florafaunaandeldritchhorrors

[florafaunaandeldritchhorrors]

I am becoming aware of the effect a lack of trust in the media has had on people, paired with a dearth of research skills.

[florafaunaandeldritchhorrors]

FINALE - You might want to read the propaganda this time. Lots of misinfo in fandom on these two in particular.

Remember, this is NOT about who would win in a fight. This is about who makes the best leader for Mandalore as a whole.

Explanation post

Seeding

Propaganda below the cut! You can submit more on this post and I will reblog it back to here! I was going to keep the text-only bits above the readmore, but we got enough in that it takes up more space than I thought.

Yes, I will even reblog the stuff based on fanon, but I will judge you for it.

SATINE KRYZE

Anon: Satine because she served. Mandalorian fashion week would love her. Manda'slay.

Anon: Satine Propaganda: Was supported by the STRONG MAJORITY, led Mandalore to be in peace for NEARLY 20 YEARS, didn't ban mando'a or armour or any part of the culture like fandom claims, is a good fighter, considered EVERY Mandalorian a Mandalorian and didn't discriminate

@lightsaberwieldingdalek: Satine propaganda: she actually ran a functioning government. Not a mercenary band, or a death cult, or a terrorist extremist organisation, an actual functioning government. Yes there was corruption, corruption she did her best to stop to the point of personally getting in firefights with smugglers, but she took a planet devastated by civil war and by the end of her rule she had schools, public works, and a justice system. - Sure, the rest can run military operations (and we don’t know Satine couldn’t, only that she *won’t*) but can they make the bins get emptied regularly to go to the recycling plants?

@lightsaberwieldingdalek: I understand Jaster has the tacticool appeal, and has the iconic armour, but guys. He did an interpretation of some problematic historical values for the more modern day, led a mercenary band, and under unknown circumstances his group started calling him the historical-cultural title of the ruler of their entire cultural group. I know he’s cool looking, and shoots real good, but at most he’s the equivalent of someone who could be a cult leader but doesn’t want to be. - Meanwhile. Satine. You have issues with her ethical code, and she’s not a cool cause she doesn’t wear the armour. And yet she is the one who *actually ran mandalore*. For 20-ish years, and not only kept it stable but built it up from the ruins of civil war! - Yes yes T-helmet cool and military man competence nice, but that cannot equal taking the ruins of a war torn society and turning it into a mostly peaceful (when terrorism happened it was a big shocking deal, not normalised) urbanised people who eat well, have access to luxury and specialised education (get a offworld Jedi to come lecture) and can ACTUALLY BREATH IN THE ATMOSPHERE RUINED BY ALL THE WARLORDS LIKE JASTER TRYING TO FIGHT THE REPUBLIC TO PROVE THEMSELVES.

Anon: Satine propaganda: she knows what the aftermath of war is like. Jaster knows war from a soldier's perspective, a commander's perspective. But Satine knows it from a noncombatant's perspective. She's seen the aftermath and wreckage it leaves behind. Rebuilding after a war takes far longer and likely costs more than the war itself. I don't think Jaster cares about what happens after the battle. But Satine most certainly does.

@archangelsunited: Efficient and long lasting leader of her faction for years, was able to navigate neutrality with the Republic during the Clone Wars. Excellent Hair pieces.

@publiusmaximum: She allowed her society to experience it's first moment of peace and prosperity in a thousand years. - After she was killed, her society was taken over by fascists and gangsters. In short order Mandalore was razed, made uninhabitable, and her people scattered. - Satine was right about everything.

JASTER MEREEL

Anon: Jaster is the one who should rule Mandalore and all Mandalorians, although he started small he searched to make a new code of conduct for Mandalorian bounty hunters, he tries to keep the culture intact yet keep Mandalore progressive and not stuck in the past and from killing each other.

@spacetime1969: He literally rewrote what it means to be Mandalorian, and he created an entire movement around said philosophy that had a good chance of becoming the controlling party of Mandalore if he hadn't been assassinated. What more do you want?

Anon: Jaster for the win, he's the most recent one who actually knows some shit (as much as I love Din Djarin this poor man doesn't know ANYTHING), besides Jango and Boba but they're both very unstable individuals.

@nerdpickle: Jaster, his philosophy perfectly balanced tradition and reform, keeping the best of both worlds, he was also one of the few people chosen by the people

Mereel is a strong and powerful leader. He defeated the traiter Tor Viszla in battle and even took in a poor, orphaned Concordian child after the battle. No more will Mandalore be forced to consider such petty ideals as peace in order to avoid outright war. Instead, we shall be known throughout the galaxy as the greatest mercenaries the galaxy has ever known. Under his rule, we shall triumph over the foolish savages of planets unconquered and be paid handsomely for it!

Anon: Mereel is a strong and powerful leader. He defeated the traiter Tor Viszla in battle and even took in a poor, orphaned Concordian child after the battle. No more will Mandalore be forced to consider such petty ideals as peace in order to avoid outright war. Instead, we shall be known throughout the galaxy as the greatest mercenaries the galaxy has ever known. Under his rule, we shall triumph over the foolish savages of planets unconquered and be paid handsomely for it!

@archangelsunited: Had a structured document for Mandalorian Culture in the modern (tm) day. He fought with the warriors he sent out and took personal interest in the results of his actions (Jango Fett mentorship). Pissed off Tor Vizla.

@nerdpickle: Satine’s Mandalore was like Switzerland, except without the well trained military, incredibly advantageous terrain, high gun ownership and giant nuclear armed alliance providing a free buffer zone on all sides.

SATINE

@bosooka: Originally here

i wrote way too much for my original draft of this (and it turned into a "fuck jaster mereel" party) so here's an abbreviated version

Why Satine is a Better Ruler Than Jaster in 2 Simple Points

Point #1: Satine actually maintained order on Mandalore for decades

This one is simple. Mereel became Mandalore in ~60BBY and Tor Vizsla tried to overthrow him a mere two years later (and nearly succeeded). He was only in power for six more years before he was betrayed by the very same violent people he allowed to remain by his side because of his belief that a Mandalorian warrior was "merely a highly-paid soldier".

Contrast Satine: ruled from approx. 42BBY until 19BBY, a reign of 23-odd years. For twenty-odd years of her reign New Mandalore was completely peaceful and there were no challengers to her authority among the people or elsewhere. Death Watch only became an issue again when they received Separatist (and ultimately Sith) backing, and Dooku discarded them for being useless. Had Death Watch not allied itself with Maul's Shadow Collective I don't think she would have been overthrown at all.

Point #2: Satine kept Mandalore out of places it didn't belong

As we've established, Mereel had no issues with Mandalorians being mercenaries, used however their clients saw fit. I won't go into the weeds of the ethical implications of mercenaries and why they are illegal under international law on Earth, but in short: letting anyone pay one to kill others is the easiest way to become the cudgel of a fascist. Coincidentally exactly what the Fett clones become when Sidious uses them to exterminate the Jedi. Mereel's "reforms" of the Mandalorian ways did not prevent his troops from getting into a fight they couldn't win against the Jedi on Galidraan (and yes, the Mandalorians shot first:

not that anyone in the fandom remembers this...) after they but an insurrection down on behalf of the corrupt governor of the planet. To be clear, the True Mandos knew that the governor of Galidraan was corrupt and most likely harboring Tor Vizsla, but they still agreed to kill "insurrectionists" for money. Their problems came when Death Watch arranged to make it look like they had also killed women and children. Truly a war between saints and monsters.

Meanwhile Satine: the head of the Council of Neutral Systems, she refused to take sides in a war pushed by the greedy and violent. Yes, she was briefly protected by clones when it comes to light that Death Watch is aligned with the Separatists, but it was immediately followed by the Republic attempting to militarily occupy Mandalore and Satine risking life and limb to keep her people autonomous. Satine refused to become a useful idiot for warmongers, even knowing that it would have been economically advantageous for her to do so. Unlike Jaster Mereel, she has ideals that she values more than credits. He would have accepted an offer from the highest bidder and turned Mandalore into a machine of war for the Sith, just like his Crusader ancestors once did.

Tl;Dr

Satine was actually respected as an authority on Mandalore for literal decades and was only challenged by a miniscule faction of terrorists who had to get foreigners to interfere in their political processes (FML) in order to actually take power from her

Satine kept Mandalore out of conflicts it did not belong in, which largely protected it from military occupation and destruction until the year she died; Mereel made a career out of interfering in the affairs of other planets if they were paid to do so

Unlike Mereel and his successor, Satine had morals to motivate her decisions that were not the pursuit of cold hard cash, including the protection of Mandalorian independence and neutrality

[florafaunaandeldritchhorrors]

Trying to explain what the fuck just happened in Lankan politics today.

The leftist party has won 159 seats out of 218 in the Parliamentary elections. The single biggest landslide win since we broke from the British and achieved universal franchise in 1948.

Any party achieving a super majority in the executive and legislative is, objectively speaking, bad. It disables checks and balances, which is a catastrophic thing for any democracy, and the only two other times it's happened for us has irrevocably eroded the fabric of civic rights and democratic freedom. Also, the reason the NPP won the North and East is that the colonized, genocided and subjugated people there have no faith in electoralism anymore. The way this government has engaged minority issues has been utterly abysmal and now they've been rewarded for it.

On the other hand:

The winners. Are all. Grassroots. Candidates.

We have voted out every single career criminal that's been barnacled into the Lankan political arena since before I've been alive. The fascist party has only three seats. The other fascists didn't win a single seat. The neoliberal legacy party won none. There are only forty people in Parliament that represent any sort of dynastic political legacy. After 76 solid years of nothing but political dynasties.

This is barely five years after the Rajapaksas swept in and absolutely glutted the Parliament with their family members and cronies end to end.

This is the illegitimate interim government we had for most of the last 18 months. We literally, physically, chased the Rajapaksas out of the country and this fucking demon set up a puppet government just so he could finally sit in that goddamn chair and be the despot he'd always dreamed of in exchange for letting them all come back. He's now gone. His entire circle is gone.

THEY ARE ALL FUCKING GONE.

In US terms, just imagine the entire GOP and the worst of the Dems destroyed and purged from Congress and Senate, the Green Party in control of all three branches of government, an unmarried abortion rights activist Vice President, and the Dems reduced to barely 20% of the House. Five years from now, when Trump's GOP has control of everything.

This is my anthropology professor. She joined politics from the small nascent leftist coalition to help keep the government accountable. She's now the Prime Minister and the most popular Parliamentary candidate in the nation's history.

On the other hand— the woman who helped make me a radical anarchist and literally helped write a book on political dissent and resistance...now is the state.

But there are so many women in Parliament! We had the lowest female representation in a South Asian Parliament and some of them were from the list of seats reserved for parties rather than elected ones. Most were either anti-feminist conservative embarrassments, widows and daughters of elite politicians and neoliberal shills. It's still only an increase of a few percentage points but now we have elected academics, feminist advocates, activists! THERE IS A REPRESENTATIVE FOR MALAIYAHA TAMILS IN THE CENTRAL PROVINCE FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY AND IT'S A YOUNG WOMAN! This is the plantation community that still live in conditions closest to the slavery the British forced upon them two hundred years ago!

I'm like. Completely mindfucked. To be very very clear, these people are not Marxists or anything near; they're mild social democrats who would only be threatening to like, USAmerican liberals, who are now center-right. The actual chances for radical reform are still quite low, and the opportunity for further erosion is extremely high.

On the other hand:

What the fuck.

Sometimes living through historical events is really damn amazing.

[florafaunaandeldritchhorrors]

my GOD tristan thinks he will get half the love instead of double and max thinks he will have to divide his love instead of multiplying it!!!!!!!! you are medical professionals read a fucking BOOK or something!!!!!!!!

[florafaunaandeldritchhorrors]

okay discourse over we’ve settled it now

[florafaunaandeldritchhorrors]

i dont consider myself a 'fashion guru' by any means but one thing i will say is guys you dont need to know the specific brand an item you like is - you need to know what the item is called. very rarely does a brand matter, but knowing that pair of pants is called 'cargo' vs 'boot cut' or the names of dress styles is going to help you find clothes you like WAAAYYYY faster than brand shopping

[florafaunaandeldritchhorrors]

at first it does not make much sense that rhaenyra says she unlike alicent has no choice but to “pay the price” - has not alicent paid her price, the price of her body and selfhood? - until you remember rhaenyra is now a kind of obscene priestess of her new order, built on the human sacrifices of the prospective dragonseeds. a price paid by her, of the blood and lives of others. which will make her queen. and she demands of alicent a sacrifice of her sacrifice. alicent’s very life was sacrificed, a child sacrifice - although not by her, by her own parent - to make aegon (a king’s blood holds special power…) and now to get her life back, she must sacrifice him in turn. she must make it willingly, knowingly, but the sacrifice is not of herself, but of her son, and the transcendence of alicent’s open air and and unremarked death is built on the sacrifice of this other that only existed of her forfeited self. there is no other calculus available to free her but this iterative consumption.

[florafaunaandeldritchhorrors]

I think a lot of people missed the point that it’s really not that hard to kill Jedi. If you’ve got a private army, you can probably kill Jedi. If you’re a sith you can probably kill Jedi. If you’re a really well resourced bounty hunter you can probably kill a Jedi. Qui-gon and Obi-Wan parallel one another in getting killed, specifically to show the audience that Jedi can be killed, but death is not something a Jedi should fear. There is no death, there is the Force.

The magic of a Jedi does not come from invincibility—it comes from the lack of any true separation between ordinary happenings and miracles, which they understand, and we do not.

[florafaunaandeldritchhorrors]

people rightfully give 1984 a lot of shit but I feel like one thing from that book that it got right and that I never see anyone talk about is the Two Minutes Hate.

Like, I think that people don't appreciate the fact that short bursts of outrage are actually a pretty effective tool for social control and engineering a sense of helplessness and complacency. You're being conditioned to feel that there's nothing you can do when you get angry other than sit and stew in rage until something else distracts you. And if you find you're consuming media in a way where you're intermittently being made to feel hate or anger or "righteous indignation" or whatever you want to call it, you might benefit from figuring out how to cut that out of your life as much as possible. Because it's not helping anyone, and it's harming you.

[florafaunaandeldritchhorrors]

This concept is so alienating and weird to me because 1) having honest but developmentally appropriate conversations with your children about the world around them and why things are the way they are and listening to their questions and opinions is SO important especially now and also 2) as someone who was raised by a powerful dynasty of libs in the early 2000s I learned who Dick Cheney was and that we hated him because he liked to start wars which were bad at age 4 and learned who Jesus Christ was at age 5

[florafaunaandeldritchhorrors]

So about Satine and Mandalorian customs…

She’s mourning a dying enemy who just bombed a public place and killed/injured several people (and could have killed/injured her), and she’s comforting him in his own language too. I can think of maybe one other Mandalorian who’d do something like that and it’s Sabine (with a name that sounds like Satine, who’s friends with the Jedi like Satine was).

Because unlike Bo-Katan “you’re not Mandalorian” Kryze, Pre “that woman tarnishes the very name Mandalorian” Vizsla, Din “you’re not Mandalorian” Djarin, Gar “fuck everybody who isn’t me” Saxon, Paz “fate has brought this blade back to my clan, and now fate will end yours” Vizsla and her ladyship “then, you are a Mandalorian no more” the Armorer, and all the rest of the warriors, Satine actually cares about ALL the Mandalorians.

Not just the ones who agree with her, not just the ones who accept her authority and not just the ones who follow one and only one ‘way.’

That doesn’t mean she’s ready to just let them run amok and do whatever they want (hence making Concordia its own province for the warriors, hence banning weapons for outsiders in the cities, hence calling rogue anybody who’d try to pull Mandalore into the war) but she freaking cares. She NEVER takes arms against another Mando or wishes harm on them, even as the traditionalists spend decades bombing their own people, fighting their own clans or houses for leadership, staging fake terrorist threats and putting people in danger, putting Sith or the Empire in power and then fighting those, and scorning any Mando not doing the same, all while professing to do that out of love for their people.

She actually cares, about ALL of them.

[florafaunaandeldritchhorrors]

I wanted to play around and “redo” the clone model, bc frankly it stinks. first I studied and rendered a version of Plunketts original clone sculpt as a base, then I sketched and intermediate, and then finished it off with a final render. The final render that I made is just a piggy-back off of Plunketts original design, a suggestion of some geometry changes they could make, but it if we’re me I would do a complete overhaul of the model to make it anatomy more like Temuera’s. Because I wanted to start at the (sort of) same starting place as Plunkett, I started with one of his original sculpts of the clones (the one I used is a sculpt of Fives).

Here is a written outline of the ALL changes I made:

removed extreme cheekbone geometry from the sides of the face in favor of a smooth plane

removed the extreme angles of the jaw in favor of Temuera’s rounded jawline, also lowered a tad

change of hairline to match Temuera’s hairline shape

complete change of the nose geometry, flatter, broader. Still “shapely” to fit the general style

lips are smaller and rounded

brows are lowered and relaxed like Temuera’s

added crease above nose and in between eyebrows

removal of wrinkles (they’re in their twenties what were you thinking)

added texture to the hair. I would suggest starting with large textured shapes and then do a painted texture on the model similar to how they did Trace and Admiral Rampart’s hair. the textures are simple but the painting makes the hair patterns more apparent on top of the model’s geometry.

(not pictured) add a more appropriate skin tone (I understand that the raw animation the clones are already pretty dark, but the shaders they use make the final rendering for animated clones SIGNIFICANTLY lighter, to combat this, make the ‘true color’ of the animated clones darker to compensate for the lightening in rendering or fix the shaders)

(not pictured) get rid of the grey/golden eyes, idk what it is about LFA’s refusal to give POC characters their dark brown eyes but just give em back, man. use the dark almost black eyes Temuera has.

I am NOT a 3D animator or a 3D modeler, however all of the things that I changed are completely realistic and achievable in 3D. (i elaborate on this more in the post)

When I started this process I made notes of some of the most glaring features on the first clone model, such as the extremely chiseled and angular face, large Eurocentric nose, straight hair, and (while it’s not pictured in my render) the obviously-too-light skin. This looks nothing like Temuera, not even if you squint. I made some notes of the features that they excluded from the model (1st image) and some notes of features that Temuera has that would help capture his likeness better (2nd image)

I’ve heard the argument a million times that the model isn’t whitewashed it’s just “the art style”. ABSOLUTELY NOT BABE, SIT DOWN AND TAKE A GANDER. This is Captain Typo’s character model, based on a Polynesian actor. LFA is clearly capable of sculpting and rendering Polynesian features and curly hair textures. They have dark skin, rounded face, DARK BROWN EYES, curls, rounded flat nose, etc. the argument that it’s ‘just the art style’ is a hot pile of garbage, stop using it.

Hair texture time! To elaborate more on the proposed hair texture in my model redesign, I wanted to explain what I’m talking about a little bit. LFA is capable of animating lots of different kinds of hair textures, they just elected to exclude it from the clone model for whatever reason. They achieve geometric texture, which is the actual geometry of the model, and painted textures, where there is simple geometry but most of the texturing is done with paint, the colors you see on top the 3D geometry. Either of these options would be acceptable for curly hair like Temuera’a. (Looking again Trace Martez’ hair might fall a bit in between the two categories, but the point is still the same)

I also understand that animation, especially 3D animation is hard. But that’s not an excuse for LFA! they’ve updated the clone model significantly about 3 times, and that doesn’t include some of the smaller geometry changes they’ve made to characters like Hunter and Rex. They can achieve rounded faces (Fennec, Typho, Trace Martez) and other appropriate features for people of color. With 3 major overhauls they should have at least tried to make them resemble Temuera Morrison.

Now you tell me, which one of these looks more appropriate for a Māori man in his twenties? (If you say the first you’re lying to yourself!)

[florafaunaandeldritchhorrors]

You show up for your first day at Copyright-Free Magic School. As you're going through orientation, you're informed that all new students get a school-assigned familiar that they are responsible for housing and maintaining. The staff member assures you that your assigned familiar is appropriately chosen and reflects you in some way.

Spin this to find out yours. (Remember, you are responsible for maintaining this familiar in your dorm room.)

[florafaunaandeldritchhorrors]

I think it’s really important to talk about how different people have different power fantasies.

For example:

For some people, the idea of someone redeeming a villain is a power fantasy.

For other people, the idea of a villain being defeated is a power fantasy.

And for other people, the idea of a character owning their villainy is a power fantasy.

I would argue a lot of fandom conflicts re: villains come from people being unable to see that their fantasies, which put them in control of a narrative (and all three of these are designed to give the author or reader control of the narrative in different ways) are someone else’s horror stories.

[florafaunaandeldritchhorrors]

man of progress

[florafaunaandeldritchhorrors]

❝ I can't let you leave. ❞

ARCANE (2021—2024)

[florafaunaandeldritchhorrors]

I know... I know...

I get we're supposed to HATE Jayce for a week, and I am livid, don't get me wrong, but what did that boy see to make him so ruthless without a second thought?