an excellent day's hunt!

star wars sideblog, or how i learned to stop worrying and love the empire | banner by @pigonart

[wookieejamcrew]

Ros Korine, Project Harvester's firstborn and Commandant Hux and the Grand Inquisitor’s eldest adoptee from my fic To Gain the Harbor! Notes/details under the cut ✂️

(also much love and thanks to @ct-hardcase for helping me with the design of her footwear <333 your input is as always invaluable)

Ros was an engineering student at Eriadu Academy before Brendol poached her for Project Harvester. Up until her early-teens, she was training to be a ballerina by her strict stage mother, but there was another path ;)

The "listening needles" on her back are her own engineering invention. They are inspired by the dressmaker pins she used to get poked with as she was fitted for dance outfits.

Like Brendol's Commandant's Cadets, Ros pledges her loyalty to the Grand Inquisitor and is tasked with protecting him. She spies on the other Inquisitors who seek to usurp him. She sticks these listening needles throughout Nur, and they work like GSM bugs/EDIC mini-recording devices. They also double as torture implements so she can extract info more proactively! Super efficient, Ros, good job 👍

(translation: Wookiee Strength Hold) (lol)

Ros uses the same brand of pomade as papa #1, Brendol. He gifts it to her. I have a cute little scene I'm brainstorming for Harbor involving her, the Grand Inquisitor, Brendol, and Imp hair-care. Evil family values~

Ros bandages her hands and feet as she has nervous habits involving her nails. And duh, I wanted to translate some design elements from the labors of ballet craft.

Presently my mood board for her saber looks like this:

[padofwan]

You look at Maul in Rebels and where he's at character-wise and it's just like. The space for Devon has always been there. I don't mean in the sense of like, that she's existed for years and they've only just now told us about her—obviously they didn't create her until they started outlining Shadow Lord—but in the sense that the overall story demanded that if we ever took a close look at how Maul got to where he was in Rebels then a character like Devon would have to be created, and so Devon was the character created to fill that gap.

The space for a Devon in Maul's narrative was so palpably needed that people were trying to fit Qi'ra into it for years because she was the closest thing we had, but I never thought she actually quite fit in there (because she's not an apprentice she's, like, an employee, and her own narrative is much more defined by what she does with Crimson Dawn after Maul exits things; the how of Maul exiting things is now inevitably going to be due to Devon, the apprentice.)

Her presence was dark matter that could only be observed via its gravitational effect on the existing narrative and this is why I just cannot consider any idea of her quickly bailing on this whole thing. Because Maul-and-Devon is premise of the show. We spent the whole first season setting it up for a reason and a vision of a version of this show where Devon leaves him next season is a vision of a version of this show that only has two seasons. Because their relationship is the premise of it. And he doesn't get to just how sad and pathetic and alone he is in Rebels if she was a brief alliance 15 years earlier.

[wookieejamcrew]

✍️✍️✍️✍️✍️

[wookieejamcrew]

yeah. gay sex secrets

[soranatus]

Master & Apprentice | Illustration by character animator, Niq Ducote

[wookieejamcrew]

thank u for always being there to kvetch with me when this fandom is being dull as fucking hell you are the realest and it keeps me from going crazy in a sea of wallpaper paste <3

groupchats with the girls will literally save your sanity from the pervasive fandom impulse to beat the life out of characters until they are so far removed from the narrative you wonder if you're the crazy one for actually having a relationship WITH THE STORY BEING TOLD. it's so hard to actually like the source material apparently but having friends who like it too helps :') <3

[alexkablob]

fandom loves nothing more than to look at an interesting story and boldly ask the question: what if we made it boring instead?

[wookieejamcrew]

ppl are really missing out on all the scandaliciousness that is rheena & lawson. bedding an information broker for an indeterminate amount of time which may or may not overlap with his marriage, two boots chiding lawson's routine deviance. good ole fashioned whoring in my star war.

[wookieejamcrew]

this opens up some wonderful opportunities to explore drea and rheena's hangups with lawson, and on a greater scale identity as it relates to women in the star war. the scorned imperial woman whose husband and father of her son frequents his old flame of an alien mistress. the spurned nonhuman woman who had life-altering history with her human ex but cannot meet his expectations of normalcy.

[wookieejamcrew]

my favorite underlying theme of maul shadow lord is denialism; the denialism not only of impulse, but denialism of our cast's new lived reality in the empire. this is undoubtedly, in my mind, one of the more deliberately written themes of this series as it is the heart of season one's core conflict, and that is because daki, almost verbatim, quotes blanche dubois in tennessee williams's a streetcar named desire.

for those unfamiliar with tennessee williams's works, one of his favorite avenues to explore character flaws was through illusion and delusion. blanche dubois, a well-to-do southern belle recently loses her family's inherited plantation to foreclosure, though the audience should understand in the changing shape of the modern world, belle reve is in truth lost to progress and modernity. blanche appears to us as a relic, entirely out of place and out of time in 1940s louisana. she cannot accept her newly lived reality, always stricken with panic at the "vulgarity" of the new world with its clamor and temptation. daki, of course, shares few superficial traits with blanche, but both remain suspended in time, unable to adapt, even going so far as to deny themselves not only their reality, but base needs, base impulses.

daki is a creature of habit and tradition. he is long-lived and has lived long. he cannot be anything but suspended in time, suspended in the stage of grief that denies reality. it is a loyalty to his culture, a devotion to himself, his identity as a jedi. his was a life and a trauma we, as humans, cannot fathom. but devon is not daki, and she cannot fathom his process for grief either. if daki is akin to blanche, devon is akin to the wingfield children in williams's the glass menagerie. tom wingfield is a warehouse worker, confined to a small apartment with his mother and sister whom he supports financially. his mother often recounts her past, much like blanche, from time immemorial, antiquated stories that feel more like fairytales they'd heard as children. expectedly, it drives both of her children to mania. tom escapes to art, while his sister, laura, escapes to her glass menagerie. both are fragile means to cope with their reality, both inside and outside the apartment. the new world is described as just as suffocating as their mother's bygone babbles:

"[...] one infused mass of automatism."

(i'll get to maul in a moment)

devon and daki are confined to living in sewers, to panhandling, to debasement common of... commoners in the wake of congested industrialization. this is not the future devon saw for herself. the empire robbed her of her clean air, her castle in the sky, her knighthood, her privilege. that fantasy is all it is now. because unlike her master, devon knows only an axial existence, her life caught between justice and injustice, peacetime and war, fantasy and reality. tom wingfield recounts to his sister an escape artist magician he saw who inspires his eventual escape from the apartment:

and let's speak of con artists because maul is not exempt from the williamsisms. when we are reintroduced to maul in this series, he is swallowed by memory. a spy droid, not dissimilar from the probe droid he employed in the phantom menace; a pair of dathomiri zabraks resembling his brothers; and a coterie of fractionally loyal mandalorians. it isn't until they are plucked one by one from his side that maul can operate unimpeded by his past. there is a line in scene one of the glass menagerie: this scene is a memory, and is therefore non-realistic. when the wingfield siblings are forced to face their lived reality, it came accompanying violence: tom's outburst shatters laura's glass figures, and the object of laura's interest, in his clumsiness, breaks her favorite of her menagerie: a lonely unicorn.

the last of its kind, with the ability to adapt.

[enter: devon]

after maul is maimed by the inquisitors, he recalls his own fractured past, all parts voiced entirely by sam witwer, all signaling to the audience, in williams's words, what funny tricks your memory plays. maul's denialism is unlike daki and devon's. maul is too shaped by tricks to not see the empire for what it really is, the tragedy lies in his inability to decode the precise reality of his trauma. and this is why maul is an expert con artist, because he was the stage magician's apprentice. he can continue to mouth palpatine's propaganda but shape it to deceive a young jedi cloistered in her own "2 by 4".

the season ends on an admission and its core conflict is resolved. devon declares to maul, to herself, that she is finally ready to confront reality and abandon the menagerie, the 2 by 4, belle reve. but the hairline crack in the glass cannot be sealed, the violence that came with her "emancipation" will continue to shape her reality like it shaped maul's. the questions i'm asking going into season two are: will devon go mad by her own proficiency to adapt, or will she invent for herself a new reality founded on illusion?

the lawsons are the civilian perspective. brander thinks he can outwit reality, continue operating unimpeded as not just a rogue law enforcement officer, but as a nominally present father. his ex-wife being an imperial loyalist is no accident. the writers are forcing conflict in brander's already volatile life by introducing "constancy" in the form of an imperial occupation. rylee misses his mother, he asks to be with her, the portrait of their family sits at brander's desk, in flames in their 2 by 4, but his father denies them both the reality of her position in their lives. she, for now, serves as a proxy for the empire, but she comes to rylee as a kind and grounding presence. she comes to brander as a reminder that the institution he serves cannot be divorced from the strongarm of the empire. its laws have always been an extension of theirs, just as drea is an extension of the lawsons.

[mylordshesacactus]

Hey so I'm gonna be very very honest here.

And this is going to make a lot of people very angry to hear.

But a lot of y'all on this website are truly deeply genuinely never going to be capable of any kind of real narrative analysis--and I don't mean 'being right all the time' I mean 'meaningfully engaging with the text in any way'--

Because you are, fundamentally, incapable of comprehending that writers usually do things on purpose.

[mylordshesacactus]

The themes are there on...purpose.

The match cuts were meticulously designed and put there to communicate something.

The VA's delivery of a line was being directed. Inflection and tone change the meaning of dialogue. This is intentional. There are entire teams of people shaping those choices and deciding which take to use based on what works best for the story.

Information is being revealed in a specific order, on purpose, to craft an emotional arc and guide the audience's understanding.

A character's romantic preferences are only, and SHOULD only be, their primary motivation if the genre is romance. That is why there is a genre called that. Most stories are other genres.

Creators who dislike a character generally give them LESS attention, MORE boring storylines, and LESS screentime.

Sometimes curtains are just blue. But if the shot composition or written narration takes time to HIGHLIGHT, especially more than once, that the curtains are blue, then the blueness of the curtains is by definition narratively important.

"Cite your sources" is not a witch's curse that banishes People With Different Opinions to the shadowrealm of Being Wrong. Someone making points that challenge your perceptions, while including screenshots and explicit examples, cannot be dismissed with "cite your sources" because they are literally doing that. Don't @ me on this one I've seen shit in the wars, y'all.

Failing to understand these things WILL bar you from ever really engaging with or understanding any narrative more complicated than Paw Patrol for the rest of your life.

I am very sorry if that makes you angry.

[dual-sabers-art]

My interpretation of Devon after using the dark side of the force for some time~

I like to think that the subtle markings we can see on her skin during Shadow Lord would darken gradually the more she trains

[wookieejamcrew]

there's this undercurrent of misogyny any time someone tries to contemplate reva sevander's (& now more recently devon izara's) place in the galaxy post-defection where they essentially send fido to the hidden path farm, superimposing this nurturing character onto a woman who spent the formative years of her adolescence a prideful hunter in the company of fellow consummate killers. a post-imperial reva should be whetting her blade for coin on imperial stragglers, not changing force-sensitive diapers on tanalorr.

[narrativelydoomed]

@swshows Week: DAY 2 - Villains/Sith

Reva Sevander in Obi-Wan Kenobi (2022)

[padofwan]

Something being completely overlooked in discussions of Rylee in season 2 is this: the very first thing he tells us is that he wants to be with his mom. He is clearly closer to his mom than his very deadbeat dad and the main reason he is living with his dad right now is because he is already in school on Janix and his parents don’t want to disrupt his life any more than they have to post-divorce. The last thing Brander does before he absolutely fails to get himself killed is tell Two-Boots to get Rylee to his mom. People are (rather unsurprisingly given fandom’s track record concerning mom characters) forgetting that Drea exists, but that is who Rylee—coming off the worst 48 hours of his life, about to be desperate for any sort of familiarity and a return the world he understands—wants to be with.

And they’re not going to let him leave. One, because he’d have no further plot purpose if he did—but more to the point because Drea Lawson is a civilian government office worker for the Empire and Rylee is about to know ENTIRELY too much about Crimson Dawn and its forthcoming quasi-Sith puppet rulers to be allowed to just leave and tell her what happened. But Maul and Crimson Dawn don’t know that about Drea, right?

Well.

Devon does.

Rylee makes what is going to be a critical mistake in his first scene with Devon before he knows she is a Jedi: while making small talk and explaining his family situation he casually mentions his mother works for the Empire. Devon is only half-paying attention to him while she looks around the room but the moment he drops that fact her head snaps over and she narrows her eyes. You might as well have a flashing warning sign saying Devon Will Remember That. The Devon we are going to have next season, who will inevitably be having a fresh infusion of dark side paranoia warping her somewhat-condescending protective instincts toward Rylee into something more controlling and possessive, is not going to let him leave. For her his protection, you see.

So when you think about what Rylee’s role in this plot next season is and how his character will develop in it, keep in mind: he is essentially going to be in a hostage situation.

[padofwan]

I’ve talked more broadly about the fatal flaw that drives Devon’s fall but I want to dig a little more deeply into the inherent subtext of gender going on with it because it’s really juicy and is a huge amount of what makes her character hit so well for me.

Devon has that streak of pride that develops into a superiority complex centering on her skill in the Force—and what is such a consistent theme of the things Maul says to her, especially in episode 3 where he is explicitly reading her thoughts out of her mind and giving voice to them, as his discovery of her name without her giving it to him reveals to us at the end? 

“The Jedi were once revered protectors of the galaxy, but now they are considered traitors. Oh, how that must bite. To live as a fugitive, hand to mouth.” “Training vigorously to achieve something that few could, only to be denied. You crave that unfulfilled destiny.” “Crushed under the heel of those who are, in truth, inferior to you.”

As a Jedi, Devon’s skill and talent gave her station and respect, but Order 66 ripped that away. The destruction of the Jedi Order forced her to hide that power and that skill and pretend to be just like any other teenage civilian Twi’lek girl to survive—and that’s the thing, right? The GFFA is, for the most part, a very patriarchal place to live, just like our world. (Please do not make me cite sources for “the GFFA is misogynistic on the Watsonian level”, the sources cited are All Of Star Wars.) So: the egalitarian nature of the Jedi Order elevated Devon—and the Empire cast her down. Every Jedi survivor experiences this loss of status, but she has it worse than many because of who and what she is without her abilities or the prestige they once gave her: a teenage girl. She and Daki spent a year begging on the streets to survive; the humiliation of that and how she must have been treated in the process could not drive her loss of status in any deeper. Is it any wonder she is so full of resentment when we meet her? That she is so seething with wounded pride she has no outlet for that she won’t even give a false name when she’s arrested?

Look at how stridently Devon pushes back against being considered a peer of Rylee’s in every scene they share, how every interaction she has with him is flavored with, at best, a graciously condescending noblesse oblige—she knows that if the galaxy she lives in considers her a peer of Rylee’s then that means it actually considers her less than him, and she ultimately thinks he is nothing compared to her. Hell, go a level more abstract with the subtext: a different kind of narrative than this one about a Jedi girl falling to the dark side would take that useless boy/hypercompetent girl setup to ultimately reduce Devon to a reward for Rylee, who that narrative would deem a more deserving main character—and the specter of that concept makes Devon want to kill everyone in sight.

This is why, of our darksiders in play in this era, it had to be Maul who turned her. A Dooku type would never get to her. The Palpatine wine-and-dine that Anakin got would not work on her. But when she was cast down into the gutter by Darth Sidious she met his former apprentice who he abandoned to the same fate—who spent a decade scraping to survive in a literal trash heap and who has continued to cling stubbornly to life despite being consigned to that fate. Maul is scrappy and devastatingly honest when he needs to be and in order for someone to successfully sway Devon Izara to the dark side they needed to understand the loss of status she experienced and the resentment it festered in her long before they met. She needed someone who truly understood what was taken from her—thus, the shadow lord, the king of the gutter himself.

I must stress: this never would have been a problem for her without Order 66. Devon was a good person, Devon was happy to use her powers to help people. She would have been a great Jedi. Devon also enjoyed being praised and respected for her powers and—and is that a bad thing? Doesn't she deserve to be? Of course she does. Dark side falls in Star Wars are all about how things can be two things at once and how the line between them is so much thinner than we like to think. Sidious took that praise and respect away from her and she deserves it back, and she feels she can't get it back in her new reality by being a good person and using her powers to help people. So it is ultimately so easy for Maul to use Devon’s resentment to demolish her altruism, so that she becomes willing to reclaim her lost prestige by becoming someone who doesn’t care about who she has to hurt to get what she wants.

Because it really was such a monstrous crime that was done to her.

[goreprofonde]

- Eduardo Martínez-Leyva, from Cowboy Park.

[zuranis-artblog]

Dedra Latex Mommy

adding to my fashion imperials series (? title work in progress)

I thought she'd look dead good in shiny latex and I was correct