just-a-repa

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mandatory kit fisto drawing because i love and adore him. muah my beautiful fish friend

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Dooku and Sifo-dyas commissioned by @charmwasjess!

A scene from @purple-ant’s fic: I Pray My Mind be Good to Me

It was lovely to work on them!!!!

Close ups under the cut

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Me watching modern star wars projects: WHERE THE FUCK IS THE TEXTURE AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH

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That’s your uncle, Ben ! 

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Padawan Dooku sketches!

Close ups of this cutie

Reference

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What do you think about the Luthen Rael is Rael Aveross theory? It think it’s silly, but fun!

Oh I have a whole obnoxious theory about it!!!! In short, YES! But probably not.

It is so fun!! :D A lot more fun than what I suspect is the truth: that Rael almost certainly got regular old murdered-by-Dooku-and/or-Sidious. Out of Dooku's family and close friends, Dooku kills Ramil, Sifo-Dyas, Yaddle, Inadvertently Kinda Qui-Gon, Jenza, thinks he's killed Asajj, and would have killed Yoda but kinda fucks it up every time. People close to Dooku don't have a high life expectancy.

....Although given the timing, Rael's last interaction with Dooku, and the fact that Rael and Palpatine are friends separately, I'm leaning toward Sidious as the responsible party. I bet Sidious was feeling out multiple options for his apprentice, and when Rael made it clear he was a light side boy, that was a no go. Plus a big tactic for Sidious in that era seems to be isolating Dooku and cutting his connections with his support group (even better if he can manipulate him into cutting them himself!). Rael is a character who goes out of his way to repeatedly and sincerely check up on Dooku's mental and emotional health. He's literally doing it in the scene where Dooku and Palpatine meet for the first time. That's not gonna fly with the Sith Lord who needs him niiiiiiice and unstable, preferably racked with grief and guilt.

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padmé should be fat im so serious

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I just don’t get it. How can our society act so goddamned normal about seahorses. How can anybody so casually accept that that’s a fish???

This is one of nature’s most anatomically perverse of all beasts. A FISH, like a carp or a bass or a beta is a fish, but it bent its body straight up only to bend its head permanently back down. It stretched its skull into a pipe. It tapered its tail like a lizard, specifically like a chameleon. It can also move its eyes independently by the way, you know, like a chameleon. Fun fact, it can change color to express its mood, like you know whatever does that. It doesn’t properly swim anymore. It buzzes its few remaining fins like an insect’s wings to float itself around at a snail’s pace. It lives its whole life clinging to coral branches or seaweed, which means it decided to become a “tree dweller” in an environment where gravity didn’t even matter anyway. The males get pregnant. They make noises at each other by rubbing some of their neck bones together. Every day, EVERY DAY a mated pair does a little dance and a little neck bone song so they remember which two seahorses they were. They’re a beautiful precious obscenity. Nothing so adorable ever made such a strong case against a logical creator.

They have as little skin and meat as they could get away with. Their skeleton is almost all they are.

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Image description: it's a drawing of Shaak Ti, Aayla Secura, Depa Billaba and Adi Gallia from Star Wars. Shaak and Aayla are standing on the back while Depa and Adi are in the front. They look like they're taking a picture together, the two in the back look confused while the other two are smiling at the camera. End of description.

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It’s curious to me to see fans (and more importantly creators) talk about Jedi critical views as partly sourced from their own damaging experiences with religious institutions. I’ve been thinking a lot about this since The Acolyte, and asking myself why, as a person with a dump truck load of reeking religious trauma in my history, I have such good associations with the idea of the Jedi - specifically with them as a faith-based institution. 

Note: These are my reflections based on my experiences with my specific religious community in a time and a place. This is not an attack on faith groups more broadly, nor an argument people are wrong for not liking or liking the Jedi based on their own religious experiences. I’m just sharing about my life. 

My trauma, specifically, so be nice to me.

Until the age of 17, I was raised in a corrupt, fundamentalist evangelical institution which controlled every aspect of my development: church, my social life, and my education. When I say corrupt, I’m not throwing words around lightly. I mean leaders in my community ended up being prosecuted and my “school” got ultimately shut down. 

I’ve found it often easier to be funny about this period of my life, to tell sarcastic stories about the ridiculousness of my schooling: the weekly literal 9 hours of Bible classes, or later, my college friends needing to teach me basics so I wouldn’t fail rudimentary science courses because “the Bible was our science textbook” for my entire education. Easier to laugh than to acknowledge the fact that for most of my life, I was stuck in an abusive, evil cult that attempted to ingrain misogyny, xenophobia, and homophobia, and taught me lies about basic history and science.

During that time, the prequel films came out. I got into Star Wars, particularly the Jedi stories. Okay, I was obsessed, with a kind of frenzied desperation. I saw the Jedi Order as the antithesis of my own toxic community rather than a reflection of it. While I was living in a repressive, rule-based culture that sought to control every smallest detail of my life and my choices didn’t matter, I saw the Jedi Order as a route of imaginary escapism, partially because of the strong contrast between the depiction of Jedi faith and my own community.

I remember needing to read a few forbidden secular books (aka classic literature) for my senior year literature college prep course. (The AP test was used by colleges, not controlled by my school, so it had things on it I wasn't allowed to read.) I was only allowed access to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment because a school board member had gone through every copy the school had and used a sharpie to mark out any word, or in fact, any idea that she found personally problematic to the faith. I read that book like a blackout poem. 

The difference between that kind of suppression and control, and Palpatine’s sneering implication of the Jedi Order keeping secrets, “It’s not a story the Jedi would tell you,” felt like night and day. 

Even the Jedi concept of chosen celibacy felt quite different from the enforced abstinence which would end only when my sexual autonomy would be turned over to a future husband for his use. Such depictions of chosen celibacy (and later, asexuality, though thankfully I was out of the community by the time they got ahold of that one) were condemned as a perversion of God’s intended purpose for the body, no different from the dreaded homosexuality or masturbation.

And let me tell you, contrary to sympathizing with a fictional depiction of a like-mindedly-restrictive faith group, the leaders in my church really hated the concept of the Jedi. Partially, this was part of a larger rejection of fantasy media - the decade of hyperpopular Harry Potter saturation and a growing perception among my religious authorities that normalizing magic and witchcraft and other gods, and engaging with such genre of fiction would offend the jealous real-life higher power we served. Those of you who knew me back then can go back to my old teen account and see me lowercasing the word to “force” lest I offend the one true God.

But I mean the theology of it, too. It’s hard to overstate how popular and culturally present the prequel trilogies were when I was growing up. I absolutely sat through sermons that critically referenced Star Wars as anti-Christian and documented the differences. I was preteen and teenager in this era - youth messages were targeted around media that my age group consumed. Star Wars was everywhere: on cereal covers, on pizza boxes, on the back of Pepsi cans. 

I think another thing that’s sometimes forgotten is how political the prequel trilogies were at the time. Attack of the Clones came out on the onset of the Iraq War and the Patriot act - Palpatine’s assumption of emergency powers in a time of orchestrated “crisis” felt deeply relevant and deliberate. My community was right-wing conservative, the evangelical base that would evolve into the Christofacist Trump alt-right. For that reason, it was also anathema.

I think most importantly, when my access to secular peers was entirely restricted, I was able to make friends online who also loved the Jedi Order. That was such a strong antidote for both the ignorance about the world that I was deliberately taught, and the teenage loneliness that my church-school institution weaponized. None of that has anything to do with the depictions of Jedi faith as restrictive or not, but it feels significant. It was the love of a story that brought me community, when the other story that might’ve brought me community came with a barbed wire fence around my personal autonomy and very identity.* 

I hope I don’t sound like I’m attacking people who DO have a gut reaction against the Jedi because of religious trauma. (Or indeed people who are Christian - obviously my community was an incredibly fucked up outlier.) Really, we’re the same people, dealing with the same issues in different ways. I’ve healed a lot since I was a miserable thirteen year old taking solace in my Star Wars books and fanfics, but there are still some religious-affiliated things I just need to avoid - I don’t enjoy documentaries about church cults ala Under the Banner of Heaven, or stories like The Handmaids Tale. I don’t judge anyone for taking a look at a series centering around a religious order and needing to nope out of that part. 

But I do wish Star Wars creators weren’t working through their own issues by using the Jedi Order as their avatar for all religious institutional evil, because to some of us, it was, and remains, a very healing space for exactly that kind of damage.

*Ironically, my cluelessness about what being queer actually meant really shielded me from a lot of the homophobia. I wasn’t one of those "evil gays"; I just, unrelatedly, wanted to fuck girls as well as guys.

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So, me and @just-a-repa have been building a starwars x predator crossover au for a while now, i only now got around to drawing digitally for it so here you go!!

This is two of my jedi oc's for the Au!

Master Ga'tu-tuan(yautja) and Master Dae'moul(vantar, my own species)

They are two of the main charachters,

And some skeches of them with obi!

From the youngster years ofc

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And he was definitely super calm and rational about that

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behold! Feemor and Pri as Master and Padawan (i'll probably be tweaking Pri's design some more bc rn she looks so similar to Komari, but i'm gonna keep the short hair for sure)

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Darth Smaul the Angy

I feel like Ani and Obi would put him in a bag and sneak him into the temple, then they'll pamper him like some pet gremlin

Qui would agree with them keeping this weird creature as long as it doesnt eat his boots

Meanwhile Mr Smaul would run around like some angry watermelon chihuahua and bite everyone's shins

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So I finished the Glass Abyss! Some thoughts under the cut, mainly about Jedi sexual relationships 

Overall, fun, engaging book that clearly ADORES Mace Windu and spends time seemingly deliberately answering popular fandom complaints about him with positive depictions. 

The worldbuilding is really fresh, you kind of think you’ve seen everything in Star Wars and then they roll out a glassified (solar flares) world of spider people and mushroom zombies. 

I didn’t love the romance narratively; it felt kind of tacked on, but I did love how it contributes to a larger picture of how Jedi treat sexual and romantic relationships. This isn’t Rael just meeting his sexual needs in unattached hookups, Mace *loves* the spider lady. He’s also Master of the Jedi Order, the leader of the fucking Council. And significantly, he doesn’t think about this even once as a problem or conflict of interest. There is no “but aughhh I am a Jedi boo hoo forbidden romance” subplot, or the implication that he’s doing something wrong by falling in love and pursuing a romantic, physical relationship during a long mission. And at the end, it’s clear that both characters understand that their greater duty is to their respective peoples, but if their decision to prioritize that over the relationship changes, they’ll find each other again. That Mace is free to make that decision, to have the relationship, and choose to return to the Jedi Order without it, or stay and keep it.  I thought this was an interesting detail in a book that also has the whole: Anakin: the Jedi must ignore their feelings!!! Mace: uh, what? I think you might’ve misunderstood that kiddo …with the implication that Anakin is maybe not the most reliable narrator about the actual rules of the Jedi, and the further implication that the problem with him and Padme is the secrecy and the lying (and legal/conflict of interest that probably make such a marriage between a Jedi and a senator a problem), not the fact of a romantic relationship itself. Which explains more of Obi-Wan’s relaxed attitude toward it - okay, Anakin and Padme are clearly involved, but what’s the harm in that if he’s being a responsible adult about it?  Rael wants to just sleep around. Mace is free to follow his heart and fall in love. Their romantic and sexual options are choices, not mandates. And I love that, by contrast, in Master and Apprentice, same book as Rael’s sexual openness, Qui-Gon is horrified by the idea of Jedi having relaxed attitudes toward sex. It feels more realistic to me that different Jedi have their own individual different convictions, interpretations, and histories around the subject of sex and relationships. Especially contrasting Rael and Qui-Gon, who were taught by the same person and presumably given the same message about it but took it in two extremes. (Although. Okay, it’s kind of funny if Rael-era Dooku (still friends with Sifo-Dyas) gave him a sex positive messages and Qui-Gon-era Dooku (NOT friends with Sifo-Dyas, very sad about it) gave him a sex negative message.)

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Trick or treat!!

The basket is getting low but I do have....

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Some modern au shenanigans

Character description part 1 here

This is the moment Rael knew he is dead meat, little shit won't keep his mouth closed in front of their parents for sure

Rael definitely buys himself makeup with his pocket money (or uses Jo's) and when he and Qui-Gon are alone in the house he just experiements with it

I also totally forgot to do something for halloween night, but happy (late) halloween guys :D