#DUEL OF THE FATES

[shutupcrime]

Some of you are too afraid to admit this but we all know Star Wars works best when it goes full soap opera

[corukant]

duel of the fates beeeoeoooommm beooowwww pssssshhhhhhh beooommmbeeoowwwwwww lightsaber noises screaming ahhhhhhh the end ✍️✍️

[star-wars-forever]

[yukipri]

YOOOOOO DUEL OF THE FATES FIREWORKS @ Princeton University reunions, Star Wars fan alumni (me) are WINNING

(sound on, trust me, it's awesome)

[charmwasjess]

Strap in for the Soresu form III Obi-Wan lightsaber post. This is gonna be a sad one, girlies. We’re getting into Obi-Wan’s Fucking Trauma. 

Qui-Gon’s death changed literally everything about Obi-Wan’s life, right down to the lightsaber form. Still a Padawan himself, he had to watch as an extinct monster from his nightmares* utterly took apart the form he’d learned since he was a child, and then, to complete the destruction, slaughtered the teacher who’d taught him the form and raised him. The devastation of Qui-Gon’s actual death had to be the last in a cascading series of horrors that started with the gut-sinking realization that Qui-Gon was losing. And if all of that weren’t enough, Obi-Wan also loses his own lightsaber in the same duel, a psychological blow to his personhood which we don’t have to guess at the significance of. Obi-Wan tells us the cost of it himself in AotC: this weapon is your life. 

The Duel of the Fates on a sheer physical level is a devastating thing to consider. It’s a grueling, full out running battle, the likes of which we don’t see elsewhere in the saga. The beauty (and pounding musical score) of the fight distracts from the sheer brutality of it. Maul is physically attacking them at every turn; he manages to kick Qui-Gon hard enough to knock all 6’3 of him off his feet; he dumps Obi-Wan into a fall that seems to be several stories high. We don’t see Obi-Wan get back up off the floor with Qui-Gon’s body at the end of the duel, and I’d be surprised if he was physically able to even stand again so after the adrenaline faded and the soreness and exhaustion took over. He just been whirled in a lightsaber blender. 

I can’t imagine how hard it was for him to pick up a lightsaber again after the trauma of that battle - much less, a new, unfamiliar one, not the kyber crystal that had been his since he was a child. The new canon’s emphasis on the spiritual relationship between a Jedi and their crystal makes this detail even more excruciating. The Ataru form itself must have felt broken and unusable. How can you put your trust in a form once you watched it be broken so ruthlessly?

And this is where Obi-Wan is so endlessly beautiful as a character. He goes through this horrifying experience of violent unmaking, and instead of avoiding lightsabers as an understandable trauma response, or picking up an overwhelming power and dominance form like V, he remakes himself into a master of Soresu: a form of simple, complete defense. He doesn’t attempt to become a weapon of attack like Maul did to disintegrate Ataru; he makes himself invincible, untouchable, with a perfect defense. Soresu works the pieces that fell apart for the Jedi in the Duel of the Fates to an advantage. It is a form of ultimate endurance, of playing out your opponent and staying up in a fight until the attacker is exhausted or angry. It preserves and it lasts. It is philosophical. It is considered. It lacks the showy flash of Makashi or Ataru and returns to the basics, even working in some of that battlefield meditation that Qui-Gon so believed in. And in that simple economy, it’s gorgeous and effective. 

I have to wonder: is Soresu, on some level, a form of kinetic self-soothing for a person who faced an incredibly traumatic battle at a young age? Does Obi-Wan use it that way?

All of this is perfectly in keeping with the themes of the character. Obi-Wan’s story remains about life, about hope, about survival. The word he uses to describe the Jedi to Luke in the OT is important to me. “Jedi knights were the guardians of peace and justice.” Guardians. And what better lightsaber approach for a person who sees his role as one of protection than a form whose signature move is called “The Circle of Shelter?”

*Maul, of course, is a tragedy in his own right, but that’s a different post. 

[fiatluxillustration-portfolio]

Digital Sketchbook - Dual of the Fates (get it dual instead of duel because there's two)

Created with Procreate

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[schweizercomics]

Lightboxing lightsabers! Unless I'm at a convention, I usually do the pencils (underdrawing) for commissions digitally and then print them out.

My go-to inking pen has for many years been Faber-Castell's PITT pen (for pieces like these, size F - fine), but when it comes to doing colored lines like the many in this piece (lightsabers, sparks, dust/smoke), there's an obstacle: Faber-Castell doesn't make a variety of colors in size F.

They DO make a lot of colors in the brush size, so I've swapped out the brush tips for size F and, voila! I've got colored pens in the right size to use in pieces like this.

[coruscanti-travelguide]

So, how long do you think Darth Maul was standing behind that door waiting for Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon to arrive? 🤔

[antianakin]

It seems a little odd to me that people apparently want their lightsaber battles to be compared to the Duel of the Fates battle as a litmus test for how good it is. While I love that particular lightsaber battle, there are two reasons why I think it stands out: first, it involved a LOT of firsts (first time with three opponents, first time using wuxia style, first time at higher speeds more indicative of the prequels, first time with dual lightsaber, first time where one of the people involved wasn't human); second, it has a really good score behind it (and the music for this was demonstrably different than what we'd heard in the OT but the soundtrack to the Prequels followed in that same vein afterwards).

It was NEW, primarily. It was exciting because a lot of it was very different to ANYTHING people had seen before in a Star Wars battle scene and that made it exciting.

So if you want your lightsaber battle to somehow be BETTER than "Duel of the Fates" you have to not only find something new to add to a lightsaber fight that no one has seen before (which is pretty difficult to do these days), but it has to somehow be SO new that it's more exciting than all the new stuff Duel of the Fates had. And that just seems a little unreasonable and ridiculous, doesn't it? New is new, your new thing is not necessarily going to somehow be better than the last new thing just because it's new.

People remember Duel of the Fates because it was SO different and that made it exciting. And the scene is good, obviously, it's a well done fight sequence, the actors are all good at their jobs, but the fight scene that I most often hear people talk about specifically because of the impressive level of skill on the part of the fighters as well as the very intentionally emotional choreography is Battle of the Heroes.

There's nothing really in Battle of the Heroes we haven't seen before. It's a one on one fight scene, it's two characters we've already seen fight each other in a different movie (though obviously with different actors), they each only have the one normal lightsaber, there's not really any props either of them uses in the fight, and the style of fighting is pretty much exactly the same as in the other two Prequels and the lightsaber fights we've seen across them (including several fight scenes in this same film). It's LONG, but that's about as new as it really gets.

What people continue to discuss regarding the Battle of the Heroes sequence, though, is how impressive Hayden Christensen and Ewan McGregor were, how they weren't sped up with CGI at all and didn't use any stunt doubles for the entire fight because both of them were just THAT GOOD at the choreo (which likely was a combination of both natural talent and a lot of time given to training each of them). That level of skill allowed both actors to do the whole fight which meant they could act THROUGH the fight. Stunt actors are incredible and obviously do often work really hard to act as the characters during the fight scenes, but it feels different when the actor is genuinely good enough to do the fight and can bring their own acting skills to the scene. If the actors can actually do it and make it look good, it can really add an extra dimension to the fight that might not otherwise exist, and I do think that that shows in this particular fight scene

The other thing people talk about a lot with this fight is the intentional choreography and the way it was created with an emotional story in mind. Nic Gillard has talked about how it was supposed to show Obi-Wan constantly giving ground to try to give Anakin as much time as possible to calm down and come to his senses, and you can SEE THAT. You can see Obi-Wan giving ground, you can see him be on the defense almost the entire time. But Obi-Wan is conflicted, obviously, he doesn't WANT to kill Anakin, but Anakin isn't offering him a lot of choices and Obi-Wan knows his duty, so he does take the opportunities to strike at Anakin when they come to him. There's an emotional depth to Battle of the Heroes that quite simply isn't there in Duel of the Fates because they built it into Battle of the Heroes. Duel of the Fates is mostly just two guys doing their job until Qui-Gon dies and Obi-Wan gets angry about it, but that only lasts for a short period of time. Battle of the Heroes is emotional from the very beginning, all the way until its tragic ending.

There is no "beating" Duel of the Fates. It's impossible to "beat" Duel of the Fates in terms of impact on the audience because the whole reason it was impactful was because it was new. New things are probably going to be about the same level of exciting each time, and it's getting harder and harder to introduce that many genuinely new things into these fight scenes. But what you CAN do is really showcase impressive skills and choreography, and/or add in tons of extra emotional depth to a scene. Both things can and do make fight scenes memorable without needing to feel "new" or different to anything else. Don't be Duel of the Fates, you'll never be Duel of the Fates. Be Battle of the Heroes. I promise your viewers will thank you for it.

[starwarsfangirl]

(Credit instagram)

[brennacedria]

Duel of the Fates, but gifs

[velvet4510]

Yeah The Phantom Menace is technically 20th century but just by a year so it gets a pass.

[liquidorcard]

"Steven Universe is a show about forgiving fascists!"

-The girl who thinks the Sith aren't evil

(Headphone user warning.)

[buffshipper8490]

(Leia & Ben art @o0-snowdrop-0o | Rey/Ben art @hotside | used w/ permission)

Rating Mature

Chapter Summary

🔞 Smut Ahead! 🔞 Ben Solo reunites with his estranged family and Rey with her friends on Coruscant as the Resistance and the citizens celebrate their victory. A month later, Finn, Rose, Poe, Chewbacca, and the droids receive Medals of Honor at a public ceremony while Rey decides to reward Ben in an entirely different way...

Excerpt

Ben Solo stood at the window of a Senate office that had been repurposed into an apartment of sorts for Rey and him, his injuries fully healed from the previous month. While the apartment was far less spacious than his old royal chambers in the First Order Capitol, Ben didn't mind. He had Rey with him. Having Rey with him made the past month or so much more manageable. Even with his mother's unwavering support, The Resistance still distrusted him, even as he freely gave them access codes, base and factory locations, and signed orders to free thousands of the wrongfully imprisoned across the galaxy. He had avoided his own imprisonment or execution, though he was still ostracized. To go to a ceremony like the one he watched from afar would be a bad idea, even though he genuinely wanted to be there for his Uncle Chewie. To show his respect towards Rey's friends, even if they didn't reciprocate. He knew they only tolerated him because of Rey and his mother, but he did hope they could reach an understanding one day. He understood, he was once Supreme Leader of the First Order, after all. He had spent much of his reign trying to wipe the Resistance out and had personally tried to kill several of them. Forgiveness was going to take a long time. Forgiving himself was going to take even longer. Ben felt Rey's arms wrap around his waist, and she gave him a peck on the cheek. "You should be down there with them, too," he said, looking back at her. "They are your friends." "I didn't fight their battle. They deserve this moment without me taking their thunder," Rey reasoned, resting her head on his shoulder. "I've already congratulated them this morning." Ben conceded with a sigh and folded his arms as he looked away from her to stare down at the parade below. "By the way... I think you should be rewarded, too," Rey said, kissing his neck now. "I don't think we'd be able to enjoy continued victories against the First Order without your intel." Ben shook his head and chuckled mirthlessly. "I'm just righting my wrongs. I don't deserve a reward for that." Rey grinned and turned him around to face her. She placed her hands on his chest, prompting him to unfold his arms. "Oh, I think it'll be just as rewarding for me as it will be for you..." she said with a mischievous grin. "Oh?" Ben arched an eyebrow. " Oh ..."

New fanfic link! Likes ❤️ and Reblogs 🔁 are much appreciated!

[greatrunner]

Would love to hear more of your thoughts on the anti-black Finn name thing

Here you go :)

[fiatluxillustration-portfolio]

Digital Sketchbook - Darth Maul

Created with Procreate

𝙵𝚒𝚊𝚝 𝙻𝚞𝚡 𝙸𝚕𝚕𝚞𝚜𝚝𝚛𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗

| Visit InPrnt | Visit Etsy | Visit Digital Etsy | Visit Patreon | Visit the Portfolio |