Just Shadows in the Starlight

Lilac || she/her || Star Wars sideblog || Mostly clone wars/prequels & rebels but also here for new shows

[obiwanwhat]

So uhhhhh the Mandalorian and Grogu is not good

[stealingpotatoes]

ahsoka doods

(commission info // tip jar!)

[husborth-deactivated20241109]

there is an interesting vein of thought in my mind brewing but i’m not sure it will be communicable to star wars tumblr writ large, because Were The Jedi Wrong To Do X is hot topic discourse, and i find most entries in that line of discourse really annoying because almost the entire point of the prequels is, “nominally good characters who want to do their best end up enforcing a shitty regime because the status quo already sucks.” i don’t think the work of defending a bloodsucking government, even a fictional one, is guiltless work, and i think that was an intentional message george lucas embedded (even if he did so in questionable ways) into the saga, because he’s made several points about this topic himself and i see where this exists in the narrative. but people who think the jedi were a cult still really fucking annoy me. i really loathe the idea that “the jedi fumbled the ball here” and “the jedi aren’t actually evil” have to be mutually exclusive statements because the discourse can’t handle even very minor nuance without shitting itself to death.

but i’m going to talk about this anyway, because if anything i can lock out reblogs and force people to look at this post and have no recourse with which to yell things at me. i was thinking about the jedi as peacekeepers. i’ve always read this as an intentional oxymoron by the time of the clone wars - a thing that is formerly possibly true but you lose absolutely all right to call yourself a peacekeeper when you start lining up large amounts of men and asking them to kill and die for you. palpatine’s trap is clever in that regard; sending the jedi to war is the precise, total, and complete opposite of what the jedi ever wanted to be, and what better way to destroy the jedi than to force them to violate their own principles? all palpatine does is sit there and ask people to become their worst selves - it’s kind of a theme with him. he is the prince of lies on his shitty little throne going, “let the hate flow through you!” because he has very little interest in luke or anakin being forced into the dark side, and a lot of interest in convincing them to choose it, and it works overly well with the father and almost works with the son. the galaxy claps when palpatine very nicely asks it to submit to an authoritarian government; palpatine very nicely asks the jedi to go to war for the republic and the jedi as a whole stoically hop to it, because palpatine doesn’t force anyone into shit, he just games the set-up. and that’s necessary to the theme of star wars - that’s the point!

but the war is inherently, by its very essence, antithetical to the jedi way; the jedi are not some ragtag freedom fighters striking back at an oppressive government the way the rebels are, where the power dynamic is entirely different. they are themselves tied intrinsically to the state of the republic. they are the government. they are the long arm of what will be the empire here shortly. the jedi will be persecuted following order 66, but they are, at the clone wars, the upper brass of the military, ascetic wizard monks taking the place of commissioned officers. the jedi place immense value on life and then line millions of lives up and ask them to go kill people because the republic decides they need to. that’s a pretty big surrender of ideals they presumably hold very close - there is an inherent oxymoron to “this weapon is your life” when the culminating victory of the series involves the symbolic gesture of the main character throwing that weapon away, and that point of the saga in particular fascinates me. you simply just would not have that depth if the move of the jedi-become-military is not interrogated a bit.

star wars will always have an anti-war undertow to it because that is partially what george lucas meant when he was writing the OT. “wars not make one great,” is one of the most vital themes of the saga, and the villains in ANH being jingoistic, murderous maniacs, bloodthirsty war pigs, exists that way for a reason. the narrative catharsis is not an act of violence, but the refusal to sacrifice yourself for the sake of violence. that’s integral to the point, if not the point of star wars. i think it’s significant that obi-wan and yoda go from generals, military commanders whose job it is to kill and order people to kill and then sacrifice lives to war en masse, to people who die nonviolent deaths. deaths that are the opposite of violent, even, for their lack of a corpse - yoda rolls over and disappears, and obi-wan all but just raises his hands and lets vader murder him. completely bloodless, completely removed from the guttural sight of owen and beru’s bodies burning, or even vader’s armor on blazing fire, or anakin’s uh, you know, crispification in ROTS. those bloodless ends equate to ascension into Force Ghosthood, a kind of vaunted extra-life you get if you’re Jedi Enough, it seems. both of their (obi-wan’s and yoda’s) thematic battles against the sith in the PT end up being futile - both obi-wan and yoda ultimately fail to stop the rise of the sith and the empire, and retire to obscurity. but luke succeeds, and succeeds unarmed. there is an innate discomfort to the idea that obi-wan and (it’s implied, but granted yoda never says it directly) yoda share the sentiment of vader and the emperor, two shattered mirrors looking at each other - obi-wan and yoda believe that vader has to die to save the galaxy, and the emperor and vader are looking for luke to take vader’s place as resident sith bastard warlord.

and i think that’s fascinating! i think the idea of - not all violence, but certainly violence that isn’t who you are - as something that eats you alive is really fun. i think the jedi called themselves peacekeepers and that was a lie, and in a lot of ways you’re supposed to read it as really, really fucking tragic that this is a lie they tell themselves, that the lie is that the weapon is your life when actually…. it’s just a weapon. you can lose it and still survive. i think the idea that luke couldn’t kill vader, not because it would have been Morally Wrong, but because it would break him spiritually, is the idea that you cannot violate your identity. if you choose to name yourself a peacekeeper, waging war will violate who you are. and, of course, there’s no better example of the damage of violating your identity than anakin, who loses everything about himself - his face, his voice, his name, the love he had for the people who mattered to him, and only regains it when luke’s like actually, fuck you, you’re a jedi. and you can’t unwrite that from your history. in a story where the main villain repeatedly asks people, “hey, would you like to do something fucking awful today?” the prequels are a tragedy because everyone in them thinks they have to, and the originals are a hero’s journey because the main cast (even if it takes anakin a hot minute) gets to the point of saying HOW ABOUT…. NO?

[whetstonefires]

oh this is so good and the bit about ‘lining them up and asking them to kill people’ sparked something in my head because. they didn’t. or at least they never intended to do that.

and that was part of the trap, wasn’t it?

like i sort of knew this already, but i tend to think of making the enemy army extremely dull and interchangeable droids as primarily a lazy writing move, to sidestep the issue of Whether The Enemy Infantryman Deserves To Die in the messed-up situation of the prequels. and it is that.

but also it was absolutely key to Palpatine’s trap, because if the Jedi had been faced with ‘go take people and have them kill other people’ they’d have been much more likely to dig their heels in. to notice that this was antithetical to their selfhood and would break them.

but instead he gave them a conflict where all the ‘people’ were on their side, and refusing to be involved would just be sending those people off without their protection, and wouldn’t obviously save anyone but themselves. so it was easier not to register the cost of waging war.

also i think he played on the weird self-destructive tendencies they tend to get as part of their ideology of selflessness. like in the obvious way in terms of courting their own destruction, but also with regard to the clones.

the jedi tend to have a huge blind spot about the ethical issues with asking other people to risk or destroy themselves for a cause. because that’s virtuous, so how can it be wrong?

it’s like plato’s version of socrates arguing, well, if you’ve agreed that punishment is a ‘good thing’ then logically a truly rational man would be grateful to have it done to him, checkmate.

[husborth-deactivated20241109]

oh, this is a super good addition, and it reminds me why i think palpatine can be a really fun villain if you start digging into the saga’s structure - the idea that the choice of clones vs droids was deliberate, to stab at the hindbrain of how the jedi council thinks, is deliriously evil and i love it. it’s so much in vein with the kind of evil that just…… rigs the game so that all the choices that benefit him look like the best ones to make. he’s just going around shoving beer goggles on everyone’s face, and then asking them to walk the straight line. i also like the point of self-destructive selflessness - that’s the epitome of what i think of when i think about the Jedi Way Taken Too Literally.

[eldritchdemigodskywalkers]

#the only thing I will add is that imo there is more to the clones vs. droids thing than just GL being ‘lazy’ #it’s specifically to show Palpatine’s experiment … aka the Clone Wars #in which he tests which ones make better soldiers #there are still real people on the Separatist side #they just aren’t the ones doing the soldiering #It’s also purposeful by Palpatine to desensitise Anakin to ‘killing’ #if you start to think of your foe as simply objects that you can hack and slash through without remorse when they are in your way #it’s conditioning!!! (via @the-far-bright-center; it probably helps [for Palps] that Anakin already didn’t feel like a person by AOTC, re: “No, I’m a Jedi”)

[jessepinwheel]

people like to write sith obi-wan as like some cool suave charismatic mastermind manipulator but actually I think some people should try making sith obi-wan a mad scientist. he turned evil because of his insatiable thirst for knowledge and he's diving into forbidden tomes and experimenting with sith alchemy on live subjects and writing extremely rigorous notes while complaining about how slipshod previous sith scholars have been about documenting their work.

he has basically no stakes in taking over the galaxy and the war is really inconvenient for him and he's a huge problem for both sides because he keeps kidnapping people to do horrible (and frequently lethal) experiments on them and he also kidnapped a whole bunch of clones because he's Way Too Interested in how they were created and trained which is overall a very weird experience for all of them

I think whoever evil obi-wan's mentor was can be the first person he experimented on. that would be fun :)

[jessepinwheel]

also while I'm thinking about evil mad scientist obi-wan I think he would have also done tons of experiments on his own body, so the reason why he won't die even though Literally Everyone on both sides of the war is trying to take him out is because he's more sith abomination and cybernetic implants and scar tissue than his original body at this point. he keeps it covered up most of the time because for some reason his test subjects start getting upset otherwise

also also, repeat test subjects (kidnapping victims). he just grabs them off the battlefield and does some fun little body modifications or sith rituals to them and then releases them again for 'field test data' to kidnap again at a later time so he can collect the new data. the changes seem generally helpful in some way but nobody knows if there isn't something else going on and obviously it is very disconcerting to not know what is going on with your own body. I imagine this comes with some kind of tracking band or implant (if you are fun it could be a collar), like when wildlife scientists tag animals, and nobody can figure out how to remove it without killing the patient

he would love the brain worms. imagine him holding anakin down and this time he *is* going to find out if it goes in through the nose or the mouth

[muffinlance]

He releases Plo Koon with a red band and suddenly. This dad-shaped high councilor is the MOST FUCKABLE SENTIENT in the universe. Commander Wolf is banging on Sithi-Wan's door begging him to please reverse the effects, please, there's only so many nights he can stand guard at his Jedi's door against The Populace

And Sithi-Wan, who's been deep in a research binge and only now coming up for air, goes Hmmmm? But the band wasn't even part of the experiment. FASCINATING.

[obiwanwhat]

I know someone has probably said this better but. There's really so much about Luke & Ahsoka interactions that can be explored. Because honestly they have every reason to resent each other?

Anakin was arguably much more of a father to Ahsoka than he ever was to Luke (even if he was more of an older brother figure to Ahsoka than an actual father figure). He trained her and built her lightsabers and had a dumb nickname for her and made dad jokes and like - everything Luke ever could have wanted out of his dad. She knew him when he was still Anakin Skywalker and not Darth Vader. She knew Padme!! Padme also was kind of her mom! Luke doesn't even know Padme's name until sometime post ROTJ - it's possible Ahsoka was the first person who could have told it to him.

Not only that, but she had the Jedi Order. She was trained by the Order at its peak, raised from infancy in the rituals and knowledge that Luke now must piece together from whispers from ghosts and whatever old texts he can scrounge up from the corners of the galaxy the Empire somehow missed. He is doing all of this on his own with no guidance, no oversight, meanwhile it's knowledge that came to her as easy as breathing.

And she walked away from all of it. Everything Luke has ever wanted - a relationship with his parents, proper Jedi training, the Jedi Order itself - she had without ever asking for it, and she walked away from it without a backward glance. And she's still walking away from it - she's not a Jedi, she won't claim that title, she won't join Luke's new Order. Maybe she shows up from time to time and tells him some stories and shares from knowledge, but she won't train him, and somewhere deep down he knows that he will never be as much of a Jedi as she is even though she doesn't claim that title anymore, and part of the reason because is she won't help him.

And for Ahsoka's part. Anakin returned from the Dark Side for Luke. He couldn't - or wouldn't - return for Ahsoka, who he trained, who knew him and loved him and would have died for him. He tried to kill her and would have if Ezra hadn't saved her. But this boy, who shares nothing with Anakin but a name and half his DNA - he was enough to bring Anakin back. She wasn't, not with everything they shared, not with all the times she'd almost died for him, and he'd saved her, and she'd saved him. How do you not kind of hate someone for that?

And besides, he's trying to bring back the Jedi Order. The Order that cast her aside as soon as it was convenient for them, the Order that allowed Anakin Skywalker to become what he did and was too blind to see a Sith Lord under their noses and that died for those mistakes. And sure, he's trying to do it differently, he's trying to do it better, but what does this boy know of better? What can he know of the sins of the Jedi Order? When he speaks of the Order with stars in his eyes, what can he know of the pain that she suffered? That so many suffered? How can he correct what he doesn't understand?

I just think it would be cool to see more of that explored in canon.

[obiwanwhat]

This post is getting notes again so I’m committing myself - if this hits 2K notes, the day it hits 2K notes I’ll make Nothing Can Ever Be Simple my top priority writing project and actually finish it

[aphel1on]

completely personal preference obviously but i hate when there's a time travel fix-it and everything goes smoothly and the protagonist is just cool and confident with all their knowledge of the ruined future. nooo shut up. what is even the point if they're not an emotionally traumatized mess frantically trying to fix things and fucking up as they do so, keeping secrets and alienating their loved ones, causing new and interesting problems and barely scraping through to an eventual better ending

[mikkeneko]

My preferred outcome is for them to avoid the problems in the original timeline only to face a whole host of new, unforeseen consequences because reality is fuckin complicated and you can't control all the factors in the world no matter how hard you try <3

[inexplicable-lack-of-tinsel]

the relationship between mon and leida lives rent free in my mind because. it’s the way that leida resents mon for never putting her first, and is justified in doing so. it’s the way that leida rebels against mon by adopting the ultra-conservative traditions that mon hates, and thinks she’s committing the ultimate rebellion by getting married, when really the marriage is something mon arranged for her own rebellion. it’s the way that buried deep down (i think) leida does have doubts about the marriage, is terrified that mon might be right, can never admit this to anyone ever because she’s a teenager. a child, who is getting married for reasons she doesn’t even know of.

it’s the way mon, from the beginning, has chosen the rebellion over her family. it’s the way she sacrificed her daughter’s future for the future of the galaxy. it’s the way she would have done almost anything to protect leida, to stop her from being trapped in an unhappy marriage as a child just as she was, but not quite anything, because the rebellion has to come first. it’s the way that she’s both selfish and torturously selfless, and at every moment the guilt of it is tearing her apart. it’s the way that she watched as perrin literally gave leida away, to a marriage that she herself arranged, watched how close the knife came to leida’s throat, knowing that she may never again be able to protect leida at all.

it’s the way that their relationship reached its breaking point when mon gave leida the chance to cancel the wedding. because what mon wanted in that moment was for leida to assuage her guilt and leida refused. and what leida really wanted in that moment was for mon to reassure her, because even after everything she is still a child who wants her mother to tell her it will all be okay, and instead she was told she should want to escape. and she saw through mon’s offer, saw it for what it was, and saw that even in this moment mon would never put her first.

[marroniere]

I wonder if Lonni Jung’s daughter grows up in the New Republic thinking that her father was a fascist. She is ashamed and angry. She refuses to use her last name. She has terrible fights with her mother as a teen.

Then Kleya finds her and pays a visit.

upd: yes i wrote it

[haltraveler]

The cast of the Original Trilogy had cliched, boring character concepts that were executed wonderfully enough for it not to matter. 

 The cast of the Prequel Trilogy had interesting concepts that were executed poorly enough to make them seem utterly stupid. 

The cast of the Sequel Trilogy had amazing, thought-provoking concepts that were executed in the town square and put up on pikes as a warning to others.

[eizneckam]

This is actually probably the best summary of star wars I’ve ever seen

[princess-from-another-galaxy]

Not to attack anyone or hate on actually valid takes, but a lot of you project your problems with real life religions/religious organizations into the Jedi and criticize them for things that they NEVER did.... Like babe, the Jedi never did that, the catholics did.

[deactivating-s00n-deactivated20]

I will always come to Zeb’s defense when people say he’s ridiculous for beefing with a thirteen year old because if I was a 35 year old man who just lived through the worst trauma of his life and then had to share a ship with two college-age adults who were certainly knocking boots in the lonely hours and then those college-aged lovers made me share a room with a plucky shonen protagonist (who then steals my fucking bed!) instead of sucking it the fuck up and moving in together I would most certainly chuck that kid off the top of a moving spaceship the first chance I got

[elfpen]

I honestly have no idea if anyone following me is still reading this story, but for whatever it's worth: Reprise IV, Chapter 22 Ao3 | FF.net

[gffa]

Skywalkers // by Tsuneo Sanda

[skeletons-eat]

Y'all depression is depressioning

[lesbianrey]

they should let sofia coppola direct a disney+ series about padmes gay handmaidens its literally her destiny

[gffa]

Having watched the first two episodes of Skeleton Crew, so far it's exactly what the trailer promised it to be. It's very cute and charming, it doesn't pretend to not be nostalgia bait, but it does so with clear love for what it's doing and a fun adventures along the way. The kids are all adorable, the scenery is pretty, and there are fun little connections to the larger galaxy far, far away without relying on cameos or even setting it on any familiar places. So far, it's low-stakes and fun in the best way.

[haaaaaaaaaaaave-you-met-ted]

Unshakeable Will by Tatsiana Maksimuk