Looking back is something to look forward to

[newtjorden]

ROTJ Han and Leia, insp. by Waterhouse

[davidcjingw]

Troubled Teens

[husborth-deactivated20241109]

me: the idea is that this guy, perpetually, inflicts the pain he’s in outwards, recreates his own hells all the time. i think people are wrong when they assume that anakin changes. i don’t think anakin skywalker ever functionally changes; he’s in his forties and saying “i must obey my master” and he’s in his twenties and falling to his knees in front of palpatine and he’s a nine year old slave all at the same time, all expressions of the same scarred, wicked internal landscape. he lived this horrible experience when he was a child, so he’s always recreating his world in such a fashion that it looks the same way, so incapable of coping with the damage of his childhood enslavement that he never really leaves it. in the family at war novel, anakin thinks, “the jedi order had been his life. the jedi had freed him from slavery and offered him a home. despite all the reasons he had to follow ahsoka, abandoning the jedi felt like a terrible mistake. he owed them too much.“ but he doesn’t owe the jedi his eternal service - there is no good that you can do for someone that will earn your life’s service, but anakin is recreating this paradigm he was raised in, where he owes a greater power - an owner - not only his labor but his life, to repay the cost of his keeping. this is not a dynamic the jedi have forced on him; this is one anakin creates, because he is hitting the instant replay on everything he’s ever suffered. he is a nine year old slave and he is lying when he says he’s a person because he’s going to kneel to palpatine and he’s going to bring his son to palpatine because he must obey his master. he is a person, and he is lying.

me: vader as a character brings his past to the present, recreates the things that shattered him over and over because he can’t leave them behind - doesn’t know how, isn’t willing to, couldn’t begin to start. he strangles people with the force because the first time he did it, he was nineteen and had to make a choice between saving republic clone troopers and saving republic loyalists on jabiim, and either choice meant damning thousands of people to die, after every other jedi - including obi-wan - had been killed or thought dead in combat. when the leader of the loyalists attacked anakin for choosing to save the troopers, anakin strangled him, and stumbled backwards, and said “i’m sorry” but it was too late, he had already chosen to kill them all. he strangles people with the force because the worst thing he ever did in his own mind was strangle padme on mustafar, because he himself is attached to a breathing machine he has little control over, that he is forever bound to - but he’s always living in these places, these moments, so unable to get up and move on that he recreates his own twisted scars. it’s an obsessive act of re-opening the wound, bleeding perpetually. it’s stereotypical - it’s perpetual - it’s a caged parrot tearing out its feathers, seeking any kind of stimulation, anything to feel any kind of control. me: this is why he drags obi-wan through the fire; not merely as revenge, though revenge is such a large part of it, but because he’s insatiably recreating what he’s lived. he cuts his son’s hand off because he lost all of his to his own father figure, he burns obi-wan because he himself is haunted by burning alive on mustafar and has to inflict it outwards - without any ability to soothe these festering psychological wounds on his own, he inflicts them outwards over and over, desperately reaching for any kind of catharsis, any kind of power over his own agonized life, striking outwards like a beaten dog that’s suddenly remembered it has teeth. he is the bottom, rotting dregs of human existence, that hideous thing that happens to people when they experience violence on violation on violence, so that the only way they know to understand their experiences is to strike outwards, to replay it, to analyze it from the angle of the aggressor this time so that maybe the power of violence will soothe their souls. darth vader is truly frankenstein’s monster; he has love in him the likes of which you can scarcely imagine, and rage the likes of which you would not believe. if he cannot satisfy the one…… he will satisfy the other. person beside me in the harris teeter checkout line: are you good

[manny-jacinto]

“Anakin…” OBI-WAN KENOBI (2022)

[whenanangelfalls]

She watched him as everything that their child would mean cycled through his mind, and her heart caught when she saw first of all the wild, almost explosive joy that dawned over his face, because that meant that whatever he had gone through on the Outer Rim, he was still her Annie. It meant that the war that had scarred his face had not scarred his spirit.

[elivanto]

INQUISITOR REVA in OBI-WAN KENOBI Part II

[newt-jorden]

Truly unprepared for the kind of person I’m going to be if we get any sort of Vader Wife Guy content in Kenobi…..

[hayden-christensen]

HAYDEN CHRISTENSEN ‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’ press tour 

[lenoreamidala]

you couldn’t save anakin

[qirahsoka]

lucifer, alexandre cabanel’s fallen angel, 1868 // anakin skywalker, revenge of the sith

[timebombtown]

Labyrinth (Jim Henson, 1986)

[newt-jorden]

#mentally i am always here

[marzipanandminutiae]

I’m starting a charity called Chemises For Main Characters. Now you can help all the weary and chafed leading ladies of period dramas whose costumers can’t spend $10 on 3 yards of cotton or the time to fashion that cotton into a shapeless bag with head and arm holes. Our commercials will feature “In The Arms Of The Angels” played over pictures of Keira Knightley.

[everydaylouie]

Visit Original Link

gus is the cat, at the theatre door…

[swprequels]

“say what you want about the prequels-” ok i will. i love them

[lookatthiscoolthing]

[aguasdelchavo]

trying to sound like a normal interested person in public

[boringthrill]

This is me

[psyzook]

Demeter to Persephone:

[digivolvin]

disney has some real nerve for this le fou nonsense when howard ashman saved the disney film studios from financial ruin with his own two hands in 1989 & ensured they would be around long enough to make these high budget remakes decades later. like full offense disney if ashman hadn’t 1) saved your company and 2) provided you with the formula you now attempt to replicate you wouldn’t be here raking in millions in profit with rote imitations of his work 20 yrs later. “why does disney need to have gay characters?” bc the man who gave you your entire childhood and disney the longevity to make ugly remakes of his movies would’ve wanted there to be gay characters and not just gay coded narratives by the year of 2017, THAT’S WHY. 

[digivolvin]

so before anyone tells me i’m exaggerating the importance of howard ashman:

in 1988 disney was in dire straights, hadn’t had a notable box office success since 101 dalmatians in 1961. they’d bled out a significant number of their animators and staff, and by the time they’d begun production on oliver & co. they were fairly directionless and not sure how they’d survive the bankruptcy they were teetering on. they’d been trying for years and years to find a formula for success and hadn’t found it yet, with only a few exceptions here and there. 

they also hadn’t done fairytale based musical since sleeping beauty in 1959.

howard ashman and alan menken were right off of the success of little shop of horrors, and when ashman was called in to do a song for oliver & co. he chanced upon the development of the little mermaid and suggested, among other things, that disney return to the musical formatting of their classic princess movies. this time, he suggested they adopt a broadway storytelling style, rather than the operettas their previous musicals emulated. (the primary difference here being that operettas have characters singing passive commentary about circumstances they’re in, whereas broadway calls for every song to be a scene in itself that pushes the story or character development forward.)

broadway turned out to be perfectly suited to animated films because 1) they provided vibrant, memorable numbers that propelled the plot quickly and 2) the best songs were marketable. disney’s financial and critical success in the 1990s– and the ubiquity of their movie’s soundtracks– would attest to this.

so menken and ashman entered the disney creative team and ashman produced and co-wrote the little mermaid, beauty and the beast, and began production on aladdin. ashman died of AIDs, halfway through the production of aladdin. but because he had insisted on bringing in and collaborating with broadway talents, soon stephen schwartz and tim rice entered the picture.

between the four of them, they wrote the music and lyrics for the little mermaid, beauty and the beast, aladdin, the lion king,  pocahontas, hunchback, and hercules. it was these core movies and the broadway talents attached to them that defined the disney renaissance, and propelled disney back to the financial and creative glory it hadn’t held since the early 1960s.

disney musicals as we know them were 100% the product of howard ashman’s creative influence and his collaboration with menken. before the little mermaid, there was no single “disney style,” because before ashman they were scrambling for footing and direction. he (and menken) not only provided the skeleton on which all modern disney musicals have been built (princess and the frog, tangled, frozen, moana) but the financial success of the early disney renaissance cemented disney’s position as the media deity it is now. 

so what does all this have to do with le fou being gay? howard ashman was a gay jewish man in the early 1990s, fighting AIDs while working in children’s movies with rigid censorship. whatever LGBT content he could incorporate into those films was not much more than metanarrative coding. 

back then, disney movies could have been sunk by boycotts and outraged conservatives. nowadays? disney can do whatever the hell they want. disney still produces and promotes pirates of the caribbean as part of their brand’s lineup, which has ALL RANGE of violent and suggestive content, but because it’s heterosexual they know no parents will protest. and yet? in the remake of a movie which was the brainchild and final passion project of a gay man dying of AIDs, they choose a villainous buffoon as their “gay representation.” 

MY POINT? howard ashman was the creative force responsible for disney’s return to glory in the 90s AND the one whose vision ensured its tremendous success and growth into the 2000s. the least they owe his legacy is to use the security their company has now–media superpower that it is– and provide the respectful representation he wasn’t allowed to when he was busy saving their asses.