ncfan-1

[ncfan-1]

[ncfan-1]

Neither Living Nor Dead – Chapter Three

Fandom: The Acolyte Archive Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Characters: Mae Aniseya, Sol the Jedi, Vernestra Rwoh Pairings: SolMae (subtextual) Summary:

“I told you to stay on the ship,” Sol said, helplessly exasperated. “Yes,” Mae agreed, “yes, you did.”

If either Mae or Sol went to Coruscant expecting to find the end of their troubles, they are destined for disappointment.

[Continuation to Anamnesis, post-canon AU]

[ncfan-1]

There's a lot of news this week, so I understand if people haven't seen this yet, but I want to be super clear that the Democrats are doing another thing that the "Do something!" people want: create a shadow cabinet.

This, by the way, is in addition to the other thing that the "Do something!" people want that the Democrats have already done: Start a town hall series.

I mention this because I'm not doing the thing anymore where you don't pay attention to what Democrats are doing because you aren't informing yourself and then you complain that Democrats aren't doing something that they absolutely are doing, and then 100 idiots share your uninformed post and you all help Democrats lose elections while insisting you had nothing to do with it.

[ncfan-1]

I still lay awake at night, quite literally, thinking about the acolyte

I've heard a lot of arguments about why it was bad in the time since it was cancelled, and I genuinely have not been able to find one that I can't explain away in a sentence or two

because that show was amazing in my eyes, and I miss it so much. the high Republic is my favorite era and I loved seeing what I had read about translate on the big screen in a really satisfying way

YouTubers who criticize just to criticize and get clicks are the death of fun, not letting anything sit in your mind before you form an opinion on it is just blatant bias, a decision that was already made.

it was the first Star wars show made with the female gaze, and it was the fastest I've ever seen a show cancelled. It was the first starwars I felt was made for someone like me (obsessed with saber fights and all)

guess that tells me all I gotta know

[ncfan-1]

I think The Acolyte is really pointing to the similarities between the Jedi Order and police (specifically American police) - Torbin being the unfortunate focal point of that (though Sol was heavily influenced by the 'hero/savior' role that is common to police too).

The Jedi put a massive amount of emphasis on combat training. They have lightsabers that they go on a whole-ass pilgrimage to create, they learn from the age of 6 (at least) how to use it/block blaster bolts/attack, etc. and then they're sent out into the field.

American police get HOURS AND HOURS of firearm training, are taught that every time you step out into the community, you're walking into a war zone where everyone wants you dead and anyone could pull a gun on you at any moment to try to kill you.

Then when they (both police and Jedi) go out into the field...it's mostly sitting around doing nothing. It's paperwork. It's driving around. It's talking to locals about non-lethal things - or at least, things that aren't about an evil person shooting at you. It's boring.

That is one of the major things new police officers note is that they thought the job would be high-adrenaline, exciting and dangerous (due to all the copganda on TV) and when they actually got in, it was so so so so so so so boring to them. They didn't see the value in helping out their community through non-violent means, they wanted to be part of a shootout and kill the bad guy and be a big hero! (This is a major problem with the US military as well, and with the cops in this country being trained AS a military force, there's no wonder there's such a huge overlap in this thinking)

So what do they do with all that weapons' training and ideas of being a flashy hero? They LOOK for an opportunity to escalate situations. They seek out 'dangerous' neighborhoods so they can 'get some action' (see: the officer who murdered Tamir Rice). Someone reaches for their wallet to pull out the ID the officer told them to get and that same officer shoots them dead because 'I thought they were reaching for a gun!!'

Torbin seemed to be running into the same situation on Brendok. He was trained as a warrior (just look at how expertly he deflected all those bolts, how he was able to keep Kelnacca from immediately killing him), he didn't expect his Jedi missions to be quietly sitting on an 'uninhabited' planet for weeks just taking environmental samples. He was itching for a different type of mission - or at least to be able to go home. So when a drop of action comes around, he's far too eager to jump on the opportunity and 'do something'. That 'something' being attacking the locals with the intent to steal their children because he's just so tired of being on a 'boring' mission.

Idk, just something to think about when looking at why the Jedi reacted the way they did and why 'peacekeepers' seem to only be interested in combat rather than exploration. Maybe it has a bit to do with their training and the propaganda they're taught about the Order. I don't know a single eco-biologist who was itching to pull a gun on local populations - maybe because they're trained to want to study things rather than being given tons of firearm training. If the Jedi were trained a little more on non-violent activities and a little less on lightsaber training, their outlook when going on missions might be different.

[ncfan-1]

Just FYI to anyone who might see my icon attached to an anon ask: I don't send asks anonymously. Ever. So if you see my icon attached to an anon ask, it wasn't me.

UM GUYS. I JUST NOTICED A CRAZY ISSUE W THE TUMBLR UPDATE.

[ncfan-1]

Okay, with news that Tumblr's staff got cut again, I am... concerned. This is truly the cockroach of social media websites, so maybe it lives, but just in case, I can be found at the linked Dreamwidth account. For right now, I use it largely as a backup for my fanfic and meta posts I write that I want to preserve, but were Tumblr to go down, this would probably become my primary site. My AO3 account is linked here.

I still have a Twitter account, though I have not used it in years for reasons that should be obvious. I've heard about Blue Sky; can anyone tell me if there is any real fandom presence there?

[ncfan-1]

matt just fired half the remaining tumblr support staff lmao

[ncfan-1]

我们家西蕊在美貌这一块的实力毋庸置疑

[ncfan-1]

#oooHHHH OP you cooked with this#i really haven't thought much about indara beyond what we see onscreen and the general 'the jedi failed the twins/coven on brendok' take#but you're so correct that indara had ever opportunity to do the right thing - both before & after the ascension disaster - but didn't#she/sol/torbin chose themselves every time honestly at the expense of the twins and all of those people#this point should be examined even further esp. in terms of the hubris/arrogance of the jedi during the HR era actually#like the fact that these jedi behaved in this way only to throw osha away when she wasn't able to overcome what happened to her family#godddd the pieces that lead up to the fall of the jedi are all here#IGER JUST LET US EXPLORE THEM JFC#master indara#the acolyte (via @astriferias)

Yeahhhh. I’ve always considered the coverup and frame job completely reprehensible for multiple reasons. Firstly, of everyone they could have chosen to frame, the seemingly dead child, really? They defame a seemingly dead eight-year-old basically because it’s the path of least resistance, and it’s especially galling when the only reason they even know they can use Mae having started the fire against her is because she ran into the middle of an armed standoff between the adults screaming for help putting the fire out. Funny how thoroughly Sol’s forgotten that detail sixteen years later. Just further drives home what people who are actually willing to pay attention when watching the OT have known since then; that this “from a certain point of view” stuff is straight-up lying.

But that’s hardly the only reason it’s reprehensible. I see it as being thus: the survey team get to keep their standing and their place in the Jedi Order and their comfortable lives, and all they have to do to pay for it is offer up Osha and Mae’s lives in their place. I’m not saying that the survey’s teams lives were wholly unaffected for the worse by what they did on Brendok, but it’s the twins who must bear the brunt of the devastating fallout of their actions, and seemingly will be doing so for the rest of their lives. The survey team kept their comfortable lives by using Osha and Mae as shields, one to serve as a scapegoat, the other to serve as a talisman of their righteousness, and showed seemingly no regard for all the kicks and blows the twins were catching as a result—some of them inflicted by her sister.

It's why I hold Indara in special contempt for responding to Osha’s struggles by recommending that her training be terminated. Like I said in the above post, Osha is struggling and suffering so much as a result of Indara’s actions and Indara’s deceit, and that Indara can evidently feel so little for Osha’s suffering, so little sympathy, so little guilt, so little sense of responsibility for it, shines a profoundly ugly light on Indara’s character. Why take responsibility when you can just rug-sweep again, right? Out of sight, out of mind, right?

And then Osha is thrown out (yes, she left voluntarily, but it was clearly a “quit before they could fire me” situation) to make her way through the wide galaxy alone, with what would likely have been little to no transferrable skills, and a lifetime of trauma that she now has even less support trying to move past than the dubious support she had while she was with the Jedi. And though I have no doubt that Sol, at least, did not want her to go and would have been happier had she stayed, had Mae truly been dead, this is the moment when the survey team would once and for all have washed their hands of the consequences of their actions, because now, even the survivor who has suffered tremendously on account of their actions is gone, and seemingly gone for good.

You have Mae, too. We have very little information about what Mae’s life was like for those sixteen years, but fandom consensus, mine included, is that she very, very obviously had no one in her life who genuinely cared about or loved her, that she was bereft of even the dubious benefits Osha had of caretakers who at least pretended to have her best interests at heart. All of this can be laid at the survey team’s feet, too, for not even bothering to take the time to confirm that she was dead. Given how quickly and easily Indara moves to framing Mae to take the heat off of herself, I… I sometimes question that, the fact that no one ever went back to confirm that Mae was dead. But that much, I don’t think we’ll ever know for certain.

That’s the past, and now we have present day. I’m going to talk about Torbin first, and I have held this back for a while, because I was afraid that to speak of suicide this way would be insensitive or reductive or outright harmful. I grasp that for Torbin to have so quickly accepted suicide as an option, he has very plainly been suffering himself, and has been so for a while. I sympathize with that, and on a whole, I consider him the most sympathetic of the survey team vis a vis the coverup, as he was just a kid himself when all of that was going down. But it still strikes me that, even if Mae did not know at the time of their exchange that the survey team had framed her for her family’s murder, Torbin did. Torbin is abjectly remorseful when he speaks to Mae, but still, he knows that Mae was framed for her family’s murder, and he doesn’t clear her name, doesn’t even warn her that that was done to her. He prefers the quick escape from his guilt to clearing her name. He prioritizes his own comfort over the well-being of his victim.

Sol, too. You can be like me, and think that he was originally going to tell the truth about what happened on Brendok, but changed his gameplan after what happened on Khofar because he couldn’t accept that his team died because of his refusal to come clean beforehand. Or you can think that at no point during the present day did Sol ever intend to tell the truth willingly. But we have what he does do and does not, do, and it’s starkly illustrative.

It says a lot that Sol doesn’t tell Vernestra the truth when she tells him that Osha was arrested for Indara’s murder. He knows of a compelling reason that Osha might have for killing Indara, and you can see in his face that he’s asking himself: Did Osha find out what actually happened? Does she know what he did? If there is any mitigating factor he could present to the Jedi to get them to show Osha leniency, it’s the truth of what happened on Brendok sixteen years ago, and he doesn’t. He keeps his silence.

It says a lot that Sol, upon confirming beyond all doubt that Mae is alive, doesn’t tell the truth about what happened sixteen years ago. That he continues to let her be scapegoated for her family’s murders. It gets so far that Jecki’s trying to arrest Mae for killing her family in Episode 5. It should never have gotten that far, and yet, Sol keeps his silence.

It says a lot that… Everything about Sol’s behavior in Episode 8 says quite a lot about him. Blame-shifting when Mae asks why he lied to Osha about what happened. Continually doubling and tripling and quadrupling down on the idea that killing the coven was “the right thing.” Refusing to tell the truth to such an extent that Mae had to trick him into confessing to having killed Mother Aniseya in Osha’s hearing in order to clear her own name.

Sol also prioritizes his own comfort over either of the twins’ well-being. He’s not going to tell the truth because he doesn’t want to risk losing his standing, his place in the Order, his good name and comfortable life. He’s not going to risk losing his relationship with Osha. He’s not going to risk going to prison. He ultimately makes the decision that Osha’s ability to truly heal from her past isn’t worth that to him. Ultimately makes the decision that Mae’s ability to have any kind of life at all isn’t worth that to him.

And yes, you can absolutely tie this in to the hubris the Jedi display during the Prequel Era. I draw a direct line from Osha being provided no support for overcoming her trauma and being treated as the problem because she is traumatized to the way Anakin is treated as a traumatized child trying to enter the Order. The way the Council speaks to him in TPM is so cold, so unempathetic, so out of touch with emotional reality. And these are the leaders of the Jedi? These are the people who are meant to be the shining examples of what Jedi are supposed to be? It sends the message that to be a Jedi, that is what you must be. Detached, yes. But also just completely out of touch with the rest of the galaxy. And so blind to it that they think that to be out of touch is a good thing.

I feel like my sheer ambivalence towards Indara makes more sense to you if you know that I consider her a complete moral coward.

[ncfan-1]

I truly will never get over the Acolyte being cancelled. For one beautiful beautiful show I was free. No Skywalker drama. Cortosis in live action. Female leads. Morally grey Jedi. A plot that made me care about the Jedi for the first time in the past 4 years. Lesbian witches. Non-dathomiri zabrak. For one season I was free. For one beautiful season I got to experience something NEW in Star Wars and it got fucking cancelled because everyone somehow forgot that Star Wars as a franchise is mid as hell, and once the nostalgia of previously loved characters (Ashoka, for example, who’s show SUCKED STRAIGHT ASS) is removed they can’t stand the same writing they praise

[ncfan-1]

I know a few people who said they weren't going to watch Skeleton Crew because of how The Acolyte was treated, but I'm surprised that they were so many. Unfortunately I fear Disney will apply the *wrong lessons* because they listen to people like this dork and will not do better in future.

However I have a feeling they will justify why SC should be renewed and not Acolyte 🥴

[ncfan-1]

how i'm handling my students using AI to write papers:

-don't accuse them on using AI from the get-go and instead ask them to informally define all the huge words that they used in their essay which i know they don't know the meaning of

-ask to see their original file where they "wrote" the essay. go to version history to see if it was just copy and pasted and then just edited a bit. i keep an eye out for the shit like "certainly! here's an essay about...."

-if they own up to it, they can re-do the assignment for a higher grade even if there will be an automatic penalty. if they don't, i process it like plagiarism and get my supervisor involved.

[ncfan-1]

university professors love to create the most fucked up pdf ever known to mankind. it's enrichment for them.

[ncfan-1]

The idea of watching episodes 3 and 7 of The Acolyte first is interesting because you're starting the show with most of the information, but I don't think it would serve the story better. By keeping 3 and 7 where they are - you're experiencing the events of the show the same way Osha does.

Master Sol is who you should trust. Mae is the killer. When you watch episode 6, you listen to Qimir and think no, he's wrong about the Jedi. How could he believe these things? Then you watch 7, and it's like - if Osha was missing this piece, what am I missing from Qimir's experiences?

Effectively, it's a show about perspective. If you watch 3 and 7 first, Master Sol and the Jedi are the bad guys. But if you watch the show in its intended order, the bad guy is Mae. Then it's Qimir. It's Master Sol. Or is it Osha too, as she chokes Sol to death. The perspective informs your interpretation. But like Osha, you may not have the full picture.

In fact, there's a lot more that could have been included in season 1. Mae training under Qimir, or Osha's time as a Padawan. But same as the episode order - in excluding elements, the story is as much about what isn't on screen as what is. What's really a limitation of the streaming era is also used to further the mystery.

Told like this, there is an incredible amount of nuance. The "bad guy" is someone who did something bad. But outside of that event, they may be someone you trust or even like. Can you reduce a character to a single event? Or does intention matter more? Osha kills Master Sol, but joins Qimir hand in hand.

You can either be told what will happen from the start or experience it and decide for yourself - sometimes incorrectly. The order of The Acolyte even pays homage to how Star Wars began, out of order with Darth Vader dying before Anakin was ever born.

[ncfan-1]

every time I remember the horrendous treatment that amandla and the cast and crew of the acolyte received online I feel sick. and the worst part is that some people who call themselves “progressives” were celebrating the show’s cancellation because they didn’t agree with some of the storytelling choices, as if “bad writing” (it’s always the same excuses) justified all the nasty racism and misogyny around the show. and then disney never said one single thing to defend their actors and creators from this nasty abuse.

[ncfan-1]

Miss Piggy’s Treasury of Art Masterpieces from the Kermitage Collection is a picture book featuring sixteen (minus the “The Birth of Venus” parody) different muppet parodies of famous artwork, edited by Henry Beard and illustrated by John E. Barrett, and published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1984.

A majority of the illustrations were originally from the Miss Piggy’s Art Masterpiece Calendar which were all reprinted with commentary from Miss Piggy herself and new additions that expanded on the “Kermitage Collection” from the calendar.

illustrations continued:

Henri Rousseau. The Sleepy Zootsy.

Rembrant van Rijn. Arisfroggle Contemplating the Bust of a Twerp.

Jan Vermeer. Young Lady Adorning Herself with Pearls (and Why Not?).

Grant Wood. American Gothique.

Pablo Picasso. Pig Before a Mirror.