#Qui-Gon Jinn's lightsaber

[sw5w]

Maul on the Offensive

STAR WARS EPISODE I: The Phantom Menace 01:16:51

[corukant]

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

[or-4]

Star Wars

[twinterrors29]

it's an open secret that Obi-Wan Kenobi is Battlemaster Cin Drallig's illegitimate son, and that that's why Initiate Kenobi spends so much time training in the salles, trying to live up to that legacy (and relish that connection with his only known family member; besides, he really likes lightsaber training)

except somehow, Qui-Gon Jinn has missed this memo

when the man publicly lays into the child at the Initiate's Lightsaber exhibition for 'being too aggressive' and 'focusing on nothing of importance in favor of perfecting his lightsaber technique', Tahl is only the first of many Masters to privately pull him aside and try to smack some sense into him

and let's just say that he finds himself inexplicably at odds with the Battlemaster for the rest of his life

[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. 

[bigkatya]

the negotiator negotiating 👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️

art insta @bigkatya

[ladyatomic]

🌟 disaster lineage 🌟

[twilightofthe]

aight so satine got impaled by lightsaber through the upper chest and died immediately

sabine got impaled by lightsaber through the upper chest and was just fine lmao

i guess sabine just won the mando name war--

wait a fuck lightsaber thru the chest insta-killed qui gon

actually i think i know the true answer

lightsabers through the chest don't actually kill anyone, it's being in proximity to obi wan kenobi that does it

[pedroam-bang]

Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999)

[lightsabergirl]

the next thing I love about maul is that stupid moment in the middle of his first fight with obi wan.

obi wan cuts his saber in half before kicking him and it makes me laugh every. single. time

(I couldn't find a gif of it so I had to make one)

do you see that face? he just accepted the fact he was falling, just collapsed, still processing what happened to his saber and I love it

[sw5w]

Qui-Gon Attacks

STAR WARS EPISODE I: The Phantom Menace 00:05:49

[maeashryver]

Force swords

So, before lightsabers were made Sith and Jedi used force imbued swords. They were made with normal materials, forged into a sword and the whole thing is then imbued with the force, unlike kyber crystals which are imbued with the persons force signature (I’m 99% sure this is what happens to the crystal). This should be used more often, when Obi-Wan was stuck on Melida/Daan and Jinn took his lightsaber, it would be so cool if he made a force sword. They are as (or more? Unclear) durable as a lightsaber and the user can channel force through it. Meaning he could point the sword and have force lightning come out of the tip. Materials for ‘sabers can be very hard to find (custom parts and kyber) so this would be amazing! They are also very visually impressive, they glow. Some show the glow as a halo like a lightsabers while others show light shining through runes in the blade.

(If someone uses this idea in their fic plz let me know)

[eveningserenityyy]

Padawan Obi-wan: What the fuck?

Qui-gon: Language, Obi-wan.

Obi-wan: Sorry master.

Obi-wan, clearing his throat: WHOM the fuck?

[thatcutenerdygirl]

You know what I need Disney. I need a show, a movie, an animated shorts series on Obi Wan and Anakin as Force Ghosts. I NEED them to go back to Ashoka and make her happy. I need Anakin to talk to Qui Gon. But PLEASE Disney, if you do this, don't mess it up!

[charmwasjess]

If there’s a legit good reason why Qui-Gon chose to specialize in form IV, Ataru, the Hawkbat lightsaber form, aside from the simple, likely fact that he did it to troll his old Master Dooku (who outright calls the acrobatics of the form “ridiculous,”) I’d like to hear it. By which I mean I’ll write you a post about it.

Ataru is fast, aggressive, and inclined to treat the battlefield as a 3D space where the air is just as comfortable a place to be as on your own two feet. A direct response to Soresu, the “defense is my attack” form, Ataru flips that into “attack is my defense.” (We won’t talk about Makashi’s contribution to the conversation: “no defense whatsoever, but think fast, I just threw a dinner fork at you so hard it stuck in your metal arm!”) 

Of course, the most recognizable and classic application of Ataru is Yoda’s; we see him whizzing around people’s heads like a little green hummingbird in his AotC and RotS duels. Qui-Gon’s version looks nothing like that. If we weren’t told, I think it would be hard to guess that those characters are using the same form. In Duel of the Fates, Qui-Gon has to move down or over those infamous walkways repeatedly. He just jumps them: no flips, no aerial maneuvers, no bouncing off the walls. And this isn’t simply a practical choice for his age and build: Jocasta Nu is running up walls and leaping out of skyscrapers at easily aged 40 years older than Qui-Gon, and for all Dooku’s bitching over Ataru acrobatics, he does more flips to simply avoid walking down a few stairs than Qui-Gon, Master of the flip form, does in his entire time on screen. 

And yet, on some level, all of that makes perfect sense for Qui-Gon. Who better to completely subvert a form? This is a character who is contrary as fuck, full of wonderful contradiction, who blends lightsaber theory centered on attack and aggression with literal meditation. While the most notable scene, actually kneeling in the pose and everything, is in TPM, he does battle meditation repeatedly on a mental level in the Master and Apprentice and Padawan novels. (And it rightfully freaks out Obi-Wan.) Qui-Gon takes Ataru’s “your whole body is a weapon” and doesn’t apply that to somersaults, but rather, to moves like punching Darth Maul off a balcony as we see him do in Duel of the Fates. He fights in a way that throws himself bodily up against obstacles. You can see the same physicality of his relationship with his weapon in the scene where he is simply burning through the blast doors in TPM. We’ve seen Jedi cut through things on screen other times, but that scene is remarkable and memorable for Qui-Gon’s level of intensity. He is the battering ram. 

And we could loop back into lineage, couldn’t we? Qui-Gon stands in a line of Jedi with unconventional relationships to their lightsaber forms; their choices are formed in context of and in conversation with each other. Those backward, momentum-gaining swings from Duel of the Fates look very familiar, but who trained Qui-Gon? (And who notoriously had a problem with Ataru and might've pushed his student on some workarounds or encouraged him to cut out bits he didn't like, such as aerials?) And speaking of, is it a stretch to think that Dooku’s own casual backflips are less a considered choice and more an old habit, being himself trained by a Master who has only a theoretical relationship with gravity? 

All this to enjoy just another example of how personal the lightsaber forms can be to specific Jedi, and what wonderful fun it is to unpack the ways they use them differently because of their unique personalities and lineage.

[star-wars-forever]