the three-day Easter weekend (Hell, if Morbius can open with $39 million then Dumbledore can do better). Any number at the higher end of that range would be a win for Warner Bros., but the international box office will be key for Dumbledore to be a success.

I’d expect no matter the box office, there will be a fourth Fantastic Beasts movie, the question is whether or not there is will be a fifth. Earlier this year, producer David Heyman commented that work on the fourth script had begun yet. I could easily see Warner Bros. trying to push the fourth and fifth films into a single final film that wraps up the series if Secrets of Dumbledore doesn’t perform well. If that is the case, don’t expect a swift end to the Wizarding World, instead Warner Bros. will take a beat, reevaluate, then find a new way to explore Rowling’s universe (preferably without Rowling).

-MB-

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geoffreytoday · 2 years

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Ewoks! Get yer Ewoks here!

We've arrived at Return of the Jedi. All aboard the merchandising train!

My first memory of seeing a film in the theater is Return of the Jedi. We had tickets to a preview screening put on by a local radio station. I've still got the invitation card somewhere, it's very spiffy.

I remember my mom being grossed out by Jabba the Hutt, and whispering to her to not be afraid because he was just a puppet.

As a kid, Jedi was far and away my favourite Star Wars movie. Which isn't surprising, it's very much designed to appeal to kids. It had cool aliens and monsters, rad space battles, crazy fast speeder bikes, adorable ewoks, and the hero defeats the villain and saves his father and the galaxy. Talk about a crowd pleaser!

As I got older, my tastes changed, and while my love for RotJ will always remain strong, I began to see its shortcomings more clearly. Eventually I came to regard it as the weakest entry in the orig trig. That shouldn't be taken as condemnation though. That's more akin to saying it's my third favourite flavour of ice cream.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with my edit honestly. There aren't any useable deleted scenes, so I'm pretty much confined to the material that's there. I do have it in mind to use some scenes from the prequels in a few key spots as flashbacks. Not full on flashbacks necessarily. I may try to find a way to superimpose them, semi transparent, into the scenes I want to use them in. That might not look good though, so I'll have to experiment and see if I can find a tasteful way to incorporate them.

I'm thinking I'd like to use the scenes of Anakin's transformation into Vader while Obi-Wan is talking to Luke on Degobah, "He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."

I'd also like to incorporate some scenes of Leia being taken to Alderaan when Obi-Wan is explaining how the twins were separated to protect them from discovery by the Emperor.

When Leia talks about her memories of her mother, I'd like to include some shots of Padme.

I don't know if I can make any of that work, but I'll give it a shot.

I might try to restructure the first act of the film. Luke's plan is pretty convoluted and has a lot of potential failure points. I'm going to have to think about possible ways that first act could be restructured. Maybe Luke's rescue attempt is a response to the other's failed plans, as opposed to all that stuff being part of Luke's plan.

I do have one kinda ambitious idea for an edit, I don't know if I can pull it off though. I'd like to move the Emperor's throne room from the Death Star to the super star destroyer.

Here's my reasoning: The whole throne room sequence is kinda meaningless if it takes place on the Death Star. If Luke falls to the dark side, it doesn't matter, because he'll only be evil for a few minutes before the death star gets blown up and they all die anyway. The stakes of the scene are much higher if they're not on the death star.

If Luke is turned, and they aren't killed in the destruction of the Death Star, he becomes a greater threat to the rebellion than the death star was, because he knows all of their secrets. He knows where they are, their strengths and weaknesses, security protocols, he probably has a numbers of passwords and security clearances. As either a direct threat, or a subversive one, Luke Skywalker fallen to the dark side could potentially wipe out the entire rebellion.

On Endor, I'm going to try to do some judicious editing to make the ewoks a little less silly and cutesy, and make their scenes a little more grounded, and try for a little more emotional weight, like in that one ewok death scene.

The movie 1000% ends with Yub Nub, none of that galaxy wide celebration crap :p Just because the Emperor died doesn't mean the Imperial government instantly dissolved. The galaxy is still under imperial rule. There's going to be a lengthy processes of deposing the Imperial government as it splinters without the Emperor.

That's not important though, what's important is that we end the movie singing Yub Nub, as nature intended.

#star wars #the reformation cut #fan edit #And Anakin's force ghost is an old man again #no more creeper Anakin leering #seriously why did they choose that specific shot of Anakin for the force ghost?

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