anondashymous

[anondashymous]

Pt I

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musk is going to die in a Tesla explosion in 6 months after sticking his nose where it doesn't belong and we will never get a conclusive answer on whether it was a CIA car bomb or just a normal Tesla malfunction

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I love Huyang, but if I could change one thing about his character I think Star Wars should have mentioned his age way more often.

Think about it for a second: Huyang is the oldest character we know in the show.

I guess you could argue that the Father is older or that Bentu is older, but can we even count those? They are basic gods in the Star Wars Universe, Huyang however it's "just" a droid. Nothing make him more special that C3-PO or R2-D2, yet he's older than Yoda.

In fact he was Yoda professor at some point. Huyang teach Yoda how to build his lightsaber.

Honestly I think it would be a lot more fun if he lost notion of time on a regular basis, like I wish he treated Yoda (and Ahsoka on the Ahsoka's series) as kids both for comedy relief and to show how many centuries older than everyone he really is.

Imagine if in The Gathering arc he briefly interact with Yoda like "Oh, young Yoda! Bringing another of your fellow younglings for build their sabers I see" as if he did it for the first time yesterday. And probably would feel like it was yesterday! Come on, my grandma thinks I was 12 last year, I sure Huyang would mess up dates was well!

And the younglings all being confused like"Did he just called Yoda young?". It would be fun and cute!

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I wish we'd gotten a more Rebels-accurate Sabine because THAT Sabine interacting with Huyang could've been so absolutely heart-wrenching.

Because Sabine generally understood the cost of the Empire, obviously, she was in the Academy, she knew Kanan and would've seen the grief and trauma he carried with him, etc. But Mandalore was still standing. Most of its people were still around. It wasn't quite the same experience for her as it would've been for Kanan.

And Ahsoka seems to be fairly removed from that at this point, it doesn't impact her much. Either she's chosen to "just move on" or she's intentionally repressing how upset and grief-stricken she STILL IS over it, and either way is not treating Huyang well. She clings to Huyang because he's a last remnant of this thing that she lost but she dismisses him and disregards everything he says because she's so messed up still that she can't help but make him the recipient of all of her frustrations.

But Sabine has now lost her planet. Mandalore was glassed. And you can even keep in that her family were very unluckily ON Mandalore when that happened instead of on Krownest and are now all dead as a result. She's lost her home and her family in one fell swoop and can't really ever get that back.

And before, she just sort-of stayed out of Huyang and Ahsoka's relationship. She didn't know Huyang before and he never seems all that upset about how Ahsoka treats him, so it's not really her business to butt in even though sometimes it makes her uncomfortable because, well, sometimes Huyang is RIGHT. But now, she looks at Ahsoka and Huyang and refuses to treat Huyang like his wealth of knowledge and his desire to stick to his programming don't matter. She stands up for Huyang more, she asks him to tell stories about the Jedi, she asks him about all of the younglings he taught, she asks him about the lightsabers he's watched Jedi make and what the differences are. She knows Ahsoka is suffering under her own grief, but that doesn't mean it's okay to treat another survivor like shit just because they're coping differently.

And so we get a comparison between how Ahsoka and Sabine treat Huyang and the difficulties Ahsoka still has with the personal impact of Anakin's betrayal, her feelings about the Jedi from her experiences as a teenager, and the loss of the Jedi as the loss of the only home and family she'd have ever known. She can never settle anywhere because the last time she settled somewhere, she lost it. It's safer not to. Sabine disagrees. Mandalore may be gone and Clan Wren along with it, but she still has Lothal and she still has the rest of the Ghost crew. Her losses are massive, but that doesn't mean it isn't still worth it to look at what you still DO have and recognize its worth.

Sabine treats Huyang well because she GETS IT now. She gets what it's like to lose everything and have what little you still have left mean all that much more in comparison. All Huyang has now is this ship, the information stored in it, the lightsaber parts he's kept safe for so long, and his memories and protocols and programming. Losing the programming and the Jedi protocols just means losing even MORE of the culture he'd been a part of for so long, why would he ever want to get rid of it or change it? Why SHOULD he? It's important to him and it's all he has left, what kind of monster would condemn him for that and ask him to give it up just because it's convenient?

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I choose to believe Huyang is being a lot more uptight than he used to be in the Clone Wars because he's specifically programmed to deal with children and the whole cast are acting more like kids than the Jedi younglings ever did. He's on stern father mode and he'll turn it off when they behave.

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At first, when I heard Huyang say this, I obviously assumed he was talking about Sabine and Ahsoka.

But after hearing him repeat it a second time, I don’t think he is referring to just them specifically. I think he is talking about each and every single Padawan he has ever trained.

Huyang was programmed and built to last, virtually indestructible, perfect for a Jedi professor droid. But all the Younglings that he trained were flesh and blood and vulnerable. Naturally, because of his durability, Huyang is made to outlast and possibly outlive most of his students. But can droids even cry? To be one means to be cursed with an artificial version of immortality. You might even say that he was doomed from the start to watch every child that he ever raised die. But I don’t think he expected it to happen so quickly and so violently.

I can imagine him trying to comfort the last Younglings who were in his care, trying to reassure them while the Temple suddenly descended into a violent chaos that none of them had ever prepared for. But they probably panicked and didn’t listen to his final instruction to stay together.

This is not the first time that Huyang has prepared himself to bury one of his own Younglings. But Ahsoka and Sabine were literally all he had left, so without them this means all his pupils are gone.

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huyang saying the jedi archives mention intergalactic travel following purrgil routes. um.

SO YOU’RE TELLIN ME. that an even LONGER time ago in the galaxy far far away that they were able to travel to a galaxy even FARTHER away????

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Ahsoka #4 - "Fallen Jedi" (2024)

written by Rodney Barnes art by Georges Jeanty, Dexter Vines, & Rachelle Rosenberg

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I think it's interesting that - in order to make his "free-thinking Jedi" characters hold any semblance of rationality in their arguments - Dave Filoni needs to resort to artificially dehumanizing the other Jedi and painting them all with the same "we dogmatically worship protocol" brush.

He does this with Huyang in the recent Ahsoka episode.

"Lolz he's so narrow-minded, preachy and by-the-book, unable to think outside the box, just like the Jedi in the Prequels."

My first reaction was being amused at the fact that Filoni had to resort to making the Jedi Order's ideals and rules be embodied by a literal machine for his anti-Jedi headcanon to start making sense.

But then I remembered: Huyang isn't just any droid.

In The Clone Wars, he had a sassy personality, he had a pep in his step, he had a sense of humor...

This character was human in his behavior, he was fun and whimsical.

But now he's been reduced to, I dunno, "Jedi C-3PO"? Basically?

"Ha! He's blunt and unsympathetic because he's a droid, but it's funny because the Jedi were the same, they were training themselves to be tactless, emotionless droids."

And Filoni does this with Mace Windu too, in Tales of the Jedi.

Mace, who brought a lightsaber to the throat of a planetary leader to defend the endangered Zillo Beast...

... and who went waaay past his mandate by mischievously sneaking around Bardottan authorities and breaking into the Queen's quarters because he felt something bad was afoot...

... was reduced to being an almost droid-like, rule-parotting, protocol purist who sticks to his instructions (and is implied to be willing to let a murder go unsolved so he can get a promotion).

I mentioned this at the end of my first post on Luke in The Last Jedi... while changes in personality do happen overtime and can be explained in-universe... if you don't show us that progression and evolution and just leave us without that context, that'll break the suspension of disbelief, for your audience.

Here, we have two characters with a different (almost caricatural) personality than the one they were originally shown to have.

Now... we could resort to headcanons, to make it all fit together.

We could justify Huyang's tone shift 'cause "Order 66 changed him". And we could make explanations about TotJ's Mace:

Being younger and thus more ambitious and a stickler for the rules, and only really becoming more flexible after getting his seat on the Council and gaining more maturity.

Being such a teacher's pet in the episode because we're seeing him through the eyes of a notorious unreliable narrator, Dooku.

There'd be nothing wrong with opting to go with either of those headcanons to cope with this. After all, Star Wars is meant to help you get creative.

But the problem I encounter is that:

Filoni has an anti-Jedi bias, so the above headcanons clearly wouldn't really track with his intended narrative.

We'd be jumping through hoops to extrapolate and fill in what is, essentially, inconsistent characterization, manufactured to make Ahsoka and Dooku shine under a better light.

And that sours whatever headcanon I come up with.

Edit: Also, yeah, as folks have been saying in the tags... wtf is "Jedi protocol"? The term isn't ever mentioned in the movies, I skimmed through dialog transcripts of TCW, never saw it there.

So it's almost as if - if Filoni wasn't draining characters like Mace and Huyang of all humanity and nuance - his point about "the Jedi were too detached and lost their way, but not free-thinkers like Qui-Gon, Dooku and Ahsoka" wouldn't really hold much water.

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My favorite thing about episode 6 of the Ahsoka series was Ahsoka changing her mind and asking Huyang to tell her one of the stories he still had that he used to tell the Jedi younglings when she was growing up in the Temple--the reconnection of Ahsoka to her childhood home, the story that began as "Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away..." is a fairy tale for children, and she initially doesn't want to hear it right now, she has other things on her mind, but when confronted with that there may be nothing she could have done to stop Sabine's choice, to stop Thrawn's return, she changed her mind and asked for one of his stories. It's Ahsoka holding onto a piece of herself as a Jedi, a piece of her culture, with Huyang and the stories of her childhood there to fill in the time and comfort her. That I believe Huyang himself chose to go with her, as the last of the Temple raised Jedi that he knew of, to tell his fairy tales for younglings to someone who remembers them and draws comfort from them, because that's what Huyang and Ahsoka are to each other, they are both of the Jedi Order.

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I still have those stories in my archive memory. Would you like to hear one?

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I love the trend of the doctor having no idea what they look like.

Ten asking Rose what he looked like was adorable, and Nine not knowing what he looked like because he broke every mirror last time is so heartbreaking, however my favourite ones are:

Prisoner Zero copying Eleven and him having no idea who it was supposed to be and calling it 'a bit rubbish' because he thought it was just a random person

Thirteen having no clue she was a woman until Yaz called her ma'am

Twelve being shocked by his eyebrows but somehow knowing what colour his kidneys are??

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david tennant, matt smith, and jodie whittaker: if doctor who calls me and im available I am so there

me: omg yes slay I love that for you

christopher eccleston and peter capaldi: there’s nothing on god’s green earth that makes me want to reprise the role of the doctor on television

me: omg yes slay I love that for you

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much better footage of the haka that shut down parliament today

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