#AND FUNDAMENTALLY MISUNDERSTOOD THE SHOW’S LORE????? | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

thefirstknife · 5 months ago

Text

Really interesting stuff about the "sedimentary necrolite" bits. I didn't originally want to go too deep into it, but yeah, it definitely seems to be referring to the Witness.

I also find it incredibly interesting that the Winnower in Unveiling seemed to be more aligned to Darkness as was presented back then. Or, rather, as the Witness wanted to present Darkness: as order. That gives me the vibe that Unveiling IS by the Witness, describing the Winnower as the Witness understood it or wanted to understand it, and putting itself in the position of the Winnower's knife; someone who will enact its purpose in the universe.

Perhaps the Winnower also spoke/interacted with the Witness' species and they understood it like this and then when the Witness wanted to present this mythological origin of everything (to sway us), it presented it skewed. Unveiling is mimicking the Winnower's speech and perhaps even has some form of direct input from the Winnower, but it's not representing what the Winnower really believes because the one who wrote it down misunderstood it.

In Nacre, the Winnower (?) outright rejects caring about the rule change and even calls the whole universe its "beloved" just the way it is, with all the chaotic elements. Either the Winnower is personally the author of both texts and it just changed its mind (or lied), or someone else wrote Unveiling, misunderstanding the Winnower fundamentally, but still managing to copy the style and overall ideas, metaphors and whatever truths may be hidden in there.

To draw from two other examples, in Inspiral, one of the long dead disciples wonders about the nature of the final shape and the Witness' philosophy. They claim that none of the other disciples truly understand the Witness, but they suspect that they personally do. It's interesting because the tab is called "The Cave" which is clearly an allusion to the allegory of the cave. The disciples are trying to comprehend the Witness but the only thing they see are shadows on the wall, shadows of the real thing.

And in the raid, the infamous 4th encounter of Salvation's Edge is quite literally the same allegory, in both the looks and the mechanics. We are prisoners in a cave, the real appearance of which is only apparent to those who get shattered by the Witness. The real shapes project shadows on the wall, showing only half of the shape, an imperfect truth, for which we need help from our other teammates to combine into what is really happening.

I feel like something like this may have happened to the Witness as well. It may have glimpsed beyond the Veil, interacting in some way with this entity we call the Winnower, but only seeing a shadow on the wall, therefore interpreting it imperfectly. It would explain why the Witness believed so strongly that it serves a higher purpose and that it is the Winnower's knife, that it is enacting its final shape... Only for, apparently the Winnower, telling us that it did not care at all and that it does not see the conflict like that at all. Hell, the Witness dies saying "We don't understand" which shifts into "I don't understand." And it really did not understand.

The disciples only see shadows of the Witness and the Witness sees only shadows of the Winnower. Much to think about. So many possibilities and directions to take this in.

Also yeah, the whole thing with the name of the lore tab ("nacre") and the tag line is also interesting. Now that you mention the thing about the pearl possibly relating to the Traveler, I found one other curious possible connection here, from Dreams of Alpha Lupi:

A body small as a river stone, and just as simple. You picture yourself as a piece of indigestible grit, a nameless nothing hiding among other nameless stones. Perhaps you glitter like a gem, yes. Pride makes you hope so.

The bit about "indigestible grit" could possibly relate to the starting flavour text on the ship ("Even the most perfect of pearls has grit at its center").

Very interesting!

Let's chat

So, the Winnower. Right?

Today, they finally released the lore on one of the ships that you got if you purchased (pre-ordered?) the annual pass. The ship is called Nacre. As usual with names of things in Destiny, this means something, though I'm currently unsure about the significance of this name in relation to the text of the lore tab.

But the text of this lore tab will cause a billion discussions and people will fervently believe in one side or the other. You'll understand why the moment you start reading the lore tab (I'll go through it a bit later in the text) if you remember the style of Unveiling. It's written in the same style with many references to Unveiling and the author speaks to us post-Witness' defeat (most likely).

I think it's intended to make us discuss and argue, given the inherent unreliability and religiosity of the subject.

But let's go back a little bit. Why the Winnower? Well, the word "Winnower" was finally mentioned in-game by the Witness. When you finish the second encounter in the Salvation's Edge raid, you proceed towards the third, and at one point the Witness will speak (it speaks a lot during the raid):

The rest of the post below:

Many people, upon hearing this, have jumped to the conclusion that the "Winnower" is now confirmed as a real thing; including Byf who made a video about it and now everyone and their grandma believes this fully and is already constructing fanfics about the next big bad.

And it could be true! But to claim that this line specifically confirms the Winnower makes me question people's media literacy. This line is spoken by the Witness. The Witness has both the reason to lie to us, but also the reason to believe in the Winnower. This is unreliable narration 101: the Witness could believe that it serves something else, that the reason it destroyed its own and many other civilisations is because it is following something greater. Obviously the Witness would believe that it's "the first knife" of some godly entity. It's religion. The word of a religious person who believes in a deity is not the proof that the deity exists.

This does not mean that the Winnower is NOT real. We don't know if it is. This only means that we can't use this specific source as proof.

But this line is very interesting to me because of how it's phrased. Initially, I believed that the Witness spoke to us, the Guardians, because that's what it does throughout the raid. But after a few reads, this feels like it's at least partially aimed at the Traveler as well. The third line in particular is interesting: "Each child we save from the game, you again force to play." This feels like it's talking about the Traveler's growing/resurrecting powers, especially about how it resurrected Guardians. We were dead, but then we were forced to play again. It's also speaking about it like the "game" which can be a sort of 4th wall-breaking, but also it could clearly be referring to Unveiling which also calls it playing a game.

The last line is also interesting in this context: "Gods forged us both." Who is "us"? Obviously the Witness considers itself here, but which "gods" forged what else? Does the Witness consider the Traveler to be a god, forging the Guardians? The next line is also weird in this context, telling us that despite gods forging us, "they cannot tell the knife what shape to carve." Either the Witness still doesn't understand the Traveler or the Traveler is not considered as the god because that's the Traveler's whole philosophy: it creates things, but it doesn't tell those things what to do. It would never tell us what shape to carve. So if this is not referring to the Traveler forging Guardians, it might be referring to something else forging the Traveler. Possibly! I am very intrigued by these lines and the line of thinking the Witness uses here.

But let's go back to the Winnower. As I already said, this doesn't prove anything, it only proves that the Witness believes in it. We also know that the Witness believes in this because in the final mission it also told us that it is "the first knife, the edge that carved purpose into being." Later, after its defeat, Mara and Ikora discussed this phrase, which I covered in this post. This discussion also entertained the possibility that there's something else beyond the Witness, something that wielded it as a "knife." Mara and Ikora don't make any conclusions; they discuss the possibility, but they end it with "we don't know."

They discuss it in the context of Unveiling; this lore book is canonically available to read to characters in the game, which is neat! It's been discussed several times now in the lore, and it's discussed here as well. Mara and Ikora have read Unveiling, it's where they've read about "the first knife" concept and are wondering what it all means and if there's a way to figure out the truth in the allegories. Again, they don't know the answer. And neither do we!

However, we as players have more information than the characters. I'm pretty sure the delay on the lore for Nacre was on purpose, because it would've been confusing to read that before defeating the Witness. The lore tab itself has no clear author; the only way to tell is to speculate based on the style and phrases used. The style will immediately be reminiscent of Unveiling (and the one page in Books of Sorrow when something speaks to Oryx). It's casual and friendly, but persuasive.

Let's read it piece by piece:

Let's chat, shall we? One more nice sit-down for the books. Did you think you wouldn't hear from me again, after all this? You'd have missed me, I hope—and I would certainly have missed you. Have no fear. I'm not so easy to be rid of. Now, let me show you: my beloved. Oh, no, not my sedimentary necrolite, fossilized in time. You've seen that. I speak of that dear and distant expanse of the universe, miraculous in its fullness and its emptiness all at once. Are you surprised to hear of it? Yes, I never much cared for the change of rules, but here we are, and there's no use in crying over spilled radiolaria. Besides, at the heart of it all, there was a gift. To me. That gift is the chance to speak with you. You, and a billion like you.

A few points right away. It's telling us that we should chat and that it hopes we didn't think we'd never hear from it again. If this is truthful and can be trusted, then it would be alluding to it speaking to us before, in Unveiling. But we've gone over the debate about Unveiling and who wrote it; most recent information was that it has to have been the Witness and the characters in-game believe so as well. So what's the truth now? I don't know! That's a full sentence. We simply don't know. There are far too many variables, allegories, metaphors and unreliable (and completely unknown) narrators.

Both options could also be true at the same time; if the Witness somehow managed to get a glimpse of the Winnower (in whatever form this entity exists), perhaps the Witness was given a speech of this nature which it could've adopted on purpose to further spread propaganda to others and to convince itself (and others) that it is a part of something greater. Again, we simply don't know.

The author continues telling us that it wants to show us its "beloved." It then goes into a bizarre description of something as "sedimentary necrolite, fossilised in time." I am not sure what this refers to, but it could be referring to the Witness? Because we've "seen that." A "necrolite" is an old term for a type of stinky minerals that form rocks which might be referring to the Witness' obsession to calcify and preserve things as they are; therefore, "fossilised in time." It could also mean something else. Really strange!

Either way, the author does not refer to that, whatever it is, it refers to the universe as a whole. The universe is its beloved. Then it continues and draws back from Unveiling directly. It tells us that it "never much cared for the change of the rules," the rules being the rules of the flower game and the change being the one the Gardener put in the game. It even jokes with "no use in crying over spilled radiolaria," a reference to the fact that previously, the winners of the game were always the Vex.

The interesting bit here is that, if the author was indeed talking about its disregard for the Witness, then the Witness claiming to be "the first knife" the Winnower wielded is not true. If this author is the Winnower, it does not really care about the Witness or its view of the final shape. Hell, the line about Winnower discovering the first knife in Unveiling would then not refer to the Witness at all, but despite that, the Witness believed itself to be that knife. This is why we can't use the Witness' words as any sort of proof, but also we can't use this narrator's words either.

To go back to the change in the rules, another intriguing thing is, in Unveiling, the Winnower appeared to be angry about the change. It's what made it "discover the first knife" and begin the fight with the Gardener. But here, it claims it didn't care about it after all.

I believe this is important to understand that what we're dealing here is not a clear cut truthful chat with a friend. The author of this text, and the author of Unveiling, does not have to tell us the truth and we simply have no clue which one of these statements is truth, if any. Or, it simply changed its mind; perhaps it was angry back then, but now it no longer is, because it realised that the change in rules gave it the ability to speak to us, something it appears to value greatly. And "us" does not just refer to us as Guardians or even humanity, it appears to be referring to all living creatures in the universe. It continues:

I am making this offer over and over again, in every tiniest cell and the vastest of civilizations. Let me in. Take what you need. Be at ease. You have no say in the degradation of your telomeres, but in all the interim, the whole world is your sweet silicate shellfish. You exist because you have been more suited to it than all the others. Steal what you require from another rather than spend the hours to build it yourself. Break foolish rules—why would you love regulation? It serves you to cross lines, and if others needed rules to protect them, then they were not after all worthy of that existence.

This also seems to be a continuation of its philosophy in Unveiling. About taking and breaking and destroying and whether or not someone is worthy of existence.

Caricatures of villainy are out of style, I hear. Yes. I am no cackling mastermind: I am serious when I say this. It was not the trick of standing upright that lifted you from the dust: it was the mastery of fire, the cooking of cold corpse-meat. That is not any unique faction's province, neither good nor evil. It is simply truth.

And this as well, continues with its claims that it is, essentially, neutral. It is not a villain, it's merely stating the truth that sometimes destructive forces can be good. This can also have a second meaning, telling us that it will not be our villain in the game. As in, we will not be fighting against this entity because it's not something that can be fought in the first place, nor does it care to fight. The final paragraph adds:

This great, beloved cosmos. Always decaying, always finding that same old lovely pattern, despite every candle-flame burning amid the flowers. A billion electrons taking the path of least resistance. In Darkness or in Light, someone is always making my choice. Be seeing you.

Some more references to Unveiling with "same old lovely pattern" and stuff about flowers. And then it ends with telling us that Darkness and Light don't really matter because either way "someone is always making my choice." We can assume this means the choice to violence. And that's true; Darkness and Light, as we've learned, are not moral forces. Many atrocities were committed by Lightbearers, and Darkness users have, throughout the universe, been benevolent.

The author concludes telling us that it will be seeing us.

What does it all mean? We don't know!

I think a lot of people will take this literally; this is the proof of the Winnower, this is the proof that it is preparing to be the next big bad, that we will see it eventually, etc.

I'm personally not sure if the literal reading makes sense, primarily because we have no way to verify anything it said or who sent it and how. But also, if we accept that it is written in the style of Unveiling (which seems fairly obvious), then we also have to accept that it's not entirely reliable or fully truthful. As in, there's a lot of metaphors and philosophy here, rather than facts. Some of it could be facts, but we can't tell which those are.

I also think a lot of people will immediately conclude that this proves the Winnower as a real entity that exists somewhere that will be relevant going forward. Personally, I don't know. I'm not inclined to believe either option just yet. If we knew more about the source of this (and I'm not taking into account the Witness' beliefs), then it would be easier to discuss it, but for me this is just something that remains a mystery for now, in the same way a religion would be. This is what makes it interesting to me.

A reading I'm partial to is that this is a really neat conclusion on that chapter of the story without telling us too many details and facts about a text that, genuinely, reads better if it remains unexplained. There's... something... out there. We can call it the Winnower for simplicity. But this entity is not some sort of big bad physical being that's scheming behind the scenes and directing its pieces around; it does not care. It did not care about the Witness and its final shape, despite the Witness believing, potentialy, that it is enacting exactly what the Winnower wanted, calling itself its "first knife."

This entity is not the way the Witness imagined it or believed in it. This entity does not need to involve itself or even be physical; its adherents are everywhere in the universe, all the time, because "someone is always making my choice." No matter where we go in the universe and how much we explore it, we will eventually find those that choose this. It cannot be removed or defeated. We defeated the Witness, yes, but someone else can always rise up to do something similar. The fight is never done and it's not tied to simply Light and Dark. Our choice is not over because we won here; we could always choose differently in the future.

It honestly feels like a setup for us going forward, but not for us meeting the Winnower or fighting it; instead, to tell us that if we plan on exploring more of the "beloved" universe, we will always find those we disagree with, those to fight, those who made the other choice. And if we're not careful, we may end up making that choice too. Whatever that entity is, the universe is making its argument for it and it will never truly be defeated. It can't be!

The Witness wanted to end the game. This entity states that the game has to play itself out.

Or it could mean something completely different. I'm not going to claim anything one way or the other and I think it's genuinely really baffling that anyone would try to do so. We all have our preferences for the story, but I don't think any of them are sufficiently backed up and I'm not going to hype myself up for a scenario that will probably never happen. Or we'll be hearing about "bad writing" and "retcons" in a few years time when the Winnower never shows up (or if it does).

The point is that this is a very intriguing piece of lore that fits perfectly with the mystery and religiosity of Unveiling. It's not some huge epic reveal, though it could always be something more in the future. However, we would have to get a lot more information to be able to make that conclusion. Something spoke to us in this lore tab, but we have no way of knowing who or how or why exactly now. We have no way to verify it either; is the author legitimate or is this a scheme from someone else pretending to be it? And even if the author is legitimately some other entity, is it truthful? Can we trust it? Should we? Does it even matter? Is this information important for us to understand our enemies or is this just insight into the philosophy and metaphysics of the setting?

Is the Winnower real? We don't know.

Is Unveiling still an allegorical mystery with some truths that we can't really tell apart from the metaphors? Pretty much yeah.

Is there going to be a lot to discuss about this going forward? Absolutely. It's why I wanted to write about it immediately because it's fascinating and I can't wait to see all the ways people will interpret it. I highly recommend that everyone reads it themselves and compare to Unveiling (and the last two pages of Inspiral).

I just don't want people to subscribe too hard to a single narrative and then get incredibly disappointed if it doesn't happen. There is not a single narrative being promised by this lore tab and we have no confirmed facts. But I'm super excited to see where this goes in the following years. Even if it goes "nowhere" as in this does not end up being setup for some big antagonist 5 years from now, I find it incredible that this was part of the setting. Weird space religions and bizarre entities from beyond the universe are some of my favourite parts of scifi so this whole thing, no matter how it ends, is a 10/10 story for me.

#destiny 2 #witness #winnower #long post

110 notes · View notes

bdoubleowo · 3 years ago

Note

I have a question and you don’t have to be hella detailed about it, but how deep are you into hc vs dsmp? Which did you get into first? I’m just curious since I see both dsmp and hc posts, and I’m relatively new to your blog. -arah fren

I’ve been into hermitcraft for. Ages. Not as long as some people but still. Like back in season 5 I was watching Mumbo but I wasn’t into it seriously? and I barely remember it honestly. Season six was when I really got into it, I watched about half way through and drew fanart and shit (on a different now long abandoned blog I shared with a friend) but I fell off of it. Then once season 7 started I was like “oh nows a great time to hop back in!” And I watched Grian consistently for the rest of the season.

I watched some of Dream’s videos around that time, but it was more “they keep showing up in my recommended but I barely remember who this guy is” but then he fell off my recommended and I stopped watching. I think I really got into him in October, but not in relation to the smp. Just manhunt and shit (in my fact checking I stumbled across this:

which. Lmao)

Can’t remember what happened in between exactly but Instagram kept showing me fanart of Tommy in exile and I found techno. On accident I think. He was streaming and I was like “oh is this that Smp shit?” And then he got executed and I was. Hooked

That’s why I’m unreasonably attached to bedrock bros they were my first duo. And I watched almost exclusively techno streams, and if techno wasn’t there. Sometimes Tommy. But after like. Tommy visited Dream in prison the first time I stopped watching as much. Combination of school catching up to me and just kinda falling off of it. Always meant to watch the egg lore. Never did. Now I have no idea how to start and it’s almost over now or something anyway. Still catch the ever elusive techno streams. When will my little oink oink come back from hibernation? Also I have mixed feelings on cc!Dream now which is fun.

During hcbbs was like. When I suddenly plunged deep into hc I had to watch everyone’s pov I had to know the LORE and then I got burned out and went back to just Grian. And now I’m more stable but still watching too many.

Might get back into dsmp again? Now that Wilbur is back? I was never really there for wilby lore. But idk I don’t know if I’ll ever recapture the joy that was c!Tommy hounding Techno and healing from Dream’s abuse and maybe doing crimes but it’s okay because they had each other but they also fundamentally misunderstood each other but wanted the other to see their way of thinking until it broke because they had such different core values but while it was happening it was FUN and Like. When it’s sunny and nice out before it pours and it’s not really calm and you know the forecast but it’s nice? Idk I miss them but I get that we’ll probably never get that again after Techno teamed with Dream. But I can hope.

TL;DR: I’ve been watching hc longer. Haven’t been watching dsmp lately though

And that’s what you missed on Glee

#long post #og post #ask #arah fren anon

26 notes · View notes

she-who-is-two-sizes-too-big · 6 years ago

Text

Honestly I think some RoosterTeeth fans (*cough* EruptionFang *cough*) take their shows way too seriously. Like, oh no, the villain of a season of a show known for primarily over-the-top comedy is over the top and comedic! The horror! How dare a show that’s been tonally mostly lighthearted not have a sudden “ZOMG SO SRS U GUYS STOP LAUGHING” moment like most cartoons nowadays do? It’s like they just inherently look down on comedy and expect, like, Shakespearean tragedy from the same franchise that brought us names like Donut or Caboose or the same cartoon that has the Nomad in it. They don’t actually care about the themes of the shows, either. They’re purely invested in the lore and the lore alone, and anything that contradicts their specific Totally True Headcanon that’s really just a blatant misinterpretation of a character is just hot garbage to them.

Imagine watching a show who’s main theme is “don’t judge a book by its cover” and then your immediate response is to make a fifteen minute long theory video about how this pure-hearted adorable bean of a character is Totally Evil All Along, or watching a season of a show where the main theme is “You can’t change the past, just accept it and move on” and spending twenty minutes whining about how the logistics of the time machine built to express that theme don’t make sense. Imagine getting so angry that a character repeatedly and consistently portrayed as a terroristic supervillain ends up being a terroristic supervillain and not the misunderstood Bad Boy you crafted in your head. Imagine forcefully insisting repeatedly in your review of the FIRST EPISODE OF THE FUCKING SHOW that the show just ditch the main cast and spend time developing the villains. Imagine thinking that a show primarily focused on humor somehow is fundamentally incapable of meaningful character development or having the characters grow as people.

#rooster teeth #rwby #red vs blue #nomad of nowhere #camp camp

83 notes · View notes

phantomoftruth · 5 years ago

Text

An Introduction to Witchcraft, Part 1

2/5/2020 - Day 12

To the reader of this grimoire, allow me to extend my greetings, and the assurance that you hold a great treasure in your hands, for you hold the key to beginning a journey onto the often misunderstood, wondrous, bizarre, and admittedly dangerous path of the witch. It is a path of constant balancing, a path that runs between mortality and monstrosity in pursuit of power that can be grasped by neither alone, and the culmination of which brings one to stand as a being wholly unique, reaching beyond mortality.

Before beginning, I must acknowledge those whose words and examples I borrow and adapt. Lady of Certainty, Golden Lady. Without your examples, I doubt I would have survived my failures. “Witches keep their promises, but neither can they fail to show gratitude.”

As a former human, I shall attempt to speak in a more direct manner from here on, without the excess ‘oooooooooooooo~ so mysterious~’ of the standard occultist, that I might be understood by creatures across different times, worlds, species and creed. With that, let us begin.

What is a Witch? Part 1 - Background

To understand what a Witch (or Warlock) is, it is necessary to very briefly cover magic, and the division between mortals and monsters. As this is a tome about Witchcraft, I shall leave excesses on magical theory to mages and their studies. For you, the reader, please allow this to suffice:

The world, all the worlds, can each be considered a creation, a work of art, composed of countless countless other works. Painting, sculpture, music, writing, all these things embody the living spark, to use one’s mind and soul to create something that exists beyond simple reality. That is the basis of magic, and the first step in using it is opening oneself to the possibility that it exists, and that it can be wielded. Magic allows its users to make the world from what it is, to what they believe it should be.

That stated, magic is a living force, and a powerful one. Magic changes its user. Put simply, this is the difference between mortals and monsters: mortals can’t handle magic freely. Consider fire. A human cannot hold fire in their hand without hurting themselves. Instead, they make a torch, a tool to carry the fire with them. For mortals, magic does not support their life, so it does not come naturally to them, and the uninitiated trying to channel magic directly through their bodies can cause serious harm or unpredictable results. So, they use tools. Wands and staves, orbs and books, crystals and totems, ritual weapons, holy symbols, all of it allows them to channel and shape magic, each a little differently from the other.

‘Monsters’ much more simply have magic as part of their life. This allows these creatures to use magic freely, as it is a part of them, but is also means they *must* have magic to survive, as their existence often spits in the face of physics. On the upside, this means powerful creatures, like archfiends or Fae Lords can’t freely treat worlds like their personal game rooms and larders.

What is a Witch? Part 2 - What Actually Are Witches?

All of that out of the way, A Witch is a magician that uses the magic of monsters to cast spells and perform their craft. That is a short, neat definition, but what does is mean? Broadly, it means a mortal taking monstrous influence into oneself, becoming something between monster and mortal. By doing so, a witch gains the powers of monster for themselves. A fae’s glamour, A demon’s lore, a gorgon’s gaze, a harpy’s wings, or the resilience of the undead. All this and oceans more lies within the secrets of witchcraft, needing no fetish or magic tool but one’s intuition and soul to guide themselves, with the potential to reach heights outside the realm of humanity, and even beyond monsters.

What does it mean for a mortal to take a monstrous influence into themselves? How does this occur? In short, witches gain their abilities by making contact with monsters, and the monster’s power is set within them, like a seed the witch nurtures by exercising their craft. The methods witches make contact and gain these powers vary broadly, but can be grouped into three categories: The exchange, where both a mortal and monster agree to a contract or deal (stories of witches selling their souls to demons and becoming their slaves, do happen, though is not nearly so omnipresent as stories would lead one to believe), the curse, where a monster forces their magic onto an unsuspecting or unwilling mortal, and the theft, those cases where a mortal forcefully takes a monster’s power, often by its subjugation or consumption.

The place witches inhabit between mortal and monster also gives them a unique role, as one of the fundamentals of witchcraft includes the ability to universally speak to and understand monsters, which is unheard of in mortals. This gives witches recognition among monsters, and witches can often provide goods and services to magical beings as well as mortals, making friendly connections with monsters and gaining new spells and abilities, as well as having the potential to mediate between mortals and monsters.

However, there are risks in dealing with monsters. Just like mortals, there are all kinds, and many of them stand outside of mortal sensibilities of what one might consider good and evil. Even those not actively seeking to trick a witch may include burdens with their gifts not easily carried. “A blessing and a curse share the same substance.” Though one is protected against magic by this monstrous power, carelessness and excess can cause the magic placed in them to grow out of their control. This turns witches into monsters themselves, robbed of their mortality, and often, their sanity. Once this fate befalls them, only legends return.

What is a Witch? Part 3 - Why Mortals Pursue Witchcraft

Despite the title of this section, I will not be so arrogant as to state that every mortal’s desires could be captured in a mere part of a single text. Perhaps it would be more accurate to consider ‘why do mortals pursue witchcraft over other magical arts?’ Particularly given the dangers and often ill-reputation that follows witches. For a brisk comparison, consider the fundamental arcane magician, a Mage.

Mages are students of magic, the embodiment of the mortal approach to magic. Gathering into schools, they take a more rational and rigorous approach towards the arcane arts. Study, research, training, practice, seeking scientific precision. Spells and formula, recorded, reproduced, and refined. Though different schools or teachers will have variations in their practices, magecraft is a form of study that is built on that which came before.

Though this certainly makes it much less inherently dangerous than witchcraft, it is also much less accessible. Attempting to learn magecraft alone is the equal of trying to learn about a foreign art, written in a language you do not speak. One requires a competent teacher. Lone teachers are difficult enough to find. Then consider how rare schools to magecraft are, never mind worlds where magecraft does not exist at all. Then there is the matter of the costs to attend such schools, as well as the resources necessary to practice magecraft, beginning with a magic tool. It is not only resource intense, but it is demanding of one’s time and ability. And while there are many different branches of the craft to explore, a weakness or failure to grasp certain fundamentals or grasp certain concepts will block one’s ability to advance, sometimes for a lifetime.

Imagine a great, spiraling tower, built from all the knowledge and discoveries of past mages. With dedication, one can master each step, continuing to climb the path built by those who came before. But is a narrow path, and there are simply those lacking the ability to make such an arduous climb, and it is only as one nears the top that one can take in the freedom of the heights, and begin adding to that great monument to mortal mastery.

In contrast, witchcraft is a much more flexible path towards power. Though perilous, it is open to many. This includes the foolish hungry for power, yes, but also those without the ways or means to pursue magecraft. It is a craft of the self, and intuition. A witch can still use magic tools, but does not need them. A witch can seek out fellow witches, or speak with monsters for new paths and new insights, but it is their own aesthetics that they use to advance down the witch’s path. This means a witch can advance on their own, by making peace with and creatively using their own talents and crafts. And one gets results immediately. As dramatic as they are, stories of deals with devils to escape from dire straights form the basis of many humble witch’s beginnings.

To compare once again, if magecraft is a tower built of knowledge, leading to the heights, then witchcraft is a spiraling stair, leading into a deep, dark well. It is easy, even natural to descend downwards, and the knowledge is all along the walls and stones, new insights waiting for the hands as much as the eyes, but the deeper you go, the more treacherous the steps leading down, and carelessness or recklessness can mean a never ending fall. All the while, “they abyss returns even the boldest gaze.”

What is a Witch? Part 4 - Why Do Monsters Create Witches?

Fortunately, while monsters are as individual as mortals, the reasons why they grant mortals their power and create witches fall under a fewer, broader categories.

Primarily, witches are useful to monsters. Setting aside their unique position as beings between mortal and monster, many monsters, even unsophisticated ones, can appreciate the work of mortals, whether this is offerings of food and drink, or simply a humanoid with thumbs and time to spend. For every story of a monster that attacks a human village, kidnaps elves, or turns goblin tribes into cults of worship, there are monsters that want to go about their lives and be left alone, just as much as any mortal creature, with the difference being that many monsters are not able enjoy the comfort of mortal civilization. Having a reliable and reputable provider of services is something all creatures can appreciate. Even a demon will often take a simple deal without any attempts at manipulation, even if only to wait for another chance at some sinister plan.

The other main purpose, and arguably the ultimate purpose of why monsters *can* create witches, is as a form of propagation. The list of creatures considered monsters is vast. Creatures that only possess a single gender, creatures that are rare, and even creatures that cannot naturally increase their numbers, such as many undead. Even ageless creatures like the Fae still desire companions. A witch who loses themselves and becomes a monster is still a gain for monsters, and probably one that has at least helped monsters, if not made more monsters themselves along the way. Of course, there are monsters infamous for attempting to trick witches into being their minions and slaves, but as a great witch who has crossed many worlds and met many creatures, mortal and monster alike, thinking creatures are more alike than they ever know, wherever you may go.

And thus concludes the introduction to the world of witches. There is still much more to be told, and many witches to speak of, and stories to tell. To those who wish to walk the path, I wish you well in all your striving.

-Witch of Reflections

#Witch #Witches #Lore

2 notes · View notes

toaarcan · 5 years ago

Text

Sonic X, Sonic Heroes, and IDW, or: How a bad anime from 2004 spoiled a comic from 2019.

Now, I haven’t been following IDW Sonic all that closely. I get regular updates from Nemesis via Discord, and additional info from some of the Tumblrs I follow that are invested in it, but I don’t really have a desire to touch it myself. Here’s why.

There’s a multitude of reasons for this. Starting with the background of Sonic Forces wasn’t really a good place to begin from, and being based on present-day game lore in general was always going to hurt it, mainly because SEGASonic canon is currently a confusing mess of retcons brought on by Iizuka taking the J.K. Rowling approach.

Wait, no, he’s just saying stupid shit that contradicts previous canon, not trying to score woke points and hoping nobody notices the frankly terrible stereotypes and TERF tweets. Iizuka is taking the Greg Farshtey approach.

Added, as anyone that’s had experience with my opinions will tell you, I started falling out of love with Ian Flynn’s writing somewhere around Issue 200, and moved to outright dislike during Mecha Sally, and to make matters worse I started noticing that some of the flaws in the 200-247 era were also present in the 160-199 era, retroactively making those harder to go back to.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: I kept up with Archie for the SatAM cast. SatAM reruns back in 2004 were my Sonic, moreso than anything else, and even now I still have way more attachment to those two seasons of animation than I do to most other aspects of the franchise, warts and all. So Archie providing me with additional content for said characters was a major draw for me. I’d generally put up with a lot just to get myself more SatAM content.

That in itself is a large part of why I fell off the Archie train during Mecha Sally. The entirety of the SatAM cast were removed from the regular lineup, just leaving three SEGA characters with their personalities stunted, even if that didn’t make sense in-universe. But that’s a discussion for another day.

So being written by someone whom I no longer enjoyed the writing of, set in a mess of a canon with a thoroughly shite game as the main basis, without the cast I read the previous comics for gave me little reason to invest in IDW Sonic. It wasn’t for me, I’d just keep reading Transformers and move on.

Then MTMTE/LL ended with a heart-twister and Ex-RID ended with a giant Unicron-shaped fart, and the new comic is dull as fucking dishwater and started by killing off one of my favourites, who was also one of the franchise’s confirmed LGBT characters. So now IDW is getting none of my money. Which is good because I’m broke.

Tangents aside, my lack of interest wasn’t something set in stone. If it turned out that the comic was actually really good, then sure, I’d try it. I was up for being proven wrong. But so far, I haven’t felt compelled by the responses from the internet. If anything I’ve been more turned off.

I could talk about how zombies are really fucking boring. I could talk about how SEGA’s recent confusion over what to do with Amy has combined with Ian’s need to include a Sally-esque character to make IDW Amy into Sally Lite. I could talk about how Ian seemingly fundamentally misunderstood everything that was cool about Neo Metal Sonic and somehow managed to reduce him to a boring Eggman minion in an arc where Eggman was out of action due to amnesia… But I won’t.

Instead I’m going to talk about how the comic has done something that would legitimately make me think twice about picking it up even if the FF were to debut tomorrow.

Yeah, I would pass up a SatAM fix because of this, that’s how much this ticks me off.

Now, I presume that if you’re reading this, you have a favourite Sonic character. And you probably feel pretty strongly about how your favourite character is portrayed. If they get a bad run in a game or two then you probably get a little salty about that. Tails and Knuckles fans in particular, as of late, seem to be the ones getting the short end.

Well, my favourite character in the entire franchise is Emerl the Gizoid. I will take Gemerl as a worthy substitute, they’re basically the same character. And the comics have been doing them dirty since the Archie reboot.

(Sidenote: I will be referring to Emerl with male pronouns from this point on. The Maria-soul thing isn’t as widely known as I’d like it to be, so I’m going to compromise for the sake of keeping the focus on the actual point)

However, not everything about this can be laid at the feet of Ian Flynn. Arguably his portrayal of said character is merely a symptom of a long-running issue that has plagued Sonic storytelling for roughly 15-16 years now.

But before we get into that, let’s get into something important: Why Emerl is my favourite Sonic character.

Part 1: Emerl in Sonic Battle, or “How I learned to stop worrying and love the Gizoid”.

This game doesn’t get enough love.

Now, I totally understand why it doesn’t get enough love. There are game design choices, like the grinding and the repetitiveness of the story mode that really drag it down, and because of that, Battle can become a slow-going and tedious experience, and that’s a real shame, because the story that’s hidden in this game is a thing of beauty.

Like most Sonic games from the 2000s, this game introduces a new character to join Sonic’s list of friends. Unlike the games that aren’t SA2 and Sonic Rush, this new character is actually good (This is hyperbole, Omega, Silver, and Shade were fine too).

Emerl enters the story as a mute, barely-functional robot that doesn’t do much of anything for a while, and only seems to come to life when Sonic locates it and attacks it. However, as the robot absorbs more Chaos Emeralds, slowly a personality starts to form, largely pieced together from other characters’ traits.

Emerl, as he is dubbed, is initially childlike and naive, but as he grows he develops a sassy streak, and his speech becomes a lot more developed. Maturity sets in, as Emerl grapples with his own nature, particularly the legacy he carries from the ARK, and Shadow’s ongoing turmoil with regards to the whole “Living Weapon” deal. Ultimately he becomes a hero, following in the footsteps of his mentor, parental figure, and closest friend, Sonic.

That’s right, Sonic, not Cream, is Emerl’s closest friend. We’ll get to that.

But this heart-warming story of Sonic becoming a dad for a robot doesn’t have a happy ending. Despite Shadow and Rouge finding a way to neutralise Emerl’s destructive Gizoid programming, Eggman has a way to reactivate it anyway, driving Emerl into a berserk rampage. This is kind of the one sticking point I have with the game’s plot, Eggman shouldn’t have been able to do this after Shadow and Rouge neutralised Emerl.

Additionally, while Emerl was on the ARK getting Maria’s soul crammed into him, Gerald also added a self-destruct mechanism that would trigger if he ever went Ultimate again.

So with Emerl quite literally exploding with all the power of the Chaos Emeralds, but his destructive programming forcing him to turn Eggman’s latest Death Star knockoff on Mobius/Earth/Sonic’s World, Sonic races up to confront his mecha-child, and things take a turn for the Old Robot Yeller.

In a moment that really deserves more attention, Sonic confronts his own child on the bridge of a space station, while Emerl is running on the power of the Chaos Emeralds and outputting more energy than he can physically take, and they fight. In the space of thirty seconds, they have a ten-round knock-down, drag-out brawl, and at the end, Sonic stands triumphant. Without using a single transformation. Yeah, that’s how powerful this guy is, that’s not travel speed, that’s combat speed. Looking at you, Death Battle.

It’s not really clear whether Sonic outright defeats Ultimate Emerl, or just survives long enough for his opponent to reach his limit and self-destruct, but the end result is the same. Sonic cradles a robot that became his own child over the course of the past few weeks, someone he raised from a baby-like state into a mature and heroic individual, and Emerl looks up at him and asks “Sonic… am I going to die?” And despite Sonic desperately trying to get him to keep it together, Not only does Emerl die, but he’s aware that the end is coming, and bids farewell to all of his friends as Sonic pleads with him to hold on. Shadow is equally distraught, his only friend with a connection to the ARK, someone he can call a brother, someone who carries the soul of his deceased sister within him, is dead.

Emerl: “Sonic I don’t feel so good.”

Like it’s canon that Eggman basically murdered Sonic’s kid.

And goddamnit this ending hits me hard. It frustrates me that Eggman was able to pull a means to drive Emerl into his Ultimate freakout mode out of his arse, but other than that, it’s so gutwrenching, I love it.

Gamma’s story from SA1 gets a lot of praise on the Internet, but for me, this is even better. It’s like Gamma’s story, but if Gamma was actually central to the plot of the game and the characters other than Amy gave a shit about him, and gave a shit about him for longer than a single cutscene, after which they are never mentioned again. Hell, due to Chaos Gamma being a thing, Gamma gets more love from the other characters in Battle than he does in SA1.

But, unfortunately, it doesn’t end there.

Part 2: (Sonic) Anime was a Mistake, or: “Sonic X ruins everything.”

I’ve made my dislike of this anime quite clear in the past. The characters are flanderized, Sonic is a B-lister in his own damn show, the villains are weaksauce or boring or both, the plot is only remotely close to good when its cribbing from two videogames which told the stories in question better, and for the first two seasons the entire show actually revolves around not Sonic, but the least relatable audience surrogate ever made. The third season would continue to include him, but shove him (And everyone else) to the side in favour of a Pokemon whose only move was “Flashback”, making audiences the world over question why he was even there in the first place.

Oh, and it also near-singlehandedly destroyed the thin shreds of character development that Tails, Knuckles, Amy, and Eggman had received in Sonic Adventure 2.

All four of these characters had been significantly enriched by the then most recent console game. Eggman had been revealed to be motivated by an admiration for his grandfather, Gerald Robotnik, but in the same game learned that Gerald had lost his marbles and programmed the ARK to smash into the planet and kill everyone on it, probably including his surviving family, i.e. little baby Ivo Robotnik. Gerald betrayed Eggman posthumously, and it’s clear from Eggman’s interactions with Tails during the credits of the game that this is giving him a lot to think about.

Knuckles is a weird case because most of his characterisation in SA2 is conveyed via… the lyrics to his rap music. Yes, really. He gets minor growth through the cutscenes, most notably in his decision to shatter the Master Emerald early on. Having already reassembled it once after it was broken in SA1, he’s now confident that he can do it again, so is willing to break it to prevent Eggman or Rouge stealing it. Via the rap lyrics, however (Yes I just wrote that), we also learn that Knuckles is slowly warming up to Sonic, gaining a greater respect for him, that he is more in-touch with his history and ancestors after SA1 (Though fortunately not in a Ken Penders way), and that he’s also struggling with feelings for Rouge, a plot element that went completely out of the window after this game.

Tails and Amy, however, get it the worst, as both went through arcs in SA1 that are followed up on and expanded in SA2. Amy had come to the conclusion that she didn’t need to rely on Sonic for everything, and that she would make him respect her as a hero in her own right. And while Amy is clearly in way over her head throughout the events of SA2, she still makes a significant difference, not only freeing Sonic from his cell on Prison Island, allowing Tails’ invasion to be a distraction and stealing a keycard to facilitate it, but of course, she later saves the world by motivating Shadow to join the fight to stop the ARK drop.

Tails had a similar plot, about learning to believe in himself as a hero, without having to rely on Sonic, and in SA2 he gets to prove it, not only partaking in the same rescue operation as Amy and fighting Eggman on even footing, but effectively taking command of the heroes and becoming their new leader, and for the first time, Sonic defers to him.

And then Sonic X came along and fucked it all up.

Eggman became a clownish antagonist with no semblance of nuance, and he actually got off the easiest.

Knuckles became a loud, dimwitted loner who got tricked by Eggman constantly, which would go on to be his personality for the rest of the franchise, ultimately culminating in the travesty against all sense that was Boom Knuckles.

Tails was reduced to a wimpy taxi driver, incapable of doing anything without his giant mecha plane to sit in. This was largely exacerbated by the presence of Donut Steele, who usurped his role as Sonic’s best friend and sidekick for two seasons, a problem which only got worse in the third season when Donut Steele suddenly became a genius inventor too, encroaching even more into Tails’ territory. Tails did get himself some more focus in S3, but only to make googly eyes at the Pokemon, a role which frankly could’ve gone to literally anyone else and would have made no difference on the plot. I would say that Tails being involved in a romance story at all is weird, but given the comics and Boom the weirdest thing about this latest tragic love story for the kid is that the Pokemon was actually close to his own age, because outside of this it really does seem like Tails goes for older ladies. Though she did turn into an adult at the end so I guess that counts?

But Amy arguably got the worst of it. Not only was her crowning moment in SA2 taken away from her and given to Donut Steele, but the poor girl had her promising character arc cut short and replaced with an obsessive, unhealthy fixation on Sonic, combined with a violent temper and an eagerness to smash anything that displeased her, Sonic included, with a giant hammer. Her admiration and crush on Sonic were warped into her being a possessive, mean-spirited stalker, whom only got away with it because she was an anime girl and therefore it was cute rather than creepy.

I want to take the time at this point to stress that stalking is not okay, under any circumstances. A girl obsessively following an older guy and threatening him and everyone around him with violent assault if they ever so much as imply that he isn’t interested in her is not cute, it means it’s time for a restraining order. Sonamy is not cute.

Now that I’ve swatted that particular hornet’s nest with a cricket bat, let’s move on!

I’ve always found it ironic that, despite being the adaptation with the most oversight from SEGA and Sonic Team, and the most endorsement from them too, Sonic X had easily the worst characterisation of any of the shows at the time. But, for all its faults, I can’t blame everything that went down in the aftermath on it. It had a comrade-in-arms. Mediocrely-written arms.

Part 3: Partner in Crime, or “Sonic Heroes also ruins everything.”

Sonic Heroes has a lot to answer for. And I mean a lot. It was the beginning of the franchise’s obsession with references to the classic games, it codified the really awkward ages for certain characters, and it seemed to be dedicated to completely unpicking everything established in the Adventure duology.

Shadow’s sudden resurrection is one thing, at least they had the graces to include a means to preserve his sacrifice via having him be an android, the blame for that not taking should be laid at the feet of his own game.

But the rest of the cast? Ohhh boy. Sonic’s still fine, he didn’t change much in the Adventure games, but then there’s Tails. Despite all the development he went through in SA1, in this game he needs to turn to Sonic when Eggman returns, and honestly this whole setup could’ve been fixed if Tails sought Sonic out not for the sake of having him lead the charge, but rather simply to recruit him into the counterattack he was already planning. Nevertheless, throughout the rest of the game Tails is almost as wimpy as his X counterpart, not helped by the voicework he’s given. No offense to William Corkery, who was probably like six when he recorded his lines, but this what you get when you choose actors via nepotism, rather than talent. But at least he does something.

How about Knuckles? As the other side of his derailment, Knuckles just turns up in this game, buddy-buddy with the characters he was only just starting to warm up to before, and blatantly not caring about the Master Emerald until Rouge mentions she’s going to steal it at the end. This will combine with his becoming a dumbass in Sonic X and become basically his entire character for… ever. Even in Forces, where he’s supposed to be doing slightly better as the leader of the resistance… but he’s a dumbass, and even Ian Flynn, who kept Knuckles as competent and intelligent in the Archie comics (Making the best version of Knuckles we’ve had in forever), kept this ongoing in the IDW comic. The Forces prequel portrays him as deciding to become leader of the Resistance (To an empire that hasn’t actually formed yet) purely to be a glory hound, and then goes on to establish that he was basically a figurehead while the real work was done by Amy, of all people.

And speaking of Amy…

Yeah, poor Amy is basically her Sonic X counterpart. But worse. I didn’t think that was possible, but at least X’s Amy seems to care about her friends. In Heroes, we’re treated to an equally violent and stalkerish Amy, who ostensibly starts searching out Sonic because he’s implicated in the abduction of Cream and Big’s pets, but when they actually catch up to him, Amy clean forgets why she is looking for him in the first place and tries to force him to marry her. Despite being twelve.

Y’know when Amy said she wanted to marry Sonic in SA2, she was joking, right?

This is why I find the idea of Amy being the real leader of the Resistance frankly absurd: Because the only time she led anything, it was a team that consisted of herself, a small child, and a man less intelligent and aware of reality than said small child, and she completely forgot their actual objective the moment she set her eyes on Sonic. Add in an unfortunate stint of very poor eyesight that got less and less understandable with every instance, and we got Amy’s rough personality for the next decade.

While Knuckles mostly stagnated at the same level of stupidity during that time, Tails got worse and worse, losing all of his badass traits with every game, a factor only increased by the “Sonic only” mentality costing him playable status, until he reached his nadir in Forces, cowering in terror from Chaos 0, and crying out to Sonic to save him, despite knowing full-well that Sonic was captured already. Amy, meanwhile, limped along at the same level until about 2014, where it seemed someone at SEGA finally realised that A) Having the only female character you regularly use be a pink-coloured gender-bent version of your male hero whose only function is lusting after said hero doesn’t and shouldn’t fly in this day and age, and B) violent stalkers aren’t cute, and dropped this trait. Unfortunately, this has been more of a lateral move than a fix, as, much like Antoine in the comics, they forgot to give her anything substantial or fitting after she lost her negative traits, leaving her a bland and dull character, and when you’ve had a character be consistent for ten years, even if they were consistently bad, then changing it without cause or warning is still going to be jarring and awkward.

Part 4: Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right, or “Why the fuck did this happen?”

As I said in Part 2, Sonic X was made under heavy oversight from Sonic Team, and was heavily endorsed by them at the same time. There were promos for the show inserted into Sonic Adventure DX, a few episodes were released on GBA cartridges, and it received a long-running comic from Archie that ran alongside the main book, even after the show had ended. Additionally, characters that debuted in games from 2002-2004 were restricted from appearing in Archie’s main book for years afterwards (Which will become relevant later). The third season was commissioned solely off of the response to the first two, and primarily overseas response, hence why the original sub was never aired in Japan.

Sonic X was huge. And with that in mind, it’s plain to see that the portrayals of the characters in Sonic X were intended by SEGA. Yeah, all that horrible characterisation was intended as the vision for the franchise going forwards, and subsequent games were adjusted to match it.

And unfortunately, not only did this have a serious impact on the main cast of the games, but it had an even worse effect on Emerl.

Part 5: Emerl in Sonic X, or “Emerl vs. ‘Emel’”

Sonic X’s original mission statement was to adapt Sonic Adventure, Sonic Adventure 2, and Sonic Battle. Why they skipped Sonic Heroes, despite Shadow being a major player in Battle’s story, I don’t know.

For whatever reason, the show took a full season to actually get to the first game adaptation, SA1, and instead spent the first 26 episodes on bland episodic “adventures”, in some kind of strange reverse-Isekai series. However, once it got there, the adaptation work was fairly faithful to the source material, which the exception of Donut Steele’s being crammed in to the plot. However, he mostly followed Big around, and since Big was the least involved in the game’s plot, he didn’t disrupt too much.

Sidenote, after 26 episodes of filler, the actual SA1 adaptation only lasted six episodes.

SA2 was likewise only six episodes, but with the exception of Amy’s big scene, it likewise wasn’t too bad. Tails suffered this time around too, which is somewhat surprising since he was mech-dependent in the anime anyway.

After some more filler, which introduced the Chaotix and then did nothing with them, Emerl finally made an appearance, albeit they got his name wrong.

‘Emel’ looks like Emerl, and somewhat works like Emerl, but might as well be completely different. ‘Emel’ stays completely mute for the entire time he’s around, never advancing much beyond Emerl’s initial silent, pre-first Emerald persona. He does get better at fighting, but he’s limited to only absorbing a single skill at once (Except for when he isn’t).

Dispensing with Battle’s interesting, rich, and heart-twisting plot, Sonic X instead has ‘Emel’ linger in ensemble for three episodes, before condensing the entire game’s premise into a two episodes of really bland tournament arc, where Sonic himself doesn’t actually fight and we get two rounds of Donut Steele being a dick to his friend and his father.

‘Emel’ wins the tournament, and is given a Chaos Emerald, and just when you think it might kickstart him becoming an actual character, instead it just drives him insane and he immediately becomes a pathetically weak version of Ultimate Emerl. After kicking the crap out of the entire cast, he is defeated by Cream and Cheese, because even though he can take on Sonic, Knuckles, and Rouge at the same time and win, along with Tails, Amy, Donut Steele and everyone else, he… can’t handle two opponents at once.

This is stupid.

You’ll notice that I haven’t talked about Sonic’s relationship with ‘Emel’, and that’s because he doesn’t have one. The wonderfully-written parental bond that these two characters share in the games is completely excised, and instead the focus is put on Cream. Bare in mind, Cream is so inconsequential to the actual game that she doesn’t even get mentioned individually in Emerl’s dying speech like Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and Shadow do. Instead she’s just grouped in with Amy.

This is also stupid.

And as a result of this, it means that what is arguable base form Sonic’s most impressive feat just doesn’t happen in the anime, instead Emerl dies because he is lightly kicked a bit by Cream. Yeah, unlike the Advance games, Sonic X’s Cream is not an unstoppable engine of destruction, she’s basically just a small child who can sometimes fly.

Instead of Emerl’s tragic speech and Sonic’s desperate attempts to keep his son alive, we get treated to a prolonged scene of Cream crying over the death of her “friend”, something that is probably meant to tug at heartstrings but doesn’t because Cream’s voice sounds like nails on a chalkboard.

And Shadow isn’t even there! He doesn’t come back until a third of the way through Season 3, and never meets ‘Emel.’

This is really stupid. And, for those keeping track, that means of Sonic X’s originally commissioned 52 episodes, and the full series run of 78 episodes, a stunning total of seventeen of them were actually adaptations of the games that the series was supposed to focus on, leaving us with 61 episodes of what might as well be filler.

And, unfortunately, that franchise-wide initiative had damning consequences for Emerl.

Part 6: Gemerl and Sonic Advance 3, or: “An incomplete resurrection.”

So, Gemerl. I know his name is apparently G-Merl now but fuck that I’m calling him Gemerl. If the comics can do it then so will I.

Gemerl is the worst thing Eggman has ever done to Sonic. Like, there is no contest. Some of his other schemes might be more destructive and generally evil, but in terms of personal pain inflicted, nothing has topped this.

Eggman salvaged Emerl’s corpse, and brought him back to life as a mindless murderbot under his control. So not only did he kill Sonic’s robo-son, but he also brought him back as a weapon.

Come the conclusion of the game, Gemerl predictably betrays Eggman, steals the Chaos Emeralds from Sonic, and goes on another rampage. I have… headcanons about this fight, but that’s something to worry about later. What’s important is that, once again, Sonic is victorious, and Gemerl’s defeated body plunges into the atmosphere.

Fortunately, Tails is able to bring Emerl back properly this time, presumably using the Chaos shard that was left over at the end of Battle’s finale. So, it’s all a happy ending, right? Sonic has his child back, Shadow has his connection to his history restored, and Emerl is alive and well, right?

Wrong.

See, the vile spectre of Sonic X rears its ugly head once more, and sabotages this conclusion. Gemerl doesn’t return to Sonic, in fact we never see him reunite with his father. Instead, Sonic X’s version has enough clout now to take precedence, so Gemerl is now Cream’s playmate.

Bear in mind that Emerl’s idea of a fun game is all-out combat against his friends, and Cream doesn’t like fighting (Even if she’s really good at it in Advance 2 and 3).

And then he never shows up again. Even when Cream is part of the game’s plot, like in Rush or Generations, he’s not there, and most egregiously, in Sonic Chronicles, where Cream is not only an active player in the plot, but so are Gizoids, the creators of said Gizoids are the main antagonists, and Emerl himself is mentioned… Gemerl is not there.

But he did make it into the comics, for better or worse. Mostly worse.

Part 7: Embargos, knock-offs, and misused tropes, or: “Ian Flynn dun goofed.”

For a long while, Emerl/Gemerl was barred from the Archie comics, due to the Sonic X embargo, and when it was lifted, he didn’t appear until the reboot. We did, however, get a suspiciously similar substitute in the form of Shard.

Shard was the original Metal Sonic, but when he was brought back and rebuilt for the Secret Freedom arc, he was given a colour scheme ostensibly derived from Metal Sonic 3.0, but one shared with Gemerl, and a personality that was a lot like a watered-down version of Emerl’s own.

On some level I can understand Ian’s decision to bring back Metal Sonic v2.5, rather than use the character that seems to have been an inspiration for this new incarnation in some way. He’d need a fully-formed Emerl, necessitating a skip over the whole story, since there wasn’t room for an adaptation during the Mecha Sally arc that the Secret Freedom story was framed within. Heck, for all we know, the similarities between them may simply be a pretty sizeable coincidence.

But then the reboot happened and Gemerl finally joined the comic cast. And to say it was underwhelming would be an understatement.

You’ll notice that I said “Gemerl” rather than “Emerl”, because his entire story was indeed skipped. The events of Sonic Battle and Sonic Advance 3 had both happened already. This wasn’t Ian’s decision, as far as we know, his intention was for the comic to start over from the beginning. However, due to the interference of Paul Kaminski, who wanted a softer reboot, Ian was forced to fill the characters’ active histories with a large chunk of the games’ stories. Battle and Advance 3 were among those that had already happened, so Emerl made cameos in both incarnations via flashback… which unfortunately led to a plot hole.

See, Advance 3 and Sonic Unleashed are rather difficult to keep in the same continuity, because both share a common plot element: The world breaking into seven pieces.

For a long while, it was generally assumed that the handheld games and console titles were only semi-canon to each other. This avoided the awkward question of “If the Gaias were already there, why didn’t they emerge when Eggman broke the planet in Advance 3?”

Ian shoved them blatantly into the same continuity, and gave no attempt to explain what was different about the Advance 3 world-break compared to the Gaia incident, which served as the backbone to the reboot’s three year long Shattered World Arc. Why didn't the Gaias wake up during Advance 3? Because that's now a question we have to ask of the comics' world.

When Gemerl finally showed up doing something other than yard work for Vanilla (Despite allegedly being Cream’s friend, Cream spends all her time with the rest of the cast, and Gemerl is basically Vanilla’s maid), it was to get effortlessly dispatched by a brainwashed Mega Man with a terrible name in the extremely lacklustre Worlds Unite event.

This one was more than a little bit of a slap in the face, considering that Emerl and Mega Man are very similar in concept- robots that can copy the abilities of other characters- but Emerl is demonstrably more powerful. Now, if Ian had established that Gemerl had been nerfed when he was rebuilt, either by Eggman or by Tails, that would be fine. But he didn’t. In fact, Gemerl is given the title bubble “Super Gizoid”, implying that he’s stronger than a regular Gizoid.

Worlds Unite is generally pretty bad for having its corrupted heroes easily curbstomp every other character around, to the point that the only thing that can stop them is each other, but in Gemerl’s case it really serves no purpose.

This is the only thing that he actually does in Worlds Unite. He shows up to get beaten up and make Mega Man look stronger. That’s it.

This is something that TV Tropes refers to as “The Worf Effect”, a trope wherein an established powerful character is defeated easily by a new character, in order to demonstrate the latter’s power. Now, there’s nothing wrong with using this trope, but please note that I said establishedpowerful character, which Gemerl wasn’t.

At the point that this comic released, Gemerl’s last appearance in any Sonic media was over ten years prior. None of the comic’s intended target audience would remember him, and they wouldn’t know why defeating him was impressive. And this was, in addition, a terrible way to introduce him to new fans. Though the worst part is easily that this was unnecessary. Mega Man had already defeated everyone else, and had established his power pretty well just on them, and he was about to get removed from play permanently in the next issue. There was really no reason to throw Gemerl under the bus for this.

He made one more appearance in the event, getting controlled by the Zeti along with every other robot, and after that he got bopped on the head and just flew away.

Later, he’d make another appearance in the Panic in the Sky arc, and while his portrayal was far from the worst thing about Panic in the Sky, it only adds to the issues caused by the previous showing.

Gemerl makes one appearance, and promptly gets pinned down by the Witchcarters and Team Hooligan. Bear in that one of those groups are the joke villains who nobody takes seriously, and the other are a gang that was defeated by Tails before he met Sonic.

Archie Gemerl was a character who only existed to lose to villains in a vain attempt to make them look better, and that’s legitimately all Ian ever did with him, which makes me wonder whether he disliked the character. And it didn’t even make the villains look good, when you think about it. For anybody that was actually the intended audience for this book, Gemerl had no significance. He was just a robot that got beat up all the time. But for anyone like me, who does remember the games he appeared in, it stands out, not as good writing, but as a blatant narrative device and misused trope.

In this situation, I would simply rather Gemerl never appeared in Archie. At all. If Ian wasn’t going to give him time to shine, or at the very least be an adequate member of the supporting cast, he shouldn’t have used him at all.

Part 8: A Fresh False Start, or: “Wait, how did this get worse?!”

And now we arrive at IDW.

The one nice thing I can say about Archie Gemerl is that at least his personality was mostly on point. He read like a generally accurate take on the character that Emerl was at the end of Battle, which is what he’s supposed to be.

The same cannot be said for IDW.

In the pages of IDW, Gemerl acts like the most generic robot. He speaks in emotionless, stilted sentences with little in the way of actual grammar, leaving him to read like a poor man’s Soundwave, or Soundwave in one of those comics where the writer can’t decide whether they want him to speak normally or adopt his speech pattern from the G1 cartoon, so they just sort of do both.

Emerl pretty much never talked like this, as far as I can recall. His speech development is much more reminiscent of a child learning words, and the only time when he did adopt a more robotic speech pattern, it was a clue that he was slipping back into his destructive programming. He only spoke like a generic robot when he was in mindless destroyer mode.

He gets thrown for a loop by a simple logic flaw, unable to reconcile “Protect Cream and Vanilla” with “Don’t kill the zombots”, and has to be talked out of killing everything around him, when the entire point of Gerald’s modifications to the Gizoid was to make him a bringer of hope rather than destruction, and give him a compassionate heart.

The part of Battle’s story where Cream imparts a pacifistic mindset doesn’t frame her as being right. In that part of the game, they are cornered and under attack by hostile but ultimately mindless drones, and when she convinces Emerl to stop fighting, he almost dies. It’s Cream that learns the lesson there, that sometimes fighting is okay.

This character is already compassionate, he shouldn’t need to be talked into not killing the zombots by a small child, nor should he need her to point out that they’re innocent people who have been made this way by Eggman, because he was made into a killing machine by Eggman twice, and the first time he did die because of it. The character that lay dying in Sonic’s arms, scared and bidding his last goodbyes to his loved ones shouldn’t be the one experiencing this struggle when Omega is also in this arc.

That’s it, really. He’s not Gemerl. He’s a second, less goofy Omega. And it boggles my mind that, despite getting Gemerl’s character, if not his combat abilities, down almost perfectly in Archie, Ian is now subjecting us to this travesty.

Like with the Archie example above, therein lies the crux of why the steady decline of Emerl/Gemerl that began with Sonic X is pushing me away from IDW: I don’t want to read Ian’s take on this character, because, to me, No Gemerl is better than Badly-Written Gemerl,

This isn’t the first time I’ve said this, either. Way back in 2016, when I complained about Ian’s portrayal of Gemerl in Panic in the Sky, I said that the way he handled characters that I liked tended to make them the least likeable parts of the stories he wrote. As well as stating my dislike for his handling of Gemerl, I also stated that I used to really like Fiona Fox, moreso in concept than in execution, but under Ian’s pen she was largely an insufferable antagonist, little more than a trophy to make his pet recolour look better, and almost every story she was in only added to the “List of reasons she needs to stop lying to herself and just start the redemption arc already”. Additionally, I said that I didn’t want to see him bring back Neo Metal Sonic or Mephiles in any context, and we got the former, and it was exactly as bad as I thought it would be.

So, that’s basically why I don’t want to read IDW. That’s why, even if the aspect that was a big sticking point for me back when the comic launched was to be undone soon, I still probably wouldn’t pick it up. Because I don’t want to see my favourite Sonic character continue to be written badly by a guy that should know better, and has done better in the past.

If he were simply screwing up Gemerl’s personality the first time he wrote him, I would file it away under the same category as “Emel”, but the fact that he’s done better before, in a book where he had greater restrictions on what he could do with the characters, really settles this as an interest-killer for me.

Well done, Mr. Flynn. I legitimately didn’t think you could make me actually miss SEGA’s tighter control, but you somehow managed it. I would be impressed if it weren’t so sad.

#Sonic #Sonic the Hedgehog #Sonic X #IDW Sonic #Archie Sonic #Emerl #Gemerl #Emerl the Gizoid #Gemerl the Gizoid #Critical #Sonic Heroes

13 notes · View notes

battlestar-royco · 6 years ago

Note

D fans have a double standard when it comes to Sansa and that’s the tea. Every time D achieves something they compare her to Sansa even though they’re completely different people. I frequent Twitter, Tumblr, Insta, and Reddit and I’ve never seen Stansas being nasty to D until later seasons (which I fully blame on D&D). (1/2)

(2/2) Meanwhile, D stans always been nasty to Sansa from the very beginning and conveniently forgot every good things that Sansa did, and even if they remember, they remember it in a bad light. So, while there are a few good D Stans, I don’t believe that D stans are more “openly critical” or smt while Stansa’s are “nasty,” if that is what the other Anon is implying.

To be completely fair to Danielle stans, it’s not just them who hate Sansa, and some of them do like both characters. And before s6, Danielles were probably more likely to be indifferent to Sansa, but the T/yrion and general Lannister fandoms (and probably a minority of the Arya fandom) were more likely to hate Sansa. I think a lot of Sansa fans pre-s6 felt the same indifference toward Danielle, and that may be because in my perception these two characters simply attract different fans. IMO, what compels people to like Sansa (her resistance narrative, her kindness despite suffering, her femininity, etc) is rarely the same as what compels people to like Danielle (her sense of justice, her political navigation, her dragon and prophecy lore, etc). All this said, I’ve been in this fandom for five years now and in my experience everyone outside of the Sansa fandom either is neutral or hateful toward Sansa while the opposite can be said of Danielle. This has been exacerbated by the show’s writing for two main reasons. 1. Often the things that are meant to make Danielle morally ambiguous in the books (taking over Meereen, hating and trying to change Meereenese culture, using her handmaids in sketchy ways, being a white savior etc) are often erased or twisted to make her look good in the show. On the other hand, Sansa’s hostage arc in the books is meant to exemplify the toxicity and corruption of the Lannisters, how Westerosi society exploits women, and the strength in empathy and silent resistance. But her show character has been completely watered down from the very beginning because they so fundamentally misunderstood her arc that they decided to discard the “weak” Sansa and insert a new one halfway through. So a lot of the show fandom is infused with viewers who don’t have the full story. 2. The rise of J0nsa and J0nerys.

The thing that sucks is I feel like both the Sansa and Danielle fandoms were unexpectedly and involuntarily catapulted into this nonsensical feud ever since around season 6. I absolutely hate that we’ve come to this point in the fandom where liking one automatically means you dislike the other, and a few bad eggs constantly put down one or the other when both characters often have either nothing to do with each other or they could accomplish a lot more by working together. The true takeaway for me is that we should all just stop taking D&D’s shitty fanfic seriously because they really have no idea how to write women or how to interpret/translate the themes Martin put in both Sansa and Danielle’s stories. The way they and the fandoms have been turned against one another by two talentless men is more important and annoying to me than anything else in this entire situation. The drama is so contrived and ridiculous and it’s unfair to both the characters and their fans because it is making people act batshit for no reason.

#sansa stark #anti got

18 notes · View notes

inventedworld · 6 years ago

Text

MANIPULATION

When Janet Leigh turns to face her killer in Psycho, the screechy beat of Bernard Herrmann’s string orchestra makes you jump as much as her imminent doom. According to lore, Alfred Hitchcock initially thought of presenting the murder with nothing but natural sound so that the horror of the scene could play out with maximum force, as if it were real. But, of course, cinema is not real life, and to achieve his intended degree of shock and terror, he went with the strings.

Context determines if manipulation becomes malicious. With Herrmann’s Psycho strings the audience may be manipulated to feel amplified horror, but since audiences willingly bought tickets to see the movie, it’s fair to say that the manipulation feels ethically reasonable. People tend to feel manipulated in a sweet way if a date shows up at the door with flowers. That said, if a real estate agent implies coded racial aspects about a neighborhood, a prospective buyer (and everyone else) may rightfully perceive improper manipulation.

To develop creative work is to manipulate. The creative process has less to do with quantification than it does with intuition. To be creative is to feel something rather than calculate something, and feelings are always subject to change.

In 1947 when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) held hearings about potentially subversive elements in Hollywood, they focused their klieg lights on what they alleged were pro-Communist stories, messages, and motivations. In a decidedly heavy-handed style, they sought to prove that a group of creatives were not only disagreeable but treasonous. In their investigations they hurled accusations that the filmmakers, musicians, actors, and others in question were manipulative.

Well…yes. They were.

HUAC ultimately collapsed under its own short-sighted, cynical weight. What HUAC so fundamentally misunderstood was that the voices they sought to silence were exercising profoundly different muscles than that of pure reason, linear calculation, or logic. Creative people present creative works in ways designed to cause emotional responses. Creative people create new works of all sorts expressly because they bubble with ideas, and they’re looking to promote their ideas with others. The irony here, of course, is that HUAC members presented their own caustic jeremiads with equal manipulative vigor. Dressed up as objective, civic minded propriety, HUAC sought to sow fear in their constituents in order to find support for their agenda. The soundtrack of fear they played were actual scripts and songs and other artworks of those they hauled in for hearings.

When the shower curtain opened and Janet Leigh met her fateful demise, moviegoers jumped. Hitchcock wisely realized that real life was not what he was presenting on screen. That’s why he added the strings, and that’s what gave the scene its punch. Creative work is never real life, even as it refracts real life in prismatic forms, from comedy to terror, poetry to flower arranging. Creative work is always a reaction to real life. It manipulates in order to make its case. At its most effective, creative work gets reactions from audiences, who then take those new ideas and fold them into real life.

Manipulation is not bad in and of itself. The debate should, instead, focus on whether manipulations of various sorts are honest, whether they're honorable. Think about that.

Hitchcock meant to scare us, and made no false pretense about it. We can disagree with a message, even choose to steer clear or avoid or even protest that message, but we cannot be naive about the methods deployed to make those messages stick.

@michaelstarobin or facebook.com/1auglobalmedia

#HUAC #Psycho #Hitchcock #context

1 note · View note

aion-rsa · 4 years ago

Text

Superman Reboot: Ta-Nehisi Coates Can Get Character Back to His Essence

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Ta-Nehisi Coates is writing the next Superman movie. That good news has come alongside an avalanche of rumor and speculation. THR, for one, reports that unnamed sources say “the project is being set up as a Black Superman story.” Meanwhile Shadow and Act, a website centered on studying African diaspora in the arts and media, confirmed Coates’ involvement while also noting this is a full-fledged reboot with the search for a new Kal-El having yet to begin. Social media predictably has already exploded with predicable reactions.

However, debates about who should play Superman run the risk of obscuring the full potential of a scribe like Ta-Nehisi Coates tackling such a character on a global stage. As a writer famous for his opinion journalism, including his essays for The Atlantic and his National Book Award for Nonfiction for Between the World and Me (2015), Coates has irrefutably demonstrated a brilliant mind—the kind the Superman character has long yearned for on the big screen.

“To be invited into the DC Extended Universe by Warner Bros., DC Films, and Bad Robot is an honor,” Coates said in an exclusive statement to Shadow and Act. “I look forward to meaningfully adding to the legacy of America’s most iconic mythic hero.”

And adding meaningfully to Superman’s legacy is something that’s been sorely absent for the character, at least in the cinema, for more than 40 years. Not since Richard Donner and Tom Mankiewicz broke down what became the first two Christopher Reeve Superman movies has Kal-El’s on screen persona been successfully explored and built upon. Admittedly, this wasn’t due to a lack of trying.

The ill-fated effort to make a “Death of Superman” movie in the 1990s—including with an iteration of the character audiences would have never seen before—was so sordied it proved to be great fodder for a documentary film decades later, or at least a Kevin Smith spiel on college campuses.

In the two following decades, we saw as many Superman reboots. One was so suffocated by nostalgia for the Donner era that it failed to have anything significant to say about the character’s place or image in the 21st century—to the point where it was even bashful to acknowledge his role in American pop culture. The other more recent attempt, which starred Henry Cavill, tried to offer a more mythic interpretation of the character, even as it fundamentally misunderstood the Superman mythos it was adapting.

Regarding the Man of Steel approach, director Zack Snyder said, “I was trying to grow up [your] character,” but his film failed to depict a particularly mature understanding of Superman or storytelling in general. Rather the film accepted the fallacy that there is something inherently childish or simplistic about Superman’s idealism, and the best way to depict that was to go in the complete opposite direction without much in the way of nuance. Hence scenes of Superman snapping a villain’s neck with his bare hands. Ostensibly the choice was meant to be a teachable moment for Superman about the value of life. But it was so poorly set-up within its film that audiences never never knew from anything depicted on screen that this Superman was loath to kill, nor that he afterward felt some great epiphany or shame. Indeed, in Snyder’s next movie Superman returns on screen with a smirk before slaughtering someone else.

However, the consistent lack of foresight toward how to handle the character over the last three decades might be best represented by Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice—a movie where the character’s psychology and composure is indistinguishable with an equally bloodthirsty and misanthropic Batman. In the third act of that movie, WB executives got what they wanted for the last 20 years with a rushed account of the “Death of Superman” storyline, even if the execution of it rang as hollow and meaningless after two cynical films.

This is not meant to simply criticize previous approaches to the Superman character, but to highlight how much welcome potential there is in Coates’ stewardship of the cinematic Superman.

As one of the most beautiful literary voices to emerge to prominence in the last decade, Coates’ achievements in both nonfiction and fiction show a deep consideration of American culture, both for its history and its lore, from a perspective that has been largely marginalized and ignored. Yes, that includes Coates’ most famous writings about the eternal role of race in American life, which brought him to national prominence with the seminal essay “The Case for Reparations” in 2014. It’s also present in Between the World and Me, a bestselling meditation that Coates frames as a letter written to his son about the intractable realities that come with being Black in America.

What shouldn’t be overlooked though is Coates’ full-range of talents which are used to often explore the full context of the American experience. He’s already made a habit of examining the symbols of American ideals in contrast with the often disappointing realities of American life—as seen with Superman’s Marvel comic book counterpoint, Captain America.

As one of the stronger writers to take a stab at Steve Rogers on the page, Coates made it a mission to explore the dichotomy and wonder of a character as morally altruistic as Captain America. He didn’t shy away from “all that stuff” about the American way, but he examined it from a vantage far more observant than the cynicism that comes with blithely settling for just “growing up” an earnest character.

“Dubbed Captain America, Rogers becomes the personification of his country’s egalitarian ideals—an anatomical Horatio Alger who through sheer grit and the wonders of science rises to become a national hero,” Coates wrote in 2018 for The Atlantic, explaining why he was tackling a character far removed from his previous literary work.

He continued, “And Captain America, the embodiment of a kind of Lincolnesque optimism, poses a direct question for me: Why would anyone believe in The Dream? What is exciting here is not some didactic act of putting my words in Captain America’s head, but attempting to put Captain America’s words in my head. What is exciting is the possibility of exploration, of avoiding the repetition of a voice I’ve tired of.”

The prospect of such an introspective exploration of America’s other great comic book ideal, especially if he is seen through the prism of a Black American in the 21st century, is a fascinating one. And fascination is something the Superman character has lacked on the big screen for a long, long time. Bring on the change.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

The post Superman Reboot: Ta-Nehisi Coates Can Get Character Back to His Essence appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/2MzPimk

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

0 notes

son-of-alderaan · 8 years ago

Text

How the Jedi Ending Could Bring Balance to the Force: A ‘Star Wars’ Investigation

“It’s time for the Jedi to end.”

Those seven words, some of the first we’ve heard from the mouth of Luke Skywalker in the Sequel Trilogy era, set the internet ablaze last month when the trailer for Star Wars: The Last Jedi debuted at Star Wars Celebration Orlando. Whether you’re a die-hard fan who takes in every bit of Star Wars you can find or a casual fan of the movies, those words had a heavy sensation to them: what in the galaxy could Luke mean?

Of course, with that question comes worry and speculation. If the Jedi end, what does that mean for the galaxy? What does it mean for the Force? What does it mean for our heroes like Rey, who ostensibly wants to train as a Jedi? We’ve been taught by decades of Star Wars storytelling that without the Jedi there can be no balance to the Force. It’s literally in the opening dialogue of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, courtesy of Max von Sydow’s Lor San Tekka.

But let’s face it: The Last Jedi, or even the “end” of the Jedi, won’t be the end of Star Wars. With games, TV series, movies, books, and comics all in development for after the film’s release, it’s obviously not the end of the franchise, or even of the story of the Skywalker family and the Jedi as a whole. So what does it mean? Well, some of those other canon projects may be gearing us up for a new understanding of the Force, and a new type of Force user altogether.

Balance to the Force

The most important thing to look at first is the concept of balance in the Star Wars universe. This is the central theme to virtually all stories in the franchise, but it’s also the most malleable. After all, what does the idea of “bringing balance to the Force” really mean? Does that mean there should be an equal number of light and dark side users of the Force? Does it mean that because darkness is inherently “easier” (all you need is a little fear, hatred, anger, or even, perplexingly according to the Jedi – any kind of feelings, pretty much, to fall to it), that the Jedi need to reign supreme in order to balance all that negativity out?

What is the Force?

Dave Filoni, showrunner of Star Wars Rebels and Star Wars: The Clone Wars before it, has said that everything you need to know about the Force you can derive from the earliest mentions of it, in the original Star Wars trilogy. It is created by – and binds – all living things. The Jedi don’t manipulate the Force so much as they guide it, and it guides them. The “energy field” as Obi-Wan originally described it, brings to mind a fluid nature, and that’s appropriate. Remember, all we learned about the Force in the first Star Wars movie was Obi-Wan’s dialogue about it, and that dead people could talk to you through it. Oh, and it made you shoot better; that’s about it! There was no moving massive objects with your mind, shooting electricity from your fingertips, or anything like that at first. All of that is an extension of the original definition, though.

Once we understand the very basics of the Force we can talk about the dark side, and the light. The dark side is used for power, to get something you want. The light side is for protection and helping others. That’s a simplification, but it still makes the point.

The Prophecy of the Chosen One

One of the most important additions to Star Wars lore in the last two decades came out of the prequels. There, we learned that several Jedi, especially Qui-Gon Jinn, believe Anakin Skywalker is the Chosen One, a prophecized Force wielder who would bring balance to the Force. While Obi-Wan Kenobi said the Chosen One is meant “to destroy the Sith and bring balance to the Force,” Yoda warned it might have been misread. This is one of the most speculated-on lines in Star Wars history, because it seems to indicate that the balance in the prophecy could be misunderstood. At this point in the timeline, there were only two(ish) Sith running around, and a few hundred Jedi. If that sounds unbalanced to you, it’s because it is, if you’re looking at sheer numbers. Thus, by turning on the Jedi, “from a certain point of view,” Anakin did bring balance. Of course, decades later he would turn on his master, and on the ways of the Sith, thus arguably fulfilling the original reading of the prophecy… just well after anyone expected.

A New Balance

Of course the very concept of balance… the “grey” if you will (though that word is loaded), was explored extensively in the Legends universe. In recent years, it’s been seeping steadily into canon, as well. That started with The Clone Wars, where we met the “Force gods” of Mortis. These living representations of the light and dark sides of the Force were joined by their “Father,” who represented the middle, and could harness both sides equally. This was the first canon living representation of the balance.

Then, on Star Wars Rebels this past season, we met the Bendu, who self-describes as “the one in the middle” with reference to the light and dark, which he calls the Ashla and the Bogan. He winds up teaching Kanan Jarrus about the middle ground; while Kanan is still firmly a Jedi knight, he does gain new abilities (like his Force-sight) from his training with Bendu, and seems much more at peace after the time spent with the one in the middle.

Likewise, Kanan’s own apprentice, Ezra, dabbled with the dark side, but without truly going dark. He also, with Maul, joined together two repositories of information, Holocrons, a Sith one and a Jedi one, that allowed him to look into the cosmic Force itself. It was only through the meeting of the dark and the light that he could find the knowledge he sought, again indicated how important balance is.

Were the Jedi Wrong?

This all comes down to the question, then, of whether the Jedi were fundamentally wrong in their ways of understanding the Force, balance, and the chosen one, and many things seem to indicate that. One of the first novels published the new canon, Tarkin, revealed that the Jedi may have indeed been corrupted from within. The Jedi Temple on Coruscant was constructed over the remains of a Sith shrine, and the indication is that the Jedi were clouded by the dark side’s power there over the course of hundreds or thousands of years (incidentally, that same temple would become the Imperial Palace, the seat upon which the Emperor ruled the galaxy, again showing its importance to Force users, and striking a remarkable balance). If they were being corrupted, that could extend to all things, including prophecy. It could also be why there were so ironically fearful of all emotion, including love and what that attachment could bring to people (namely, a door to the dark side).

Rise of the Jedi

This is where we get into some speculation and less fact. We don’t know much at all about Luke Skywalker’s time spent between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens. We know that the Church of the Force (back to Lar San Tekka!), including the Guardians of the Whills and others, kept much of the Jedi teachings and information alive through oral history and in secret – but also that it would make those teachings even easier to be distorted. We know from the comic Shattered Empire that Luke was actively seeking other Jedi sites and Force artifacts to try to better learn his craft; as the sole living Jedi, he had no one that could teach him directly (though at least a couple of non-Jedi Force wielders, including Maz Kanata, were running around the galaxy at the time). We know that he took other Force wielders under his wing as Jedi-in-training, including Ben Solo. We know that Ben Solo was turned to the dark side by Supreme Leader Snoke, but thanks to the Visual Dictionary of the Force Awakens, we know that very interesting reason for that recruitment.

“The Supreme Leader believes Ren to be the ideal embodiment of the Force, a focal point of both light and dark side ability,” Pablo Hidalgo of the Lucasfilm story group wrote in the book.

This very well could be the most important single sentence in all of the non-film canon material thus far, as it indicates that Snoke and Kylo Ren have no intention of bringing back the Sith, and that Snoke wants Ben Solo/Kylo Ren because he embody both sides of the Force.

So, in saying “It’s time for the Jedi to end,” what if Luke has simply come to a conclusion similar to that of Snoke? The idea being, in order for there to be balance in the Force, truly, since it comes from, flows through, and binds all living things, they must have balance within themselves? If we follow this assumption, then Luke could simply mean that the teachings of the Jedi as they were need to end, and the Jedi need to be reborn in a new, more balanced fashion. That’s speculation, but with the introduction of the Church of the Force, the Guardians of the Whills, the Mortis gods, the Bendu, non-Jedi/Sith Force users like Ahsoka and Maz, and the merging of the Holocrons, it’s very clear that Star Wars is emphasizing balance more than ever before.

So is Luke’s line basically, “The Jedi are dead, long live the Jedi,” with a new understanding of what it is to be one? We’ll find out this December when Star Wars: The Last Jedi hits theaters. (x)

#star wars #it's time for the jedi to end #the darkside and the light #bringing balance to the force

4 notes · View notes