#sw meta

[obiwancreampie]

...which could mean nothing.

Nick Gillard interviewed by IGN / Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith Novelization written by Matthew Stover / Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith

Bonus:

[carbonitechaz]

The more jedi are added to the 'survived O66 list' the more clear it is that the the tragedy of the Jedi is absolutely about genocide, but it's no longer COMPLETELY about Obi-Wan and Yoda as the exiled survivors or Luke as the Hero that can Save Us. The tragedy isn't about BEING alone, its about FEELING alone.

Kanan and Cal, who almost certainly knew each other (to me), are circling the galaxy around each other. They both know Saw Gerrara. Gungi goes back to Kashyyyk. YODA IS STRAIGHT CHILLING. Ahsoka is running an intelligence agnecy. And like, that's what, 5 people? I know there's a handful of more, but even if there's a hundred? Instead of 10000? It's not much, its obviously about their decimation, but they're all, at least for awhile, under the impression that they are lone survivors. They all have to shed everything that identifies them as Jedi, they see their temple desecrated as the palace of a tyrant. They cut their braids and shed their robes, they hide their lightsabers. They find new families, new roles, all assuming the Jedi are extinct.

AND YET. They are all pulling in the same direction. They all remain true to the Jedi they are. Most are involved in the rebellion, some train students, all of them shine in the galaxy even though it's an offense punishable by death.

It never mattered to the Emperor to get every last Jedi ever. It was about destroying their culture, it was about scattering them, breaking their will, and making sure they FELT alone.

It works, for awhile. But as we are shown over and over, being a Jedi is not about any of that. Being a Jedi is about hope, about goodness, about the peace and light that you carry with you, that sustains you and supports you, it's about offering yourself up as a vessel for that peace and hope to manifest itself around you no matter the consequences.

So truthfully, the Emperor could never succeed. No matter how dark things get, the Jedi - whoever they are, wherever they come from, no matter how long its been since they swung a lightsaber, cannot be defeated. Only killed. They will all, always, no matter how few, pull in the direction of justice, and they will always succeed.

[cross-d-a]

Jod Na Nawood’s backstory is FASCINATING!! And makes SO much sense!!! Order 66 fucked up SO much in the galaxy, it’s so interesting (and tragic) to see what it’s done to the force sensitive children who were unable to be taken into the Temple. It truly supports how GOOD the Jedi Order is. How good the JEDI are. I can’t even fully comprehend everything the galaxy lost and suffered without them. And- Jod’s master. She didn’t have to take him in. He knew that. He knows she was desperate. But she took him in anyway and taught him what she could. We only get a very tiny glimpse of that backstory but it’s utterly gut-wrenching.

Imagine the survivor of a genocide. A Jedi on the run, desperate and hungry and grieving, running into a little kid just as lost as her and seeing that LIFE in him. Feeling the FORCE in him. What would that have done to her after feeling everyone she knew and loved ripped away from her. But here is this kid and he needs help and maybe she does, too. Maybe they can help each other. And so she folds him under her wing just as any Jedi would have done. She teaches him the ways of her people, knowing that their way of life lives on in her and that she is passing it on to a new generation. And that probably hurt. It probably hurt SO much. Because she can’t give him what she could have if the Order was still alive. And he’ll never understand what it means to be part of something so beautiful and long-lasting. But she does what she can, and they maybe never would have met if Order 66 didn’t happen. And it’s an awful thought, the worst kind of thought, but she can’t help but be relieved they found each other. Because she loves this lost little kid and maybe they’re broken together, but they’re more whole together, too. And maybe without Jod she could have run and hid forever. Maybe she couldn’t have, plenty Jedi were caught and murdered. But she knew the risk and she took it- and the way Jod talks about it (“they made me watch”) makes me think that he feels he’s responsible for her getting caught. And it makes me wonder how she felt when she was caught. Knowing she was one of the last of her kind, and that this kid was going to be alone again. Orphaned in a completely new, terrible way.

And I wonder, too, if looking after the kids reminded Jod of his old Jedi Master. And maybe he thought “I can’t get attached because then they’ll catch me too and I’ll die just like her.” And you know what, Jod? It did happen that way. You got caught because of those kids. But only because you forgot what it means to be a Jedi, which is to say that after your Master died you tore out that softness within you. Abandoned love for fear. Exchanged generosity for greed. And it’s true grief and trauma changes people. That a little kid alone in the galaxy does what they can to survive. But Jod isn’t a little kid anymore and it doesn’t excuse the choices you make. It’s a wretched world, one without a Jedi, and Jod suffered all the more for it.

And I wonder, too, what Jod thought when Wim paused in the elevator. When that little kid called out to him, despite everything Jod had done to him. Did Jod look at Wim and think: “Yeah, that’s what a Jedi would be” and then hate himself all the more for it? Well, who can tell. Jod is a fascinating character and I’m excited to see where the show next takes us.

[aces-to-apples]

From a storytelling perspective, Maul absolutely needed to push Daki further into the fight with Vader. For the audience to see, for Lawson to witness, for Devon to no doubt crash out over in season 2. But I think he also needed to do it from a character perspective as well.

Look at what happens directly before he does it: he's beat to shit, leg in complete fucking agony, losing the fight with Vader and there's no two ways about it. He's given it his all, his aggression and his rage and his desperation and all his tricks, and Vader just keeps meeting him head to head and stopping him in his tracks. Vader holds back Maul's blade with his bare hand, and Maul may do the same, but then Vader gets his metaphysical hand around Maul's windpipe and absolutely ragdolls him. He and Daki are only barely holding back the inevitable—the full-force fucking tide of the Dark Lord of the Sith. If he keeps fighting, he dies, and Maul is above everything else a survivor.

But look at what else he does. He looks back at where he knows Devon is fighting the remaining Inquisitor; he's hearing her cry out, and he's hearing her lose; he's running the numbers and knows there's no winning this now. He says "no", a whisper under his breath, not desperate but resolved. He makes the decision.

It's a chess move: sacrifice the knight to save the queen (or the pawn he's planning to get to the other side of the board, at least).

And then again, when Vader catches up to Devon and is wailing on her, Maul says "no" and visibly overexerts himself bringing those ruins down on Vader so they can escape. He even hands over a piece of himself, of his old life, maybe even of his soul, to Devon when she loses her Jedi saber fighting the Inquisitor just before.

But honestly, I think it may even go deeper than the utility of it all.

In some small way, even if it's something that doesn't even really make a difference to the outcome, I think Maul needed to have a hand in Daki's death rather than just letting nature (or rather Vader) take its course. Maybe it's remnant Sith bullshit, betraying and killing Masters and taking apprentices, or maybe it's something buried in his psyche. If he has a hand in Daki's death, then if Devon ever finds out, that betrayal will be more fodder for her to use the dark side with. As ever, that pathological need to always have a hand in his own downfall—self-sabotage disguised as proaction.

Tragedy with the illusion of agency.

[ladytharen]

if I think about how closely they're holding each other at the end too much I will start spiraling again

we often joke about the lack of personal space between them all through the movie but they end bound together so closely not a single thread of light comes between them. jyn doesn't have to be here. she's not injured, she can walk, she's the one who carried cassian to the shore, as far from the fighting around them as they could get on foot. cassian's back is broken and he can't stand up without some help by this point. she could have bailed and tried to find a shuttle off-planet on her own. she didn't. she didn't even consider it. maybe she would have found an exit in time, probably not, but she doesn't leave him. she's here, at the end of all things. they struck a fatal blow to the empire even if it cost them both everything. she's six inches shorter than him and holding him up and they're clinging so closely their faces are pressed together in their last moments. no wonder they left the impact they did. what death star?

[englishlotusflower]

I do not see people talking about Ezra's 'mace windu's grandpadawan' moment on mandalore because in heroes of mandalore when the transports go off the cliffs and ezra runs up them and jumps up the cliff (and admittedly falls and has to be saved by sabine bc teenage boy) all i was thinking was hey remember that moment on ryloth when the bridge gets turned off and mace windu is running up the transports and debris and jumps up the cliff. ezra never met mace and yet ezra has still inherited something from him. something something disapora cultures where you sometimes dont even realise where the thing you do comes from and no one else knows either because everyone who could have told you is dead

[padawanlost]

Some people argue Anakin should have been written to spare the tusken women and children, that it would make him more likeable. But I’d argue if he had only killed the men, it would make him worse, because it implies he had control of himself, making him consciously sadistic. That is not what was happening, Anakin was mad with grief and just cut down everything that moved. But even then we’re not meant to see it as justified, even he’s scared of what he’s done.

Anakin was never meant to be likable in the traditional Hollywood way. He is a tragic hero. He was supposed to fuck up everything—especially himself. But the idea that Anakin needed “fixing” to be a good fictional character is as old as the prequels themselves. It’s usually tied to the audience’s inability or unwillingness to see Anakin Skywalker as a tragic hero, as a victim, as an emotional wreck, or simply as someone who is not a classical hero—or someone they don’t see themselves as.

Let’s not forget that before the prequels, all we really knew about Anakin was that he was Luke’s father and Darth Vader. Some people expected Anakin to be the ultimate badass male fantasy type, or a little psychopath from the womb. That’s why the prequels were such a hard swallow for some fans. The truth of who Anakin really was clashed hard with the fantasy and expectations they had built around him.

All that being said, I’m glad George had the courage to have Anakin slaughter everyone. Not only does it make sense when you look at everything he does later as Darth Vader, it also illustrates that one action—no matter how horrible—did not prevent Anakin from being good and heroic afterward. It’s as if he’s saying: look, a person capable of committing these heinous acts is also capable of committing selfless, heroic deeds. That’s why Luke ends up saving both his father and the galaxy. In that scene, George plants the seed for Darth Vader’s most cruel atrocities, but also the seed of Luke’s faith in his father.

In the end, the Anakin who married Padmé, who trained Ahsoka, who cared for the clones, who freed slaves, and who fathered Luke and Leia is also the Anakin who slaughtered women and children. In the same way, the genocidal Darth Vader is the one who killed Palpatine and helped save the galaxy.

IMHO, if Anakin hadn’t killed everyone—if the Tusken massacre had never happened just to keep him likable—the character would have lost so much of his impact and complexity.

It’s like the people who claim Padmé cheating on Anakin with Obi-Wan would have been a better motivation for his turn to the dark side.

People, pleaseeeee…!!!

[reflectionsofacreator]

Being neck deep in the Old Republic era of Star Wars really puts things into odd perspective when the occasional OG meta crosses my dash. Here I am thinking about the nature of the Jedi Order and its tendency to hegemony and severely mistrusting anything and everything that they can't fit into their neat little world view, alongside the desperate and sometimes unethical strides the Order made during the twenty eight year long galactic war against the Sith Empire, where both factions where hundreds of thousands if not millions of force users strong, where sometimes the sheer need of bodies leads to a disconnect between teachings and actual practice... Not to mention the era is haunted by the actions of the events three hundred years prior of the actions of Darth Revan and the Jedi Exile, by the wars that shaped them, and thus gave rise to this unstable and constantly breaking galactic conflict!

And then I read a very thoughtful meta about how the Jedi are a small and marginalized religious group that are both lauded and exploited by the very Senate that they serve. And like. It's not wrong. The Prequels are very much about that!! But god it just reads so at odds to me because that's not the situation I'm familiar with and know.

It's just that the Clone Wars as a concept are just so small in comparison to the scale of this civilization on civilization war of the Old Republic. Honestly it wouldn't surprise me if the developers of SWTOR had that very concept in mind when they were creating the game: Take the Clone Wars and just make it bigger. Instead of a few million clone troopers versus droids you now have tens of millions of soldiers and conscripts on both sides, instead of a couple thousand Jedi versus a dozen of dark-siders and Sith, you now have hundreds of thousands of Jedi and Sith. Not only that, but the Republic itself is smaller, only really encompassing the Core Worlds and a good chunk of the mid rim, plagued by the Sith Empire seizing worlds from them and other worlds seceding in protest. It isn't just the Separatist Conflict, it's that on top of the war against an entirely separate sovereign entity that desires all of the Republics resources and planets.

It's also like. The Sith. No longer is it just Palpatine with his myriad groomed and broken boys and the occasional Fallen Jedi or dark sider, it's now a full blown concept and institution. Power schemes and backstabbing but also a full multilayered society of Sith, military, civilian, slaves all working in concert to be the aggressors of a very big and very costly galactic war. Sure they're kinda uh. Evil. Sometimes. Especially with Emperor Vitiate's stated goal of devouring planets but like. You get to see how sympathetic and morally nuanced people just living in this society can be, from the top all the way down to the bottom. It's not just spooky evil boogeymen cackling away in the dark, it's just mostly that.

It's a fascinating era to dig into and play around in, because you have things like Alderaan's civil war and succession crisis, the discovery of the Voss as a society of Force users who refuse to fall into a binary of dark/light and the Republic and Empire's desperate bids for favor, the politics of the Hutt Cartel and how they brush up against these giant nations, how places like even the outer rim are affected by this galaxy spanning conflict.

Don't get me wrong, I like the original movies and the prequels/rebels era of the timeline! It's just so small compared to what I'm dealing with, with the room for many stories about so many different conflicts just in the Jedi Order alone. The Old Republic era just hits different, and has a lot of flexibility in most every concept it brings forth for every institution to be both a hero and a villain depending on where you look. (Star Cabal you're on thin fucking ice)