Will Kill For Hera Syndulla Screentime

[not-this-crude-matter]

One day Palpatine was like, "New guy just dropped: Vader. You don't get to read his CV but he's allowed to kill anyone he wants. He's guy #2 in a religion that's just us. He gets to order the navy around."

It's like if the Archbishop of Canterbury had diplomatic immunity and an aircraft carrier.

[blogofex]

That's literally just how archbishops were for most of the middle ages. Very authentic.

[padofwan]

The thing is "Padawan. Steal a car." is actually one of the oldest and noblest Jedi traditions. Part of the standard duties of being a Padawan involves securing the getaway vehicle when your assignment has gone sideways six times over and developed into a full Situation. They have all done this. I know in my heart that even Luminara at some point looked at a situation and sighed and asked Barriss to please steal a car before the shooting starts.

[padmestrilogy]

yoda giving up mid fight with sidious for no reason then exiling himself for 30 years really annoys me & i think it’s cowardly but it’s also exactly what i would do in that situation like oh my fucking god you’re not making me fight the guy that shoots lightning a second longer. he literally shoots lightning. i’m going to make myself soup in the forever forest and if another stupid kid ever comes by trying to get me to help him fight anything i’m gonna eat his lunch and hit his dog with a stick

[probsdontrememberme]

Star Wars aliens based of photos

[blueberry-ry]

Beskar’ta Necklaces

A style that originates from the planet of Harswee, by the fusion of their own traditional jewelery with mando culture, which later also became popular with the New Mandalorians movement (but with a more simplier design).

[tossawary]

Thinking about how Han Solo is apparently a regular visitor to Tatooine and Different First Meeting AUs... if Han Solo had fucked up and gotten into horrible debt earlier, maybe Jabba might've forced him to become a podracer or something. He IS a hell of a pilot. (He's maybe even a little Force sensitive about it!) Humans don't tend to have the reflexes for podracing, but that's fine, because the crowd likes a good deadly explosion every now and again.

The funniest stupid thing that could happen here is some podracer promoter looking at Han Solo and going, "If that's fake, that's a stupid ass name. If that's real, that's stupid ass name; never use your real name. We've got to get you a gimmick, kid. We've got to make up a persona. We're gonna sell a storyline, so you can do better for yourself than just helping Jabba fix the races to get the most of the sports betting money."

(Download the new Duel of the Fans app for live betting on wins and crashes today!!!)

"There's only been one human podracer of any note here, some really tiny kid about 30 years ago, and people still talk about it. So we're gonna say you're him all grown up and coming home. We're gonna build on something here. No, I don't know how humans age and I don't care. You'll be wearing a helmet most of the time, and then we'll just say you look good for your age. Humans are ugly, who can tell? Kid, we're going to make you a STAR."

And fine, whatever, it works to start out with. Han is mainly focused on not dying, both on the racetracks and at Jabba's terrible, non-stop parties he's forced to attend sometimes. (Boba Fett SUCKS; Han would shove that guy into the sarlacc pit if he could get away with it.) He's GOT to find a way to get himself and Chewie off of this awful sand planet...

And then this belligerent teenage farmkid shows up like, "I heard about your podraces on the radio! Are you my DAD?!?!" And also two Star Destroyers are suddenly looming overhead, full of Imperial Security Bureau agents AND Imperial Inquisitors, demanding to know how Jedi General Anakin Skywalker is alive and why he's making dramatic villainous speeches kayfabe-style about how he's going win the Mos Espa Belt for humans everywhere on the Coruscanti Galactic Sports Network's Outer Rim Podracing channel.

[mercysong-tardis]

My Duchess Satine Kryze (Ceremonial Gown) cosplay, photographed by Michael Hardison (on Facebook) at PopCon 2024

[ozvezdja]

its really unfortunate that padme no longer used the body double approach to security after aotc because the concept of the queen of fakeout deaths being married to the guy who loses his shit at the thought of her dying is honestly the wildest fucking thing and i think it's underutilised. let's give anakin a few trial runs before his big breakdown ok. maybe seeing padme getting assassinated live on space tv on a monthly basis will let him microdose on acceptance and inner peace. he can get into a different stage of grief each time and maybe when rots rolls around he will be fine

[ahsoka-in-a-hood]

No WAIT WAIT fucking WAIT. RoTS happens, Padmé dies, and Sabe steps into her place. She shows up at the senate. No one knows Padmé is dead except a very few people. Vader is loosing his fucking mind all over again. Sabe is playing a very high stakes game but she's not about to let Padmé's life's work die with her

[padmestrilogy]

it was deeply inconvenient for the galaxy et large and often difficult to understand, but padme really did love that guy. and if your analysis of her is based in a denial of that, you’re going nowhere

[phoenixyfriend]

"Padmé was an ineffective centrist" Padmé was such a thorn in the side of the far right that three successive movies had fascists trying to kill her, specifically, for getting in the way.

If fascists keep trying to kill you, I don't think you're ineffective! And I really doubt you're a centrist!

[phoenixyfriend]

If the fascists are trying this hard to kill you, you're not ineffective.

[mmeiram]

funny thing, the senator danced with a jedi all night during the senate ball.... they must be really good friends.

[mmeiram]

biblically accurate anidala

[maidenvault]

During my last rewatch of the prequels I was actually shocked by how much I've misremembered or decontextualized certain moments in my mind because of how they're often talked about in fandom as showing the Jedi as too arrogant, too bureaucratic, generally just burying their heads in the sand while everything goes bad etc. So I'm gonna try to address every individual scene that typically gets brought up to argue that this is an actual theme in Lucas's portrayal of the Order.

The Council doesn't take Qui-Gon's account of meeting a Sith seriously.

Mace and Ki Adi Mundi do both express doubt this guy could be a Sith. (Understandably! Historically they've never known Sith to be able to hide their existence, and for them to have survived totally in secret for a thousand years is a pretty wild thing for Qui-Gon to be so sure of.)

BUT Yoda admits that the dark side is hard to see, and Mace assures Qui-Gon they'll do everything to find out the identity of the attacker. Later he's ordered to go back to Naboo and try to draw out Maul to discover more. Qui-Gon accepts this and doesn't ask for backup. Why should he? He held his own against Maul before, and Maul's probably not gonna show himself again to face a ton of Jedi. They end up missing the chance to learn who trained Maul because of how things go down, but Qui-Gon's death isn't the result of the Council mishandling the situation.

At the funeral, Yoda says the presence of one Sith means there's another out there. They know they've got to be on guard now and will be, but they've got no more leads for now.

2. Qui-Gon's not here to free slaves.

There's this idea that slavery existing on Tatooine shows the Order is apparently too tied up doing shady things for self-interested politicians (footage not found) to help the people who really need it. But Padme's shocked to know the Skywalkers are slaves for a reason. The truth is there isn't a lot of slavery in the galaxy at this time because the Jedi have helped keep it that way for centuries only by working with the Republic. In TCW we see that Zygerrian slavers have a particular hatred of Jedi because they're literally The Anti Slavery People and did so much of the work to crack down on their trade. But Tatooine is controlled by the Hutts and they simply don't have the resources to start a war with them.

(And honestly, it's crazy how people talk like Qui-Gon's a monster for honestly and apologetically telling Anakin no, that's not why he's here. This is a child he's already indebted to and who has a hero-worshipping idea of Jedi, it would be fucked up for him not to be clear about how he can't help him and his mom.)

3. They doubt Dooku could be behind the assassination attempt.

This I understand shows the Jedi to be a little naive. But they knew Dooku as a good man, and at this point he and his followers are still putting on a show of wanting to secede for idealistic reasons (and a few of them, manipulated by Dooku, actually do have good intentions). Only later do the Jedi learn they're illegally building an army before they've even officially left the Republic and clearly have no interest in the peaceful resolution Padme's been advocating for. And they only find this out because they have Obi-Wan investigate the assassin and this very quickly leads him to Dooku.

4. "Arrogance, yes. A trait more and more common among Jedi. Even the older, more experienced ones."

In context, this line from Yoda is clearly not meant to be taken so seriously. Obi-Wan says he fears Anakin is too arrogant, and this is Yoda's light-hearted way of telling him not to be so hard on him. Part of training a Padawan is learning to trust them so they can grow, and Obi-Wan perhaps needs the reminder that he isn't done learning himself.

Of course Yoda saying this could be partly motivated by them having been caught off guard before by the existence of Darth Maul and the dark side clouding their awareness, as we're told repeatedly throughout the PT they know is a problem. But it's kind of contradictory to take this as confirmation that this is a serious fatal flaw of theirs. If someone acknowledges their own arrogance then they're aware of their ability to be wrong, which means they can't actually be that arrogant. If truly meant in a general sense and not just as a gentle reproof of Obi-Wan, it's a pretty self-deprecating comment coming from Yoda.

5. "If an item does not appear in our records, it does not exist."

Chief Librarian Jocasta Nu gives this haughty response to Obi-Wan looking for Kamino, a system that's not in the Jedi Archives. So being so overly confident in the infallible knowledge of the Jedi, he takes her word for it and totally drops this lead.

Except no, he goes to someone older and wiser to figure out what this actually means. And he and Yoda are forced to conclude that the unthinkable - a trusted person among them somehow had reason to erase information from the archive - must nonetheless be what happened. This is honestly an exception that proves the rule: Kamino, and we can assume only Kamino, is missing from the archive only because it was removed, which is so suspicious it just shows he must be on the right track to discovering something. Jocasta is kind of snooty about it but theirs obviously is supposed to be one of the most accurate and complete databases in the galaxy.

6. Obi-Wan doesn't believe what Dooku tells him about the Senate.

For one thing, in this conversation Dooku's lying about basically everything but this. And I can't ever stress enough that Palpatine is a threat unlike anything the Jedi have ever dealt with before, who's already taken control of so much before they even know they're fighting anything, so the idea that a Sith is controlling the Senate would be really hard for anyone to believe.

Still, we know Obi-Wan reports this to the Council anyway. But it's a vague statement and they still don't have any information to act on. Palpatine soon has them very busy putting out fires in the war, and naturally fighting the Separatists who are led by Sith seems the best way for them to get to the bottom of what exactly is going on with the dark side. And they do finally turn their attention to how power-hungry Palpatine is getting once the war is nearly over and they've got the bandwidth for it, and think about what they might have to do if he's the threat to their democracy they fear, but of course he's too many steps ahead of them all the time.

---

So basically, what we see the Jedi being so guilty of in these examples are thought crimes. When confronted with the crazy explanation that happens to be true, their instinctive reaction is "No, I don't think that's possible." And then they do their due diligence to uncover as much of the truth as they can anyway. And Yoda, the Grand Master of them all, is often the first to admit that their first assumptions could be wrong. But Palpatine wouldn't be a good villain if his moves were predictable and he couldn't get an advantage over the good guys - that's just how storytelling works sometimes and it's not that deep.

It honestly felt stupid typing so much of this out because it's 90% just describing what actually happens in these scenes. But I guess it's a lot to ask that people actually carefully watch the films they discuss. 😒

[larkstonguesinaspicpart1]

[ishowdespair-deactivated2026012]

[josephsaturn]

I think that “Anakin was a slave child who was groomed by Palpatine and raised by someone who wasn’t ready to take on a child, thereby leaving him in a social limbo state where he’s surrounded by people but only has a few close confidants, with the one he trusts the most actively trying to take advantage of him”

and

“Anakin was taught right from wrong from a young age, first by his mother and then by Kenobi, but any time he was presented with a choice, actively CHOSE WRONG EVERY SINGLE TIME”

are two sentences that can, should, and MUST coexist to fully understand Anakin Skywalker as a character

[stealingpotatoes]

Please ALSO imagine Ahsoka asking Padmé's help with planning an outfit for some Fancy Party she has to attend. Also maybe Satine is there.

YES YES YES YES I THINK I WILL IMAGINE THAT