#This post brought to you by remembering that The Green Knight exists

[rustchild]

desperately craving weird surrealist arthurania. Knights with no faces wandering through the mists. Seams between Christian and pre-Christian Britain gaping like open wounds. Beafts and visions. Maybe a monk. Maybe the monk is gay

[the-shinysnorlax]

The Green Lantern cycle: How DC uses and mischaracterizes their “forgotten” characters

As of me writing this, I just finished Green Lantern: First Flight, and it had me thinking: Just how many adaptations of different GL stories are there? (No, Justice League doesn’t count)

The answer? Not a lot. At least, not a lot of good ones.

Sure, you have First Flight, which is a pretty decent film. And you have the animated series, objectively considered one of the best adaptations of the GL comics to exist. And if you are a “hardcore” GL fan you might even remember Emerald Knights was a movie too.

But the animated series was canceled before it got any real potential, first flight got forgotten to time, and emerald knights is really just a bunch of shorts complied into a movie. And these were all released 10-15 years ago. What have we gotten since?

Well there’s that disaster that is the live action movie with that guy from Deadpool (And the equally as awful theme park ride that came with it which squandered the name “First Flight” for the GL franchise) and there’s Beware my power which pisses me off for reasons that I won’t talk about for this essay (Wasted potential of making a proper adaptation of Emerald Twilight)

And that’s about it really. DC has been hesitant to adapt any GL comics into movies/shows outside of the same old Hal origin rewritten for the millionth time and really just brings them out to put them as a JL member.

And that got me thinking. DC has done this before. Not just with Hal and his buddies either. The JSA, the aquafam, Arrowfam, young Justice and much more have been brought back only to be put back in the void and largely forgotten outside of their fanbase. Thus making me to dub this

The Green Lantern Cycle

It consists of these steps. I’ll be using its namesake as an example, notably Kyle Rayner (Because hes my favorite GLC member I’m sorry I have a bias)

1. A comic run or a hero gets a sudden resurgence

This could be more people reading the comics, or nostalgia catching up to the older audience and remembering how good it was to read the comic back then. More people are talking about it, and it gets popular again.

So hypothetically let’s say that Kyle’s original 90s run just. Suddenly gets popular again. More people are talking about it outside of his fans in their little circle, it blows up, more people read it, talk about it, all that.

It’s also during this part of the cycle DC starts to take notice and do minor things like, say, acknowledge him in a social media post, or put him in a comic issue in a major role, or even reprint his comic run again. This satisfies people, but it’s only a temporary thing. That’s where we move onto step 2

2. DC decides to make a movie/comic run of character

When I say movie, I mean their animated movies that take less time to produce, not a blockbuster theater movie.

So now that the character is mainstream (At least in comic fandom sense) DC announces they’ll do a comic run or in the very rare sense, a whole movie about them! Of course fans get excited because they’re getting a resurgence, and they’ll hype this up to no end.

DC being the bastards they are, don’t market this at all but the fans sure do. As the release date inches closer and more is being released, the more fans get excited. And then the big day comes and the comic/movie is out! And that leads us to step 3

3. The movie/comic is plagued with mischaracterization and bad writing.

Sometimes we can see the bad writing show as the first previews are out. Sometimes it’s not obvious until it’s out. But regardless, with DC being well. DC. It releases, it’s bad. The fans are disappointed.

The 2 main places we’ve seen this is with YJ2019 and Tim Drakes newest run. Both hyped up by fans only to crash and fall and ultimately getting cancelled.

It also happened to the injustice movie from 2021 as well.

Let’s go back to that Kyle example. Hypothetically, DC released a movie about Zero Hour or Kyle’s first few issues. Of course fans will be excited (Myself included) and then when it releases, it’s a hot mess.

Maybe they just completely disregard Emerald Twlight. Maybe they butcher Kyle’s origin hard. Maybe they mischaracterize him entirely. Regardless, the movie is bad.

But doesn’t sway fans that much. Sure, the hype has probably died down, but they’re still going to have loyal fans who can’t wait for the next time the character will appear.

But DC doesnt get the memo

4. DC assumes fans don’t care for the character anymore, and puts them back in the void

Instead of realizing they are in the wrong, DC instead thinks the fans just. Don’t care for the character. It wasn’t bad because DC fucked it up, it was bad because the fans just wearnt ready!

So what do they do? Well, DC puts them back in the void for multiple years and only brings them out for cameos and minor roles.

And rinse and repeat. Over and over and OVER again.

Of course, this green lantern cycle doesn’t happen to everyone. Kon-El is doing fairly well right now. Dick Grayson has gotten a massive resurgence (For better or worse). The Arrowfam is doing decent enough in the GA series.

But that’s very few and far between.

For the most part, any character that isn’t associated with the big 3 or was made in the 90s just keep falling into this cycle and rarely ever escape it.

And it sucks for the fans who just want more good content of the character. They just want to see the character break this cycle and quit being stuck in this purgatory till the end of DC itself.

[randomnameless]

Jury's forever out (did you know the devs said they had 10k years or lore for the Fodlan verse?) about what Rhea and Seteth were doing during the initial Nabatean vs Agarthan War - but given how they seem to have doubts about their existence or are even surprised by their power to shapeshift... I wonder if they even participated in it or were kept away from that war because they were "too young" or something.

Which leads me to another point you made in the previous post i forgot to reply, Rhea didn't build the golems used to safeguard the Holy Tomb or its mechanics - the Holy Tomb was here during the Sothis Era, so it could be inferred the golems were built by Sothis herself?

We will never know.

About the "losing contact" with the church people in Enbarr... well, the game flies over it because you cannot raise a brow at Supreme Leader's policies in the Fodlan verse, but I wonder if the faithful hid, were turned in demonic beasts, or just died.

This is what is annoying in SS, since it's the Byleth route but Billy can't say a thing, we have the tacky exposition "don't you remember you came up with this plan!" and the route feels... well, annoying.

Given how Edel was hanging out with Rhea's sword when you reunited with her in chapter 13, how Rhea hasn't been sighted in either Faerghus or Leicester, it comes as a surprise that no one actually made the link earlier : Rhea is obviously either dead, or somewhere in the Empire.

Enbarr is supposed to be the oldest (human?) city in Fodlan, it existed before Seiros! Apparently Seteth met his wife there and they got Flayn, and Rhea, while she was Seiros, built a giant canal. The game mentions those things as an afterthought, but when you realise it, it's as if, idk, 1000 years after Ephraim's death, Myrrh was held prisoner in Renais - it becomes even sadder, Nabateans used to live there, and now, the people in charge of the city wants them gone because their ears are pointy.

Too bad Dedue is a green unit thus cannot kill named/important characters, but his "infiltration" in Enbarr is actually referenced in 3 Nopes!

Pretty sure they modified Edel's armor lol, we joke about boobplates and all (the same FEH artist who made summer!Byleth and summer!Rhea gave them larger than source material breasts, so he had to do the same when he made Edel in her golden armor!), but given how the statue in the palace of her ancestor depicts him as a holy knight ! And the unparalled defense is shit - idk if I was unlucky or something, but OG Armor!Knight Dedue has more def than her when she is a playable unit.

In CF, Aymr - Edel's weapon - reveals its secrets, you cannot repair it using Umbral Steel, like other relics, but you have to use Agarthium to repair it. It's a made in Agartha relic copy.

I know I joke a lot about Edel's beef against Rhea'n'Sothis, tbh, after playing CF the "their ears are pointy they're not like us" argument felt like the strongest, but I'd be curious to hear what you think about it when you'll tackle CF. Her line against Seteth (and Flayn!) is, imo, explicit enough, they cannot rule over the "people" because they are not humans, they are nabateans.

Ah yes, that cutscene. She lets her feelings for her teacher take over her cold and emperor persona one last time or... tries to sway Byleth to her side until the end ? Or the devs really wanted to hammer the "feel sad for her" to sell more goodies/alts in fe heroes?

I don't see Hubert as going behind her back, but Hubert wanting to spite Thales even in death, to the point of telling us where to find him to kill him.

The terminology sucks, because Hubert is the one who came up with the "Slithers" name, but then both Rhea and Seteth knows them by this name?

You're right on Catherine, she enrolled as a student, nearly died after Leeroy Jenkins'ing on a monster, Rhea saved her, then she graduated, she was accused of having participated in the regicide, Rhea welcomed her in Garreg Mach, then she arrested and brought back Christophe to the Monastery because he tried to kill Rhea, Christophe died and the Church hid the reason for his execution as "he was involved in the regicide" instead of revealing "he was involved in a plot to kill the Archbishop".

Quickly dumping out the Enbarr notes, since I'm sure the Shambhala section will have a ton of infodumping to note.

I think the only difference from VW is that we run some weird plan where a lot of our troops sneak into Enbarr ahead of the rest of the army moving in. Because uuuuh I guess we're weaker than the united army with Leicester? Everything else is pretty much exactly the same, including Dedue's part and the Edelgard death cinematic.

tbh I think it actually ends up feeling even weaker here? I thought it would fit better, since this is the "you like Edelgard but can't agree with her" route, but since she appears so little and her writing is so bizarre and confused... It actually feels kinda worse, since her dialogue feels incredibly inconsistent.

I thought I'd have some more appreciation for Edelgard after this route, but uh. I don't. Hm.

Anyway, onto more interesting points, I am starting to get the impression that Rhea and Seteth don't actually know much about the Agarthans. I think they might not actually know that the mysterious "those who slither in the dark" are from Agartha (and that's why they have beef), and it's basically explicit that they don't know who helped Nemesis make the Sword.

Which isn't an issue, but it's hard to remember that they know so little in practice.

Liveblogging:

A priestess mentions that they lost contact with all church personnel in Enbarr when the war started.

A soldier mentions that some of our troops have already departed for Enbarr dressed as merchants and traveling performers. We have an entire plan to have small squads sneak toward the capital and link up with the main army. The Empire apparently thinks we have abandoned our plans to invade (after Merceus).

Sylvain didn't think he's live this long (in the war)... bby. He wants to strike down the empire for Dimtri...

Apparently, we think Rhea is in Enbarr because of a soldier from Merceus. I guess Judith only told us that the Empire captured her. I already forgor.

The pre-battle blurb also mentions the troops moving in secret and our surprise attack on Enbarr. I don't recall this from VW. We were already outnumbered there, so I guess here with just the Church and Judith's troops, we're even worse off.

Based on the map close up during the pre-battle exposition, it looks like Enbarr was built on the delta where a river forks into two, with both ranches leading into the sea on the west.

Oh, Dedue is here! AC lied to me :( (/jk)

The music for his entrance is uh... imo it's a bit too heroic, given that he's here because Dimitri ended up like that.

He came after Gronder field, so... two months ago, since there was Merceus in between but not anything else. He gives us info on the inside of the castle (layout, presumably) and tells us that Rhea is at the palace.

Edelgard's axe, Aymr, is described as "a Crest Stone weapon designed to Edelgard's specifications, allowing her to use Raging Storm."

Edelgard's class, Emperor, is "With unparalleled defense, Edelgard appears as an unstoppable force in the legendary armor of the Adrestian Emperor." Note that her armor is a boobplate. So like... did they modify it for her, or....

Edelgard is so confusing. Even to the last, she goes on about how determined she is to "free this world" from the "vile grasp" of the "false goddess and her minion." But like... Edelgard has NO basis for beef with Sothis or Rhea. It's so puzzling and empty.

Dialogue with Seteth: He tells Edelgard to return Rhea and release her grip on Fodlan. Edelgard says that if we strike her down, "they" will return. So she can't permit what we desire (????? what? like, you'd assume she means the Agarthans, but everything else points to her talking about the Nabateans). She also knows that Seteth is a child of the goddess and thinks he can't be permitted power over the people. This is SO wild.

Anyway, to get this dialogue, I let Seteth get the last hit. The Edelgard death cutscene makes equally little sense on this route, btw. Edelgard was going "fuck you guys, I didn't think you'd make it this far, but I don't care and I'm never giving up" in the battle, but now she's all "you must strike me down to move forward, I wanted to walk with you..." GIRL WHAT

Hubert going behind Edelgard's back to write us a letter where he's basically entrusting the future and Fodlan to us is like....... l m a o This was whatever on VW, but on a route where we are the Church and those lizards Edelgard hates so much... god.

Anyway, Seteth apparently didn't really believe the Agarthans were behind all this, or else even around at all. He's very shocked and unhappy about Hubert's letter.

OK, unlike VW, where Claude is there for the info dumps and Rhea holds at least some stuff back, here she has no reason to hide anything. And she says she does not know where or how Nemesis got the Sword of the Creator. They only guessed that someone must have given him this power and tried to investigate it, but they never found the answer. They only NOW surmise that it was the Agarthans. ...hang on, do they even know that "those who slither in the dark" are from Agartha....

Felix and Sylvain are together at the monastery, cute. Felix even calls Dimitri by name when talking about defeating the Empire and the Agarthans to let him rest in peace.

Catherine backstory: She was born in House Charon in Faerghus > was called Thunderstrike Cassandra > attempted Officers Academy, was saved by Rhea as a student > was implicated in "a plot to kill the king" (seems to be Duscur) > fled to the monastery since she felt it was safe > Rhea hired her > and had her execute Christophe when he tried to assassinate Rhea, though the charges given publicly were regarding Duscur.

Is that right?

Anyway, next time: Shambhala

[esmeraldablazingsky]

shout out to secondary colors for being such good visual indicators of corruption and contagion in fictional settings

[davidmann95]

Thoughts (if any) on DC's April 2021 solicitations?

Let’s take ‘em in order! I should be able to muster up a comment on just about everything one way or another.

Green Lantern #1: Oh this is gonna be bad. Heard only the worst about Thorne’s Future State: Green Lantern, and I assume Jo Mullein’s DCU debut will be wasted here to either function as some kind of ridiculous ‘popularity contest’ with Teen Lantern for who gets the bigger push, or as a way to put TL over with a few “good work kid, you got a future” comments. Also, and granted I don’t know how Morrison will end or this will begin, is the New Guardians angle being immediately dropped?

Robin #1: Dope suit, art, and premise, but it’s Williamson so I don’t care.

Batman: The Dark Knight #1: I’ll read this and I expect to like it, but between this being Kubert’s first big Batman project since Master Race, the ‘old but not quite retirement age yet’ angle, and the title, I’m concerned the shock ending here is that it’s actually a stealth DKR prequel.

The Next Batman: Second Son #1: So they really are committing here, though weird that this kinda makes Ridley’s Future State book basically a longform teaser for this. And I’ll get it as it comes out since it turns out this won’t be in that John Ridley’s Batman collection after all - sorry Dustin Nguyen, I love your stuff but I won’t buy an entire trade of material I otherwise already own just for one new story by you.

The Batman & Scooby Doo Mysteries #1: I got that whole great-looking Scooby Doo Team-Up run by Fisch for free on Comixology, I should read that sometime and see if this’ll be worth getting too as well, because it sounds like a hoot.

Challenge of the Super Sons #1: Glad people who want it are getting it, I do not care.

RWBY/Justice League #1: WILL BE GETTING A POST ALL ITS OWN

Action Comics #1030: His powers waning definitely won’t help the standard pre-run fuming by a lot of Superman fandom, but it’s an interesting pairing with PKJ apparently doing mainly cosmic Superman adventures so I’m curious where he’ll go with it. That it’s particularly cited as being tied to Death Metal might validate my suspicion that the new ‘everyone remembers their entire mainstream publishing histories’ thing will play into Johnson’s description of Clark really feeling his age at the start of the run. And Janin on covers even before he gets in on the book proper! And that Midnighter description!

Superman #30: This sounds like where Johnson’s gonna start with that worldbuilding he touted, and I’m curious; definitely reads in this instance like him shoving Clark and Jon into some swords-and-sorcery-esque territory he’s familiar with.

American Vampire 1976 #7: Not reading, don’t care.

Batman #107: I assume ‘the events at Arkham Asylum’ are the ‘A-Day’ ominously brought up in Future State solicits. Tynion Batman, Jimenez as the regular artist now, whatever the Unsanity Collective is, all entirely my shit. More importantly than any of that though, GHOSTMAKER BACKUPS. And drawn by Ricardo Lopez Ortiz, artist on Steve Orlando’s excellent The Pull! Dope!

Batman: Black & White #5: Any other issue and ‘Jamal Campbell doing a life story of Nightwing’ would probably be the highlight, but in case you somehow hadn’t heard Gillen/McKelvie are making their DC debut on a Batman vs. Riddler story here, absolutely wild.

Batman: Urban Legends #2: Even more excited for this now that I’m onboard for the Grifter and Outsiders stuff given how much those features pleasantly surprised me in Future State.

Batman/Superman #17: Injecting it isn’t enough anymore, I need to be on some kind of constant IV drip with this book. I was wondering whether it’d take the premise to further generational riffs or follow a history of mass-media Supermen and Batmen, but instead it’s veering off in a direction I never could have guessed and I couldn’t be more excited.

Batman vs. Ra’s Al Ghul #6: NOTHING CAN STOP THE ADAMSVERSE. NONE MAY DARE TRY.

Batman/Catwoman #5: Wondering how this Harley involvement plays in - I don’t imagine it’s quite what it seems given how King’s written her before. And love that Joker by Mann on the cover, major Clown at Midnight vibes.

Catwoman #30: No reason to assume this run won’t continue to rule.

Crime Syndicate #2: Dammit, I don’t think this book is going to be good, but I’m kinda tempted.

Detective Comics #1035: Wouldn’t be psyched, but Dark Detective was another pleasant surprise so I’ll give this a chance.

The Dreaming: Waking Hours #9: Again, not reading.

Far Sector #11: Sucks a little knowing we’ll never see that little ‘Young Animal’ label in the corner again after this wraps. At least it’s going out on its highest note.

The Flash #769: In a vacuum this would sound dope but I have less than no faith in this, and goddamn that’s a terrible cover.

Harley Quinn #2: I’m sure it’ll be fine, no interest.

The Joker #2: I wanna believe Tynion will be able to make this work, he keeps talking like he has more freedom on this than he has some other books, but everything about this reads like the price he has to pay for relative post-Joker War freedom on Batman.

Justice League #60: It’s Bendis/Marquez on Justice League, lots of people will complain but I’ll mostly dig it. More interested in Ram V briefly getting to write the main crew in the JLD backup.

Man-Bat #3: I’d ask why this exists - and as a matter of fact I still do - but checking out some of DC’s digital-first output recently I see Dave Wielgosz has something on the ball, so maybe he’ll be able to make this work? Perhaps I’ll check it out in trade someday if worth-of-mouth is on its side.

Nightwing #79: I maintain, this is gonna be huge. And clever move to make for how to justify Nightwing keeping up his standard way of business after Bruce loses most of his money.

Rorschach #7: A comic I will purchase and let’s continue leaving it at that.

Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? #109: DC’s highest-numbered comic (that hasn’t gone through an interim renumbering), astonishing. Not getting it myself, but respect.

Sensational Wonder Woman #2: Can’t say this sounds like my thing.

Suicide Squad #2: I’ve been swayed into checking out the Future State debut, but that’d have to really blow me away for me to follow into the main book.

Superman: Red & Blue #2: Sadly if unsurprisingly DC’s clearly not stacking this with AAA attention-grabbing names in the same way as this latest version of Batman: Black & White, but there do seem to be some interesting names from outside the usual big two roster here. And the main and Bolland cover may disappoint but holy cow that David Choe variant.

The Swamp Thing #2: I have no doubt it’ll be incredible but time and again I learn I simply don’t have it in me to care about Swamp Thing regardless of the objective quality of the effort put into him.

Sweet Tooth: The Return #6: Another one I’m not interested in.

Titans Academy #2: Oh lord so this is where they stuck Billy Batson.

Truth & Justice #3: I continue to have no idea what if anything the unifying idea of this anthology is supposed to be.

Wonder Woman #771: Wonder Woman as troubleshooter for mythological mishaps isn’t a permanently sustainable or desirable status quo but I’m down for it for as long as it lasts if it’s any good (though that Immortal Wonder Woman preview...concerned me, in spite of Jen Bartel’s jaw-dropping art).

So that’s 19-23 out of 37 I’ll be getting - if DC’s standard for success with Infinite Frontier is the proportion of their line people will be checking out, I guess it’s winning with me.

[fatefulfaerie]

New (Part 3/3)

Part 1: https://fatefulfaerie.tumblr.com/post/621364335842820096/new-part-13

Part 2: https://fatefulfaerie.tumblr.com/post/621446432569917440/new-part-23

“And safe travels!” Zelda exclaimed as she waved to the last of the guests, them crossing the bridge and disappearing into the approaching night.

She closed the door, it latching closed as she let out a sigh.

“That wasn’t too bad,” she remarked. “Chaos, sure. But we expected that.”

The only response from Link was the sounds the dishes made beneath the running water, the scrubbing, the tiny clatter when a clean plate would be put to the side.

“I think it went well,” she continued as she headed upstairs. “And now we have a new picture to put on the wall. I’ll have to ask Purah how she printed it all that time ago.”

Zelda sat down to her diary on the table, a habit she was happy to start after a hundred years of incoherent and manic thoughts. Not to mention seventeen years before that of nearly failing at the practice.

It was freeing, the first time she opened an empty diary to the first page. Before her was a future not weighed down by her past. She could look at things like a blank page, everyday something new that proved she was moving forward. For the past couple weeks since Calamity Ganon was expelled from Hyrule, she had written everyday at least something to resolve the day.

Yet as she placed her quill down she didn’t know what words to write, the black ink smudging, splotching on the page.

She dropped the quill back into the black bottle of ink with a heavy sigh.

Her gaze went to Link, as it always does, studying him as he cleaned with her head falling to rest on her left hand.

He finished the last plate, placing it upon the others and bracing his hands on the edge of the counter with a bowed head.

“I think we need to talk,” Link said without moving.

Zelda took a deep breath before she shook her head up and down. Remembering Link couldn’t see her she replied,

“Okay.”

His hands came off the counter and he turned around, heading up the stairs without meeting her glaze. Yet, it wasn’t difficult. Zelda’s head was downcast, on that black splotch as if it were a spider she was relentlessly watching, keeping an eye on.

Link decided to plop on his bed, staring at the ceiling with one leg bent and one straight.

“Do you recall what I said?” Link started. “On the field. When you asked if I remembered you?”

Zelda nodded.

“You said yes,” she replied, turning her head.

Link nodded.

“You apologized for your honesty earlier,” he continued. “But I told you I remembered you, maybe not everything, but I remember enough. My memory is fragile but that doesn’t mean that your honesty now should be changed by that. If I’ve done something wrong--”

“Link…”

“If I’ve done something wrong,” he insisted. “I want you to be honest about it. Going forward, I...I want you to be honest. And it’s not just you either. These past couple weeks have been courteous at best, but...I didn’t realize it was because of me.”

Zelda looked from Link back to the black dot on the page, interlocking her fingers.

“I spent a hundred years waiting for something definitive,” Zelda said. “It’s only because of my impatience that I snapped today. You should take your time to think about things...process things. I’ve had a hundred years and I didn’t even lose my memory. Please take the time you need.”

Zelda picked back the quill back up and started to write of her day, of greeting the descendants and relatives of the champions and sharing a meal with them.

Link sat up and studied her as she wrote in her diary.

He pulled the Sheikah Slate from its latch on his belt, the screen chiming before opening to a gallery of pictures.

He clicked on the first one, the normal one, the perfect one, the one that would likely be hung and kept and preserved a hundred years from today. Hopefully with less tragic death, but with just as much emotional weight.

Link swiped to the next picture.

Zelda was smiling bigger, his arm around her, but not much had changed. He swiped to the next one, stopping, holding the grips of the slate with both hands.

He didn’t even remember this one being taken.

Sidon, Yunobo, Riju, and Teba were all looking at the pair of Hylians with a smile as the couple stared deeply into each others’ eyes. It really was a beautiful picture, how well the love between them was expressed in just one look, how the sunset gleamed and made them glow.

Link swiped to the next and exhaled a sigh. Their lips were connected, but their bent, unrehearsed arms showed their surprise. It looked so forced, like at any moment one would pull away from the other. It looked as if they were completely different people from the picture before.

With a couple taps, Link had the prompt before him to delete it. After all, if this picture existed a hundred years ago, he would have been decommissioned and jailed for treason, and the assault of a royal if the King wanted to avoid the ruin of Zelda’s reputation. If not, it would become a scandal that would harm her father's trust in her even more. Even now she still had eyes on her, although she had tried to avoid it. If she decided to return as Princess or even rise as Queen, she shouldn’t let some minor infatuation get in the way.

But Link thought of Kass’ words as his finger hovered over the button.

Love. The princess’ love for her fallen knight awakened her power. That was what caused all of it in the first place. That one word and Link realized that falling in love with a memory wasn’t foolish because he had fallen in love with those green eyes before, that smile. He loved her back a hundred years ago and, Princess or not, he couldn’t deny that he felt the same now.

He rescued her from Calamity Ganon and he acted like he didn’t know, to protect her, to not embarrass her, to not force anything upon her. Somewhere along the line, somewhere within these two weeks he must have forgotten that she needed him too.

And so he hurt her by doing so.

With a certain resolve, he activated the camera rune, setting it so that it faced him instead of what was behind the Slate.

He grabbed it by the handle and approached Zelda. She turned her head at the sound of footsteps just seconds before Link planted his lips on hers.

SNAP

Her lips were parted and her eyes opened wide as Link withdrew. He offered her the Slate.

“A do over,” he said with a smile. “As requested.”

Zelda took the Slate into her hands. She stared at the picture and Link sat on the near bedpost waiting for her next words.

“Do you always do as you’re requested?” She asked quietly, still looking at the picture.

“I don’t exactly have any evidence to the contrary,” Link said.

Her gaze lingered on the picture for just another moment longer before she placed it on the corner of her desk without a word or a care. She went back to her diary and began to write again.

Link considered whether he’d done something wrong as the silence fell. He looked down to his hands as he thought upon it, scratching one thumb with the other.

“But for instance,” he continued, with a courage he hoped would work in his favor. “If I was requested to jump off a cliff for no reason other than certain death, I wouldn’t do that.”

“So you only do things if they aren’t absolutely abhorrent?” Zelda asked.

“Yeah...I guess…” He replied before panic settled within him and his eyes widened. “Wait...no, no...I didn’t mean…kissing you, it…”

Link exhaled a sigh, straightening the words in his head like the offerings of apples in a line of mysterious statues.

“I do what people request of me because I like helping people,” he explained, “finding them lizards or mushrooms or whatever they can’t get themselves. But with you it’s different...it’s always been different. I saved you because I needed to see you happy and free and...I kissed you because I wanted to. It was more than not abhorrent...it was a request I was actually happy to do. In fact...I would only ever kiss you.”

From Link’s point of view, Zelda showed no change.

But she had put down her quill, her cheeks had reddened and her heart had soared and sank and burned and froze all at the same time.

“I am sorry,” Link said, thinking he needed to speak further. “So sorry that I didn’t bring this up earlier. I knew you loved me, and I’ve been spending so much time asking myself whether or not I love you like I did then or whether or not you still love me now...that I’ve been unclear with you. And to be honest I don’t know if what I feel now is what I felt then. I don’t know if it’s more or less or the same or how it was different...but I do love you.”

Still no response.

“Goddesses, Zelda,” Link implored in her silence. “Please say something. If I’ve misread things or messed it all up we can go back to how it was this morning. If that is what makes you happy, I...I’ll be your knight attendant, I’ll protect you and defend you and nothing more. I’ll be by your side until you no longer want me to be.”

Zelda stood up and faced him quickly. She stared until she started shaking her head no.

“No,” she said, her voice breaking. “No.”

She stepped forward and took his hands. Her grip on them tightened as she bowed her head.

“I want you with me,” she said. “I need you...to stay...always.”

Link nodded in understanding.

“Okay,” he said with a slight chuckle that portended a smile. “Okay.”

He brought his hand to her chin to tilt her head back up, their eyes meeting before their lips did for their third kiss of the day. Each time it had gotten deeper, at first a quick peck, than something longer and much more intentional. Now it was something they delved into, Zelda’s fantasies about making out with her knight attendant coming to fruition as she felt his hand move to cup her cheek.

“So,” she prompted after they withdrew.

“So,” he repeated, his eyes dancing in hers.

“Does this mean we’re...together?”

Link nodded.

“I think so.”

“Do Hylians still call it courting?” Zelda asked with a tip of her head.

“I think so,” Link said, his face contorting in a way that broadcasted the fact that he was thinking, searching the ceiling for answers. “Although I think some of them have coined the term ‘dating’, where marriage isn’t definite and they just kind of spend time together. And then there's this thing where they forego marriage all together and just...hook up.”

“Y-you…” Zelda stammered. Her face was beet red. “You mean people…”

Link nodded.

“Yep,” he said. “Someone actually asked me once and I told them no thanks.”

Zelda shrugged.

“I guess we’re both kind of old-fashioned for these times,” she said.

“Seems like it.”

“Would it be strange to say that we’re courting?”

“No,” Link said in reply, smiling. “Just new.”

[if-the-crown-fits-translate-it]

Discord pt 90

[Date: 17/03, 02.33 PM GMT - 17/03, 03.53 PM GMT]

[This conversation was going on in #arg, partly simultaneously to another in #general. The second is referenced later and was posted separately before this one.]  

[Direct continuation of pt 89]

[After Void pointed out the gdoc change, Fetch added another message:]

[Added was: “Please don’t tell them please don’t tell them please just pretend you never saw this just please.”]

Void: “nvm may be just my bad internet fucking things up ignore me”

Jack the Observer: “Oh. I see it.

Little sunflower seeds in green and yellow :)”

[Maxwell: “Where do you see that?”]

Jack the Observer: “Ask fetch, I think. He’s the one who edits the blog”

Jack the Observer: “But it’s there, if you look.”

Maxwell: “Fetch....”

fetch: “It isn't though?? I'm looking at the doc right now and there's nothing about sunflower seeds”

Jack the Observer: “I can send pictures, fetch.

If you would prefer?”

Maxwell: “i cant find anything”

fetch: “jack. after yesterday do you really wanna push me.”

Jack the Observer: “Yeah, i kind of do, actually

I could

I feel like it’s important and relevant information”

Void: “fetch knows best about what is there just ignore what i said,,,,”

fetch: “yeah. let's just ignore it.”

Maxwell: “but you all said...seeds”

donti (e): “... fetch please, this is serious.. it could endanger everyone here”

Jack the Observer: “Sunflower seeds :) leaves in yellow and green. You think if i won’t let Max hide it, I’ll let you, Fetch?”

fetch: “jack. drop it. right fucking now with that stupid fucking smile.”

Jack the Observer: “You are, in fact, just as important as Max is.

Unfortunately.

And it’s imperative that we keep all of you safe.”

Maxwell: “that...is one of the nicest things ive heard you say to us....”

fetch: “i know the doc better than anyone. i know what's there and whats not. if I say there's nothing there then there's nothing there.”

Jack the Observer: “You put it there, Fetch.”

fetch: “there's nothing there.”

Jack the Observer: “ Uh huh. /s”

jaynoblade: “he's right. there's nothing there. i just looked”

fetch: “im not ignoring anything there's nothing there.”

Jack the Observer: “Jay, what the fuck”

jaynoblade: “genuinely. i just looked. nothing”

donti (e): “hey hey hHEYyyyy chill”

Jack the Observer: “Is it gone — wait”

fetch: “check for yourself, jack”

[Context: Fetch deleted his edits about the seeds.]

Jack the Observer: “Oh, no i still have it”

fetch: “as i said. there's nothing there.”

Jack the Observer: “I still have it. And i have more pictures if you want to see them.”

donti (e): “... seeds?”

Maxwell: “thats just an image of a previous thing?”

fetch: “how do i know you aren't just editing shit”

[donti (e): “... seeds?”]

Jack the Observer: “I’m trying to have Fetch tell you first.”

kateza: “Hi good morning what’s going on?”

Mothbo: “Jack saw something no one else did”

[fetch: “how do i know you aren't just editing shit”]

Jack the Observer: “Fetch. You know I don’t lie.”

[Mothbo: “Jack saw something no one else did”]

Jack the Observer: “Haha :)”

fetch: “but you sure as hell spout a lot of bullshit.

now for the last time. There's nothing. there. Fucking drop it.

please.”

Jack the Observer: “And now instead of knight you sound like Max

Crazy”

Maxwell: “what?”

Jack the Observer: ““Oh no, i don’t want to tell them, please i just want to suffer by myself and not accept any help even though I clearly need it, no everyone else is busy, everyone else is stressed, they can’t know please don’t tell them”

That’s what you sound like

And that’s what Fetch sounds like too”

fetch: “you better watch your fuckin mouth, pal.”

Mothbo: “Jack, that's not going to help them all. I know you're hurt cos of Syd but don't take it out on them.”

Maxwell: “....”

[Mothbo: “Jack, that's not going to help them all. I know you're hurt cos of Syd but don't take it out on them.”]

Jack the Observer: “I’m not angry, I’m amused. And I’ll admit, slightly frustrated. What is up with these people and their self esteem issues.”

fetch: “what's up with you and your attachment to someone that doesn't exist anymore?”

Maxwell: “.....fuck off”

Jack the Observer: “If you don’t tell them within the hour ill see you in #img”

[fetch: “what's up with you and your attachment to someone that doesn't exist anymore?”]

Jack the Observer: “Oh, so you don’t exist when Knight is out? Shut the fuck up”

Maxwell: “i....”

Jack the Observer: “I’m glad you’re not all acting so goody goody and nice talking me anymore. This is refreshing.”

[People tell Jack and Fetch to stop arguing with each other. That just solved nothing and there’s no time to waste]

fetch: “i don't have the energy to fight anymore. there's nothing in the doc, whatever you have is edited bullshit, end of story.”

Jack the Observer: “Okay, we’re just going to ignore someone purposefully endangering their own health then. Sounds good to me /s”

[kateza: “I just woke up, I’m assuming something supposedly happened with the doc, I’m assuming the edit history was checked can we please stop fighting I don’t like this”]

Jack the Observer: “I can see something important. I’m being forced to keep imperative information to myself. You can see why I might take issue with this.”

fetch: “i thought you loved keeping information to yourself. that's what an observer does right. he just takes in information and does nothing with it. he doesn't get involved.”

Jack the Observer: “This is different.”

fetch: “of course it is.

just drop it.”

donti (e): “ah.”

Jack the Observer: “Yeah it fucking is different, Fetch. We fucking need you on this team. We’re meant to just ignore when you’re hurting? We’re meant to ignore when you’re endangering yourself?”

fetch: “i said. drop it.”

Jack the Observer: “Holy fucking shit not everything is about Syd”

Jack the Observer: “Maybe this is just about you”

fetch: “well maybe I don't want to be paid attention to. i'm not a fucking zoo exhibit. just leave me the fuck alone.”

Jack the Observer: “I don’t know how many times? I have to say this? But if I saw you as nothing more than a “zoo exhibit” i literally wouldn’t care about this at all”

Void: “fetch, people will learn one way or another. please at least take the chance to tell them yourself?”

Jack the Observer: “Clock is ticking”

fetch: “there's nothing to tell. im fucking fine.”

Jack the Observer: “There you go, sounding like Max again”

kateza: “wait, ok, so now fetch supposedly has the buds? Is that’s what’s going on? No one is catchinng me up everyone’s just arguing”

Jack the Observer: ““I’m fine I’m fine” you’re clearly not.”

[kateza: “wait, ok, so now fetch supposedly has the buds? Is that’s what’s going on? No one is catchinng me up everyone’s just arguing”]

Jack the Observer: “I can see something. Fetch isn’t letting me tell anyone.”

fetch: “well MAYBE I DONT WANT YOUR FUCKING HELP.”

donti (e): “HEEEEY HEY

jacks doing what he can”

fetch: “YOU EVER THINK ABOUT THAT? YOU CANT FUCKING HELP ME.”

Jack the Observer: “...”

fetch: “QUIT TRYING.”

Jack the Observer: “...”

Jack the Observer: “...

...

that was a bit too loud for me, actually. Ill be in #img in fifty minutes.”

Jack the Observer: “good luck.”

fetch: “fine. i need a nap anyway.”

Maxwell: “......”

[People talk about how important it is to share information, especially with how the situation currently is, and that they’d have to work together if they were ever going to resolve anything about this problem. They then note that if this in-fighting continues, more and more people might be dragged into Crown’s court. But then…]

jaynoblade: “okay, this is somewhat off topic, but.... do we even really know who crown is? because we thought he was ranboo in enderwalk, but then in that one ask he implied that he isn’t”

Maxwell: “hes something else then....”

Maxwell: “uh small problem”

donti (e): “prince read the backlog.”

[This refers to the conversation that had been simultaneously going on in #general2.]

A random Spark: “I know...which means Prince probably now knows the deal with the three court members and why they're gone”

kateza: “which means we'll be having another mind wipe probably :/”

LLyr: “D:”

Maxwell: “OH NO OH NO OH NO”

Maxwell: “i...”

donti (e): “if we had explained it fae would be wiped and then we'd be in trouble.”

Maxwell: “can we tell faem? fae already know....”

Maxwell: “he only brought up me and fetch....should we tell him about marcus?”

donti (e): “... maybe?”

A random Spark: “It's a good idea to.”

LLyr: “if the dam has already broken, i dont see a reason to keep it hidden. maybe ask marcus what he thinks about it?”

Maxwell: “i wanna say his name...”

donti (e): “you already namedropped him,

go for it

he might as well get the facts.”

kateza: “i don't like this

i don't like where this is going”

Maxwell: “jack what did you put in images”

Jack the Observer: “What i promised i would.”

donti (e): “fetches entry.”

Maxwell: “hes..oh god”

Maxwell: “i messed up i messed up i messed up--”

kateza: “no no no

you tried to help max. you did what you thought was right and even if it didn't have the outcome you want you tried to do what was right and that's good of you”

Maxwell: “i made it worse no no no no”

Jack the Observer: “You calm down too.

Panicking isn’t going to help prince.

It’s fine. Let faem remember.”

[roguish-gallery]

Did you ever make that joker tier list, I always like seeing what people think of all the different ones. Though if they put Romero last I can no longer respect them.

LMAO I DID! I think I’ve made it kind of obvious in this blog but I... don’t... particularly... care... for... the joker.... unless he’s, y’know, fun to watch. Cause he’s a clown, and clowns are supposed to be entertaining. But since you politely brought it up, and and because I have a deep respect for mutual Romero-lovers, I guess this would be a good time to explain my rankings and just discuss my general thoughts on each clown:

General Thoughts:

For the most part, I don’t really care for the Joker. This is hardly an uncommon opinion here on tumblr, but I definitely fall on the side of the fandom that feels that he gets too much attention from DC. I get WHY they use him so often for films and comics, and I don’t have anything against *most* folks who consider them their favorite Batman villain, but at this point he’s used more for shock value and as a crutch instead of anything interesting. Like, instead of giving attention to the other Rogues, writers (at least for the comics) will try and make up some bullshit story that they can shoehorn the Joker into, ‘cause it sells. It’s tiring, and I feel like the character has lost his meaning; I can only read so many stories about the Joker, I don’t fucking know, wearing a suit made from dead babies and Jason Todd’s flayed corpse before I get sick of it.

I’m at the point where I’ll like any Joker who’s just fun to watch. I genuinely respect those who prefer darker interpretations of the character, but that isn’t me; I vastly prefer the lighthearted takes on him, because... at this point... writers who use the “cleaner” version of him tend to be more creative, since they actually have to write a Joker story that doesn’t rely on gore/torture porn.

TIER ONE:

Joker Baby: Self explanatory. Joker Baby is thematic, thoughtful, and intense. Everytime I watch this video, I shiver with fear and pleasure; something primal in me awakens whenever Joker Baby runs his fingers through his spray-on dyed hair, and ends up smearing green paint on his forehead- it represents the inner turmoil, the chaos, that resides within the disturbed body that is Joker Baby. Nothing can ever hope to top the artistic and cultural impact Joker Baby has had on society.

TIER TWO:

Batman Ninja: I genuinely believe that Batman Ninja is one of the most fun, organic, and creative things to come out from the Batman side of DC comics in like... hmmm... a decade, maybe (I could talk for hours about how much I love this movie but that’s something for a future post). This Joker is easily, and unironically my favorite interpretation of the character, period. I love his energy, his design, everything. This is the most fun I’ve ever had watching a Joker on-screen, and for that I’ve gotta give the film credit where it is due.

Batman ‘66: I looooove Caesar Romero. Batman ‘66 in general is one of my favorite pieces of Batman media, and I absolutely adore this Joker. The show is pure, genuine fun, and it’s nice to turn my brain off and watch a show where the entire cast was allowed to goof around. This Joker is just a cute, goofy little clown-man who likes to commit crimes, go surfing, turn Gotham’s water reserve into gelatin, and have wild orgies with Penguin, Catwoman, and the Riddler. I massively appreciate the hustle. I love his little mustache and his facial expressions. I’d give him a chaste little kiss on the cheek if I could.

The Batman: EXTREMELY CONTROVERSIAL TAKE BUT. I think TB!Joker is better than what people will give him credit for. I can only imagine how stressful it must have been to be the first Batman cartoon to follow BTAS and the writers for this show knew they were gonna be fucked no matter what they did with the Joker, so they just decided to try something completely different with him. Personally, I appreciate the new direction- he has a fun, unhinged energy. I’ve placed him higher than BTAS/BTNA!Joker simply because The Batman was the show that got me into the Rogues in the first place, and I’m just a bit closer to this Joker because of it. Also his vampire form was cool as FUCK in Batman Vs. Dracula and the scene where he gets drenched in blood at a blood bank is fucking awesome.

Batman the Animated Series/The New Adventures: Everyone loves BTAS’s Joker, and I’m no exception. Mark Hamill is fucking great, and the writers clearly knew the character well enough to create a version of him that can be fun and threatening. As an aside, I unironically like his redesign in BTNA- I remember Hamill mentioning somewhere that he thought it was neat that this Joker looked more like a shark (I’ll see if I can find a source on that... I think he said it in an interview with Kevin Smith?) and I kinda agree with him. the redesigns in the final season are hit or miss, but I didn’t get why so many people bitched about the Joker’s new look.

Batman Unlimited: Hear me out... Hear me out... Clown... funny... and cute... He wears a little crown and gives Solomon Grundy a little smooch on the cheek and it is as delightful as it sounds. Yes the Batman Unlimited films literally only exist to sell toys but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy them on some ironic level.

TIER THREE:

Lego Batman: He’s a gay icon. He has the range. Enough said.

White Knight: This is just a genuinely good, original take on the character, and the art in White Knight is absolutely gorgeous. 

Arkham: My friends and I joke that this Joker is basically a more unhinged version of BTAS! Joker and... yeah. I’m glad Hamill and Paul Dini got to fuck around with the character more, but I never really dwelled on the Joker parts of the games like I might have for other characters. I definitely liked him the most in Arkham Asylum, as he was more fun to watch. Arkham City was fiiiiine, but I think I replayed the game so much that I kinda got fatigued with everything about it. Genuinely hated his part in Origins, and I was pissed that he stole the attention from Black Mask and Bane (who’s the best fucking part of Origins IMO). I’ll admit that I... Haven’t... played... Knight yet (I have it on PC but my laptop is too wimpy to run it) but like... He’s dead at that point, so I’d assume he isn’t the main point of that game anyway. I love Mark Hamill and the fact I can personally beat the shit out of this Joker, so he’s ranked up pretty high for those reasons.

TIER FOUR:

Batman ‘89: TBH this Joker should be a rank higher, but I’m too lazy to hop onto PicsArt to change it. NIcholson was an excellent choice, and I apprecaite how this Joker makes use of the playful and unhinged aspects of the character. Also, his outfits are cute, and I love the museum scene.

Brave and the Bold: Technically this Joker SHOULD be ranked higher since he’s literally based on the more lighthearted comics in the 60′s but... ehhh... I haven’t really watched BATB so I don’t have any strong opinions on the show and how it handles the character. he’s ranked this high through beause I appreciate what they were going for.

Golden Age: The quality of comics are always subjective, based on the creative team behind them. Some I’ll like more, others less so, It’s kind of hard to rank the pre-52 comic version of the Joker because of this.

TIER FIVE:

Killing Joke: Read it, didn’t care for it. I acknowledge how massive the impact this comic had on... everything, but just because I recognize how important this graphic novel is, doesn’t mean I have to like it.

The Dark Knight: Ledger did an excellent job with the role, but uhh... I’m kind of sick of the alt-right chuds who are out there sucking this Joker’s dick. The fanbase definitely ruined the character for me.

TIER SIX:

99′: Eh

Endgame: No

Suicide Squad: NO

Death of the Family: Hate him. Despise him. Lame stupid dumb little edgy bitch.

Gotham (Jeremiah): I don’t particulary care for Gotham in general, but the only reason I ranked this Joker over Jerome is beause I thought it was kinda funny to see that they made him a little rat-man, and I liked watching all the fujoshi on here cry and complain that they can’t ship this version of the joker with the pre-pubescent Bruce Wayne in the show bc he’s too ugly.

Gotham (Jerome): stop shippping this freak (who is fucking eighteen years old) with a literal twelve year old child. what the FUCK is wrong with yall.

UNRANKED:

The Joker (2019): I don’t plan on watching this film, nor will I ever. I know this is ironic, coming from someone who runs a Rogue blog, but stuff that focuses primarily on a character’s deteriorating mental health makes me reaaaaallllllyyyyy anxious (it’s kind of a phobia) and considering that I don’t particularly the Joker, I have no reason to watch something I know will only give my dumb ADHD-ass intrusive throughts.

[levaer]

pretentious post about quincy culture and folklore, because kubo designed them with very strong national attributes which were barely addressed - if at all - and i’m here to do them justice.  also because some ppl have wack takes on the quincy.

i want to preface this by reminding yall that, while kubo used an european imagery for the wandenreich, it’s reasonable to assume that quincies are from all over the world, and therefore we can’t really speak of one homogeneous quincy culture. yhwach’s army is itself very ethnically diverse; it’s safe to assume every quincy carries their own cultural baggage with differences tied to their origins.  however, the goal of this post is to highlight not the differences, but rather what shows the quincy all belong to a single national entity based on a common set of values, traditions and folklore.

the culture of blood  — starting with blood seems somewhat fitting to me, since the quincy arc is called the blood war. blood is the red string that ties all quincies together:  the blood of their king, and through him, the blood of god. first of all, all quincy have blut  –  latent or not, the ability allows them an offensive or defensive use of their blood vessels. then, drinking yhwach’s blood is the culmination of the schrift-bestowal ceremony. as in the bible, the blood of the sacrifices marks moses’ covenant with god, and in mass you drink the blood of christ, blood marks the covenant of the quincy people as well.  one so strong it cannot be watered: ichigo, gemischt quincy by heritage, cannot resist the ancestral urge that is inherent in his blood when facing yhwach  – going as far as to turn against whatever he stands for, slashing the soul king, unconsciously activating blut too. blood is always thicker, isn’t it? and maybe that’s why quincy are adamantly attached to the concept of ‘blood purity’. while outdated it may be, i think it should be regarded as the expression of a cultural tendency at self-preservation of their kind as yhwach’s heirs and the soul king’s descendants. a tendency at preserving the holy covenant that exists within their blood.

the many-pointed star  —  throughout the last arc, we see that yhwach has several emblems of his own (the wendehorn, the three-pointed star resembling of a Y) but the most famous quincy symbol is the pentagram inscribed in a small circle.  the word pentacle or pentagram originally meant 'any symbol that protects against evil spirits' (very fitting for the quincy) and it exists in almost all the cultures. in a christian context, which seems to be the background for many european quincies, the pentagram symbolizes the star of bethlehem (christ’s place of birth, it gives me strong yhwach vibes), the five wounds of christ, and the five virtues of knighthood:  generosity, courtesy, chastity, chivalry and piety (”sir gawain and the green knight”, line 663, late 14th century). the quincy, especially the sternritters, aside from having ‘star’ in their name and the heavy religious themes, also retain a strong knight imagery. my point is, i’m sure quincy symbols vary across the globe and across the centuries, but the pentagram stays, as if it was some sign of an ancestral fear and the will to fight it.

the honor of the quincy  —  i stated in a post how i believe the concept of ‘quincy pride’ to be a relatively new one, which the generations following the genocide came up with in order to cope with the collective trauma and unite, in spite of it. so, i can’t say it’s effectively a rooted cultural element – but i can say that it will be one. the sons and grandsons and great-grandsons of the victims of the genocide will remember, the survivor of the blood war will remember. quincy pride will continue to exist, it will grow wings and travel, because as i said, yhwach’s army was ethnically diverse and so, i think, were those involved in the massacre.

the emperor’s song and other stories  —  all human groups feel the urge to tell themselves. when a group is persecuted, oppressed and systematically brought on the brink of extinction, that urge is amplified to the point it becomes a way to carry on, as individuals and as a collective. in canon, we are introduced to the kaiser gesang, in all things a legend narrated by the quincy over the span of centuries, supposedly written and represented artistically and passed down from generation to generation. not to be too insistent but yall, the presence of legends and myths is constitutional of an organic community. if the quincy have legends such as the kaiser gesang, it’s not far-fatched to believe they were not just people scattered on earth to annoy shinigami; more importantly, if the quincy, no matter their geographic origin, share common legends – imo that confirms a sense of national identity, despite maybe not belonging to the state yhwach was forming. it’s also safe to assume the kaiser gesang was not an isolated case.

[haljathefangirlcat]

MOR mozalieri angst and galadred jb 👀

OH MY GOD ARE YOU TELLING ME YOU’RE INTO MOR TOO SDFGHJKLSDFGHJKLK

... ahem. These are both really short because I jotted them down as a spur of the moment thing  and I have absolutely no idea when or if I’ll actually make something out of them. So I’m just gonna post everything I wrote for them since it counts as “a little snippet” anyway, lol.

The first one is angsty af and entirely the fault of that part of L'Assasymphonie where Salieri is playing with the knife while ranting about his impostor syndrome and his inferiority complex. Uh, and Le Bien Qui Fait Mal, too, but that goes without saying. If it ever went anywhere, it would probably include very pained love/professional admiration confessions, a idiots in love/mutual pining “wait, no, I’m pining for you but you wouldn’t even look at me!” “are you kidding me, I’m the one pining but I thought you hated me!” moment, and PLENTY of hurt/comfort. I have absolutely no idea about anything else, though, because I don’t even know where or when even the scene I came up with is set... which would be a pretty important thing to know, from a practical standpoint, tbh.

TW FOR SELF-HARM AND VIOLENT IMAGERY

He’d only ever thought of what it was like to love like that. To feel the bright-bladed knife plunge and twist and dig inside his chest, tenderly cut through quivering flesh and sinew, saw his ribcage open to open up his heart to the burning beauty and white-hot light streaming in from above. To seek that pain and hide away from that pleasure, and curse the man who was the cause of both while cursing himself for letting him hold such power over him, for loving him and for hating him, for always failing to live up to him, to be like him.

He’d never spared one thought to consider what it might be like to be loved like that. To be made aware that your very existence was a spring of endless suffering for one who claimed to feel an ever-growing affection for you, to be made into an obsession in the black of night and an ivory idol bathed in golden sunrises, to become an inescapable curse. To have that much power, and not rejoice in it or even want it. To not be cruel enough to stomach it.

Mozart didn’t need to mock him with his brash laugh or hurl cold words at him. It was the softness in his voice that made guilt well up in his gut like pouring venom into a bowl until it overflowed; it was the sadness in his gaze that cooled his heart until he shivered. It was his own shame at himself, washing over him once again in new, sudden, crashing waves for new, sudden, piercing reasons, that brought him down on his knees, brought his head in his hands.

And Mozart, he came down to him. He lowered himself and crouched on the floor to reach him. Put his arms around his shoulders for a moment, then drew back and took Salieri’s wrists in his hands, holding them gently, gingerly. Scared, or disgusted, or perhaps just careful not to stain himself with his blood. It was starting to cool. It felt sticky, dirty.

«Come with me,» Mozart said, and drew Salieri’s hands away from his face. Some distant part of Salieri’s mind felt he should not allow that so easily, but the rest of him just felt tired, so he did. How strange that even though he was the one shaking, his breath ragged and hitching, it should be Mozart to cry. He wanted to laugh at the sight, but found he couldn’t. He could only let himself be dragged up to his feet, and then into a chair when he started feeling lightheaded.

He even obediently raised his hand and stayed put as Mozart ran to fetch warm water, soap, and clean cloth.

The second one is, once again, inspired by one of your fics. ;) Remember when you wrote that artist!Jaime/tattoo artist!Brienne fic where they bonded over Arthurian characters and I was like, “someone should introduce both of them to the concept of Galahad/Mordred because they’d love it so much for their own different reasons?” Ideally, this should be the fic where they actually get introduced to it... if it ever went somewhere.

The basic plot would be: “Jaime was overjoyed when he found out he could pour his old love for all things Arthurian AND his passion for drawing into fandom. His first fanart were all very dramatic, very romantic Mists of Avalon -inspired Arthur/Morgana pieces because he identified with that due to his ‘fated’ relationship with C., but as that started to go sour, he branched out into edgy, purposefully badwrong Arthur/Morgause stuff. Eventually, he found out about Galahad/Mordred and got really into the whole ‘doomed man on the path to making all the wrong choices finds redemption through connecting with another misfit with a high moral drive and noble nature who may have his own issues but believes there’s something good in him for some reason’ aspect of it. That’s when Brienne, budding fanwriter mostly into gen stuff due to romance bringing back bad memories, found his art and unexpectedly got hooked to the whole ‘noble-hearted and justice-loving misfit can’t really connect with anyone on a deeper level until he meets snarky, sad not-so-doomed man who actually sees HIM beyond both the brave knight thing and the ‘will never fit in anyway’ thing’ aspect. Now, they regularly chat through comments and tags and the occasional message. But things get more complicated when Jaime, who actually lost a hand in an incident years ago and had to relearn to draw after that while suffering the ableism of the usual suspects, finds the courage to post selfies on his blog both with and without his prosthetic hand to show the world and himself that the hardships he had to overcome don’t mean he’s less of a person or less of an artist or less in any way. That’s when Brienne goes from finding him interesting and funny and actually pretty charming to finding him HOT. Which scares her a whole lot due to her past experiences. But that’s okay because they’ll never see each other irl anyway, right? Unless they find out they actually live in the same city and Jaime asks her to meet to work on a collaboration they’ve been thinking of for a while but never really got to work on until now...”

And here’s what I currently have:

But then Mordred is staring at him again with those too-green eyes of his, except that this time there’s no mockery or coldness in them, and Galahad’s been warned again and again not to get too close to him and he’s been told over and over that he can’t trust him, but now he thinks that maybe, maybe he really does understand –

 Brienne stares at her screen. She actually described Mordred’s eyes as gray. Didn’t she? Usually, she picks dark gray, or dark brown, or dark. And yet, in this one story, they’re suddenly green.

Okay, time to take a break from revising. She gets up from her chair, rolls back her shoulders, and goes to grab a snack and a glass of water. She tries not to wonder what’s gotten into her – but she doesn’t really need to anyway, because she has a feeling she already knows.

Not that there’s anything bad about it. In a way, it only makes sense. He’s the artist who got her into the ship in the first place, and they’ve had a few pleasant conversations in the notes to his posts and, eventually, in the comments to her fics. So, it’s not that big of a deal if she associates him with these characters. And… well, recently he’s started posting selfies on his tumblr. And fine, she might have some sort of pathetic little celebrity crush – is that even the right term? Is he a Tumblr celebrity? – on him. Truth to be told, it’s not even as pathetic as the crushes she’s had when she was still in school, because at least he’s never insulted her or made fun of her looks, and she’s reasonably sure he wouldn’t even if he ever had the chance to. Which he won’t get, but anyway…

Anyway.

Apparently, the lines might blur when she’s distracted. Big deal.

[akitokihojo]

Enchanted - Interlude

Before last weekend, this little part didn’t exist. I had a craving for more inukag softness and figured the creation of this would also be a good way to say thank you to those who’ve followed and read and responded positively to this story up until now. I really don’t have the proper words to express how happy and grateful I am to all of you, so I attempted to communicate that through this short bit!

Part five will be posted later today!

----------

She hadn't even noticed him, completely absorbed in what she was doing - or she just couldn't hear his footsteps approaching while she kneeled so close to the stream. He took advantage of her unawareness, treading over twigs and dried leaves carefully until he stood just a few inches behind her. Crouching carefully, Inuyasha readied his hands, making a deep noise he knew would startle her as he quickly and tightly grasped the sides of her arms. Kagome screeched, a shiver running over her entire body as she lost her balance and almost toppled forward into the water, his hold on her preventing the fall.

He laughed, bringing her back as she looked over her shoulder, her panicked expression shifting to offense as she wriggled from his hands. He laughed even harder, jumping to his feet and back as she turned to push him away.

“You’re such a jerk!” She shouted, flicking the remnants of the water on her fingers towards him! “You scared the crap out of me!”

“Just what I was going for!”

“Shouldn’t you be at home or something? Aren’t you still grounded?” Kagome mocked, standing up and whipping her hands to the side in an attempt to air dry them quickly.

“As a matter of fact, no.” Inuyasha feigned a grimace, stepping forward to hold her arm so that there was no risk of her stumbling into the stream. “I’ve been off the hook for almost a week. I’ve just had some things to take care of. What are you doing out here?”

“Kaede wanted a specific herb, so I came out to find it.” She pointed to a little bucket a few feet off to the side, a small, green plant poking out from the soil its roots were snuggly blanketed in. When the prince’s attention was turned, she wiped her hands on the front of his dark blue cloak, drying them as thoroughly as possibly with the smuggest smirk she could conjure. “I was washing my hands when you came up. How’d you know where I was?”

Inuyasha looked at her with baffled amusement, chuckling but never stopping her. He tapped the tip of his nose with a finger, silently telling her he’d caught her scent before lowering his hand to brush some loose dirt from her hip. She was wearing a long, white dress, black stitching trimming the edges of the scoop neck and sleeves. A black string laced just below her breasts and down the center of her abdomen tied the cloth snug against her waist, and her wavy, dark hair contrasted beautifully with it all. It was bold to wear such a light color while uprooting a plant, but she’d managed to get out of it with minimal stains, and the few that had caught weren’t deep or eye-catching in the least. Not if anyone was paying attention to what was important. With the dense clouds setting in overhead, the forest lifeless and dull, and the world being filtered in the dreary colors of the winter season, Kagome walking through the woodlands in a long and flowing dress of white really helped solidify his original idea that she was actually a nymph. He could practically see the tiara of vine and baby’s breath adorning her head.

There was a cleared throat from behind Inuyasha, clearly intended to interrupt their moment, and Kagome glanced over, noticing two guards watching them. Slightly uncomfortable, like she might be doing something wrong, she withdrew her hands, taking a step back as Inuyasha lolled his head in their direction. It was the same two people that had been there on the first day she met the prince. The man was giving a knowing smile, his head tilted and indigo eyes alight with humor while the woman beside him gave a sympathetic grin, as if to apologize for her partner. She was in the same uniform as he, her coat and pants a little more fitting for her petite body, but still looking flexible enough for her to take action if need be.

“You remember my escorts.” Inuyasha groaned, holding a hand out in a presenting manner.

“How could I forget? Sango and dirty mouth, right?”

The female knight immediately snorted, hiding the laugh behind her palm while Inuyasha didn’t even bother to bear the same courtesy.

“I didn’t - I didn’t even do anything to deserve it this time.” Miroku muttered, bemused.

“You always deserve it.” The prince sneered.

“Wow. So much fun. So glad we came.” 

“Alright, alright.” Inuyasha waved him off, turning back to Kagome. “So, it took a good day and a half, but we tracked down the man.”

Kagome watched his ember eyes travel from hers to the healing mark on her cheek. She’d had a fun time coming up with a detailed lie on how she’d tripped over her own feet and face-planted into something when Kaede asked about it. But she wasn’t a very good liar and the herbalist didn’t even need her wit to catch onto the impracticality of it all, so Kagome just insisted a lot could happen in the dark and pretended from then on that she was too embarrassed to talk about it.

��His name’s Bankotsu, and he’s been taken care of.” He said, grazing his thumb over the fading scratches.

“Yes,” Miroku stepped forward, a genuine grin on his lips. “Thank you for reporting him to the guards when you did. We couldn’t have found him without the scent on the cloak you gave us.”

Kagome resisted the curious furrow of her brow, glancing at Inuyasha who merely stared at his aide. Without a queue from him, she could only think to play along; the prince wasn’t supposed to be out that night, so she didn’t want to be the one to blow his cover - especially after he’d saved her.

“Uh - sure. No problem. It was the right thing to do.”

“I’m kidding. I know you’re lying and I know everything that happened that night.” Miroku plainly stated.

“What? Why’d you set me up!?” She asked incredulously, flashing a glare toward a grimacing Inuyasha.

“Because he owes me one and you called me a dirty mouth.”

“He got Koga to act as if you reported the assault to him, who then reported it to the council, who then - you know, it’s a long chain that had to completely jump over me which Miroku was responsible for.” The prince explained. “But he’s got his payment now, and he’ll be shutting up.”

Sango nudged her partner to make sure he heeded Inuyasha’s word, then made a vague gesture to the prince with a slight twist of her expression.

“And,” He drawled disappointedly. “I have to get going. We were passing through on the way to run an errand.”

“Oh, okay.” Kagome gave a tiny nod, smiling softly. 

It didn’t feel right to leave with just that. After the other night, their feelings, learning so much about one another, touching, walking away with a simple goodbye seemed beneath them now. He could physically feel the eyes of his aides watching him, though, and it quickly created an awkward tension as he fumbled over his thoughts on what he could possibly do to say hey, nothings changed and I’m still in love with you but my guards are watching like vultures and I’m not quite sure what’s appropriate right now because I’ve never really done this before and apparently I’m not too good at it. He wanted to kiss her - even a little peck would do - but felt increasingly uncomfortable as the two continued to stare. Clumsily, Inuyasha cleared his throat and briskly kissed the top of Kagome’s head, to which she gave a surprised and breathy squeak. 

“I’ll - uh - see you -“

“Oh, come on! You can do better than that, Romeo.” Miroku taunted.

He felt his own face ignite in a wave of heat, his expression dropping pleadingly. At his side, Kagome turned, understandably hiding her own humiliation from the people he used to call his friends.

“Could you give us two minutes, guys?”

“Just two? What are you gonna get done in two?”

“OH-kay, we’ll be going!” Sango pinched the back of Miroku’s arm, exasperatedly dragging the idiot around the curve in the trail where they couldn’t be seen anymore. 

Inuyasha hid his aggravation behind his palm, massaging one of his temples with his thumb until he knew they were gone and some of the awkwardness dwindled. Turning to Kagome, he noticed the deep pink of her cheeks, her brown eyes staring off at a bush behind them while sucking on her bottom lip.

“I’m sorry - I hate him - I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay.” She uncomfortably laughed, bowing her head shyly. “I guess we’ve gotta get used to that, right?”

“No, because I’m killing him tonight.”

Kagome laughed again, this time the return of her stability bringing back the melodic ring in her voice. His eyes were glued to her smile, softening whatever edge he’d previously felt, and in his peripherals he noticed her hand slowly, waveringly inching toward his own. Inuyasha stayed perfectly still, allowing her to move at her own pace until the tips of her cold fingers curled around his, and when she was there, he helped to firmly entwine them together. As she glanced up, biting the side of her bottom lip, brown eyes captivating him, he decided to take full advantage of their momentary privacy.

“Come on.” He whispered, pulling her a little ways away toward a large tree to conceal them.

“Where are we going?”

“Shh.”

“Inuyasha.” She giggled faintly. He guided her around the opposite side of the trunk, never letting go of her hand as he leaned his back against the bark and brought her closer. 

Kagome happily stepped inward, her smile widening as the prince, her prince, tenderly swiped some hair behind her ear, the pads of his fingers following the curve of her hair and tickling over her collarbone.

“Hi.” He sighed.

“Hi.”

Inuyasha closed the gap that remained, grazing his lips over the plush of hers, feeling her press onto her toes to seal them together. The soft touch quickly heated, their seconds together being spent wisely. He released her hand as she gave a slight suck to his bottom lip, snaking his arms around her back to hold her closer, feel the way her body arched into him, kiss her deeper. They’d only shared a moment like this once and yet he already felt himself growing selfish and addicted. The prince felt her hands climbing up his chest, the motion tedious and deliberate, and if he was fooling himself into thinking she had the same thoughts of codependency as he, that was just fine by him. Once her fingers met his neck, Inuyasha inadvertently dragged in a sharp inhale from the shock.

“Your hands are freezing.” He murmured into her mouth.

“Warm them for me.” Kagome giggled, her fingers curving around the back of his neck, threading into the silver hair at the nape.

If Inuyasha could spend the rest of his life kissing her, tasting her, rubbing noses, hearing her sighs, breathing her in, nothing more - nothing less, he’d easily consider his years well spent. It was like they matched each other perfectly, synchronized, and the way she molded against him was so comfortable that words failed to describe how elated he was.

His name was called by one of his aides, and immediately he groaned defeatedly, the thick noise reverberating between their lips. As if it never happened, he continued kissing her, holding her impossibly closer for one more moment. Again, his name was called, and Kagome pulled away an inch.

“I think our time’s up.”

“No, ignore them.” He kissed her. “They’ll go away.”

Giggling, she gave him one last, delicate kiss before stepping back from him so he wouldn’t be tempted to neglect their calls further. If they came over and found them this way, she’d most likely die of embarrassment. 

Once more, Inuyasha’s name was called, this time more croaky than the last. He’d missed bringing that desperate cry from Miroku. 

“Alright, alright! I’m coming!” He drawled. Reaching an arm over Kagome’s shoulders, he pulled her close as they walked back, tucking her into his chest so he could easily kiss her head. She wrapped her arms around his waist, walking in sync with him as they came back to the path where his guards waited.

“I hate you.” Miroku chided.

“Sorry. She was showing me a tree.” Inuyasha said, shrugging.

“You’re filthy.”

The prince chuckled, giving a flick of his hand so they’d head off knowing he’d be right behind them. They followed his silent order, and with the small window he had, Inuyasha curled a finger beneath Kagome’s chin and tilted it up for his advantage. Just a small kiss this time, but she smiled into it and his knees almost caved.

“I’ll see you later.” He whispered.

“Bye.”

| Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Final |

[virareve]

While languishing over the fic exchange, I recently noticed that some of the first few times I shared some drabbles/one shots I posted from a collection of short J/B writings I’ve put up on AO3, I was just sharing a link to the main work and not the specific chapter. I wanted to reshare some of the ones I was most proud of/cared about the most that I didn’t properly link to previously.

For anyone who prefers, I’m posting the text to the chapter below as well. :)

Summary:   Unsent Letters from Kingsguard's Lord Commander Jaime Lannister are leaked to the press.

King's Landing Chronicles, Issue 1011

Excerpt from page 2:

Love Letters from the Lord Commander By Pia Waters

Once thought the coldest, cruelest man in the Six Kingdoms, unsent letters from the head of the royal Kingsguard’s Lord Commander shed light into the enigma that is Jaime Lannister, and reveal that he is not so much a mystery as he is a man with his own inner turmoils and a love long gone.

Content leads royal experts to believe that the letters were penned sometime after he was reinstated to the Kingsguard, following the execution of Dowager Queen Cersei, his sister, for plots against the crown. (This was the last time state sanctioned capital punishment was permitted before 'Ned's Law' was enacted and banned capital punishment throughout the six kingdoms.) Readers will also notice the subject of the letters does not appear to be the late Queen, his alleged lover for most of his career. Many are surprised by the emotional depth thought nonexistent in the man the press popularly dubbed the Kingslayer but King Tommen and the newly coronated Queen…( Cont. on Pages 5-7 )

- - -

King's Landing Chronicles, Issue 1011

Excerpt from page 7, The Last Letter:

What is more beautiful, my love? Love lost or love found? Don't laugh at me, my love. I know it. I'm awkward and naive when it comes to love. I ask questions straight out of a pop song. This doubt overwhelms me and undermines me, my love. To find...or to lose? All around me, people don't stop yearning. Did they lose or did they find? I can't say. A motherless child, who is raised by a heartless father, has no way of knowing. He lacks a first love. The love for his mother and father. That's the source of his awkwardness, his naiveté. You said to me, as the snow whirled down on us in Winterfell, "Stay." But I didn't do it. There, my love, is love lost. That's why I've never stopped wondering, since that day: Where have you been? Where are you now? And you, the shining pinnacle of my regrets, did you lose or did you find? I don't know. And I will never know. It hurts to even remember your name, my love. And I don't have the answer. But this is how I like to imagine it, the answer. In the end, my love, we have no choice. We have to find.

- - -

Brienne dropped the paper, swiping at the tears in her eyes.

“Oh Jaime,” she sighed, feelings of nostalgia bubbled in her. Now that so much time had passed, it no longer hurt to think of him. And her mind could only think of him now. Jaime with his part-time irksome, part-time cheeky smile. And his mischievous green eyes. Or his gazelle-like gait. Or the way he smiled and she felt like it was just for her.

It was nice to feel like that.

It was nice to feel warm at the memory of Jaime and not angry at herself for remembering him.

She traced the text on the glossy paper of King's Landing Chronicles. Sansa had mailed it in from the mainland with the insistence that she read it.

When Brienne and Jaime had stopped seeing each other nearly eleven years ago she'd been heartbroken and distraught. The memories in Winterfell had quickly proven too much and she left her new home for her old one. It was a comforting choice in the end. There was something welcoming that she felt on Tarth that she had not felt before. Something that perhaps the change she sought inside of her, and had experienced on the mainland, allowed for as she sought to build a life of her own.

Over a decade since, and she felt calm in knowing she’d met that goal. That her life in smalltown Morne was something that existed without ghosts of her dead mother and siblings and memories of a man she expected would never enter her life again.

Unburdened, she sat comfortably at the dining table her father had carved for her and her family. The laughs from her children, young and precocious and so full of love, teased into the house through the open windows. They were accompanied by the squeaks of skin against water and thick plastic as her children went through the slip-n-slide she’d made for them, over and over again.

Oh, how she loved Gal and Alys.

The choice to embrace motherhood and start a family after she’d given up on ever finding love again, had been easily the most rewarding thing in her life. It was something she had wanted as much as she wanted to fall in love. Raising her two had been a balm for so many internalized wounds, and the pain that used to flare constantly became forgotten and relegated to a dusty corner of her memories.

And yet to know that she’d still been on his mind brought a sharp relief to know that Brienne of yesteryears had not been a fool. She’d been in love and had been loved. None of that could be called a mistake.

Learning what had been in his mind, she could say, too, that the end was not her fault. Here was physical evidence to put her fears at bay and tell herself “Look, you are whole! It was him who was broken!”

But it sounded rather cracked and jaded and Brienne wasn’t feeling cracked and jaded herself. She had loved him and he had loved her.

Not all who loved were allowed to be together. It was the theme of her own parents’ tragically short love story and she would be remiss to think it could never apply to her. As sad as likening her story to her mother and father's was, she could also find the evidence she needed to point out to herself that what had existed in those brief months was a love story.

It had to have been. Because once he’d left, Brienne had never wanted to love another man again. The ending might have been harsh, but the rest of it was a fairytale. No one could ever know her, ever understand her, as well as he had. She had been prepared to never be loved in life and now that she had experienced a love to end all loves, she didn’t ever want to fill in the gap with a poor replacement.

She no longer felt like she needed to.

Brienne shook her head and stood up from the table, brushing her fingers gently over Jaime’s words one more time.

“Love bugs!” she called out, making her way down the back porch, pulling off her own clothes to reveal her own swimsuit underneath, “Wanna learn a trick you didn’t know Mommy could do?”

She jogged slowly past them in the direction of the nearby cove.

“Yeah!” they screamed joyfully.

They took off as fast as their much smaller legs could take them and crashed into her sides, each grasping for one of her hands. Alys was quick to intertwine her long, nimble fingers with her mother’s left, while Gal was clumsily forceful as he wrapped both his hands around her right in an airtight clasp.

Leading the children on, Brienne brought them to a short cliff overlooking the cove and kneeled before them, “Now we’re only ever going to do this with Mommy’s permission and an adult with you okay?”

The two of them nodded vigorously, enthusiastic at the prospect of whatever she was going to show them.

“Alright,” Brienne grinned, standing up and letting go of their hands. “Watch me and do what I do.”

Putting a good distance between her and the cliff's edge, Brienne squatted down into a runners position and quickly pressed off against the earth with a mighty push, speeding towards the edge. On reaching it, she pushed off with all her might and yelled into the air with a freeness she rarely allowed herself.

“Goldenhand!” she screamed, like a knight invoking the legends beside her into battle.

She’d forgotten what it was like to freefall in exposed air, exhilarating and a little bit terrifying all at once. But the air was warm and her hair experienced its own descent as gravity pulled her down and she couldn't help the want to yell again. So she did.

The ocean welcomed her lovingly when she breached the surface and for a moment, Brienne thought of Jaime, taking her just outside of Casterly Rock, encouraging her to take the leap.

Above the children cheered when she surfaced, then swam backwards to put space between her and the bottom of the cliff.

“Your turn!” she yelled, cupping her hands to her face.

Gal and Alys looked at each other. They grinned and moved away from view.

With them out of sight, Brienne briefly allowed her eyes to close, lapsing into that memory of Jaime, sunkissed and smirking as he pulled her after him into the water. His bright, light laugh as she screamed bloody murder and he yelled out “Goldenhand!” like it was the normal battle cry for this sort of event.

“Goldenhand!” the children screamed out in delight and she opened her eyes to watch Gal and Alys catch air. Of course, without her there, they’d decided to jump in holding tightly to each other’s hands.

Brienne couldn’t stop the love that overwhelmed her heart.

Their identical faces were lit with joy. Their golden hair fluttered in the Tarth wind.

When they surfaced, they paddled over to her, trying to talk over the other in their battle to hold all her attention. Their emerald green eyes glittered with impish glee.

[brooklynislandgirl]

@mynameisanakin​ {{xx}}

To say time was immutable was the worst kind of fallacy. It can be stretched or dilated. It can be shrunk. Filled to the very possible edges or shut up and forgotten. It was subject to individual perception which then was galvanised by a cohesive agreement to believe in the same fractured set of moments corresponding to external reality. At least that was what her Master had explained to her once. She wasn’t sure she understood what he meant then, nor is she sure she has a grasp on it now. Or if both were the same and she just chooses to see it differently. What she is absolutely certain of is limited to a minor handful of things. The first being that hours ago the Temple had come under attack. Which meant that somehow, somewhere, something had gone catastrophically wrong. It’s the sound of screaming and pounding feet that first alert her. So of course instinct takes over. She ushers her charges ~younglings that are injured, sick, and otherwise impaired~ to the safest place she can think of.

Thrulan knows even the forgotten places, pathways that most Jedi are unaware even exist. There aren’t so many. Only three. She gives him medicine for them. All of the credits she can scrounge so they aren’t a burden on his small family. The only other thing she knows with absolute certainty is that Anakin is still alive. The agony he was in was significant. Had nearly buckled her to her knees and she wasn’t sure if he felt her reaching out to him. Offering what strength she could that he might take it, enfold it around himself, to protect him until she can find him. Likely wishful thinking, but she wanted to believe it so much that she simply accepted that as a truth. Especially when she can’t feel him reaching back. That there’s distortion thick and heavy between them.

She can only fear the worst; that Anakin is here, and she knows he is. That he is trapped in some corner unable to free himself. That he is hurt. That he is...no. Twisted and cloaked as his brilliant presence in the Force has become, it isn’t waning. She won’t let that be the truth. She won’t let him go so easily.

That becomes a third thing. The halls as she moves are too quiet in places. Too loud in others. The great library is empty. There’s so very little to find there. Even the Temple Guards are not at their posts, and of course, why should they be? They were under an attack, there was better places for them to be. Her sabre flashes as she makes her way ever closer to Anakin. Though she’s brought up short when she sees who the invaders really are. As if she wouldn’t know the legion by sight. These men, never just clones, who have been under his command, whose wounds she’s mended, whose grief she tried to ease, whose deaths and sacrifices she’s recorded painstakingly for the archives so that they might be remembered beyond purpose, beyond what they had been created for. Only to be betrayed. Why would they have turned on Ana-

No. Not...turned. Parrying blaster fire as best she can, she senses....a link. They...They... Two clones go down and she tries to press forward, stopped in her tracks seconds later by a third trooper she hadn’t seen in the shadows. His rifle is aimed at her, held level. But he hesitates. Brows knit above her eyes, sweat damp strands of hair threatening to slip into her vision as she tilts her head. “....Biscuit?” Against all hope, the trooper removes his helmet, confirming that this was in fact the one she thought him to be. The one who still had an both legs thanks to her. “My Lady. I am so sorry. I don’t want to do this.” Not General. Not Master or even Knight Ivers. Not Melakeni. But...lady. She swallows past the rapidly constricting lump in her throat.  “Wha... what is happening, here?”

The trooper looks sick, green under his tawny skin in a way that is both natural and unnatural to her and the more he speaks, the more his face hardens into a mask of duty and remorse.

He doesn’t attempt to kill her when she staggers back under the weight of this new knowledge, one palm splayed against the smooth metal wall to catch herself mid-collapse. Her mind reels. Her sabre thumps dully against the floor as that hand comes up to her chest.

She takes hold of the Force and wraps it around her like an impenetrable wall that nothing can escape from or press advantage into as her heart breaks. The faces of her friends sweep through her memory alive and full of life. They are gone. As are the Masters she has spent the last decade serving. 

Remember these lessons well, little padawan, for suffering is a crucible of strength. Her Master’s voice comes to her unbidden and she knows he still lives as well. Where she cannot quite tell. But the voice, a silken thunder of a whisper in her ear, is not wholly wrong. She knows as terrible as the Dark Side must be, that the Jedi had long ago become corrupt. They slaved under the will of the people, currying favour and gathering quiet power until they no longer resembled what they once purported to be; servants of the Force.

And the Force is a living and breathing thing. A river that flows through everything from the most infinitesimal speck of stardust to the edges of the galaxy and perhaps even beyond, to places unknowable beyond the imagination of even the greatest enlightened minds. Its intention was not to steal and enslave infants. Its will was not to be ruled by fear of upsetting those in power in exchange for some small semblance of a voice in galactic matters. The Jedi Order, she can see more clearly now than ever before, was nothing more than rotting fruit on the Force’s branches, dragging it down with the weight of its corruption.  And as surely as the tears flowed freely down her face for what she knows has been lost because of it, for the innocence and sweetness and life that was now nothing more than a guttered candle, she understands that the will of the Force was for Anakin to... to wipe clean the slate. To destroy every last vestige of what was, in order for what could be to come about. The restoration of balance, to restore the Force itself and not what sentients had made of it.

She recalls a poem she had read in the archives, only a fraction of it as she let go of her anger. Her confusion. As she gave herself as always, to the Force and its will.

Even as it is for your growth, so it is for your pruning. Even as it ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun, So shall it descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.

Biscuit retrieves her lightsabre without a word of protest from her. She can hear the sigh as she looks up into his face. Despite this directive of his, there is some kindness left in the clone. “I’ll make it quick, Lady. Painless.” “A moment more, please?” He nods. She straightens up as sharply as her spine will allow, and levels her chin. She passes a hand over her face to wipe away any traces of emotion that lingered damply on her cheeks and tried, ridiculously, to straighten her hair. Doing so, she conceals clever little gestures with her fingers. “You should take me to him. He will want to do this himself.” “I...I should take you to him. He will want to do this himself.” She takes a step forward, relieves him of her sabre, and wraps a delicate hand around the white and blue armour. Her steps to the grand hall are silent compared to his own and they do not speak during the trek. She looks neither left nor right. Doesn’t look at the bodies strewn where they fell. Does not acknowledge the char and pockmarks that scattered across the walls from blaster fire. The fire and smouldering ash does not make her tremble though she fears that only second to what they will find. The smoke doesn’t bother her at all. In fact she forgets to make herself breathe in those achingly long moments. The Temple all around her that was once home is now a tomb.

Biscuit leaves her there in the centre of the hall. Takes a stance somewhere out of her periphery and she wonders later how badly he will be punished for allowing her to cloud his mind. For allowing her to come into the presence of his Lord armed and utterly capable of cutting him down if she were fast enough, clever enough.

And what does she find? Significantly more than she had hoped but disturbingly less than what she feared. He looks like a ghost haunting himself. Blurred and fractured at the edges, worn so thin she can practically see Coruscant beyond the doors behind him. Awash with old blood and new, and light that could be either from the dying of the day. His eyes are so hollow. His face drawn and remote and before he even acknowledges that she is there, she can feel him crawling over a threshold of breaking. This is not a man proud of what he has done, not a man who will ever sleep again knowing he has done the right thing, even if that is exactly what Anakin has done. Frangible arms wend around her in his terrible silence. Her eyes close as he brushes his mouth against the crown of her hair and breathes her deeply as if for the first time he can. Breathe. Take air deep into his lungs and scour his psyche with her presence. A hand comes up to his chest where his heart beats strong but erratic. And then? It isn’t a question. Nor is it a command. It isn’t even a choice because choice implied she had a say. No senator, no chancellor, no master, no living being loves Anakin the way she does. Nor had they in all the years before except for maybe his mother. And in an entirely different way. No. It isn’t a choice. And no one would ever have been foolish enough to believe that it was. She untangles herself from Anakin. Braces one foot behind her, shifts her centre of gravity. With preternatural reflexes, she reaches for and takes hold of her sabre. Thumbs the near flat depression on the hilt and allows the purple blade to ignite in the gathering gloom around them. Sees its glow flash in glossiness of his eyes.

Her other hand comes up. There’s a little flip and suddenly the blade is laid across both hands, and she curtsies before him, deep and tired and inscrutable. She does not have a heart, but if she did, it would be bleeding for her little sun, for her Anakin. “In all things, in all ways, I am yours to command, my Lord.” Loud enough to be heard by the gathered clones. Then quietly, more intimately, meant for his ears alone... “That is maybe the stupidest thing you have ever asked of me, Ani. The answer is always yes.”

[thecomicsnexus]

Final Crisis

CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS #12 MARCH 1986 BY MARV WOLFMAN, GEORGE PEREZ, JERRY ORDWAY, TOM ZIUKO AND TOM MCCRAW (RE-COLORED VERSION)

SYNOPSIS (FROM DC DATABASE)

In Brainiac's starship, Dolphin, Captain Comet, Rip Hunter, Animal Man, the Atomic Knight, and Adam Strange convince the reviving robot that his memory was tampered with to make him forget the Crisis. Admitting that his power is inadequate to battle the Anti-Monitor, he sets course for the world of a more powerful being. On Earth, the Anti-Monitor's visage is seen in the skies all over the globe. He repeats that the Earth is now in the anti-matter universe. His past victories over positive universes are meaningless, he says, because of the super-heroes' efforts to stop him. When he lists Supergirl and the Flash as casualties, Kid Flash demands to know what has happened.

The Supermen scan the globe and watch the populace panicking. Harbinger appears, and teleports them to a chosen destination, then gathers Dr. Light from Japan, leaving Sunburst to defend the island. When Dr. Light states that she caused Supergirl's death, Harbinger replies that the battle had already killed Supergirl, and that the Anti-Monitor's final attack merely gave her a swift death. In the skies, the darkness splits into a million shadow demons, which begin an all-out attack on humanity, and the super-heroes mass to resist them. The Global Guardians team with other heroes to free their native lands from the threat, but the demons' numbers seem endless. The Phantom Stranger summons Dr. Mist to help revive the Spectre who lies comatose. Below, Harbinger has gathered a large group of heroes, along with Pariah and Alex, to lead a final assault on their nemesis. Alex creates a bridge between universes, and they depart near Apokolips.

Brainiac's ship goes into stationary orbit, and he and his guests teleport to the planet, where Darkseid appears and introduces himself.

Back on Earth, the majority of the heroes are still battling the demons. The Dove is slain by a shadow-being as his brother watches in horror.

In Dr. Fate's Salem tower, the magically powered heroes have gathered to pool their shamanistic might. The Earth-2 Green Lantern and Dr. Occult form the nexus of their energy.

On Qward, in the anti-matter universe, Harbinger and the heroes have arrived in the Anti-Monitor's old headquarters. Kid Flash insists on joining them because of his mentor's demise. Suddenly, an image of the Flash appears to him—the last one Barry cast before his death. Wally follows the afterimage to where an insane Psycho-Pirate clutches at an empty uniform. Kid Flash knocks him out, and realizes that Barry Allen is truly dead when Lady Quark finds his ring. Pariah informs them that a great concentration of evil lies before them. They follow to find a towering Anti-Monitor, ready for the final slaughter.

In Atlantis, Aquaman leads his underwater legions against the shadows. Lori Lemaris saves a trapped Mera with a force beam. A demon closes in on her and kills her. In Chicago, Green Arrow of Earth-2 is killed by a shadow. In Philadelphia, Cyborg, the Son of Vulcan, the Vigilante, and the New Wildcat continue rescue operations.

In New Orleans, Shade the Changing Man witnesses the death of Prince Ra-Man. In Skartaris, Travis Morgan leads his forces against the black menaces. In Gotham City, both Clayface II and the Bug-Eyed Bandit perish at the hands of the demons. In Salem, the tide finally turns. The supernatural crusaders send their combined force in a net of energy to gather the demons from the Earth's surface, and bind them helpless in space. Over the Earth, lives have been lost, including those of Kole, Huntress, and Robin, but other lives have been saved. For a moment, the survivors can take stock.

On Qward, the Supermen of Earth 1 and 2, Captain Atom, Lady Quark, Firehawk, Wonder Woman, and other tarot's strike at the Anti-Monitor, but he ignores their blows, feeding on the energy of a nearby star, As Dr Light absorbs the energy of one of the binary suns they are between, the Anti-Monitor feels his power draining away. Alex begins to drain the anti-matter energy away from their enemy. Negative Woman uses her negative-self to bind the Anti-Monitor and inhibit him: then Harbinger leads all the energy-producing heroes against him, Dr. Light blasts him with the energy of a sun, and he falls into the ruins of his fortress. Alex creates a dimensional hole, large enough to enclose the Earth and return it to its proper universe. The heroes follow. The ball of bound demons hover and then fall on the fallen enemy. Thus, the Anti-Monitor absorbs his slaves energies and rises again, while the heroes start to give battle. Wonder Woman is caught in a withering flash of power, and is borne away to an unknown destination. Superman of Earth-1 and Lady Quark vow deadly revenge, but Kal-L knocks them out, and tells Superboy to take them back. Since he has no world and no wife to return to, the elder Superman has the least to lose. Then he confronts the monstrous Anti-Monitor, and batters him. Superboy sends Superman and Lady Quark back through Alex's shrinking body, and turns to aid him. Superman continues his one-man war against the Anti-Monitor, striking telling blows, while the villain, his power waning, absorbs more energy from the anti-cosmos, and blasts him and Superboy. Darkseid, watching the conflict on a viewscreen, proclaims his planet to be endangered if the Anti-Monitor survives, sends a power burst at him through Alex's eyes. The enemy, devastated, is hurled into the core of one of the binary suns. Superman, Superboy, and Alex are stunned to see the spectre of their enemy rising from the sun. Superman smashes into his foe's fiery body, scattering him: the remains fall back into the sun and the star begins to implode.

They bravely await the end and Superman wishes that Lois could have lived to see their triumph. At that, Alex produces Lois from a void-pocket in his body where she had been sent to wait. She tells her husband that she had been to a tranquil world. Alex cannot return them to Earth but he can take them all to this beautiful world. Superman, Lois, and Superboy opt for that choice. The foursome vanish seconds before the exploding sun would have reached them.

Back on Earth, Lyla is explaining facets of the Crisis to Pariah and Lady Quark. Wonder Woman was returned to the clay which Aphrodite and Athena had given life, then spread across Paradise Island.

Time then continued to reverse itself, as the Amazons were returned to their original homeland before they fled Man's World. Zeus brought the homeless Wonder Woman of Earth-2 and her husband Steve Trevor to Olympus, where they could live peacefully. The bodies of Robin of Earth-2, the Huntress, and Kole were never found. All those who died were mourned. In Keystone City, Jay Garrick determined that Kid Flash's illness was in remission, his body chemistry being changed by a blast from the Anti-Monitor. He could again move at super-speed, though only to a maximum of Mach-1. Wally donned Barry Allen's uniform, and announced, "From this day forth — the Flash lives again!"

The Great Disaster will not exist in the Earth's future, but a lost child will be found in Command D. adopted by General Horatio Tomorrow of the Planeteers, and named Thomas. Jonah Jex will be torn from his era to fight in the future, while the Guardians of the Universe must face the first division in their ranks. Thus, Lyla concludes her tale, and Lady Quark and Pariah ask her to help them explore their new homeworld. They leave with her, honoring the memory of their benefactor, the Monitor. And, in Arkham Asylum, the staff discuss a new patient who seems beyond help, straitjacketed in a rubber-lined room. Roger Hayden, formerly Psycho-Pirate, gibbers about Earths beyond numbers, the Anti-Monitor, and the memories, which only he had been allowed to keep.

NOTORIOUS DEATHS IN THIS ISSUE

Anti-Monitor

Dove

Green Arrow (Earth-2)

Huntress

Kole

Robin (Dick Grayson, Earth-2)

Sunburst

Bug-Eyed Bandit

Clayface II (Matt Hagen)

Lori Lemaris

Ten Eyed Man

REVIEW

The ending of Crisis is the only part of it that remains canon after it (as it happened on new earth). Although many things about it will not remain (no one will remember the multiverse, not even the ones that survived it). Same will apply to deaths like Huntress, who will be completely replaced post-crisis.

So, was it worth it? Absolutely. Wolfman’s idea of rebooting the universe every 10 years would have been a great idea, but sales will not always allow for it (this is the reason DC was never able to do a complete reboot, you don’t fix what isn’t broken, namely Batman, Legion of Super-Heroes and the Green Lantern Corps).

As for its legacy, this event is the father of all events. Cross-overs and team-ups have been plenty, not only at DC, since the Golden Age. And while there have been similar events in 1982 and 1984 over at Marvel, they barely had any impact (Spider-symbiote being the one thing to remember). Crisis was a whole different thing. But sadly, it happened at DC, that means that not all the opportunities will be taken seriously.

Crisis offered the chance of a blank slate, but instead, the relaunch was sloppy and as a result, the universe required a soft reboot less than 10 years later. Crisis tie-ins are a good demonstration of how slow DC was to react to what they were doing. They do not match the chapter of the month.

Another interesting example is Wally West, who was restored in the end, with a slower speed, and became the Flash. However, it would take more than a year for Wally to take on his own book. This coincided with Justice League International and the end of Legends. Wonder Woman suffered the same delay as well. There were no plans to what would happen afterwards, because DC wasn’t fully aware of what they just did. They were too busy closing down titles, and the reaction to restart everything was delayed, sometimes by more than 5 years. Fortunately, the man of steel would end the year with one of his most emblematic runs.

As for the story itself, the science makes little sense, but I am willing to forgive those flaws. The essence of the event was to revisit the DCU history, to streamline everything and to showcase every single character they had. It was supposed to launch in 1983, but it had to wait until the 50th anniversary (while a long research had to be done to figure out the full DCU history). This story accomplishes that. The tie-ins... not so much. But Crisis as a story works very well. Without tie-ins.

There is a lot of love poured into it as well, and you can tell. Those final sequences with Alex Luthor, Kal-L, Lois and Superboy-Prime are beautiful and sad at the same time (again, DC would shoot themselves in the foot by desecrating that ending in 2005, but that’s a story for another time).

You cannot imagine another penciler for this story either. George Perez is the god of team-ups. Since then, he had some replacements, most notoriously, Phil Jimenez, but in 1985, it was pretty much him. And the art is so beautiful, and so meaningful, Crisis on Infinite Earths became on of the greatest achievements in comic-book history.

Jerry Ordway had to step in after Giordano and DeCarlo, for reasons I do not know. He was the perfect choice for this event. His style adds some clarity to Perez style, where Tanghal wouldn’t have dared to modify too much. As a result, you get an interesting hybrid. Ordway’s realistic faces, with Perez crazy layouts and detailed backgrounds.

The art in general is something to admire over and over. That scene where the shadow demons break apart and darkness becomes sky... that’s Michael Bay High Octane shit. You are basically watching a disaster movie.

Some of the deaths in this story mean nothing. Losing Green Arrow from Earth-2 or Helena Wayne will not have an impact. But they can seriously affect some readers.

One thing I didn’t mention before, was that New Genesis was actually part of the Crisis, as Darkseid only cloaked Apokolips, but apart from Crisis #10, I haven’t seen anything happening over there in other books.

Now, which version should you buy? All of them.

I grew up reading the spanish adaptation, which was pretty much the original with translated text. Then I bought 1998′s slipcase, which was already re-colored. I really think this one was the best as the wrap-around cover has the full Alex Ross painting. 2015′s deluxe edition includes the History of the DCU, with a new cover by George Perez. Perhaps this one adds more value. There is also a very expensive edition coming at the end of the year that includes all the tie-ins, but as you may have read, not all tie-ins are good or worthy of reading with this saga.

Then I actually recommend the digital version, as this book is so beautiful, you don’t even want to touch it.

I give this story a score of 10

[son-of-alderaan]

There’s a desert valley in southern Jordan called Wadi Rum, or sometimes “the Valley of the Moon.” There are stone inscriptions in Wadi Rum that are more than 2,000 years old. Lawrence of Arabia passed through there during the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire. More recently, J. J. Abrams went there to film parts of the latest Star Wars movie, The Rise of Skywalker, because it’s largely uninhabited and starkly beautiful and looks plausibly alien, and one of the things that has always made the Star Wars movies feel so real—as if they had a real life of their own that continues on out beyond the edges of the screen—is the way they’re shot on location, with as few digital effects as possible. George Lucas shot the Tatooine scenes from A New Hope in southern Tunisia. For Skywalker, it’s Wadi Rum.

They don’t do it that way because it’s easy. Abrams and his crew had to build miles of road into the desert. They basically had to set up a small town out there, populated by the cast and extras and crew—the creature-effects department alone had 70 people. The Jordanian military got involved. The Jordanian royal family got involved. There was sand. There were sandstorms, when all you could do was take cover and huddle in your tent and—if you’re John Boyega, who plays the ex-Stormtrooper Finn—listen to reggae.

But in a way that’s the whole point: you’re out there so the world can get up in your grill and make its presence felt on film. “It’s the things that you can’t anticipate—the imperfections,” says Oscar Isaac, who plays the Resistance pilot Poe Dameron. “It’s very difficult to design imperfection, and the imperfections that you have in these environments immediately create a sense of authenticity. You just believe it more.” When Isaac arrived in Wadi Rum for his first week of shooting, Abrams had set up a massive greenscreen in the middle of the desert. “And I was like, ‘J. J., can I ask you a question? I notice we’re shooting on greenscreen.’ And he’s like, ‘So why the hell are we in the desert?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah!’ And he said, ‘Well, because look: the way that the sand interacts with the light, and the type of shots you would set up—if you were designing the shot on a computer you would never even think to do that.’ There’s something about the way that the light and the environment and everything plays together.” It’s that something, the presence and the details and the analog imperfections of a real nondigital place, that makes Star Wars so powerful.

It was powerful enough to bring 65,000 people to Chicago in April for Star Wars Celebration, a fan convention where you could see a giant Stormtrooper head made out of 36,440 tiny Lego Stormtrooper mini-figures, which is a world record of some kind, though I’m not sure exactly what, and where people were dressed up as Muppets who were themselves dressed up as Star Wars characters. But the main event was the launch of the trailer for The Rise of Skywalker, which was held in a 10,000-seat arena and was such a big deal that even though the trailer was going to be released on the Internet literally seconds after it was over, I—an at least theoretically respectable member of the media—was not only tagged, wristbanded, escorted, and metal-detected, but sniffed by a K-9 unit before I could go in.

J.J. Abrams, alongside Stunt Coordinator Eunice Huthart, directs the Knights of Ren; elite fearsome enforcers of Kylo Ren’s dark will.

I sat down with Abrams a couple of hours later. For the occasion, he was wearing a suit so black and sharp, he could have been doing Men in Black cosplay, but his most distinctive feature is his dark curly hair, which is upswept in a way that is only slightly suggestive of devil horns. Abrams talks rapidly, as if he can barely keep up with the things his racing brain is telling him to say. When I told him that not only was Star Wars the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter, but that all 10 of the Top 10 trending topics were Star Wars–related, and that he personally was No. 5, he was visibly stunned.

Then he recovered enough to say: “Well, I aspire to No. 4.” (For the record, No. 4 was the late Supreme Leader Snoke, who frankly did seem beatable. If you’re curious, No. 11 was pro golfer Zach Johnson, who had just accidentally hit his ball with a practice swing at the Masters. Life goes on.)

Disney executives talk about how important it is to “event-ize” Star Wars movies; i.e., to make them feel not just like movies but like seriously momentous occasions. They won’t have much trouble with this one: The Rise of Skywalker isn’t just the last movie in the Star Wars trilogy that began in 2015 with The Force Awakens; it’s the last movie in a literal, actual trilogy of trilogies that started with the very first Star Wars movie back in 1977, which began the saga of the Skywalker family. The Rise of Skywalker will finally, after 42 years, bring that saga to an end.

FIRST LOOK Vanity Fair reveals Keri Russell as the masked scoundrel Zorri Bliss, seen in the Thieves’ Quarter of the snow-dusted world Kijimi.

We all thought the story was over in 1983 with Return of the Jedi, and then we really thought it was over in 2005 with Revenge of the Sith. But Star Wars has always been an unruly beast, too big and powerful (and profitable) to be contained in one movie, or even in a trilogy, or even in two trilogies, let alone numberless novels, TV shows, comics, video games, Happy Meals, and so on. Now Abrams has to gather all those threads and bring closure to a story that was started by somebody else, in an America that feels a very long time ago indeed. “That’s the challenge of this movie,” Abrams says. “It wasn’t just to make one film that as a stand-alone experience would be thrilling, and scary, and emotional, and funny, but one that if you were to watch all nine of the films, you’d feel like, Well, of course—that!”

Like a lot of things that we now can’t imagine life without, Star Wars came really close to never happening in the first place. In 1971, Lucas was a serious young auteur just five years out of film school at U.S.C. He had only one full-length movie on his résumé, and that was THX 1138, which is the kind of visionary but grindingly earnest science-fiction epic that only the French could love. (They were pretty much the only ones who did.) Everybody expected Lucas to go on and make serious, gritty 1970s cinema like his peers, Brian De Palma and Francis Ford Coppola. At the time Lucas and Coppola were actively planning a radical epic set in Vietnam with the provocative title Apocalypse Now.

FORCE MAJEURE First Order leaders General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson) and Allegiant General Pryde (Richard E. Grant) on the bridge of Kylo Ren’s destroyer.

But Coppola would have to finish that one on his own, because Lucas went a different way. “I had decided there was no modern mythology,” he said in 1997. “I wanted to take old myths and put them into a new format that young people could relate to. Mythology always existed in unusual, unknown environments, so I chose space.” Lucas tried to acquire the rights to Flash Gordon (that would’ve been a dark timeline indeed), but when he couldn’t, he came up with his own original science-fictional epic instead. He called it The Star Wars. Like The Facebook, it would have to shed a direct article on its way to glory.

Even though American Graffiti had made Lucas a bankable director, Star Wars still came together slowly. In the first draft, Luke was an old man, Leia was 14, and Han Solo was “a huge green-skinned monster with no nose and large gills.” Fox executives were baffled by Star Wars, and they squeezed Lucas relentlessly for time and money. We forget now how jerry-rigged the first movie was: the cantina aliens weren’t finished, and the monumental Star Destroyer that dominates the opening shot is, in reality, about three feet long. The Death Star interior is basically one set re-arranged several different ways. To make Greedo’s mouth move, the woman in the Greedo suit had to hold a clothespin in her mouth. “What I remember about working on the first film,” says John Williams, the legendary soundtrack composer, “is the fact that I didn’t ever think there would be a second film.” (He also, like everybody else, thought Luke and Leia were going to get together, so he wrote them a love theme.)

But wherever real mythology comes from, Lucas had gone there and brought something back alive. People wanted movies that gave them something to believe in instead of relentlessly autopsying the beliefs that had failed them. We’d had enough of antiheroes. We needed some anti-antiheroes. “I realized after THX that people don’t care about how the country’s being ruined,” Lucas said. “We’ve got to regenerate optimism.” Like American Graffiti, Star Wars is a work of profound nostalgia, a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate anthem of longing for the restoration of a true and just power in the universe—the return of the king. And at the same time it’s a very personal hero’s journey, about a boy who must put right the sins of his father and master the strange power he finds within himself, and in doing so become a man.

Star Wars is also an incredibly enduring vision of what it’s like to live in a world of super-advanced technology. Science fiction often ages badly, turning into kitsch or camp—just look at Flash Gordon—but Star Wars hasn’t. More than any filmmaker before him, Lucas successfully imagined what a science-fictional world would feel like to somebody who was actually inside it—which is to say, it would look as ordinary and workaday as the present. He even shot it like it was real, working close-in and mostly eschewing wide establishing shots, more like a documentary or a newsreel than a space opera. “It feels very grounded,” says Naomi Ackie, who’s making her Star Wars debut in Skywalker playing a character named Jannah, about whom she is allowed to say literally nothing. “There’s the kind of spectacular-ness, and the supernatural move-things-with-your-mind magic stuff, but then there’s also this really grounded, rugged nature where everything is distressed and old and kind of worn out and lived-in. And I think playing with those two ideas means that you get this feeling that it could almost be real. Like, in a galaxy far away, it could almost be the case that you could have this.”

When Lucas made the first Star Wars sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, he cheekily labeled it Episode V, then went back and re-labeled the first movie as Episode IV, as if the movies were an old-fashioned serial that the rest of us were all just tuning in to. Around that time, he also started talking about Star Wars as a nine-part epic—so in 2012, when Lucas retired and sold Lucasfilm to Disney, it wasn’t exactly heresy that Disney announced more movies. At the time, Kathleen Kennedy had just been named co-chairperson of Lucasfilm, and she tapped Abrams to direct the first Disney-owned post-Lucas Star Wars movie. It was a bit like saying, Make the lightning strike again, please. Exactly here, if you could. Oh, and could you also earn back that $4 billion we just spent to buy Lucasfilm? (Narrator voice: He could.)

At first blush, Abrams’s debut Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens, looked like an elaborate homage to the original. Just like in A New Hope, there’s a young Force-sensitive person on a poor desert planet—that’s Rey, played by Daisy Ridley—who finds a droid with a secret message that’s vital to the Rebellion (or wait, sorry, it’s the Resistance now). There’s a villain in a black mask, just like Darth Vader, except that it’s his grandson Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), né Ben Solo, son of Han and Leia. Kylo has a planet-killing weapon, much like the Death Star but way bigger, which becomes the target of a desperate attack by Resistance X-wings. There’s even a bar full of aliens.

Abrams also insisted on keeping to the analog aesthetic of the original trilogy: those aliens had to be latex and yak hair, not bits and bytes, and everything possible was shot on location using film cameras, not digital ones. Even Lucas had abandoned that approach by the time he made the second Star Wars trilogy, but many fans consider those movies to be a cautionary tale. “Famously, the prequels were mostly greenscreen environments,” Abrams says. “And that was George himself doing that, and it ended up looking exactly how he wanted it to look—and I always preferred the look of the original movies, because I just remember when you’re in the snow on Hoth, when you’re in the desert on Tatooine, and when you’re in the forests of Endor—it’s amazing. If you put a vaporator here, there, all of a sudden almost any natural location suddenly becomes a Star Wars location.”

But the more interesting thing about The Force Awakens and its successor, The Last Jedi, written and directed by Rian Johnson, was how they subtly complicated Lucas’s vision. Thirty years have gone by since the ending of Return of the Jedi, during which time the newly reborn Republic became complacent and politically stagnant, allowing the rise of the reactionary neo-imperial First Order, whose origins we will learn more about in Skywalker. “It was almost like if the Argentine Nazis had sort of got together and actually started to bring that back in some real form,” Abrams says. Just like that, the rules of the Star Wars universe changed. It wasn’t all over when the Ewoks sang. Obi-Wan Kenobi and all those Bothans had died in vain. Even Han and Leia split up. It’s all a little less of a fairy tale now.

The feather-haired godling Luke suffered the trauma of having a Padawan go bad on his watch. It’s an echo of what happened to his old mentor, Obi-Wan, with Anakin Skywalker, who became Darth Vader. But where Obi-Wan made peace with it, waiting serenely in the desert of Tatooine for the next Chosen One to arrive, Luke’s guilt curdled into shame. He hid himself away, so that his Chosen One, Rey, had to spend most of The Force Awakens searching for him, and then another whole movie convincing him with the help of Yoda’s Force ghost to keep the Jedi Order going at all. Star Wars arrived as an antidote to the disillusionment of the 1970s—but now, in its middle age, Star Wars is grappling with disillusionment of its own.

DESERT POWER Joonas Suotamo (Chewbacca), Ridley, Anthony Daniels (C-3PO), and John Boyega (Finn) await the call to action for a chase scene.

By dint of advanced Sith interrogation techniques, I was able to obtain valuable advance information about The Rise of Skywalker. Here it is: common emblem.

Anthony Daniels, who plays C-3P0, is the only actor who has appeared in all nine movies of the Star Wars triple trilogy, so if anybody’s entitled to leak, it’s him. Daniels says he loved the script for The Rise of Skywalker, but he didn’t get it until the last minute, right before shooting started, and for some reason he just couldn’t memorize his part. “My first line would not go in my head!” he says. In person Daniels is like a C-3P0 whose preferences have been reset to charming and voluble. “The line that I couldn’t say was two words: ‘common emblem.’ Common emblem, common emblem—I would say them thousands of times. My wife would say it back. I just couldn’t say them!”

Fortunately C-3P0’s mouth doesn’t move, so he could add the line in postproduction. Anyway, there’s the big scoop: “common emblem.” I don’t know what it means either. (Also I 100 percent guarantee that they will change the line before the movie comes out so that this scoop will end up being fake news.) Daniels also told me that C-3P0 does something in this movie that surprises everybody—but he wouldn’t say what. “He keeps his clothes on. It’s not like he suddenly does this thing, but …”

The only other member of the old guard on the set this time was Billy Dee Williams, who plays the charismatic Lando Calrissian. At 82, Williams has lost none of his roguish charm, but now it comes wrapped in a kind of magisterial dignity. People tend to remember Lando for the deal he cut with Vader in The Empire Strikes Back, rather than for his redemptive comeback in Return of the Jedi, and Williams appears to have spent the last 45 years defending him. “He’s a survivor. It’s expediency for him,” Williams says. “You know, he was thrown into a situation which he didn’t look for and he had to try to figure out how to deal with an entity which is more than just a human.” And, he adds, with the weary air of somebody who has spent way too much time justifying the behavior of a fictional character, “nobody died!”

HOT TAKE Members of the crew shade and shine Daniels, the only cast member to appear in all nine of the Skywalker films, while BB-8 looks on.

Chewbacca is still here, too, but it’s not the same man in the suit. The original actor was Peter Mayhew, a seven-foot-three-inch gentle giant who was working as a hospital orderly in London when Lucas cast him in the first movie. Mayhew retired after The Force Awakens, and he died on April 30 at 74. His replacement is Joonas Suotamo, a fresh-faced former professional basketball player from Finland who always wanted to be an actor but was hard to cast because he’s six feet 11 inches tall. “When I first met [Mayhew] he told me I was a wee bit too skinny,” Suotamo says. “But we also had a Wookiee boot camp, which lasted for a week. He told me all kinds of things about the moves that Chewbacca does, how they came to be and his reasoning behind them.” Suotamo has now played Chewbacca in four movies and enjoys it about as much as I’ve ever seen anybody enjoy anything. “It’s very much like silent-era film, with Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin,” he says. “He’s a mime character and that’s what he does, and I guess in that minimalism comes the beauty of the character.”

Other things we know about Skywalker: We can safely assume that the Resistance and the First Order are headed toward a final smash, which will be a heavy lift for the good guys because, at the end of The Last Jedi, the Resistance was down, way down, to a double handful of survivors. They’ll face a First Order who suffered a stinging but largely symbolic loss at the Battle of Crait, and who, I feel confident, have learned something from the previous eight movies. The Empire built and lost two Death Stars. The First Order has already lost one super-weapon in The Force Awakens. Presumably it won’t make the same mistake twice, twice.

But the stakes go even higher than that, cosmically high. Sources close to the movie say that Skywalker will at long last bring to a climax the millennia-long conflict between the Jedi Order and its dark shadow, the Sith.

HORSING AROUND Finn and new ally Jannah (Naomi Ackie), atop hardy orbaks, lead the charge against the mechanized forces of the First Order. “It’s extremely surreal to be in it,” says Ackie, “and see how it works from the inside.”

STAR CROSSED Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) and Rey battle it out with lightsabers in a stormy confrontation. Their Force-connection—what Driver calls their “maybe-bond”—will turn out to run even deeper than previously revealed.

The hottest area for speculation, however, is the identity of the titular Skywalker, because at this point there aren’t many Skywalkers left to rise. One is General Organa, the former Princess Leia, Luke’s sister—but Carrie Fisher, who plays her, passed away in 2016. That was a deeply painful loss for Abrams personally, but it also presented him with an impossible choice as a filmmaker. He needed Leia to tell the story, but Abrams didn’t feel like a digital Carrie Fisher could do the job, and there was no way Lucasfilm was going to re-cast the role.

But then a strange thing happened. Abrams remembered that there was some footage of Fisher left over from The Force Awakens, scenes that had been changed or cut entirely, and he dug them up. “It’s hard to even talk about it without sounding like I’m being some kind of cosmic spiritual goofball,” Abrams says, “but it felt like we suddenly had found the impossible answer to the impossible question.” He started to write scenes around the old footage, fitting Leia’s dialogue into new contexts. He re-created the lighting to match the way Fisher had been lit. Bit by bit, she found her place in the new movie. “It was a bizarre kind of left side/right side of the brain sort of Venn diagram thing, of figuring out how to create the puzzle based on the pieces we had.” Fisher’s daughter, Billie Lourd, appears in the movies as a Resistance officer named Lieutenant Connix, and at first Abrams deliberately wrote her out of the scenes in case it was too painful—but Lourd said no, she wanted to be in them. “And so, there are moments where they’re talking; there are moments where they’re touching,” Abrams says. “There are moments in this movie where Carrie is there, and I really do feel there is an element of the uncanny, spiritual, you know, classic Carrie, that it would have happened this way, because somehow it worked. And I never thought it would.”

The only other member of the surviving Skywalker bloodline—that we know of!—is Leia’s son and Luke’s former Padawan, the fallen Jedi Kylo Ren. Kylo probably isn’t capable of actual happiness, but things are definitely looking up for him: by the end of The Last Jedi he has taken control of the First Order and killed or at least outlived his actual father and both of his symbolic fathers-in-art, Luke and Supreme Leader Snoke. Sources at Disney also confirm that his long-rumored Knights of Ren will finally arrive in Skywalker. “And then he had been forging this maybe-bond with Rey,” Driver says, “and it kind of ends with the question in the air: is he going to pursue that relationship, or when the door of her ship goes up, does that also close that camaraderie that they were maybe forming?”

SANDBLAST Camera operator Colin Anderson readies a take for a chase sequence spotlighting the heroics of Chewbacca, BB-8, and Rey.

Darkness in the Star Wars movies tends to come from fear: for Anakin Skywalker, Kylo’s grandfather, it was his fear of losing his mother and his wife. After two movies it’s still not so easy to say exactly what Kylo Ren himself fears, even though he’s as operatically emo as Vader was stoic. He’s fixated on the past—he made a shrine to his own grandfather—but at the same time the past torments him. “Let the past die,” he tells Rey in The Last Jedi. “Kill it, if you have to. That’s the only way to become what you are meant to be.”

Presumably whatever’s eating at Kylo started in his childhood: maybe being the kid of literally the two coolest people in the galaxy isn’t as fun as it sounds. Driver—who has obviously thought this through with a lot of rigor—points out that, as cool as they are, Han and Leia are both obsessively committed to lifestyles (smuggling, rebelling) that don’t leave much room for kids. He also points out that, unlike Luke and Rey, Kylo never got to go on a nifty voyage of self-discovery. Instead he grew up under the crushing pressure of massive expectations. “How do you form friendships out of that?” Driver says. “How do you understand the weight of that? And if there’s no one around you guiding you, or articulating things the right way … it can easily go awry.” By the emotional logic that governs the Star Wars universe—and also our own—Kylo Ren is going to have to confront the past, and his fears, whatever they are, or be destroyed by them.

Where Lucas’s trilogies tended to follow the roots and branches of the Skywalker family tree—their personal saga was the saga of the galaxy writ small—the new movies have a slightly wider aperture and take in a new generation of heroes. There’s Rey, of course, who sources say will have progressed in her training since the end of The Last Jedi to the point where it’s almost complete. With that taken care of, all she has to do is reconstitute the entire Jedi Order from scratch, because as far as we know she’s the Last One.

If Kylo Ren can’t be redeemed it will almost certainly fall to Rey to put him down, in spite of their maybe-bond. Their relationship is the closest thing the new trilogy has to a star-crossed love story on the order of Han and Leia: a source close to the movie says that their Force-connection will turn out to run even deeper than we thought. They’re uniquely suited to understand each other, but at the same time they are in every way each other’s inverse, down to Kylo’s perverse rejection of his family, which is the one thing Rey craves most. “I think there’s a part of Rey that’s like, dude, you fucking had it all, you had it all,” Ridley says. “That was always a big question during filming: you had it all and you let it go.”

PUNCH IT! In a historic reunion, Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams) retakes the helm of the Millennium Falcon, joined by Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), Chewbacca, D-O, and BB-8. “He’s a survivor,” Williams says of Lando.

Rey is also, according to totally unsubstantiated Internet theories, a leading candidate to be the Skywalker of the title, pending some kind of head-snapping reveal about her ancestry. (For the record, the other leading unsubstantiated Internet theory has the “Skywalker” of the title referring to an entirely new order of Force users who will rise up and replace the Jedi.)

Rey seems ready for it all, or as ready as anybody could be. “It’s nice having that shot at the beginning of the teaser,” Ridley says, over avocado toast at a fancy Chicago hotel, “because I think it’s quite a good visual representation of where she is now: confident, calm, less fearful.… It’s still sort of overwhelming, but in a different way. It feels more right—less like inevitable and more like there’s a focus to the journey.” Focus is a good word for Rey: on-screen Ridley’s dramatic eyebrows form a wickedly sharp arrow of concentration. I asked Ridley what she’s thinking about when Rey is using her Force powers, and it turns out Rey seems focused because Ridley is actually seriously focused. “I literally visualize it. When I was lifting rocks I was visualizing the rocks moving. And then I was like, Oh, my God, I made it happen! And obviously there’s loads of rocks on strings, so, no, I didn’t. But I visualize that it’s really going on.” (That scene, which comes at the end of The Last Jedi, is another example of classic nondigital Star Wars effects: those were real rocks. “It was actually really amazing,” Ridley says. “It was sort of like a baby mobile.”)

There’s also Finn, the apostate Stormtrooper, played by the irrepressible Boyega, who in person practically vibrates with energy and speaks with a South London accent very different from Finn’s American one. In some ways Finn has gone through a complete character arc already: he confronted his past—by beating down his old boss, Captain Phasma—and found his courage and his moral center. He has had a tendency to panic, if not actively desert, in clutch situations, but at the Battle of Crait he proved that he was past that. “I think he’s just an active member of the Resistance now,” Boyega says. “Episode Eight, he couldn’t decide what team he was fighting for. But since then he’s made a clear decision.” (Cast members tend to refer to the Star Wars movies by their episode numbers: four is the original movie, seven is The Force Awakens, and so on.)

Finn still has to make a clear decision about his romantic situation, though. As Boyega put it at Star Wars Celebration: “Finn is single and willing to mingle!” The movies have been teasing his emotional connections with both Rey and the Resistance mechanic Rose Tico, played by Kelly Marie Tran, with whom he shared a fleeting battlefield kiss in The Last Jedi. Rose seems like the more positive choice, given that she stops Finn from deserting early in the movie and saves his life at the Battle of Crait, and that the precedents for romantic involvements with Jedi are extremely bad. Tran is the first Asian-American woman to play a major role in a Star Wars movie, and she has been the target of both racist and sexist attacks online. But she has come through them as a fan favorite: when she appeared onstage in Chicago, she got a standing ovation.

Finally there’s Poe, who has mostly struggled with his own cocky impulsiveness, because he’s a loose-cannon-who-just-can’t-play-by-the-rules. Poe will have to step up and become a leader, because the Resistance is seriously short on officer material. In fact, some of that transformation will already have happened where The Rise of Skywalker picks up, which is about a year after the end of The Last Jedi. “There has been a bit of shared history that you haven’t seen,” Isaac says. “Whereas in the other films, Poe is this kind of lone wolf, now he’s really part of a group. They’re going out and going on missions and have a much more familiar dynamic now.” Star Wars has always been about friendship as much as it is about romance, and as of the end of The Last Jedi, Rey, Finn, and Poe are all finally in the same place for the first time since The Force Awakens.

The Rise of Skywalker introduces some new players, too. There’s a tiny one-wheeled droid called D-O and a large banana-slug alien named Klaud. Oh, and Naomi Ackie, Keri Russell, and Richard E. Grant have all joined the cast, though, again, we know practically nothing about who they’re playing. Going from being outside the Star Wars leviathan to being right in its belly can be a dizzying experience for a first-timer. “I actually tried to do this thing while we were filming,” Ackie says, “where I’d go one day, walking through London without seeing a Star Wars reference somewhere. And you can’t do it. You really can’t. So it’s extremely surreal to be in it and see how it works from the inside.

WELL MET Jordanian locals play the Aki-Aki, natives of the planet Pasaana.

If anything, Star Wars is only getting more omnipresent. The franchise under Lucas was a colossus, but he still ran it essentially as a private concern. He could make movies or not, as his muse dictated—he was beholden to no shareholders. But Star Wars under Disney makes the old Star Wars look positively quaint. Between 1977 and 2005, Lucasfilm released six Star Wars movies; when Skywalker premieres in December, Disney will have released five Star Wars movies in five years. “I think there is a larger expectation that Disney has,” Kennedy says. “On the other hand, though, I think that Disney is very respectful of what this is, and right from the beginning we talked about the fragility of this form of storytelling. Because it’s something that means so much to fans that you can’t turn this into some kind of factory approach. You can’t even do what Marvel does, necessarily, where you pick characters and build new franchises around those characters. This needs to evolve differently.”

A useful example of that fragility might be the relatively modest performance of Solo: A Star Wars Story in 2018. Solo was a perfectly good Star Wars movie that has made almost $400 million worldwide—but it’s also, according to industry estimates, the first one to actually lose money. In response Disney has gently but firmly pumped the brakes: the first movie in the next Star Wars trilogy, which will be helmed by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, the duo behind Game of Thrones, won’t arrive till Christmas of 2022, with further installments every other year after that. There’s no official word as to what stories they’ll tell, or when a second trilogy being developed by Rian Johnson will appear.

But even as the movies pause, Star Wars continues to colonize any and all other media. In addition to video games, comics, novels, cartoons, container-loads of merch, etc., there are not one but two live-action TV series in the pipeline for Disney+, Disney’s new streaming service: The Mandalorian, created by Jon Favreau, and an as-yet-untitled show about Cassian Andor from Rogue One. I have personally tried a virtual-reality experience called Vader Immortal,written and produced by Dark Knight screenwriter David Goyer. At the end of May, Disneyland will open Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, a massive, 14-acre, $1 billion attraction where you can fly the Millennium Falcon, be captured by the First Order, and drink a blue milk cocktail (it’s actually nondairy) and Coca-Cola products out of exclusive BB-8-shaped bottles at the cantina. It’s the largest single-theme expansion in the park’s history: Take that, Toy Story Land. The Disney World version will open in August.

You realize now that, under Lucas, Star Wars always slightly had the brakes on—we were always kept a little starved for product. With Disney driving, we’ll really find out how big Star Wars can get.

ENCORE Composer John Williams conducting the Star Wars score, drawing on themes and motifs he has woven across four decades. “I didn’t think there would ever be a second film,” he says.

When people talk about the new Star Wars movies, they tend to talk about how faithful they are to the originals. What’s harder to say is how exactly the new films are different—how movies like Skywalker keep their connection to the past while at the same time finding a way to belong to the world of 2019. Because regardless of whether or not Star Wars has changed since 1977, the world around it has, profoundly. “There’s a loss of innocence, a sense of innocence that existed in the 70s that I don’t think to any extent exists today,” Kennedy says. “I think that has to permeate the storytelling and the reaction to the stories and how they’re set up. It has to feel differently because we’re different.”

We know things, as a people and as an audience, that we didn’t know back then. For example: back then it felt sort of O.K. to like Darth Vader, because even though he was evil he was also incredibly cool, and the kind of fascism he represented felt like a bogeyman from the distant past. But now fascism is rising again, which makes the whole First Order subplot look super-prescient, but it also reminds us that fascism is not even slightly cool in real life. “Evil needs to feel and look very real,” Kennedy says, “and what that means today may not be as black-and-white as it might have been in 1977, coming off a kind of World War II sensibility.” In the Star Wars–verse, Dark and Light are supposed to balance each other, but in the real world they just mix together into a hopelessly foggy, morally ambiguous gray.

But the changes are liberating too. Star Wars doesn’t have to stay frozen in time; if anything it’s the opposite, if it doesn’t change it’ll die. It will turn into Flash Gordon. For Abrams, that means he can’t go through this process so haunted by the ghost of George Lucas (who is of course still alive, but you get what I’m saying) that he winds up doing a cinematic Lucas impression. At some point Abrams has to let Abrams be Abrams.

The Rise of Skywalker might be that point. “Working on nine, I found myself approaching it slightly differently,” he says. “Which is to say that, on seven, I felt beholden to Star Wars in a way that was interesting—I was doing what to the best of my ability I felt Star Wars should be.” But this time something changed. Abrams found himself making different choices—for the camera angles, the lighting, the story. “It felt slightly more renegade; it felt slightly more like, you know, Fuck it, I’m going to do the thing that feels right because it does, not because it adheres to something.”

There are a lot of small subtle ways that Abrams’s Star Wars is different from Lucas’s, but if there’s a standout, it’s the way that the new movies look at history. Lucas’s Star Wars movies are bathed in the deep golden-sunset glow of the idyllic Old Republic, that more civilized age—but the new movies aren’t like that. They’re not nostalgic. They don’t long for the past; they’re more about the promise of the future. “This trilogy is about this young generation, this new generation, having to deal with all the debt that has come before,” Abrams says. “And it’s the sins of the father, and it’s the wisdom and the accomplishments of those who did great things, but it’s also those who committed atrocities, and the idea that this group is up against this unspeakable evil and are they prepared? Are they ready? What have they learned from before? It’s less about grandeur. It’s less about restoring an old age. It’s more about preserving a sense of freedom and not being one of the oppressed.”

FROM THE ASHES Mark Hamill, as Luke, with R2-D2. Speculation is rampant about who will “rise” as the Skywalker of the movie’s title—and how that choice will reflect the way the world has changed since Star Wars debuted in 1977.

The new generation doesn’t have that same connection to the old days that Luke and Leia did. It’s not like their parents destroyed the Old Republic. We don’t even know who their parents were! They’re too young to remember the Empire. They’re just here to clean up the mess they got left with, the disastrous consequences of bad decisions made by earlier generations, and try to survive long enough to see the future. Is any of this resonating with 2019? Might there possibly be a generation around here somewhere that’s worried about the consequences of its own decisions for the future? Star Wars has never been and probably never should be a vehicle for political arguments, but to paraphrase Ursula Le Guin, great science fiction is never really about the future. It’s about the present.

You could even—if you’re into that kind of thing—imagine the story of the new Star Wars trilogy as a metaphor for the making of the new Star Wars trilogy. In fact, I was totally prepared—because I am into that kind of thing!—to try to push this overthought metafictional hot take onto Abrams … but I didn’t have to. Abrams got there ahead of me. “The idea of the movie is kind of how I felt going into the movie as a filmmaker,” he says, “which is to say that I’ve inherited all this stuff, great stuff, and good wisdom, and the good and the bad, and it’s all coming to this end, and the question is, do we have what it takes to succeed?”

Kylo Ren has it all wrong: you can’t bring back the past and become your own grandfather, and you can’t kill the past, either. All you can do is make your peace with it and learn from it and move on. Abrams is doing that with Star Wars—and meanwhile the Resistance is going to have to do that, too, if they really are going to bring this saga to an end. Because we’ve been here before, watching a band of scrappy rebels take down a technofascist empire, and it seemed to work fine at the time—but it didn’t last. The same goes for the Jedi and their struggle with the Sith. To end this story, really end it, they’re going to have to figure out the conditions of a more permanent victory over the forces of darkness. Their past was imperfect at best, and the present is a complete disaster—but the future is all before them. This time, finally, they’re going to get it right.

[dormienschas]

A New Legend Begins Chapter 2

A/N: We finally get to one of the good turning points of the story!!! Currently working on Chapter 3 as I post this chapter! Constructive Criticism is acceptable here! I know these first two chapters don't really have much going on, but chapter 3 is where the story starts to take its turn! So please, enjoy chapter 2 of A New Legend Begins for right now! Feedback and questions are welcomed!!!

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Word Count: 2,890

Chapter Title: The Lowly Farmer Meets the Legend

           The doors to the throne room were slammed open as the King marched through the line of guards up to his throne, the fire emitting from him burning hotter than usual. He looked around the room at the nervous guards and tapped his heavy boot on the floor in irritation. “So, where is he?” There was silence for a few seconds too long and he started to tap his finger on the arm of the throne. “I said, where is he?!” The fire surrounding Enji Todoroki grew bigger with his anger.

           A guard hesitantly threw his hand up and stepped up before properly kneeling. “We don’t know sir. All we know is that he is nowhere in the capitol.”

           The fire blew from the king’s body with anger. “He left!?” He rose from his throne to stand in at the edge of the stairs. “You let him leave the capitol?!”

           The guard coward down in fear and brought the other knee down. “S-sir, Prince Todoroki must have waited until the shift change at night and left. None of us would have known during that time.”

           King Todoroki growled in humiliation and irritation and maybe a bit proud of how smart his own son has become. “Find me the Hunters and make it quick. I have a job for them.” He watched as the guards all saluted him and left the throne room. King Todoroki sighed and began to wait patiently. “Shouto. You will be punished for leaving.” The ruler sat back in his throne and began to tap his finger as he waited for the Hunters to arrive.

           Back into the village just outside the walls of the Capitol of Endeavor, Izuku, Ochako, and Tenya were all getting the punishment of their life in the forms of Inko and Toshinori.

           “What do you think you children are doing not going to school?” Inko pointed her finger in Izuku’s face and he couldn’t help the nervous swallow.

           “And what about bringing a hooded stranger into your home Midoriya? Who knows what this guy’s intentions are! You’re being careless again!” Toshinori also pointed his finger in his face and Izuku couldn’t help the nervous shiver going down his spine as the two towered over him with a threatening gleam in their eyes.

           “That’s not it, Miss. Midoriya! This guy is not a stranger.” Ochako went up to Todoroki and pulled the hood down. “It’s the prince.”

           Inko and Toshinori paused and stared at the heterochromia prince with wide eyes before quickly getting down on a knee in respect. “Oh my gosh. I am so sorry your highness.”

           Todoroki held up a hand to stop the further apologies. “No need for that. I’m trying to stay hidden from the guards. They were only trying to help me out by covering me and please, just call me Todoroki. I’m not much for formalities.”

           Inko was the first to stand up and quickly pull his hand into hers. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you Todoroki! I will be happy to have you stay here for as long as you need! Are you hungry? You probably haven’t had breakfast yet. But, it’s a little late for breakfast now. Maybe brunch? What would you like to eat?”

           “Please mom. Calm down.” Izuku quickly pulled his mom back from the prince to give the man some room to breathe.

           Toshinori was next to properly greet him. “It’s a pleasure to meet you Todoroki. I’m Toshin…”

           “I already know who you are. I’m actually surprised that I am able meet you again after all this time All Might.” Todoroki grabbed his hand and shook it. The whole room was quiet and Toshinori’s face was surprised and shocked, but quickly turned into a grimace when he looked around the room. Everybody was staring at the lanky man.

           “W-wait. Did you just say All Might? As in the legend of the most powerful knight that ever existed, All Might?” Izuku was shaking now. He could not believe that Todoroki just called his master All Might. The very knight that he looked up to his whole life.

           “Yes. This is All Might. He’s not a legend. He’s real and standing right there.” Todoroki pointed at Toshinori, confirming Izuku’s thoughts. “His real name is Toshinori Yagi. He was a very powerful knight back in the day. I was only a child at the time, but I remember him very clearly.”

           “But the legend said he disappeared!” Tenya gestured to the man with wide eyes.

           “Yeah. He disappeared into this village because of the wound he received. He asked the King to leave because of the severity of the injury and retired to this village, leaving his name, All Might, behind and keeping his identity a secret to live peacefully after defeating the Underworld Demon.” Todoroki looked back to Toshinori. “I’m glad to see you’re living well.”

           “Master. Is this true?” Izuku was shaking. This man that has been living with them for years was the All Might. The man he looked up to for so long. The man who has been training him.

           Toshinori cleared his throat and scratched the back of his neck. “I didn’t think you would recognize me Todoroki. But I’m glad you did. I’m glad the people in the castle can still recognize me, never mind the prince himself. You’ve grown up quite a bit.” He turned towards a freaking out Izuku. “Young Midoriya, what Todoroki says is true. I am All Might, your master and motivator.”

           Izuku couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t believe it, but the whole idea of his master being All Might could be plausible. There were many instances, now that he thinks about it, that has him partly believing the unbelievable. Izuku felt himself losing it before the room blacked out and Izuku laid on the floor, passed out from shock.

           “Midoriya?” Izuku groaned and tried to open his eyes a little. His head hurt from the shock of All Might. The thought jostled him awake and he quickly sat up. “Oh. You’re awake.”

           The green haired boy looked over to the lanky blonde man, who could possibly be All Might, and Izuku’s eye widened. “A-All Might. You’re All Might.” Toshinori sighed heavily and scratched the back of his neck and looked out the window. Izuku then noticed that the sun was starting to set.

           “You want to go train before we lose sunlight?” Toshinori was looking at him now with a serious expression. “We should talk too.” He stood up and walked out of his room, leaving a chill down his spine. This might not be a good training session. Izuku sighed and put on his red boots and grabbed his sword to head out into the field.

Toshinori was sitting on the stump like usual, the yellow rays turned into a pale orange as the sun touched the tree line afar. He cleared his throat to gain his master’s attention. “Do you know about the legend of All Might Midoriya?”

           “Yeah. You saved Musutania by yourself and was the Kings’ most trusted knight. You held a power that no other could dream to have. The power itself could also rival that of the Kings’ but you would never use it to overthrow the throne which made you admirable and loyal. But as the legend says, you disappeared after you fought the Underworld Demon, the most powerful Demon from the Kingdom of Demon Leagues. You gained a major injury and after defeating the Underworld Demon back into his own kingdom, before conquering Musutania, you disappeared without a trace. At least, that’s the gist of the story.” Izuku walk onto the large dirt patch in front of Toshinori and got into his basic stance to start warming up.

           “That’s right. My power is extraordinary and helped me push the Underworld Demon back into his own territory. Straighten your right leg. You missed that rule twice already,” he pointed out. “Do you know the name of this power?”

           Izuku stopped moving and gawked at Toshinori. “Your power has a name?”

           The man nodded his confirmation. “The name of the power is One for All and I was not born with it. This power has a unique ability to be passed on from one user to the other to continue growing and to hold the peace of the Kingdom of Musutania.”

           Izuku sucked in a breath and stared at the lanky blonde man before him. “You mean, your power was given to you?”

           “Do you want to know why I’ve been training you Young Midoriya?” Toshinori was now standing up and Izuku watched as the lanky blonde man started to change form, into the familiar sketches in his book. The lanky blonde man before him was no more. All Might stood in front of him, the power radiating from him and making Izuku feel the wall of strength coming at him in waves. “I’ve been training you, so that I could pass this power onto you. You, Young Midoriya, should be the next greatest knight of the Kingdom of Musutania.”

           Izuku’s heart skipped many beats. “You mean, you want me to be the next holder of One for All?”

           “Indeed. You have the heart of a pure knight.” All Might smiled down at the crying boy.

           “B-but what about you?” Izuku remembered a part of the story that he never put thought into. “So, do you really have an injury that was so severe to where you had to retire?”

           Suddenly, there was a blast of air and Toshinori was back to his small self. He sat back on the stump and started to unbutton his white top to reveal a nasty slash on his left side. The wound looked like it was trying to heal but could open at any minute. The skin around it was jagged and scarred. “I missed a step and the Underworld Demon took the opening to attack me. I still pushed through, which probably was another reason as to why the wound won’t heal properly. But as you just witnessed, I’m only able to stay in that form for about five to ten minutes before I revert back.”

           “So, you’re losing your power,” Izuku finished Toshinori’s thoughts.

           “Indeed. So, Young Midoriya, are you willing to take on One for All and train to use this power for the greater good of this kingdom? Will you be the next knight that will defeat all evil and protect the people? Will you be the next All Might?” Toshinori held his hand out towards the young, trembling boy.

           Izuku had to take a few seconds to wipe his tears away and properly face the man. He took the hand that reached out to him and stared into Toshinori’s intimidating teal eyes. “I will.”

           Toshinori smirked grabbed Izuku’s sword and transformed back into All Might. “Now, I need you to hold onto the hilt of this sword with me and the power of One for All will transfer into you.”

           The freckled boy watched as a yellow fire-like glow starting to surround All Might like an aura. His eyes widened as he saw the sword start to shift and grow into a larger blade. “Now, witness the full power of One for All, and take it as yours Young Midoriya.” The yellow glow around All Might was being sucked away by the sword until the glow left the powerful knight and the sword embodied the power before the glow licked at Izuku’s hand and grabbing onto him. The power crept up his arm then, his torso, all the way down to his legs and head. Midoriya himself was now surrounded by this power and Midoriya had to breathe deeply as his heart rate speed up. The yellow suddenly changed color, a seafoam green covered the green haired boy and the fire-like aura began to shift and disappear before coming back as green lightning surrounding him. The aura crackled around him before collecting all at his chest and entering his body. The sword slowly changed back into its original form and so did All Might.

           “Now, Young Midoriya, you have the power of One for All. You will be the next savior of this kingdom.” Toshinori smiled down at the boy and let the sword go.

           However, the sword suddenly came crashing down into the ground along with Izuku’s body, creating cracks into the dirt “What the hell? The sword is heavier!” Izuku had to grab the hilt with both hands to properly hold the sword. “What’s going on?”

           “The sword is heavier because the sword also holds the power of One for All along with its holder. The heavier the blade is, the more power you hold. You must be strong if you can barely hold the blade. You need to train more to properly hold and wield it now that the power infused with the blade.” Toshinori stared at his soon-to-be successor and sighed in relief. “I’m glad I chose you Izuku Midoriya.”

           Izuku looked up at his role model, a gleam of motivation and determination glimmered in his eyes and smiled up at him and held a fist against his heart. “I will not let you down All Might.”

           “Good. Now, we should head back in, the sun is beginning to go below the horizon. We shouldn’t worry Inko.” Toshinori would not want the end of that spoon in his face again, or have the woman yell something about keeping her baby out too late.

           Izuku heaved the sword back into the sheath and was surprised that the sacred blade felt lighter. “That’s odd.”

           “The sheath helps hide and compress the power the sword holds. Makes the blade easier to carry when travelling,” Toshinori looked behind him to see Izuku examining the sheath and smiled to himself. “Always needing to know how everything works huh?”

           Izuku hooked the sheath back on his belt. “Of course! I like to know how magic works and how birthed powers work. But now…” Izuku held up his own have and made a fist, imagining that green lightning surrounding him but shook his head of thoughts that could keep him up all night.

           Toshinori opened the door and gave his trainee one last look for the day before bed. “Goodnight Midoriya.”

           “Goodnight Master Toshinori.”

           Todoroki was in the sitting area of the home, reading a book that Midoriya knew came from the shelf in the far corner of the room. “I see you’re still up. You can sleep in my room. Do you want the bed or?”

           “I can deal with whatever you lay out.” He watched the prince close the book and placed the old text into its proper place on the shelf and followed Izuku into the room. Luckily, Inko already placed the rest of their blankets by his door for him to use and the extra mattress she made a year ago with the small pillows to accompany it. Izuku tried to make the makeshift bed look comfortable. He was still housing the prince and would like to make sure he was comfortable.

           Todoroki sat down and was satisfied. He took off his vest and shoes and shoved himself into the top few blankets. Izuku couldn’t help but stare at the heterochromia prince before he decided to ask the question that’s been bothering him since their run in. “Todoroki.”

           “You want to know my real reason for running away right?” Todoroki looked over at him and Izuku made a sound of confirmation to his question. The prince sighed and placed his hands behind his head. His red and white hair flared across his forehead and puffed air out to moved stray hairs out of his eyes. “I’m not worthy yet.”

           “What? Not worthy?” Izuku sat up a little and placed his arm under his head to roll onto his side.

           “Yes. I’m not worthy to be king yet. There’s still so much to learn and I feel like I know nothing about the kingdom itself, the people I mean, and I’m not strong enough to rule this kingdom yet. I left the capitol to find my worth. I’m not returning until I do.” The prince looked over to the freckled boy. “All Might was training you right?”

           Izuku nodded in confirmation. “Yeah. He’s been training me for a year and a half so far.”

           “Hm. It’s been awhile. He has been weakened majorly since I last saw him. Can I ask a personal question?” Todoroki turned onto his side to fully acknowledge him. “Are you going to be his successor?”

           Izuku swallowed and stared wide eyed at the prince before calming back down. “Yeah.”

           “Did he already give you that power of his? One for All I mean.” Todoroki was looking into his eyes now and Izuku was starting to think that Todoroki was asking him for help in some way.

           “Yeah. Today actually.”

           “I figured that’s what you two were doing.” Todoroki turned onto his back again. “I’m glad.” Izuku stared at Todoroki. “I’m glad he chose someone he trusts. I’m glad he chose someone that I can trust.”

           Todoroki turned away and Izuku could see his breathing slow down into a steady rhythm. Izuku couldn’t help the smile that graced his features and turned towards the ceiling of his room. “Goodnight Prince Todoroki.”