HE'S FINE DW o66 was avoided, he's safe, he's just gotta deal with being sad about losing some friends (and having one friend reach new never before seen pits of misery)
[also on ao3] Anakin falls, the Republic doesn't. Obi-Wan has to deal with the immediate aftermath.
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When Obi Wan returned to Coruscant, it seemed as if the world was on fire.
It wasn't entirely in his head. From the heights of the surface-shuttle, the celebrations — groups of revelers with their best wine, parties in the high towers, and the odd firework — looked like happy flames, spreading fast across the planet.
The war was over. It had been announced on the holonet yesterday; Dooku and Grievous were dead, the remaining leaders had been forced to surrender. The Republic had won the war, at last! The unsure joy sang brightly through the sky, brightly through the Force. It sang so brightly that it almost threatened to lift the sorrow in Obi Wan’s heart.
Almost was not enough, though. Obi Wan’s sorrow knew too much to leave. It knew that the announcement had carefully omitted the truth. It knew why the Chancellor hadn’t announced it himself, and what ending the war had cost. It knew all that had happened in the days between his duel with Grievous and his return to the capital. And so his sorrow would not be moved by even the strongest song of the Force.
Obi Wan said his goodbye to Cody — who like every other clone in the GAR, would now be reporting into medical for their operation or waiting to do so — and caught a shuttle to the Temple.
He made his way up to the council chamber, the steps so much more of a challenge for his suddenly-old body than they ever had been before. The walk was too slow, gave him too much time to think and no time to shake the dread in his heart. Every eye fell on him as he finally entered the chamber; the dread only settled in deeper.
The Jedi dictated against attachments, but each Council member had trained a padawan or two. They knew of the special bond a master and student had and so they knew of the quiet grief in Obi Wan's heart.
They did not know how to soothe it, though. If Anakin had died, they might have said I'm sorry, or he is one with the force. They might have comforted him in ways they knew, and everything might have been easier. Less complicated.
But the Force did not often allow Obi Wan the simpler option.
Obi Wan looked at the circle of seats around them. Those fragile words of comfort would be reserved for the ones absent today; Master Fisto, Master Kolar, and Master Tiin’s chairs lay overwhelmingly empty. A few dormitories in the Temple would be in similar states — some to be returned to, once their owners were out of the Halls of Healing. Others to remain empty, like the dead masters’ chairs.
Obi Wan finally sat in his chair, hoping the exhaustion in his bones wasn’t too visible.
“We may begin,” Master Windu stated. Despite the newly-severed stump of his arm and the surely-painful lightning scars, Windu moved with the same grace he always had when he sat down.
Master Yoda sighed, ancient eyes fixed on the carpet and none of their faces. “Befall the Republic, a grave fate almost did. The Sith Lord, Chancellor Palpatine was. Planned on using our friends and allies the clones to kill us, he did.”
Obi Wan had sat with Cody after they received the news, both silently contemplating what might have happened had destiny tilted in the the wrong direction. Soon enough, though, Cody had to tell his troops, leaving Obi Wan alone with his grief and self-blame. Obi Wan did not resent this; he had always understood they were always General and Commander first, anything else second.
“As I am sure you’re all aware,” Mace continued, “Palpatine did not act alone."
None of them wanted to say who or what had aided the Sith Lord. Involuntarily, Obi Wan sensed for the presence in the temple prisons far below. His bond used to feel like something strong, well-wrought — never perfect, it always had some chip or crack in it from an argument or three — but always loving. Now his bond with Anakin felt like an arm trapped in electrically-barbed wire. Something soft and fleshy held fast in something sharp and clawing and painful. Something that would not let go of its bleeding prey.
Yoda looked down. “Deal with him within our Order, we shall. Wronged and killed only Jedi, he has.”
Only Jedi. Anakin killed Jedi. Obi Wan had seen the recording with his own eyes, but he could still barely believe it. He had struck down their brothers and sisters — those few who had come to aid Palpatine’s arrest — as if they were nothing but faceless battle droids. No, something worse, more than drones following orders; he had fought as if they were slavers, here to take all Anakin had gained in the last fifteen years. He had protected Palpatine as if his life, as if his freedom, depended on it — until behind him, unknown, Mace forced himself to his feet and plunged his blade into the Sith Lord’s heart.
And when Anakin realised, he simply stopped. Surrendered. Allowed himself to be captured, knelt and submitted to the harsh push of the surviving Jedi as they brought him, bound, to unconsciousness. No begging, no apologies — no remorse.
Watching the recording of those moments, an uneasy awareness had crept over Obi Wan’s shoulder. He knew that had Palpatine not fallen, had Anakin continued to have a reason to fight, his corrupted Force could have ended them all.
Obi Wan recognised the same uneasy awareness in the Council before him. How close their order had come to extinction.
“Agree on this course of action, do you all?” Yoda asked the quiet chamber.
Obi-Wan managed a quiet yes, ignoring how the word tasted of betrayal.
Although his hands shook, his heart did not have the energy to hammer in his chest. He could feel it thudding steadily, reluctantly, sorrow keeping the rest of his body achingly still. He wanted nothing more than to sleep for a week and to pretend none of this had ever happened for as long as the galaxy would allow it.
“There remains one question,” Master Windu said darkly.
A spike of fear bled into Obi-Wan’s chest.
“What of the twins?”
The words took a white-knuckled hold of his barely-beating heart and crushed it like fruit beneath the foot of tank-walker. He had naively hoped the council would just forget that when she found out about her mentor's and Anakin’s treachery against the Republic, Senator Padmé Amidala had gone into labour. The Jedi shouldn’t have even been there (Obi Wan should have been able to tell her, he should have returned quicker, they should have waited for him), but they knew of the Senator’s closeness with both Palpatine and Anakin. It had been a questioning, not an gentle informing.
“We don’t take children this young,” someone pointed out.
“We cannot usually sense them this young,” said another.
Maybe it was his imagination, but Obi-Wan thought he could feel their brightness from here. Not as strong as Anakin, a blazing solar storm in the Force against the distant fires of his fellow— against the Jedi. Yet the twins still seemed to sing through the Force like overblown stars.
“If Senator Amidala refuses…?”
Obi-Wan could not bring his dead-eyes up to see who was speaking, could not comprehend anything more than their words. His heart did not want to.
“The Senate does not trust us. She is one of our strongest allies,” a voice to his left
“This is more important than politics. This is about the safety of the galaxy,” another to his right.
They are only babies, Obi-Wan could not find the energy to say.
“We do not steal children without [consent]… but we can all agree that this is a special case and special measures can be taken.”
“We cannot allow even the smallest chance for their potential to be corrupted.”
“Indeed, we cannot take that risk,” someone continued. “They must be raised within the Order, under our supervision and protection.”
Murmurs of agreement echoed in the council chamber.
They are only children, Obi-Wan wanted to say. They are not their father. Palpatine is dead. They will not be turned, they are not a threat.
But he could not bring his mouth to move, could not bring himself to truly disagree. What did he know about threats? He had never thought his padawan would be a threat, never thought he would join the Sith, never thought he would slaughter Jedi — and yet here he sat in the half empty council chamber. Here he sat in the Temple, full of younglings and padawans and knights and masters, full of those Anakin would have destroyed. Here he sat among the ruins of their bond.
“Obi-Wan?” Mace’s voice cut through the murmurs. “Do you… have anything to add?” he asked gently.
Obi Wan barely managed to shake his head. He was so tired, so very tired. He wanted nothing but to sleep until this awful nightmare was over.
With that, the council was adjourned and the other Jedi filed out of the chamber, no doubt to go to Senator Amidala's residence or sit by their half-dead fellow Jedi. Obi Wan couldn't quite bring himself to stand. Couldn't quite bring himself to leave the room where he had uttered that yes or that head-shake of betrayal. He stayed sat, tired chin resting on tired arms resting on tired knees, and tried his best to tell himself that Anakin betrayed him first, that this was only deserved justice.
you can kinda tell when a writer has spent a lot of time around kids bc they avoid most of the pitfalls that come with writing children. namely, not giving them a too cutesy or twee voice but making them sound more like extremely weird little adults. kids playing pretend will almost never cutely slot into some romantic scenario for the adults' benefit bc the adults are usually too busy cleaning up or wondering what the fuck is wrong with their child. kids also have surprisingly stringent hangups ranging from very petty grievances to downright chauvinist gender roles, more often than not the result of a tragic education but sometimes far surpassing what they were taught in intensity. what im saying is there's nothing inherently wrong with treating fictional kids as stock characters but it's always quite nice to see when they aren't
It's extremely common for very young children to suddenly say something extremely cogent and articulate, that's jarringly inconsistent with their normal speech. This is usually something that they heard an adult say recently. A kid will spend ten minutes telling you a story about how they fought a wolf yesterday using simple sentences of fifty cent words, then nibble a snack, wrinkle their nose and say something like "I feel like Mum was overenthusiastic with the salt today, and not for the first time either" before going back to their clumsy story. (They do understand what they're saying when they do this. Kids' communication is usually held back by their vocabulary and pronunciation, not their understanding.)
Young kids are also a lot more socially aware than people give them credit for. Young children are perfectly aware that adults don't take them seriously. They know when their parents don't actually like them. They listen and remember when adults talk about them while they're in the room. Kids will develop basic abilities to charm etc. from babyhood and will begin experimenting with social norms and concepts of deception, appropriate information, and acceptable language and attitudes in toddlerhood. By the time a kid is five or six, they have solid social strategies for relating to adults and separate ones fr relating to their peers, that they'll continue to refine for the rest of their lives. They will also say completely off the wall shit because they don't have the context to know what is and isn't considered super fucked up yet.
By the time a kid is eight or nine, their main difference from adults is in experience, interests, and ability for long-term focus. An eight year old can think as intelligently and coherently as a thirty year old, they just have less experience and information to draw from, and are likely interested in very different things. They're also likely still slightly hamstrung by vocabulary and literacy, though much less so than a younger kid.
Teens will behave like adults who have little power (a teen is often at the mercy of their parents and the state and rarely taken seriously, which is extremely frustrating) and who are high stress and mid-crisis, because they're going through a transitory period where their bodies and moods are changing and are having to constantly learn and adjust; a fourteen year old in a stable situation will act pretty much like a thirty year old with an oppressive boss who's just left a tumultuous relationship.
#oh is *that* why i feel 14 again after my fiance broke things off with me and i had to move halfway across the continent back in with my ma?
Yeah that's just what humans feel and act like when they're unmoored and powerless and unpredictably changing. Teenagers are pretty much constantly unmoored and powerless and unpredictably changing, and react reasonably to those circumstances.
I mean, we're talking about people whose lifespan is Yes.
"Oh, the weak wine? That is for children. I am two thousand years old, and I daresay one sip from this highball would knock you on your ass for a week."
Look, there's this weird thing people do with high fantasy where they want elves to be immortal/extremely long-lived snooty aristocrats and also somehow incapacitated by imagining the taste of salt too hard. "Orcs and dwarves have the hardest booze" no they don't, they have work in the morning! In any of these settings, elves would pregame harder than hobbits party and everyone else has shit to do tomorrow.
The average high elf builds up the drug tolerance of a mid-70s Hollywood producer and then spends three centuries studying alchemy. While humans seek immortality, the Immortals seek the elusive "philosopher's cocaine."
you're owen lars. your father has fallen in love with a woman and she's enslaved. you and your father aren't rich, but eventually you manage to free her. this one woman. one woman on a planet full of injustices.
you're owen lars. the woman you call mom had another child once. it doesn't make her love you less, but she talks about him in a way that makes it clear that she loved him, too. he's off to be a jedi now and she's very proud.
you're owen lars. your mother's been kidnapped and you have to assume the worst. a man and a woman step into your home and the man announces himself to be that kid who went off to become a jedi. he knows you less than you know him and before anything else can happen, he takes off to bring back his mother, a feat you think is impossible.
you're owen lars. anakin skywalker brings your mom's corpse to your doorstep. her funeral is interrupted by a message of utmost galactic importance.
you're owen lars. your brother is dead. you never saw him again after that first time. there is another jedi on your doorstep, with a baby in his arm and you know what it means and you can't bring yourself to face him as he hands your nephew off to your wife.
you're owen lars. obi-wan ben kenobi is a pain in the ass. he was more your brother's brother than you ever were and he doesn't understand your particular kind of grief, is drowning in his own. you don't even know the full story and kenobi will never tell you all of it. but you have a child to care for so you tell him off and get back to work.
you're owen lars. you didn't know your brother, but you know your nephew and your nephew wants out of this place as soon as possible. you know he won't be safe out there but in the end you're helpless to stop him. and you know the stories, you remember the one time you met him, the days your mother died. and you do this for her and you do this for your father and you do this for your brother and you do this for your nephew.
you're owen lars. your last act is to protect your brother's child. your child.
Apparently both the Jedi games are bundled together for like $9 on steam and ooohhhhh my goddamn I'm soooo tempted.
i love that you came to my one blog with the askbox open to say this LOL but you should do it. $9 is craaaaazy good for those games theyre incredible and you're gonna meet all my beloved blorbos <3 [palpatine voice] dewit
One of my big breaks with star wars canon is that I fully think that, even with hyperlanes, they should need several weeks to get from the outer rim to Coruscant. I will write that trip as taking Forever unless people are using restricted tech (military) or breaking the law (Han Solo).
I can accept a midpoint btw. The military can take a few days but the freight travel should be weeks.
But like... it should take as long to get a superfreighter from Tatooine to Coruscant as it does to get a container ship from Japan to Ireland (48 days).
I want to imagine that they (the cargo ships) are also more dangerous at FTL speeds so they have dedicated slow lanes. Extra wide for safety, with really long "exit ramps" so they can accel/decel out without hitting anyone. We want to avoid an accidental Holdo Maneuver.
There are also emergency lanes that are kept clear for, well, emergencies. It's not like you can DODGE in a hyperlane. You can't pull over to let the emergency ships speed past you.
So. Service lanes.
So you have the extra slow lanes for freight/cargo/other huge liners.
"Normal" lanes for personal or small group transports.
And emergency lanes for the military, relief aid, political officials, etc.
So the military gets there in two days (ftl equivalent of Mach speeds), solo travelers get there in anywhere from one to three weeks (you can pay for the faster lanes, but it's restricted for safety; bounty hunters usually pay for the faster lane).
And the giant cargo ship is going to take two months. Because fuck you, transportation is such a crucial element of SO MANY TRADE ISSUES, you can't just whittle it down. It needs to be a pain in the ass. You gotta make it suck.
#I totally agree #the interesting thing about galactic level trade is its sheer scale too #hyperlanes don’t connect every single planet- it’s totally feasible that to get from planet A to planet B #you’ll have to drop out of hyperspace like 4 times to pick up another lane #like how you have to change highways to get from city A to city B #I like to think that each time the freighters drop out of hyperspace they have to go through planetary customs too #like how trucks on the road have to periodically pull over for weigh in stations #so a trip you could make in a week gets an extra day and a half worth of time #spent waiting in lines for customs and whatnot (via @katrina-loves-birds)
You get it!
In this vein... who here has spent hours upon hours watching logistics videos by Wendover Productions?
The more I rewatch Satine's scenes, the more I think Obi-Wan is completely right to call her hysterical. Girl's not capable of thinking logically about ANYTHING, she just claims things are untrue if it's convenient to her despite any and all evidence to the contrary. She condemns people for being unable to stop a war from starting without understanding why that war started in the first place or any seeming understanding that it isn't always POSSIBLE to stop a conflict from happening if enough people are trying to make it happen anyway. She can't seem to keep her own ideals straight depending on the situation but can and will judge anyone who doesn't manage to live up to her own conception of her ideals. She has no idea what's happening in her own government and no real control over it apparently, and she blames everyone else for the consequences of her own political choices. She's practically frothing at the mouth about the corruption in her government to the point that she's ready to throw an innocent man in jail on trumped up charges because he questions her performative activism.
Her whole attitude as a goverment leader really is so... not thought through.
I understand wanting to not be involved in the war, but the Secor is dependent on trade for ressources - especially food. And no one wants to trade with them because they don't want to help them out in the war. And not having defence for your system is also frankly irresponsible. She is having a dinner with Padmé (a senator from one side of the war) when that could be seen as a clear breach of neutrality. She barely seems to know (or care) that there's a famine going on. She destroys evidence of the (presumably) elected prime minister's corruption. It's baffling that she looks down upon the Jedi for fighting in the war, when she herself is presumably in the position she is in because the Jedi got involved. Her pacificsm seems to be completely ok with people dying, as long as it means her version of the moral high ground stays mantained. She actually doesn't seem to be all that well liked either - Palpatine's plot to get involved in Mandalore works way too smoothly, and her people are way too ok with her being overthrown when Maul and Death Watch arrive. I am frankly confused how she is supposed to be the head of the independent systems.
The entirety of Mandalore was badly handeled in the Show, because, wheter Lucas liked it or not, the legends Mandalorian lore was already in people's heads (and has a dedicated fanbase), and everything they were doing with the Mandalorians was getting compared to it. Making all the Mandalorians of Satine's faction that we see human, white, largely blond and dressed in the same uniform colours, was probably not intentioned to be bad. But the fact that so many of the visible and unhelmeted Mandalorians of other factions, especially the ones that weren't directly in Death Watch, that we see are POC and accepting of non-humans like Grogu, makes it weird looking back. Also: Why is she dressed like a peacook when all of her people wear the same gray-white-turquoise color scheme? Are we meant to see the underlying messaging in this, or was it on accident?
Din is used to being around Luke, who is so powerful in the force that it just like leaks out of him. It’s almost unconscious but honestly, Din begins to find it kind of weird when it doesn’t happen.
Like Luke is so strong with the force and able to sense most things around him, thus it’s just easy for him to move Din out of the way of an impending blow or blaster shot. He gets used to the rhythm of fighting with the Jedi. He must learn to trust Luke to move him this way and that, sometimes the Jedi will even reinforce Din’s strength with a light push of the force.
At home it’s more simple.
Luke’s school is everything to him. It’s best to just assume that if you are on the planet then Luke Skywalker knows, who you are, what you are doing, and what you want.
For the sake of his students he is always aware of everything. His use of the force extends across the vast acres of land used by the school. Thus, when Din moves in with Luke as partners, he has to get used to the force as yet another roommate.
One day, Din finds the mug that he just dropped hovering three inches from the ground. He stands there confused for three minutes as Luke is almost half a mile away on a walk with Grogu.
Or another time when Din is out working on the ship. he realizes that he grabbed the wrong tool and is all pissed that he is going to have to walk back up to the school when he hears a sudden ‘ting!’ Against his helmet.
He looks up to see the exact tool he needs hovering above his head.
The best is when it’s late at night. Luke is tired and the children are in bed. He can feel light tugs on his armors buckles. Luke doesn’t seem to be aware of the almost absentminded pulling at Din’s clothes and armor. Not until almost an hour later when Luke literally picks Din’s entire body up and pulls him into the bedroom using the force.
Din’s absolute favorite Is when Luke is tired in the mornings, brain half back online. Din will try to get out of bed before being pulled back towards Luke with the lazy tangling arms of the force. He’s always less gentle, most because of his partial awareness. It makes Din’s heart expand in fondness at the warm and soft unconscious desperation for his partner’s comfort.
I've been feeling some kinds of ways since I finished Jedi: Survivor so I'm going to ramble some thoughts that other people have probably already had, about something that blew my mind as an extraordinary example of medium-as-storytelling. big honkin spoilers for Je:Su below.
So, "turning to the Dark Side" in SW is usually going to be a plot beat in the two primary forms that SW media takes, right: visual (movies, TV) or written (all the books, but also in fanfic). In both cases, as the audience, you're largely going to have to take the author's explanation for how it feels, why a character is doing it, and what the motivations are behind it. Even in visual media you're more likely to be told than shown, since it's established as an extremely internal, feelings-based experience for the characters. Because it's not a process replicable in real life, storytelling explanations for the difference between how light and dark side Force usage feels is going to have to rely on metaphor, and on the audience's willingness to engage in pathos. Which, to be fair, audiences are famously great at! There's been mixed results in SW media, but it's perfectly possible to make turning to the dark side a very engaging story beat that feels emotionally real and justified.
Then, there's interactive media. I'm fascinated by the storytelling potential of narrative games because of the different way they demand that the audience engage with the story, right, the way that physiological input from the audience changes the connections that the brain makes to the input it's receiving. The way having to press a button to make the next action happen manipulates the lizard brain into believing itself the cause of the effect, even though the forebrain understands that the story is just as predetermined as a published novel, so the button push is really not very different from a page turn. It's a potent tool for manipulating the audience's emotions and engagement, very easy to fumble but pretty mindblowing when executed well.
There were definitely moments in Survivor when I was like "ok am I going to be allowed to actually play this game some day" when control kept being taken away from me in favor of cutscenes. But as the story went on and I got into it, I stopped minding the times when my thumbs were still, and barely noticed the transitions between "I am making this happen" and "I am watching this happen." That's good narrative game storytelling, for sure. But it still felt like a good story that happened to also be a good video game, not quite meshing the two in a meaningful way. Until Nova Garon.
A lot depends on how you play this, I'm sure, but in my case I pressed through the end of the game from the last Dagan fight to credits in one sitting. Because of how tired my hands were from the physical demand of the Darth Vader fight, and because I had been maining blaster stance for much of the game, I made a semi-conscious choice when I reached Nova Garon to use my saber as little as possible. I one-shotted a lot of unarmored officers from across rooms, having decided that Cal felt cold with rage and tightly coiled, so it would make sense for him to not even give these people the honor of being killed by a lightsaber. So I'll grant you that I was adding my own hot sauce to the delicious angst recipe the game had already made for me.
Then you get to Bode and have a really long cutscene that doubles down on the idea that Cal's anger is, at that moment, cold. He's tightly restrained. For several back and forths in the conversation he even still tries to be neutral in front of Kata.
So, for me at least, it REALLY fucking worked as a storytelling move when Cal explodes. Bode runs off, you chase, and the very first thing you're faced with is a room packed with a comical amount of enemies, the kind of melee scrum you've been trained by the mechanics for the whole game to approach with a whirlwind lightsaber freakout using either double-bladed or dual stance, ideally using Slow to buy some time. I had truly played into the game's hands like a fool here because I only had blaster and single stance as options at the time. So I'm looking around my screen in that split second, considering my stance and Force and slicing options, prepared for punishment, barely registering the notification scroll on the right side of the screen because a whole bunch of new databank entries get dumped by the Bode cutscene - the last one of which is, iirc, 'Kata Akuna.'
So Kata Akuna fades upward and is replaced by the same size white text, relatively small, suggesting a button press to you, like it's done a dozen or more times before to say stuff like 'press O to dash' or 'press R1 to tame the creature,' relatively benign things that are always very useful tools that you use over and over and over as soon as you gain them. Except it says 'press [button command you already know and have internalized as your most powerful Force tool with the longest cooldown, which you were just thinking about using] to have Cal embrace his darkness.'
And like, the phrasing is fascinating to me there. It's always fascinating to me how anyone talks about playing a video game, anyway, like "I just beat Ganon" or whatever instead of "Link just beat Ganon," because of course you feel ownership of the actions of the protagonist of a piece of interactive media in a way you rarely feel ownership of the actions of anyone in a book or movie. Previous button instructions in this same game have said 'press [blah] to do [thing]' without a given addressee, leaving the player to probably interpret that, unconsciously, as the unspoken 'you' that is typical in English grammar. 'You press O to dash.' 'You press R1 to tame the critter.' But - 'press [dah] to have Cal embrace his darkness' is so - unsettling and offputting, separating you, player, from Cal, protagonist - and it's occupying a VERY important space because the buttons its asking you to press are ones you already probably wanted to press, but instead of doing the thing you wanted it to do it's going to do some kind of new, horrible, unknown thing that is almost certainly going to be bad for Cal.
Then you press it, because you have to, and it's the best fucking shit that's ever happened to you, the player. It jumps your level by 10, instakills half the people in the room, makes you fast and powerful and nigh unbeatable. Depending on what difficulty you've been playing on, it may make a combat encounter that looked like a surefire several-deaths-in-a-row run into something as trivial as a roomful of bugs. It lasts an insanely long time. It's godmode. It's a broken mechanic. It makes your screen bleed. The unbridled glee that you, the player, probably feel while killing that room full of people is at stark odds with the circumstance you are in, storywise, because you are supposed to be feeling grief and rage and driving urgency to hunt and catch your fleeing enemy. But instead you have a moment in this room of, if you're like me, hooting and hollering while doing a big old war crime, just because it's suddenly easy and fun.
It took me a couple more 'embrace the darknesses' to realize that Cal only has one stance in that mode. Anything you've learned before is thrown away - earned skill ditched in favor of brute strength. And I didn't really care? Even though I did really enjoy how skilled I had gotten with my favored stances, because the combat in Survivor feels really good, and also I knew they'd be back after no more than 2 minutes in dark side mode. So even though I didn't get to do the moves I'd spent so long mastering, every 'embrace the darkness' was a little indulgence of having my cake and eating it too. It started to feel like an insta-win mechanic against any enemy of a low enough level, and a safety/turtling mechanic against slightly more difficult ones. I wanted to trigger it as soon as the cooldown ended even when I didn't need to, just for the fun. I felt safer having it available.
And all of that - as a mechanic - is the single most compelling depiction of the Dark Side that I've ever seen in a piece of SW media.
The way it shows up as an understated suggestion in your periphery. The way it cuts through every Gordian knot in front of you. How fun it feels, how unfair it feels, how safe it feels to have it on your side. As a game mechanic it places the audience in the position of actually feeling what before only metaphor could attempt to describe - the way turning to the dark side is all about letting go and letting loose. Being a nuclear reactor mid-meltdown. Laughing and button-mashing and going "oh no, oh shit, I shouldn't be doing this" but not stopping. And also, as the player, your mind is not clouded by any mysterious outside control - you're aware of what you're doing, you're aware you're making choices here, you could definitely stop using the mechanic after the first instance where the game has to put a finger on the scale for a moment to teach you the controls. And maybe you do make that choice, idk how you play. But you get through the massacre and at the end when Merrin asks Cal not to kill one last person, and Cal agrees, it doesn't feel cheap? It doesn't feel like Cal 'snapped out of' anything. It doesn't feel like there was anything for him to snap out of, because he, like you, has just been making these choices for room after room of enemies, and frankly no one's been around to ask him to stop before now. He still seems reasonable, and so a reasonable request by someone he cares about still reaches him.
The Dark Side isn't the grief, pain, suffering, anger, etc. It's the release from those. And this one moment of a game mechanic explains that so powerfully and succinctly, in a way that other mediums can't replicate. It's one of the the best uses of a medium in the service of the story since House of Leaves. It's still making me have to lie on the floor and stare at the ceiling weeks later.
There's more to say about how the menu screen changes once Cal's embraced his darkness, altering his internal landscape in a way that doesn't change what you have access to but which can never be unseen. About how 'Slow' as a mechanic is gone forever, the most powerful Force ability Cal had just eradicated by an imposter version (a better version, the insidious inner voice wants to say). About the dramatic, overwhelming way the game chooses to command you to embrace your darkness next time, when the whole screen goes red and black. And the phrasing is different there, too, not 'have Cal embrace his darkness' but just 'embrace the darkness,' because this time you and Cal are not being treated as semantically separate entities. The first time, it's like maybe Cal wouldn't want to, so you, player, have to be the little Sithy whisper in his head that makes him do it. But the second time, Cal wants to do it so badly that his desire to embrace the darkness overpowers your, player's, agency to attempt to make any other choice. Even if you could have won that fight another way, Cal didn't want to win that fight any other way. He takes away your UI until you free him into his darkness, release him from his complex suffering into the simplicity of power.
It's just so fucking good, okay. It's such good storytelling, structurally. The way the player's choices and Cal's actions are on a surface level one-to-one correlated but actually form this intricate internal conversation. Using the most important thing a video game can be - fun - as a tool to describe a very dark place that anyone might go to internally, whether in a reality with space magic or not. But! Not by doing the thing that's been done before, the old "you [consumer] should feel bad because your act of consumption made the characters feel bad" fourth-wall-breaking meta thing that shames the reader for being entertained by others' pain (aka experiencing pathos, an extremely normal and not-shameful thing for humans to do). Survivor uses the audience's enjoyment of the medium against them narratively, in a gleeful and not-shaming way I don't think I've seen from media before, and I love it.
anyway I have no big conclusion here, I just am a writer who gets impressed when other writers do good writing. props to Respawn for making me writhe in my feels.
okay, the Jedi are the mysterious magic monks of the galaxy, but I need to know more about Jedi representation in pop culture and society in the gffa, please tell me all about:
the thousands of space rom-coms that use the ‘secret and torrid love affair with a Jedi’ cliché
actors who talk about how they ‘learned everything about the Jedi and even read their Code so they’re almost a Jedi themselves’
the numbers of articles from trashy holomags about the ‘10 things we should adopt from the Jedi way this summer’
conspiracy theories on the holonet about the Jedi Order controlling the Chancellor thanks to their magic abilities or how grand master Yoda is actually just a puppet
rich and bored upper-class coruscanti citizens who are ready to pay a fortune to get a Jedi doing a few tricks at their fancy soirées
how many times Windu had to stop Vos from going to said soirées
how many kids dress up as Jedi for the space version of Halloween in the core worlds
how entire systems don’t believe in the Jedi and think they’re just characters in children’s stories because they haven’t seen one in centuries
and the very important question every Jedi has been asked at least once, which is of course if they’re allowed to have sex
in my head the star wars equivalent of tswift is some human woman named tay’lor spiff or something and her stans are losing their minds over theories that she’s secretly a jedi singing about the horrors of war, even though she’s from a neutral system that hasn’t seen so much as a moral panic in 50 years
the theories get even more egregious during the imperial era, with people straight up thinking she joined the rebellion in secret and is loading her songs with subliminal rebel propaganda. their main piece of evidence for this is if you play a certain song backwards, it sounds like she’s saying “freedom” in shyriiwook. the fans get really defensive if you point out she’s performed at the yearly empire day celebration thrice now and her family historically owned ewok slaves
spiff fans (also known as “spiffies”) insist that the two decommissioned venator-class destroyers spiff purchased, the bad blood and the reputation, are for diplomatic purposes that benefit the rebellion. jedi’lors have concocted theories that she served on both ships during the clone wars and was respectful of every clone that served there, despite her courtship of a gravball player that thrice advocated against the clone veterans being granted natural citizenship
all goofing aside I don't understand the urge to reimagine Tay'lor Allisoarn Spiff as a secret Jedi fighting for the rebellion when the rebel alliance is literally like overflowing with women fighting the empire. Gara and Ke'Cha and Mileu and Halcey are right there. like what are we doing here. like I'm not even saying you can't like Taylor but why would you hang all your hopes of taking down the empire on her
🤖 thedroidteer-andthegarbagecompactor Follow
Isn't Lady Gara a force sensitive?
🪐chirodactylmanisagatewaydrug Follow
Hence why I put her in the list of famous force using women who are in the rebel alliance?
(okay ignore the fact I've put an image in here but this is ops icon)
🪐chirodactylmanisagatewaydrug Follow
#im sure op has this post muted by now but Ur icon is so real op
The icon is because of this post
👤Eelinrmalice-deactivated201X023
btw to just clarify for anyone who sees this reblog of this post
op is basically saying something along the lines of "yea ik tay'lor spiff is a jedi but like. why is she y'all's only force using rebel icon when there are all these other force users in the rebellion???"
i might have worded this badly but hopefully i got the main point across
🪐chirodactylmanisagatewaydrug Follow
Hi OP here I most CERTAINLY DID NOT SAY TAY'LOR SPIFF IS A JEDI???
i’ve learned people get #Mad if you point this out but the way padme gives birth, induced and mostly around people she doesn’t really know/did not realize she was pregnant, absolutely does play into running themes with her character around lack of privacy and control. it’s not not a parallel with that attack of the clones bit where obi-wan asks why they can’t see padme through the security camera and anakin says she turned the camera off because she didn’t like them watching, and it was her idea to use herself as bait. she puts herself in further jeapordy for a second of privacy. and it’s not even true privacy because she’s being sensed in the force. and of course this would be a major concern for her given she came of age with the eyes of a whole planet, then all of the core world on her. it comes back to the fleeting moments alone she has with anakin, how fragily their little world is framed. and then her fantasy of raising her children in isolation is deliberately subverted by her giving birth (heavily implied) prematurely while watched. like, it’s there
do you ever just think about the obi-wan-fakes-his-death-arc for like five minutes and realise there is no aspect of it that makes sense. like why does obi-wan, one of the clone wars' most famous war heroes, have to fake his death and pretend to be this guy. was nobody else free that weekend. why did they pick the guy with the galaxy's most emotionally unstable and highly homicidal padawan and then proceed to not tell him at any point. why did they introduce perfect face-changing and voice cloning technology as well as (SEPARATELY) perfect disguise holograms and never ever use any of these things again. or think abt the ramifications of that on the wider world. why did i have to see bald obi wan. when did his hair grow back. this arc pissed on my wife
[also on ao3] [series] Cere wakes up to her crewmate, former Inquisitor Cal Kestis, having a nightmare not long after his seeing Second Sister and escaping Sorc Tomo’s arena.
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At first, Cere thinks the scream was from her own nightmare.
In that initial, bleary moment of consciousness, she’s trying to remember what her mind was forcing her to see, what might have made such a noise. It isn’t until she hears the quick, unsteady footsteps and the fresher door shutting down the hall that she fully realises whose it was.
That realisation immediately has her throwing off her blanket and swinging her legs off the bunk, dashing to her door. This is far from the first time she’s heard Cal wake up with a nightmare, but it’s the first time she’s heard him yell like that in the night. She can’t bring herself to do her usual act of waiting five or ten minutes and heading to the kitchen as if she woke up on her own to check on him. Instinct screams at her to go to him now.
As she exits her door, there is, of course, no sound of movement from the next-door cabin. Greez can sleep through anything — a fact which Cere is thankful for most nights. She’s sure she would’ve woken him up plenty with her own yelling more in the past year otherwise. Then again, even if Greez had heard, she doubted he’d come out of there soon. He probably figured his face was the last thing Cal wanted to see after the events of the past couple days, even if Cal had clearly been trying to show Greez he didn’t much hold it against him.
After they were out of Sorc Tomo’s range enough to have all mildly calmed down, Cal had acted like it was fine that he’d been captured, knocked out, and forced to fight in an arena to pay back Greez’s debt. He treated it with his usual out-of-place levity, even making a joke about it not being half as bad as the training arena back in the Fortress and that as kidnappings go, it definitely wasn’t his worst.
Greez managed a nervous ha! at that and made a face like he was mentally cataloguing every possible dish he could cook to make this up to Cal. Cere had only nodded, trying to think of anything but the Fortress and Trilla and Cal being captured on Bracca as a child. And how close he might have come to recapture at the hands of ‘The Second Sister’ just before his capture by Tomo’s men.
It hadn’t particularly worked, she’d been feeling a little sick since the conversation — and the way Cal had been looking at her a short while after didn’t help. He kept staring strangely when he thought she wasn’t looking, almost studying her, like her face had the answer to some ancient, too-complicated puzzle. Between that and Greez’s nervous chattering, dinner had been awkward at best. They’d all turned into bed a tad earlier than usual.
Now, Cere reaches the ‘fresher door, hearing the tap running and what might be someone’s quick, I’m-really-trying-not-to-cry breathing. He probably wants privacy. She’s figured from the past few weeks that Inquisitors, even defected ones, don’t do well with vulnerability or people seeing them ‘weak’. The knowledge he’ll likely be more angry than grateful barely gives Cere a second of hesitation before she knocks on the door anyway.
“I won’t be long,” comes a croaky, muffled reply.
Of course, his first thought is still that someone just wants the toilet. “Are you okay?” Cere asks, ear almost to the door.
After a few moments, the sound of running water stops. The heavy breathing slowly flattens out to something inaudible from this side of the closed door. Cere steps back and the door makes a shhck noise as it opens, revealing a wide-eyed Cal.
He’s splashed water on his face and roughly wiped it off with his sleeve. It’s turned the grey sleep-shirt Greez bought him a dark, almost black colour in the crook of his arm and by the collar. It’s mingling with what she’s sure are sweat stains. His eyes are wide and he’s gripping the doorframe on both sides like he thinks the ship will jerk suddenly or that his legs will give way even more suddenly. He clears his throat before he speaks; “Yeah, I’m fine. I’m—”
Cal stops himself and Cere has the distinct feeling he’s trying his hardest not to start crying again.
If they had been a master and padawan in the Temple, she would have counselled letting his feelings flow freely into the Force, told him to allow himself to cry so that he could let go and be at peace. But the Temple is long gone, so she instead asks; “Do you want some tea?”
Cal manages a little nod.
Cere walks towards the main area of the ship and she finds herself a little surprised to hear Cal’s footsteps behind her, much louder than the eery near-silence he usually walks with.
Noting how unsteady he sounds, she also heads to the couch and grabs a mug someone left on the tabletop, hoping it looks like she just came over to clear up and not to see that Cal managed to sit down without falling over.
He sits down and shrinks in on himself. Normally, Cal is a good half-a-foot taller than her, but hunched over himself with his forearms on his knees, he now looks like a small child. Like if he stood up now he’d be below her shoulder-height at the very most.
She picks up the mug and begins to walk away from the couch—
“I remembered you tonight,” he blurts out.
Cere halts only a step away. “Hm?”
“You were Second Sister— Trilla’s master, weren’t you?”
The suddenness of the question takes a moment to process. Cere’s heartrate begins to thunder in her chest, like it thinks she’s actively being shot at. The rest of her body feels like it’s been frozen-still in ice. Part of her wants to move to the kitchen to make that tea, pretend she didn’t hear it and give herself a second to think, but her jackhammer-panic keeps her in place. She’s about to panickedly ask what did she tell you, I’m sorry, I can explain until she registers that quiet, gentle tone Cal asked with.
“I… was, yes,” she answers.
He nods, humming out a small acknowledgement. “Mm. I didn’t recognise you with the shorter hair and looking…” he closes his mouth for a moment, searching for the right word, “so much healthier,” he finishes.
The idea that she looks ‘so much healthier’ than any point in her life seems laughable. She’s not sure whether it’s the lack of sleep, the lack of the Force, or the events of the last years, but on the odd occasion she actually looks in the mirror she’s always half-convinced she’s coming down with something. She’s fairly sure the only times she’s looked worse were when she was injured on missions back in the Clone Wars, or back when…
The possibilities of where he remembered her from dwindle down to one. If either of them had ever met in the Temple, she doubts either of them would remember it, and he certainly wouldn’t have seen her ‘unhealthy’ there. There’s only one way he would’ve seen her so unwell and remembered it. Only one place he could have seen that.
Cere’s unable to avoid looking down at his bare hands when she asks the question she already knows the answer to; “Recognised me from where?”
He glances up at her for a second before his eyes drop down to his hands too. “Nur.”
Cere nods slowly. She doesn’t know when she sat down, she just knows that her legs don’t feel quite strong enough to stand back up. He was captured after her and Trilla. She knows the only person they brought into watch was Trilla. So he must have seen her through…
“I tried not to,” he says quietly. He sounds so unbelievably small and soft, and it seems so impossible that he has ever been a deadly Jedi-hunter.
“I tried to push the echoes away but they— they were too strong. I couldn't help it. It was like they had claws and… they just—” he huffs out through his nose, hard and shakily. “I don’t think they ever even tortured me. Physically, I mean, I— they didn’t have to, I— I broke the second they put me in there.” He says it too flatly, like he’s talking about some mundane event happening to someone he’s never met. “There was so much pain.”
Cere doesn’t know what to say. Doesn’t know how she could say anything to that. He’s barely spoken about what happened in Fortress outside of flat jokes. Cere shouldn’t be thankful for that, she really shouldn’t.
“I think I remember your echo,” he says absentmindedly. “I liked your one.”
Cal’s gaze is still glued to the floor, so he can’t see the way Cere’s eyes widen or the way she grips the empty mug so tight her knuckles are practically white. What? Liked? How could anyone have liked that? What is that supposed to mean? Did they make him take joy in the memory of a Jedi tortured? Was that part of his torture? It has to be a slip up. He doesn’t mean that. He can’t have liked that. What does that mean?
It’s only decades of Jedi training that keeps her still in place and stops her from snapping, standing up, walking into her cabin, and pretending this conversation never happened. She tries to remind herself he’s traumatised and sleep deprived as she silently waits for elaboration.
“You were the one who managed to escape,” Cal continues, either sensing her confusion or continuing as he would have. “Everyone else broke or died, but you got out.”
“Oh,” she breathes involuntarily.
The wave of initial shock passed, the true horror of Cal’s statement dawns on her. Everyone else. Of course. If he’d seen her torture, he’d seen the same of everyone else that had been tortured on that table. Not just seen, experienced. He’d experienced her pain and Trilla’s pain and the pain of hundreds of Jedi captured before him.
She tries to think about what that means, the enormity of what he’s saying, how long or often they must have put him on that table as a child for him to have remembered so many and hers specifically, but her mind keeps catching on I liked your one. Maybe it was simple self-interest. Maybe it’s just the impossibility of imagining what this teenaged boy had been through; whatever it is, she can’t drag her thoughts past the fact the worst days of her life were the best thing he experienced on that table and what that means.
She blinks, coming back to herself a little. “But I didn’t just escape. I broke too. I—” she’s not sure why she has to say it, he knows anyway, but she has to make sure he knows what she really is— “I gave Trilla and the younglings up.”
She braces herself for righteous anger, but Cal doesn’t even hesitate to say; “You lasted so long, though. I lasted minutes and in the end, I— you killed a lot less Jedi than I did.”
“I fell, Cal. I used the dark side.”
“And you used it to escape.”
The other half of that statement remains unspoken; you fell and used it to escape the table. I fell and I didn’t. Cere swallows, her mouth tightening to a thin line. After everything he’s been through, Cere cannot hate herself aloud without teaching Cal to hate himself more. There is nothing she can say to make him see her how she sees herself, for he will always find some second-half-of-the-statement that he thinks is worse. They could spend the entire night trying to convince one another that they are worse than each other and where will that leave them? In a spiral, trying to dig themselves deeper and deeper into the pit the Empire threw them both into.
He won’t stop this first, she knows — and he shouldn’t have to. He’s still only a child, only a padawan, she’s supposed to be the sort-of-maybe-master here. The Temple may be gone, but that doesn’t mean she can’t try to drag him out of the pit he’s trying to push himself into.
He’s rambling now. It’s the most she’s ever heard him talk ever, let alone about his past. He’s saying something about not making Master Tapal’s sacrifice worth it, not making anyone’s sacrifice worth it, he should’ve lasted longer, he should have resisted, he should have—
Cere reaches out to hold Cal’s nearest shoulder. He stops talking abruptly, wide-eyed, near flinching. He leans into the touch ever so slightly. “You were thirteen, Cal,” is all she can manage to say.
He shakes his head, picking at his thumbs and refusing to hold her stare. “I should have been able to—”
“You were thirteen.”
Cal looks up at her — finally looks up at her — and the sheer emotion in his eyes threatens to shatter her supposedly-Jedi-stoic heart. His eyes seem at once surprised and grateful and panicked and grieving. The expression on his mouth is somewhere between sour and upset.
She doesn’t know which one of those emotions gives her the push she needs to say more. “You said it yourself, everyone broke or died. There weren’t any exceptions and you were only a child. You couldn’t have done any different. You didn’t have a choice then.”
He shakes his head ever so slightly
“None of us had a choice then”, she says, even if she can’t quite bring herself to fully believe that the words apply to herself. “But when you could, you chose to let that other Jedi escape and to contact me. You chose to leave the Inquisitorius.”
Cal bites the inside of his cheek, eyes flitting back down.
“You chose to come back to the light. You’re choosing to help find the holocron and rebuild that light.”
He blinks several times and when he speaks, it comes out croaky but solid; “The light didn’t feel like much of a choice either. It was like I— I mean, I think I have the echoes to thank for that too.”
“How so?” she says, surprised at how masterly her voice is beginning to sound. Surprised at how openly-Padawan-like he is beginning to sound to her too.
“Most of the Jedi that I—” he furrows his brow for a moment— “most of the Jedi got caught because they saw someone in need and couldn’t stop themselves helping. They were being hunted and… killed, and still they all kept choosing to be kind. Even if they knew it was gonna get them found.”
He shrugs. “I guess I just… wanted to be like them. I wanted to help, like they did. Or the echo gave me their ideas, I don’t know if there’s always a difference…”
Most of her mind is fascinated and amazed by this, that the very ability that broke him could bring him back to the light. But at the back of her mind, a small disappointment blooms. Such a technique will not work for Trilla; she might truly be lost if this is the only way to break free.
“What if it doesn’t stay?” Cal asks, a too-young fear in his voice, “What if it’s not mine and I find too many bad echoes and I just… I go back the other way?”
Cere understands, not for the first time, that all Cal was allowed to be under the Inquisitorius was his psychometry and a weapon and that absolutely nothing has been his for five years.
“Cal,” Cere starts, “your light isn’t just an echo of someone else’s. The Force doesn’t work like that and I think you know that.”
Cal’s brow remains low. He doesn’t believe a word she’s saying, or maybe she just sounds too much like a boring teacher to be listened to.
Cere takes a slow breath in. She needs a different tactic. “I don’t know what it’s like to feel the past like that and I’m not going to pretend I do. But from what you’ve told me, the echoes only show you the past, maybe what that person felt at the time. They don’t show you how you should feel about them afterwards. You could’ve ignored all those echoes. You could have seen them as a reason to keep your head down and keep enacting the Empire’s orders to avoid being like them. But what you just said… you chose to see the hope and kindness in those memories, not the darkness.” She reaches out to his hand and shakes it a little as she says; “You chose the light. Nobody chose that for you.”
And she knows this to be true. If he could feel the echo of her torture and her dark, broken escape and still find it likeable, if all he saw in the echoes of dead Jedi was their kindness, he could find the hope in anything, no matter how lost he thought he was.
“You’re made up of a lot more than other people’s past. And a lot—” she struggles to get the words out, knowing if she says them she will have to start believing them herself, “more than your past, too.”
Cal barely glances at her for a second before turning away to hide his face again. From the little of his features she can see, she can tell that dark look has lifted and the conflict in his face seems quiet. He can’t dispute what she’s said, maybe doesn’t even want to.
The gentle hum of the ship’s engines and systems fills the silence he leaves. The sound seems so peaceful, so unlike the past minutes, and Cere thinks that she would be quite content to sit here enjoying the sound for hours, hand on Cal’s. The idea sounds suspiciously like meditating.
The panic in her blood begins to drain away, ceding ground to the late night tiredness she had forgotten. She barely staves off a closed-mouth yawn and finds herself remembering why this conversation happened. She remembers Cal’s dislike at being seen vulnerable and deciding not to not to wait for him to remember that dislike too, she asks; “Do you still want that tea?”
Cal nods quickly, actually looking at her sitting up straighter, like he’s physically trying to move above that conversation. “Yes. Thank you, yeah.”
Cere stands up, taking her hand from his and still holding the empty mug with her other hand, and takes the short few steps up to the little kitchen, making sure it looks like she can’t see Cal wiping his eyes the second her back’s turned.
As she puts the dirty mug in the sink and grabs two clean ones down, Cere thinks that just as Cal had his hopeful echoes, she has Cal. Someone who fell further into the Dark than her, for so much longer, sparking so brightly against her closed-off Seeker senses. Someone who had to climb so much harder to find the light again. To her, he’s like her own light at the end of this Forceless tunnel she’s pushed herself into, an idea that there could be a way out of whatever hell she’s been in for the last five years.
The scared, disappointed place at the back of her mind begins to hope. If Cal has Cere looking for the light after only a few weeks, he must have rubbed off on Trilla the same in four years. For the first time in years, she finds herself thinking there’s still hope for her first padawan too — and maybe some hope left for herself too.
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