Please explain your reasoning in the tags and may the Force be with you.

MACE

These nerds WOULD dig up 500 year old recordings just to prove a famous battle master was overrated, dress up in vintage formal attire, and present their findings to the council (who are not impressed and generally uninterested)

"I've learned from Palpatine."

had a surreal experience at work this morning. i was the only person on the floor when we opened and a customer came over and was like "do you mind if i ask you for help with something?" and when i jokingly said "i don't think you have much of a choice to be honest" he replied "we always have a choice" and then we both just stood there opposite each other like rival wizards of light and dark for several moments.

it literally felt like this

Star Wars Annual #2 (2017) pencil & ink by Emilio Laiso color by Rachelle Rosenberg

This is the more charitable take (the less charitable one is that people are just being willfully dense for the sake of a straw man argument), but so many people in the Star Wars fandom appear to struggle with the concept that stories are constructed and can be critiqued as such. I cannot count the number of times I've seen someone respond to a critical read by saying, "Oh but George Lucas was involved, and we know he actually intends it to be read like so because he's talked about it!" as if this is in any way a compelling argument.

#1, "It can't be bad if George Lucas was involved in its creation" is a bold hill to die on when Attack of the Clones exists.

#2, If a story requires authorial clarification to hang together properly then imo it is almost by definition poorly told.

But most importantly, #3: Lucas is not a particularly subtle writer. I am extremely clear on how he intends the story to be read. And the disparity between that intention and the execution is exactly what I am criticizing!

Literally rule one of textual analysis is that what a text is stating is not the sum total of what a text is saying. "This story is stating X very loudly and bombastically, but is in fact saying Y" is an extremely valid line of critique. "The creator(s) clearly want my takeaway to be X, but have not succeeded in crafting a story that conveys X" is an extremely valid line of critique.

You can disagree with that critique. But going "Can't you read? Can't you see that the story is telling you X?" is at best a profound misunderstanding of what that critique actually is in the first place.

If I say, for example, that I think TCW fumbled the ball by making the Separatists a bunch of cartoonish baby-eating villains, and you respond, "But they are intended to be villains! They are written that way on purpose! They have to carpet-bomb planets for LOLs so that the Jedi have no choice but to get involved in the devastating war fought by an army of slaves on behalf of a corrupt state transforming alarmingly quickly into a full-blown fascist empire!"

...Yes. I am fully aware that they were written that way on purpose. And I think that is a bad narrative choice.

I think it is a bad narrative choice not simply because I would have preferred a different story, but because imo it is a clumsy and dishonest way to handle the concepts and themes which THIS story has chosen to play with. Neither TCW nor the PT are coy about leveling some very specific criticisms at post-9/11 US political culture (there is a war profiteer named Halle Burtoni, ffs). The Galactic Republic is analogous to the United States of America, sliding headlong from deeply-flawed-democracy-that-serves-mostly-moneyed-interests toward mask-off dictatorship. The Clone Wars are Forever Wars, both context and pretext for increasingly naked authoritarianism at home and increasingly naked imperialism abroad.

The problem is that the creators want to have their cake and eat it. They want to play with signifiers and never fully engage with substance. They want to tell a story about structural failure, place the Jedi in extremely consequential positions of authority at the center of the action, and yet absolve them of any moral complicity. This impulse to insulate your protagonists from criticism is definitionally bad writing imo. It is the creative equivalent of a journalist giving a fawning softball interview or an advertiser airbrushing a photo into oblivion: making something that is flawless and blandly appealing, at the expense of something that is complex and interesting and true.

What's more - the way that the creators accomplish this is by unraveling their own metaphor to the point of incoherence (and frankly, offensiveness). In order to paint the Jedi as morally blameless, they take the signifiers of American empire - proxy wars and puppet rulers, profiteering corporations, indiscriminate bombing, a weapon called "the defoliator" which manages to evoke both napalm and Agent Orange - and put them all in the hands of the Republic's enemies. In doing so, they not only hollow out their own themes and hamstring their own critique. They recreate the self-justifying propaganda of the very imperialism and authoritarianism that they set out to criticize.

Of course the Jedi had to lead a slave army to fight the devastating forever war on behalf of the empire-in-all-but-name. The enemy was just SO evil. They had to do whatever was necessary.

Stories are constructed. In-universe events represent out-of-universe narrative choices. When somebody says "The baby-eating villains were right," they are not typically claiming that it is heroic and good to eat babies; they are criticizing the story's framing. When I say "The Separatists were right," I am not saying that the Separatists as framed by the story are not self-evidently villainous. Nor am I saying that I would have preferred less cartoonishly evil antagonists as a matter of personal aesthetic preference. I am saying that when (1) you write a corrupt and authoritarian and imperialistic state which is failing its citizens (it is a plot point that even people outside the upper levels of Coruscant - the heart of galactic wealth and power! - don't always have running water in their homes); and then (2) you write citizens at the margins of that state (the Outer Rim) rebelling against it; and then (3) you paint those rebels as cartoonishly violent and evil, and simultaneously as the source of most of the corruption (someone explain to me why the evil corporations rebel against a government that is already giving them seats in the senate...?); all while (4) pointedly representing them as Other and alien, in ways that sometimes shade into outright ableism or racialized caricatures.....then you have made a series of very specific narrative choices. I am saying that in an attempt to split the difference between a space fable in which the heroes are capital-G Good and a political/military sci-fi story about the collapse of a crumbling democracy, you have failed to successfully deliver either of those things. I am saying that you've undercut your own themes and pulled all your own critical punches. I'm saying you've put your finger on the scale.

And yeah, I think this is definitionally and at times egregiously bad storytelling. You are free to disagree - but disagree with the actual substance of the argument, not some weird straw man about how I don't actually understand the creators' intent.

i hate this spoon.

i bet it's some late 70s plastic kid's spoon

it simply lacks that certain pleasant weight of a metal spoon

it's too thick and doesn't have enough surface area for a satisfying spoonful of cereal

i hate it

A Finn study. I haven’t really drawn him before, so I wanted to change that.

I thought of another insane TRoS interpretation (2 actually) bc the TRoS neurons in my brain are just that powerful and get so much exercise that they're still producing all these years later🪖🩹📿🗡🕵‍♂️🦰🧟‍♂️🌩👫🪦🐌🏳️‍🌈

So why does Kylo not have a ghost? Two explanations, both alike in dignity (which is to say barren of it):

1. (I thought of this one second but it's simpler so I'll explain it first.) When Rey died, she died-died, so when Kylo gave her his life-force he was actually transferring HIS soul to HER. So now he's literally walking around in her body. There is no Kylo ghost because he/she's still alive.

2. (I thought of the first part of this one first and then the second part third.) There is no Kylo ghost because Kylo's soul actually died a long time ago due to Palpatine's meddling. Palpatine tells him, "I've been every voice you've ever heard inside your head," so whenever Kylo started hearing voices that made him turn evil, like when he was 12 or 16 or whatever, this external force pushed his own consciousness away. Over years of overwhelming evil influence, the fragile young Ben soul got crushed and totally wiped out/sent to Jedi Purgatory/damned to Sith Hell😱 So he's just a Palpatine Puppet the whole time we see him in the movies.

What's an elegant way to end this post...

But that's just a theory...a main blog theory. Thanks for reading👏

HOLD ON IM GOING INSANE

the way these words keep going and they make you feel like multiple trains are taking turns running you over and you think oh theyll stop at one point. but they keep coming.

no let this one cook

Mothma

He knows it’s true.

I watched the final 2nd season episodes of Star Wars: Rebels T_T

"I am the master now Obi Wan! -- Dave Prowse, Darth Vader"

"Good wishes, Alec Guinness. [arrow toward Dave] Pompous ass?"

Knights of the Old Republic is first, and foremost, a comedy.

I think Malak had a nice couple of months before he realized Revan was pretty much un-killable. She’s like a cockroach.

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My foundational read on the Star Wars prequels/TCW/other stuff set in that era (and I don't think this is even in the spirit of reading against the text, so much as just...expanding on themes already present) is that Anakin becomes Darth Vader when he slaughters the Tuskens, and the Republic becomes the Empire when it goes to war to preserve its access to the territory and resources of planets that - when you strip away the narrative device of the Separatist leaders' cackling villainy - have textually valid reasons for wanting to leave. Sure, maybe there was a grace period where the man and/or the government could have been hauled back up the ledge they'd already stepped over. But the fall happens in Attack of the Clones; everything in ROTS, everything in TCW, is just Palpatine consolidating his power.

Which does break a bunch of those big broadly sketched light/dark, good/evil, jedi/sith binaries that the space opera is playing with, so I fully get why people who are responding to that part of the story might find my takes baffling or off-putting. But I also think a good bit of the weird dissonance of the PT is that of a story that is trying to have its cake and eat it too, and what I'm responding to is the political thriller half of the equation, and I think it's legit to say you prefer the mythic space opera side of things but not to insist that's the only valid way to read the text.

@medeaofcanva saying that mon and leida function as a parallel to agamemnon and iphigenia, the king and the daughter they have placed upon the altar to launch the ships of an entire war… if you were a king and the gods said to place your child on the altar and you knew, knew that the success or failure of everyone dependent on you depended on if you would sacrifice your child what would you do