I'm sure you've already heard the news, but in case you haven't...Sublustrum is getting a remake next year!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjwlaWYUmCc
favorite thing about them: Lana is my rock. I mean...my characters’ rock. Heh. She’s so utterly soothing and strong. Not strong like Strong Female Character™ strong, but she has so much mental and emotional fortitude. I love her.
least favorite thing about them: she’s so dang hard on herself! (this seems to be a theme)
favorite line: I love her little ambient quips if you click on her when you’re just standing around, especially “I never was much for idle chatter” (me neither, girl) and “Yes, I’m still here. Haven’t gone anywhere.”
brOTP: her and the player character. Doesn’t even matter the class, all my characters love her.
OTP: I don’t have an OTP for her per se, but I do have a secret fondness for her and Koth together.
nOTP: can’t think of one.
random headcanon: she drinks tea and writes poetry...oh wait, that’s canon. Never mind.
unpopular opinion: that she’s the literal greatest. Is that an unpopular opinion? If so, I side-eye the fandom.
song i associate with them: Black Blade
favorite picture of them: This amazing art by terra-7. <3
Those post remind me of something I've been meaning to ask you; have you ever read Caitlin Kiernan's "Emptiness Spoke Eloquent"? It's her own stab at imagining Mina's life after "Dracula," and as you could expect it's not particularly happy. I do know Kiernan herself has said that she's never been happy with the story despite rewriting it multiple times over the years, mostly due to the fact that Mina isn't her character.
I should find it and read it! I love Caitlin Kiernan, so even if I don’t end up liking what she does with Mina I’ll at least appreciate the writing.
Disclaimer: I unwisely had a glass of wine on an empty stomach so my answers may be a little bit tipsy. Since you didn’t specify a particular segment of SW I’ll limit my answers to the official present canon, i.e. the movies and the animated shows.
Favorite Female: I love them all but I have to go with Rey.
Favorite Male: That’s hard. Is it weird I’m tempted to say Darth Vader? I feel like the fall and redemption story of Anakin Skywalker was what first really reeled me in to Star Wars in the first place. But also, Cassian Andor, because reasons.
3 Other Favorite Characters: I can never choose just three. Jyn, Ahsoka, Bodhi, R2, Sabine, Yoda…better stop there.
3 OTPs: Jyn/Cassian, Kanan/Hera, Holdo/Poe
Funniest Character: Yoda probably
Prettiest Character: Easily Poe Dameron, I mean holy heck have you seen that man’s bone structure
Most Annoying Character: Could it really be anyone besides Jar Jar Binks
Most Badass Character: Pretty much all of them, but a special nod to Amilyn Holdo.
Character I’d Like as my BFF: Finn and/or Rose.
Female Character I’d Marry: I’d marry Padme just to keep her away from that train wreck she actually married in canon
Male Character I’d Marry: I would go for Obi-Wan (younger version, obviously). He’s nice to look at, and given the desert hermit thing, he’d clearly be fine with giving me all the introvert space and alone time I need.
Character I Hate/Dislike: I LOVE EVERYONE IN STAR WARS. Except Palpatine. Palpatine can suck an egg.
If you don't mind me asking, what are your thoughts on reylo, and how has TLJ changed them?
I’m glad you asked, actually! That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot since seeing TLJ, so thanks for giving me an excuse to get said thoughts down in written form.
I’ll start by saying that I personally did not ship Reylo after The Force Awakens, though I can see why plenty of people did. They’re pretty; they have chemistry; he swoops her up in his arms and carries her off to his ship like Hades and Persephone. The interrogation scene in particular was a pretty charged sequence. The moment when Kylo takes off his helmet and the camera zooms in on Rey’s startled face, it was really easy to interpret that as an oh crap, he’s hot expression. Even I half-interpreted it that way and I didn’t even ship them. :p
The primary reason I was pretty iffy about the pairing after TFA (aside from thinking, at that point, that they might be related), was because of the whole vibe leading up to and during the interrogation scene. He forcibly renders her unconscious, abducts her, then invades her mind and uncovers personal information without her consent while looming over her and saying “You know I can take whatever I want” as she is physically restrained and crying. I don’t know if the screenwriters were intentionally drawing parallels to rape threats or not, but it’s uncomfortable and was actually quite upsetting to me the first time I watched the film. That she turns the tables on him and ends up reading his mind saved the scene for me, but still doesn’t entirely negate the previous creepiness.
In TLJ, on the other hand, Rey essentially has all her agency back in their interactions. It’s interesting to compare and contrast their scenes in TFA versus TLJ:
In TFA, they both get into each other’s heads, but there’s that inherent underlying violence and power struggle. In TLJ, they have this mental Force connection to each other through most of the movie, but the fact that neither of them initiate it or can control it puts them back on equal footing. (Granted, there’s still a manipulative aspect to it if Snoke is telling the truth about being the one who established the Force bond, but in that case, Kylo was being manipulated just as much as Rey.)
In TFA, Kylo abducts Rey without her consent. In TLJ, she basically mails herself to him of her own free will. Side note: I loved that her motivation in this was two-fold and that it was prompted by a Force vision. It would have been easy for the filmmakers to portray it as a clichéd “good girl tries to change bad boy with the purity of her luuurve” thing. But while Rey does have compassion for Kylo/Ben and wants him to be redeemed, she also has the purely practical motivation of wanting his strength in the Force to benefit the Resistance instead of the First Order, and she has a reason (the Force vision) to believe it will work rather than just blind naiveté.
In TFA, they have a big lightsaber battle against each other. In TLJ, they fight together against mutual enemies. This illustrates another area where the filmmakers subvert what might be the typical toxic trope. After Rey defeated Kylo in TFA, conventional masculinity would dictate that Kylo be enraged and humiliated at having been beaten by a girl, and an untrained girl to boot (see: all the dudes post-TFA who insisted until they were blue in the face that Rey was a Mary Sue). But instead, after having his ass handed to him, Kylo changes his tune from threatening and domineering to restrained and even respectful. He recognizes her power and wants to add it to his own rather than freaking out, feeling threatened by female strength/competence, and immediately wanting to undermine or quash it. (Refer, again, to that certain noisy subset of the fanbase.)
In TFA, Kylo says “the Supreme Leader is wise” right before killing his own father in hopes that it will please Snoke. In TLJ (which takes place, like, three days later), Kylo chops the Supreme Leader in half rather than obey his order to kill Rey.
The magnitude of that is actually pretty significant when you consider how long Snoke has been influencing Kylo/Ben. He’d been in Ben’s head since childhood, at least. I haven’t read any of the tie-in books (except Phasma which, unrelated side note, is awesome), but apparently one of the novels actually suggests that Snoke first started influencing Ben before he was even born? In which case, that he was able to break free from Snoke’s influence at all is pretty miraculous, and that Rey was the catalyst definitely says a lot about how he feels about her.
In TFA, Kylo is all about imposing his will on Rey. In TLJ, he asks her to join him. He even says ‘please’!
So yeah, overall, their interactions in TLJ make the idea of Reylo far more appealing and more in line with the pairings I usually ship. There’s still one caveat, of course, which is the now-infamous scene where Kylo tells Rey “You’re nothing…but not to me.”
There seem to be two popular ways to interpret this scene. One is that Kylo is using a common abusive, manipulative tactic in which the abuser tries to get his victim to depend on him (e.g., “no one will ever love you but me; you’re so lucky that I’ll even have you”). The other is that the scene is something reminiscent of the Pride and Prejudice proposal scene in that Kylo is a conflicted, misunderstood, awkward guy, himself a victim of Snoke’s abuse and manipulation, who is trying to express to Rey how he feels about her in the best way he knows how and kind of royally mucking it up in the process.
I personally fall somewhere in the middle on this scene. On one hand, I’m really hesitant to label a guy flatly telling a woman “you’re nothing” as in any way romantic or sexy. We’ve gotten enough of those problematic messages from the Twilights and Fifty Shades of the world, and if Rey had accepted Kylo’s offer at that point, I would have been upset. On the other hand, I do think it’s important to take characters’ entire contexts and histories into account when analyzing their actions, and I can see how interpreting Kylo as a Mr. Darcy-esque figure kinda works here. (Also, I love Pride and Prejudice.) And, Rey is not swayed by anything he says at this point, which is HUGE!!! I love that she sticks to her principles and refuses to compromise them.
Anyway, I could probably say more, but it’s late and this post is already way long. So in conclusion, I would currently label myself as “cautiously shipping Reylo.” Some of the less-than-comfortable aspects I’ve mentioned here make me hesitant to completely and totally embrace it, but at the same time I recognize that there’s never going to be any such thing as a completely perfect ship with completely perfect characters. (That would probably be boring, anyway.) And there’s still a whole ‘nother movie for Ben to get his issues straightened out and become the person Rey deserves,* so there is definitely potential there.
*As much as that is possible, because Rey is the pure shining angry compassionate wonderful cinnamon roll moonbeam of my life and no one could ever be good enough for her lbr
nesterov81 replied to your post “I want to fly up to Edmonton and personally punch in the face every...”
Wow, it's that bad?
Yeah. :/ I mean, for people who enjoy puzzles--or at least have endless free hours to spend running around jumping on random things and clicking random buttons until stuff happens--then it’s probably a great game. Unfortunately I’m not one of those people. BioWare games used to be known for their strong stories and characters, which is why I played them, but in this game that’s all taken a backseat to endless busywork and tedious crap you have to slog through in order to try to move the story forward. It sucks. :(
sinvraal replied to your post
“I want to fly up to Edmonton and personally punch in the face every...”
Montreal's fault, this time. And yeah.
Plenty of blame to go around, haha. I’m glad I’m not the only one on the disappointed/frustrated side.
Obvious question coming from me, but here goes: Book 4, Legend of Korra, you have complete creative control to rewrite it, Bryke and budget be damned. What would you do?
I would cut out Meelo and Wu entirely, or at least pare their screentime waaaay down. It always blew my mind that in a show with a very limited number of 22-minute episodes, Bryke wasted so much time on those poor excuses for humor.
I would kill off Mako, because…I can. *twirls mustache*
I would axe the entire Varrick/Zhu Li “romance,” because (unpopular opinion alert) that entire relationship grosses me out in the extreme. Varrick spends three seasons treating Zhu Li like actual garbage to the point where it’s practically abusive, then makes the most half-assed confession of feelings ever, and she…….marries him? Ugh. For a show that, silly Book 1 love triangle notwithstanding, generally did an admirable job of giving its female characters depth and agency and letting them be actual people instead of plot devices for male characters, they dropped the ball with Zhu Li in a big way.
Actually I would just have Zhu Li kick Varrick to the curb, then team up with Asami to become a truly awesome badass duo of genius lady engineers.
I would give Lin more to do, because she’s easily one of the show’s best characters and was criminally underused in Book 4.
I would rework the ending of the show in a way that would lose Korra’s whole “I had to suffer in order to learn how to be a better person!” thing. I know gallons of ink have already been spilled on this subject, and I think I get what Bryke was trying to aim for–finding a way to work through pain, etc. Which is fine…but when your two white male showrunners put their bisexual mentally ill woman of color protagonist through immense physical and mental trauma so that she can “learn how to empathize” with other people, it’s a little uncomfortable to say the least.
It goes without saying that I would handle Kuvira significantly differently than Bryke did.
I would spend more time fleshing out and developing her backstory and motivations rather than shoving them into a few lines of dialogue right at the end of the series finale. I would portray her actions and decisions, including and especially the problematic ones, in a more nuanced manner rather than “oh crap, we have to make this chick evil, let’s throw in PRISON CAMPS!!”
I would actually follow through on her relationship with Su. I would explore both their past and present in a meaningful way, rather than setting up a compelling conflict and then totally dropping it. I would have them sit down and talk through their issues like mature responsible adults! Or barring that, they could get their aggression out with a bending battle like Su and Lin did, then sit down and talk like responsible adults. I would actually give their relationship desperately-needed CLOSURE.
I would obviously do away with the whole prison camps thing, because that never made any sense for Kuvira’s character to begin with and essentially only existed to give Bolin some semblance of a character arc.
I didn’t hate the colossus mech as much as everyone else apparently did, but I didn’t love it either. I would be fine with scrapping it, though I’m not sure what exactly I would do in its place. If I did keep it, I would obviously not keep the canon ending of “Kuvira’s Gambit.” I wrote a canon-divergent ficlet where instead of firing on the warehouse, Kuvira called Korra’s bluff, knowing she wasn’t really going to hurt Baatar, which would have put Korra on her heels and provided some interesting conflict, I think.
I would have fleshed out Kuvira and Baatar’s relationship, and also fleshed out Baatar’s character in general, to give their separation at the end of the season more emotional weight. Bryke had all the tools in place to make Baatar an interesting character–the only non-bending grandchild of the great Toph Beifong! more family issues than you can shake a stick at!–but they totally whiffed on it. Missed opportunity.
For that matter, I also would have expanded on Kuvira’s history with the rest of the Beifongs, including and especially Opal. I think there could have been some interesting stuff there if it hadn’t apparently been more important to dedicate large chunks of screentime to Wu’s singing and Meelo’s fart jokes.
I think I would have kept the scene with Korra and Kuvira in the Spirit World, or something like it, because that was actually fairly well done. Though I probably would have made it longer and given it more depth. I also would have given Kuvira and her storyline more closure rather than just…shuffling her off to prison, apparently never to be heard from again?
…Honestly, it’s a good thing I wasn’t in charge of the show, otherwise it would have to be renamed Legend of Kuvira and the Beifongs.
