I like those odds @mandallorian - Tumblr Blog

underbellamy-deactivated2023100

*breathes in deeply while meditating* *in a yoga instructor voice* I will be calm when the 100 s3 trailer comes out today, I will not freak out, or scream at the top of my lungs and have a stroke in the process. I will collect myself and my thoughts and be nothing but calm. Absolutely. Calm.

#the 100

christophernolan

THE ACOLYTE Season 1 | Episode 8

#the acolyte #oshamir #star wars

d3epfriedangels

Alexa play Kate Bush's Oh to Be In Love

#anidala #star wars

loth-creatures

Loving star wars is a curse and perhaps a mental illness of some kind

#star wars

goodsirs

The Acolyte 1.05 "Night"

#the acolyte #qimir #sol #star wars

mandolare

Osha & Qimir + HANDS

#the acolyte #oshamir #star wars

bumblbibi

the slight facial expression he does when she breaks eye contact.

#the acolyte #qimir #osha aniseya #oshamir #star wars

ncfan-1

People remark a lot on Mae’s girlfailureness this season, and with good reason since it’s more overt, but frankly, both of the twins were kind of in that place in Season 1. Neither of them are where they’re really meant to be in Season 1, from the standpoint of their mindsets and what works for them.

Mae’s rage is more than earned, and I’d argue that she straight-up has a filial duty to see that her coven’s killers answer for what they’ve done, as after her mother’s death she was for a short time the new matriarch of her coven (before the rest of them, you know, died, with Mae unable to fulfill her duty to protect them on account of being an eight-year-old girl). But it’s not what drives Mae. Mae is ultimately proven to be driven by her sense of duty and her care for her community and her loved ones, with her rage as an expression of this duty and care because her community were all killed, and the killers never suffered any consequences for it. She could not protect them as their Mother, and she cannot be with them ever again—all she can do is this, make sure that they can at least rest in peace by having their killers answer for their crimes, one way or another.

And the reason I know that it’s the sense of duty and care that drives Mae, and not the rage, is because she can ultimately look at Sol, the man who indefensibly killed her mother—with Indara killing the rest, you can make a solid argument for self-defense, but you can make no such argument with Sol—and offer him a way out that doesn’t involve his death, if he will only confess. Even to her mother’s murderer she is willing to extend this grace, in exchange for justice being done, for someone finally answering for what was done to her and her people, for the galaxy knowing what happened on Brendok, and being forced to look at this place and see not an empty ruin but a once-community that was meted death where it deserved life.

When Mae lets her rage lead her actions, she flubs at every turn. The only reason she can kill Indara is by using trickery (and, by implication, Indara being seriously disturbed by the implication that she was alive all this time and left to die on Brendok), with Indara wiping the floor with her until she realizes that this is Mae, that Mae was alive all this time—and after Indara dies, Mae looks visibly unsatisfied, as if she’s realizing deep-down that this isn’t really what she wanted, after all. In foreshadowing of what Mae really wants deep-down, she offers Torbin the choice of living if he is willing to confess what he did to the Jedi Council, but because she doesn’t have the confidence that she can persuade him to confess, she takes poison with her as well and offers it as an alternative choice—and when Torbin does take the poison, Mae looks visibly unhappy, making it plain that that wasn’t really what she wanted. She’s completely unbalanced by rage (and also, I think, by fear; there’s a moment when she freezes up after realizing that Sol is there that genuinely looks like she’s mentally regressed to the night her mother was killed) when she fights Sol in Episode 2, and can’t lay a finger on him as a result. Even Jecki, who is a talented but very green Padawan, gives her problems—Mae only very rarely has the upper-hand in their prolonged scuffle.

In Episode 8, Mae stops letting the rage lead her, and suddenly, her competence levels get a huge boost. You see Mae get the drop on Sol not once but twice, first by getting herself out of the restraints right under his nose and shocking him, and then by interrupting him before he can kill Qimir and this time successfully laying into him, ultimately getting his lightsaber away from him. She’s the most level-headed person in the three-way—soon-to-be-four-way—confrontation that follows, the most clear-eyed person in the fortress.

I’m not saying that Mae is never selfish. Her treatment of Osha before Episode 8 is Exhibits A through Z of her capacity for selfishness. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it’s in Episode 8, where Mae seems to recognize that it’s not the rage that should lead her, but her sense of duty and care for her community, that Mae is finally able to let go of Osha and let her go away from her side, if that’s where she’ll be happy. Because she’s grown fully into her role as a community leader, and a good community leader recognizes that not everyone who was born into that community will be happy and fulfilled there, and if that’s so, you should let them go without bitterness, because their happiness should matter more to you than their staying here. Because that’s what a good family member should do—prioritize their family’s happiness over their physical proximity. She has fully grown into her role as Mother, because she has shown herself willing to make the same selfless choice that her own mother once made. The tragedy of it is that Mae has no coven left to be Mother of.

Meanwhile, you have Osha. Osha who ultimately failed out of the Jedi because she couldn’t let go of her anger and resentment. Osha who tried to make it work in an Order that prioritizes duty and care for others, but who couldn’t make it work there because that isn’t what drives her. Osha is driven by her emotions, by her need to seek out what fulfills her personally. There’s nothing wrong with this—but even if she had been able to let go of her anger and resentment toward Mae, I don’t think Osha would ever have thrived in the Jedi, because her prioritizing emotions and personal fulfilment over duty and care for others is antithetical to what the Jedi are.

And in Season 1, Osha is adrift. Yes, she hasn’t trained in six years, but I don’t think that’s an explanation for how badly her connection with the Force has atrophied. The Jedi’s mindset never really worked for her, but she still managed to internalize it, and I think that the conflict between the Jedi mindset of selfless care for others and Osha’s own need for personal fulfilment above that, coupled with that lack of training, is what has caused her connection with the Force to atrophy so badly.

She is plainly driven by her anger and resentment towards Mae, and being told to cool down and let it go by Sol just as plainly frustrates her. Even after all this time, even after having spent sixteen years thinking that her sister had suffered a far more dire punishment than would ever have been appropriate for what she did in a fit of temper, even after having learned that her thought-to-be-dead sister was actually alive after all, she never lets it go. She never has a moment where she stops to wonder how long Mae was alone on Brendok, never has a moment where she stops to wonder how Mae even managed to survive the fall, how she even managed to survive until whoever found her and took her away from Brendok did so. She never has a moment where she thinks in horror or at least unease that her sister may have gone through some bad, bad times on Brendok alone. Nothing can move Osha’s anger. Everything she says about and to Mae drips with contempt. She seems all too happy to forget that Mae ever had any positive traits at all, behaving as though Mae was some sort of demon child with no redeeming qualities. Osha says that she wants justice, but it’s plain that what she really wants is to hurt Mae the way Mae hurt her. She wants to answer hurt for hurt.

Look at how quickly Osha begins to respond to Qimir, if not overtly positively, then at least in a spirit of being willing to listen to him and consider what he’s saying. Has anyone in Osha’s life ever validated her like this before? Do you think a single person has so much as implied to her that it’s okay for her to be angry with Yord, who was once her friend, for participating in the Jedi’s attempt to railroad her for Indara’s murder and not believing in her innocence? Do you think that anyone else in Osha’s life would tell her that it would be okay for her to feel hurt and rejected that Jecki didn’t reciprocate her interest? Do you think that anyone else in Osha’s life would ever tell her that it was okay for her to feel at least a little abandoned by Sol, in the end, to tell her that it’s okay that she had wanted that sort of familial relationship with him even if it wasn’t what was appropriate for a Master and Padawan, and that it’s not her fault that Sol ultimately couldn’t give her that?

For the first eighteen years of her life, Osha was surrounded by people who told her to prioritize duty and care for the community over her own personal wants and fulfilment, even when that wasn’t really what she wanted at all, and ignoring her own wants made her feel empty inside. Then, for the next six years, she was adrift. Then she met Qimir, who validated everything she could never admit that she felt and wanted. Who told her that it was okay to feel as intensely as she does, when I seriously doubt that Osha’s deep, intense feeling was ever validated by the Jedi, who would instead lead her away from these things. Who told her that it was okay to seek out personal fulfilment and growth over anything else she could be seeking out, and offered her a way to do it by means of putting on his helmet.

And Osha puts that helmet on, of her own volition, and from there begins to rediscover her own power.

And then she finds out that Sol was the one who killed her mother all along.

I don’t think there was any chance of Sol walking away from that confrontation without Osha killing him or at least gravely wounding him. Not when he’s minimizing, not when he’s making excuses for himself, not when he’s refusing to give her the space to feel all the things she has every right to feel and instead invalidating her perfectly justified anger and betrayal, and certainly not when he attempts to justify what he did by telling her that it was because he loves her.

How must Osha have longed to hear him say that when she was a child? When she looked to him as a surrogate parent, before reality must have set in with her that they could never have that sort of relationship, not really, because of the nature of the Order they were now both a part of. When she was a child, when she was a teenager, even when she was a woman before she knew the truth, Osha must have longed for it. But now? He can only say it now, after she’s found out that his hands are stained with her mother’s blood, and he isn’t even willing to tell her he’s sorry for what he’s done? When he’s behaving as though what he did wasn’t bad at all? Now, those words can be nothing but a knife to Osha’s heart.

But even if Sol had not attempted to minimize or justify what he had done, even if he had been truly contrite, I really don’t think Osha would have let him off without killing him or gravely wounding him. Because it is such a dire betrayal of her love for and trust in him. Because Osha is a very black and white thinker, at the end of the day. Because Osha is driven by her emotions, not by a sense of duty or justice, and the thing she has felt for her mother’s murderer has been rage and hate. And now she’s discovered who her mother’s murderer actually is.

And Osha goes from having very little conscious command over the Force, to Force-choking Sol straight to death.

If Osha is in pain over Sol’s death, it is because her love for him was just as strong as her rage, and she cannot let go of either of them—she does not want to let go of either of them. If she feels the need to justify going off with Qimir by framing it as protecting Mae from his reprisals, then it’s not because that’s the only reason she would go off with him, but because it’s the only reason she can consciously accept would be a good reason, at least right now. If she still seems unsure at the very end, it’s not because she’s seriously reconsidering, but because she’s still trying to convince herself that this is something she is allowed to want for herself. Because even if the Jedi’s ideals were ultimately never something Osha could live out and be fulfilled, she still internalized them, and she’s still unlearning them. She’s still getting into the place where she can accept that it’s okay to want to explore the Dark Side of the Force.

So we see both Mae and Osha’s competence levels go way up in Episode 8. And I think we’re going to see them stay way up in S2, even taking Mae’s newfound memory loss into account. Because now both of the twins are where they can actually thrive—though considering that Mae with her memories back would probably rather throw herself from the tallest tower of the Coruscant Temple then become a Jedi (understandably so), let’s hope for the sake of everyone involved that if Vernestra is training her in S2 while she still doesn’t have her memories back, that it’s in the ways of the Force in general rather than as a Jedi specifically. Neither one of them are acting against their nature anymore.

#Star Wars #Mae Aniseya #osha aniseya #the acolyte #qimir #sol

dealingdreams

The Acolyte 1:5 epi Night having Predator vibes is so cool. Especially when we think about Qimir as character. We've seen in The Predator films it scanning folks and choosing not to attack until provoked. Much like Qimir who also only attacks unless another character is a possible threat. I just think that's so interesting!! Like he's so cool!

#qimir #the acolyte #star wars