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ayakashiramblings · 5 years ago

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Dawn and Twilight’s Social Media Accounts

Kuya

@NevermoreButSnore.

1230 followers.

Yes, I copied Edgar Allan Poe. Yes, I’m not sorry about the rhyme. Or calling him out.

Not that he really cares.

Insists that he is a headcanon creator on Twitter

Everyone who follows him knows that he is lying.

If we really had to classify him as a writer, it would one who posts those way-too-accurate posts about writers complaining about writing.

Like the notebook hoarding one. Not that anyone here in the fandom is guilty of that, haha... haha... ha.

Ironically is one of the more popular ones out of the whole group.

His flat responses and laziness are way too prominent to NOT be noticed.

If you actually tentatively sneak into his DMs though, for writing tips, he will patiently listen and... rather bluntly advise you.

It’s still advice though and is always the type to check out and reblog any short fanfics.

It just has to be weird, sporadic hours because he is the type to fall asleep with the phone on his face.

Koga Kitamikado

1230 followers.

@CapitalKayKay

Listen, there is a reason why a lot of successful businesses chose Instagram as their social media so Koga is no exception.

What makes his account stand out, as you can see from his rather cheeky username, is that he is willing to be an open book.

So he isn’t constantly shoving down any products he is sponsoring or whatever piece he is endorsing.

It’s more of genuinely wanting to hang out and explore what the world has to offer.

Whenever he posts a picture of the gang together, he’s the one tagging all of them, even the ones with hard usernames.

And there’s always a nice comment thanking whoever hosted the fun time or being appreciative of the area and the locals.

It helps that he has a sense of humour so the memes are always just the right amount of teasing but nothing too bad that will deter potential clients.

Because of his down-to-earth nature, he reels everyone in.

Uses the space to invite everyone following him on any celebration/casual outing.

The thing is... he has a lot of followers.

So... good luck.

Aoi

1150 followers.

@DeredArtTooTsun

Look, even he knows he is a Tsundere. It’s a small victory getting him to acknowledge that, let alone use it to brand himself here.

But god, he’s the man I’m most jealous of on Tumblr.

PERFECT BULLET JOURNALS AND SKETCHES.

Got the spreads that literally define ‘aesthetic’, a perfect lineup of art materials even with pencils that have their numbers faded, and somehow, the emotions can pass through the paper and screen.

Even does tutorials on perspectives, positions with cute annotations. Just don’t praise them for being adorable though and focus on improving your skills, dummy.

Ironically though, it’s his mindless vents that get the most number of notes.

It helps that the pics include him, a very cute... I mean... manly boy screaming at very, very hot men.

A bit baffled but whatever it takes to get commissions.

That’s right, he takes them. At least there is a back-up option should the restaurant ever go out of business.

Spoiler Alert: Still doesn’t get paid as much. People, have you seen the number of talented artists here? Aoi might be in the rankings but it’s still hard attracting business.

Support your fandom artists, everyone!

Ginnojo

1000 followers. Just nice.

Ginnojoz

Poor grandpa didn’t intend to put that extra ‘z’ letter, it was a typo because scales don’t get along with haptic touch.

And unfortunately, doesn’t understand how to change it.

Once, he was huge on Vine before it died. The end of an era that he has to witness again. RIP.

Gin-Gin, it is RIGHT. THERE.

Expect to find his super short self-defence videos and Book Club Readings on YouTube.

Girls actually appreciate his instructions and attempts to provide help even if they are alone.

He did try to respond to the nice ones and actually succeeds.

It’s always easier getting to know the language of women when you don’t really see/touch them.

A deep baritone is perfect for some sexy excerpt of a historical novel...

Until he corrects the setting.

In fact, he sometimes rage-quits and rewrites it.

Unlike Kuya, him doing those established ideas actually catches on.

Yura and Gaku

1500 followers.

MelodyandTheBeat.

... Tik-tokers. Tik-Tok people?

WTH do you call them?

As you can see, they are the most popular since it’s combined stardom.

Look, their covers and music mixes are beautiful.

They always have their own version that somehow combines traditional Japanese music... with k-pop.

And of course, food porn.

Just be grateful there isn’t that awful squelching sound you hear when you consume jelly or the breaking of chilli seeds.

Listen, I usually separate them because it’s never nice to be grouped as having the same activity as your twin.

But in this case, being both equally beautiful AND talented sells their uploads.

Even the cringy ones made because Yura is such a Luddite.

Like just turning his head and being amazed his hair can turn so many colours, being impressed with each tilt until he gets to a black shade.

Suddenly hurls the phone away. Gee, wonder why? Guess black isn’t the new... black for him?

Gaku sometimes even introduces new filters he created based on Yura’s random requests that strangely get circulated on the site.

Oji

550 followers all know Oji-Sanz

Unlike Ginnojo, he deliberately adds the ‘z’ letter to sound cool.

You wanna know what’s worse?

He actually uses Facebook.

Aoi decides to give up on him. Nobody blames the poor student.

It’s apparently some old form of social media? Never used it, no sirree.

Always changing his relationship status but at the end of the day, he’s single and ready...

To post about all the lovely ladies destined to enter his restaurant.

He thinks it’s great publicity.

It really isn’t but one good thing about Oji is he includes EVERYONE.

This man respects his customers and always helps advertise their wares, especially if their connections lead to more resources.

And less grocery shopping on his part.

Does post the recipes he and Aoi created but will never use because the Milk Hall had a certain style to follow.

Officially makes Aoi his son... on Facebook at least.

Aoi now tolerates the account.

Barely.

Toichiro Yuri

WhatheMeSay has 1231 followers!

In your face @CapitalKayKay and @NevermorebutSnore!!

You know, I’m so glad that there aren’t any users with those names because I’d be so scared of accidentally tagging them.

Also, geddit? Because... What the fox say?

Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding... yeah, I’ll stop.

Pinterest Guy. And actually does spend on his ‘hobby’ to show off to everyone.

It does boost you and your father’s sales so there is nothing to complain about.

His boards are always alliterated just to sound super catchy and it works so long as he gets the right emoji.

Kabuki plays better be promoted or else.

Filled with candid pictures of his victims all taken at different angles you didn’t know were possible and in varying degrees of hilariously misunderstood positions.

He even supplies a donation link, heavily leveraged by his followers, since there are incentives tied to it like early access.

A bit suspicious the photos look like cropped out parts from Koga’s posts and some of the text resembles Kuya’s... er... wisdom?

He takes an unholy amount of selfies when he thinks no one is looking and so they are always surprised upon finding them on the Selfie Board.

There is a locked board that no one can access, even his followers who are his comrades in real life.

It’s actually just one picture in there.

It’s you smiling and giggling at a joke of his. Not even you know it’s been taken. Guess he is as soft as his fur, eh? He better come out soon or else.

Kuro

Kuroruohtumbling

Ginnojo is unfortunately just old enough to have grown up with Scooby-Doo to understand the reference.

Snapchat, like a snapping snake! Hiss!

Unironically loves the puppy face.

Ok, but the glimpses of his stunts help show snippets of the circus life.

He and his whole troupe family will even don costumes best suited for certain filters.

Sometimes ropes in Ginnojo... and by sometimes, I mean enough for everyone to start wondering if the stoic man is part of the act.

To be fair, he randomly hugs people and ranks them here.

You, of course, were number 1.

Now, if only he didn’t use the bloody song to announce it but you forgive him.

Maybe even risks revealing his ayakashi form before deleting the message to you.

Loves making international fans and learning various languages through each post, sort of like flashcards but animated and more fun!

And with 1200 followers, he might become a polyglot like Koga.

Shizuki

Everyone bans him from creating one.

Because they know the power of his roasts is too great.

Little do they know he goes undercover.

Underground.

And under their noses.

That’s right. His rant town on... MySpace.

Unapologetically uses a good chunk of his salary from serving the House of Yuri just to get nifty themes that help with the whole burning process.

Look, there’s a reason he and Oji are friends.

This is why.

Their taste in women seems fine but we really have got to do something about their affinity towards DEAD PLACES.

To be fair, he made the whole thing drunk but that doesn’t mean he should maintain it SOBER.

He just feels that it is a waste of space if he doesn’t utilize it.

And it also becomes kind of cathartic. From the intrusive hugs to his master and Sir Gaku irking each other to no end, he needs it.

Zero followers... but only because it’s super private.

It becomes 1 the moment you jokingly create an account.

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son-of-alderaan · 6 years ago

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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.

#star wars tros #the rise of skywalker #vanity fair #long post

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eleanor-writes-stuff · 6 years ago

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a language that i never knew existed before - Day 21

For @senauma, who requested a modern AU where Rey and Ben meet at work, with love at first sight and mutual pining because that’s the good stuff, y’all.

Thanks for this super fun prompt, and I hope you like it!

Last call for prompts, Reylo fam! Don’t forget to drop by and leave a request!

25 Days of Reylo Also available on AO3

[11/22/18, 09:18 AM] To: [email protected] From: [email protected] Subject: Re: Finalizing

Yeah, I can’t believe we’re actually done.

Flying in next Tuesday for the final meeting. Looks like we might finally get to meet in person after all. Can’t wait to see you, Rey.

- Ben

The thing is, Tuesday at the final pre-merger meeting won’t be the first time they meet in person.

Not for Rey, anyway.

The first time she ever met Ben Solo was at the press conference announcing the merger six months ago, a whole month before they were both designated their companies’ respective merger liaisons and assigned to work with each other. He was up in the front, at the long table along with Luke and Lando and all the other stakeholders, while she and Finn had their backs plastered to the wall at the very end of the packed room, a whole ocean of press and cameras between them.

Even still, Ben Solo had been impossible to miss. Taller than anyone else in the room, he’d drawn her eye the second he emerged from the side entrance and took his seat next to Lando. The way his eyes scanned his surroundings while everyone else spoke, the way his quiet yet sure voice filled the room whenever he was called upon, the little smile he’d flashed the cameras when Poe cracked a joke during the group photo… every single detail about Ben Solo from that day has stuck with Rey ever since, made all the more vivid by the fact that she’s gotten well acquainted with those eyes and that voice and even occasionally that smile thanks to the last few months of video conferences and late-night calls.

And now…. now she gets to experience all of it in person again. Of course some part of her had known that Ben and the rest of the Cloud City team would eventually relocate, that in the near future he might very well be a part of her everyday life. But knowing that two companies are about to merge and processing the fact that the man you’re half in love with will soon be just five minutes away are two very, very different things, and Rey is only now figuring that out.

[11/26/18, 07:32 PM] To: [email protected] From: [email protected] Subject: Re: Finalizing

Just leaving the office. Everything’s ready for tomorrow morning! It’s been fun working with you on this, but I honestly can’t wait for this merger to be over and done with so that we can all go back to normal. Whatever normal ends up looking like once the country’s two biggest tech companies become one, that is.

Have a safe flight. I’ll see you soon, Ben.

- Rey

Soon can’t come quickly enough. If it were up to Ben, he would’ve flown out Monday afternoon and arrived just in time to ask Rey to dinner after work. Thanks to Lando, though, they don’t end up leaving for the airport until five, and when they do get there it’s only to be told that there’s a two-hour delay.

By the time they arrive in Yavin, it’s nearly midnight. He debates writing to Rey throughout the ride to the hotel, but if the past few months have taught him anything about her, it’s that she’s as much of a night owl as he is. Not to mention breathtakingly radiant and smart and funny and–

Is it possible to be in love with someone you’ve never met? Rey, at least, has the advantage of having seen him in person way back in May, albeit from across a crowded room. But Ben has never seen her outside of a screen, and for the umpteenth time he curses himself for leaving in a rush that day rather than sticking around for the post-conference mixer where he would have been introduced to her.

Instead, the very first time he laid eyes on her was during a video conference, when she was just one of the dozen people whose names and positions his uncle had spouted off before calling the meeting to order. Even then, though, squished between Luke and Poe and dressed in a non-descript black shift dress, Rey had been the most interesting person in the room, and he’d found his eyes drawn to her again and again. Sometimes Ben wonders if maybe his meddling uncles had noticed that, if that’s why Luke and Lando had partnered them up shortly after.

Even if that’s the case, Ben can’t bring himself to be mad at them. Hell, he’ll let them gloat about it as much as they want if it actually leads to anything.

If Rey actually lets him into her life.

Ben (00:12): Just landed. Heading to hotel now. I’ll see you in the morning. Sleep well, Rey.

She doesn’t see his message until the next morning, when she wakes up at six in order to get to the office extra early and make sure everything’s ready for the meeting. It’s really more of a formality at this point, just some signatures on a dotted line to cap off months and months of negotiations, but Rey still feels the need to check that everything’s perfect. Even now, four years since she first started working for Skywalker Tech, there’s a constant need to prove herself, to keep earning her place. Maybe, she’d mused to Ben once, when their late-night call about merging HR protocols turned personal, deep down I still can’t believe that I finally belong somewhere and I keep thinking that I’m going to fuck it all up and then it’ll be gone, just like that. A pause, and then– Wow, I should really go to sleep.

Ben had laughed then, a rich, raspy sound that made her toes curl. A little bit of psychoanalysis never hurt anyone, he’d said, and in her mind Rey pictured him smiling at her, shrugging those broad shoulders of his, maybe even leaning in to brush messy strands of hair away from her face.

And out of nowhere, a wave of homesickness unlike any she’d ever known before had hit her right in the gut, a particular brand of longing that would take her months to recognize as pining.

So now here she sits, the first to arrive at a meeting where she’ll be seated next to the man she’s been pining after for the past six months. It’s eighty-thirty, half an hour before the meeting is scheduled to start, and Rey has gone through the contract in front of her at least four times this morning alone. She’s about to pick it up for a fifth time when the door opens, and–

“Ben.”

Rey (06:04): Sorry, just saw this Had an early night to get ready for this ridiculously early morning Anyway, off to the office now Would you maybe wanna get lunch after the meeting?

He’s supposed to leave with the rest of the team at eight-thirty, but the second Ben wakes up to find Rey’s text, he knows there’s no way he’s going to be able to concentrate on the meeting unless he talks to her first.

He skips the gym, showers and gets dressed in thirty minutes, and orders an Uber a little after eight. It’s a twenty-minute ride, thirty with light traffic, and Ben spends all twenty-three minutes scrolling up and down his chat with Rey to figure out whether she’s asking him to lunch as colleagues or friends or…

By the time they pull up to his uncle’s company, Ben still hasn’t figured it out – par for the course when it comes to his relationship with Rey, really. She’s been a mystery since day one, this stranger who sets him at ease with just one smile, this voice coming from tinny speakers that somehow soothes him more than anything else in the world. Ben has gone all his life looking for a place where he can finally find peace, spent years exploring countryside mansions and remote mountains and exotic islands, but of course he would find home in a pair of hazel eyes and a lilting accent and a soul that feels like the missing part of his.

If his uncles could hear him now, would they regret unleashing someone like him on poor, unsuspecting Rey who probably just thinks of him as a work friend? Or would they just fist-bump each other and ask to give a toast at the wedding?

Ben grimaces at the thought, makes a conscious effort to rein himself in as he steps onto the elevator. Lunch first – whether or not it’s a date – and then he’ll maybe consider everything else. The elevator ride is quicker than expected, and within minutes he’s standing outside the conference room, watching Rey through the glass walls.

She has her back to him, but he can see that she has her hair down in waves and she’s wearing a cream-colored dress and he can just picture the look of concentration on her face as she goes through the contract, the familiar sight of a slight furrow between her brows and her lower lip trapped between her teeth emblazoned in his mind after months of working together.

Precious minutes tick by while Ben tries to compose himself and gather his nerve to walk in. When Rey reaches for the discarded contract yet again, he knows it’s time.

“Ben,” she breathes before the door has even closed behind him, before he’s even had a chance to meet her eye, and then she’s throwing the contract aside, pushing her chair back and standing up and–

“Rey,” he murmurs, crosses the room and falters with only inches between them. Rey hesitantly raises her arms and he haltingly stumbles closer and then suddenly they’re hugging and somehow, impossibly, it’s not awkward at all.

His arms wrap around her waist and hers circle his neck and when she laughs, a puff of warm air dances across the exposed skin of his neck. “Hi,” Rey breathes with a slight giggle, dazed and in disbelief. Her lips barely move against his skin but he shudders anyway, pulls her closer and squeezes her hips.

“Hi,” Ben echoes, lips brushing against her temple. She sighs and rests her head on his shoulder, and if it weren’t for the meeting he’d be happy to stay like this forever but–

“I got your text,” he tells Rey, still holding her tight. She doesn’t say anything, just tenses the slightest bit in his arms.

Ben pulls back, and she reluctantly loosens her hold on him so that they’re looking at each other now, and he shouldn’t feel this comfortable around someone he’s only just met, shouldn’t feel at home with a stranger, but he does and so the words escape him without thought.

“Rey… did you ask me out?”

She stares at him for the longest time, and with each second that passes by without a denial comes the ever-increasing urge to smile until he’s grinning at her like a fool and she’s beaming at him like the sun and–

“I suppose I did,” Rey laughs, her hands still twined behind his neck and his arms still slung around her middle, and Ben’s pretty sure he had a dream like this once, a dream where they were holding each other and dancing and smiling while all their loved ones watched. “Is that… is that okay?” she asks, her smile dimming.

“It’s more than okay,” Ben hurries to assure her, to put that smile back on her face. “It’s perfect. You’re perfect. God, I can’t believe–”

“That you’re finally here?” she interrupts, slides her fingers into the curls at the base of his neck. “Yeah, me neither.”

That you feel the same way, he’d meant to say. That I could be so lucky. That home is you in my arms.

But they’ve got time for all that and more, now. They’ve got time for lunch dates and long walks and all the things he could never tell her over the phone back when he still didn’t know how right she would feel in his arms.

So instead, Ben pulls her back in and rests his cheek on her head. “I’m here now, sweetheart. I’m here to stay.”

“Good,” Rey murmurs, lips grazing the side of his neck. “Because now that I’ve finally found you...”

She doesn’t say it yet, just as he doesn’t. But they both trade an unspoken promise they’ll give voice to soon enough.

Now that I’ve finally found you…

… I’m never letting go.

The constant switch in POVs kinda bugs me, but other than that I’m... actually okay with this, even though it didn’t turn out anything like the fic I set out to write and it somehow ended up being more than two thousand words. I hope you enjoyed it as well, and thanks for reading!

As always, please don’t hesitate to like/reblog/comment.

#reylo #reyben #kylo ren/rey #rey/ben solo #rey/kylo ren #star wars #rey #ben solo #kylo ren #ficlet: language that i never knew #my fics

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ghostmartyr · 7 years ago

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Okay. Let’s try this again. But healthy-like.

...Which, since it’s me, means religious stuff. I understand if reading about how I want to blow my brains out is easier to stomach.

Things are bad, but not insurmountably bad. I have a solid support system. The monetary side of that support system scares me to death, but nothing has gone away yet. Even if it does, I am supposedly devoutly religious enough to believe in miracles, and believe that divine intervention is very literally the only reason any of my life has been possible.

There’s no reason to think that’s going to change. The fact that I don’t find that entirely comfortable is between me and God, and the more energy I put into that, the more it’ll be okay. Life is bad enough that only a miracle can save me, and I believe in miracles. That’s like the opposite of a problem.

In theory. Practical application of said theory is lost somewhere between wanting to shoot myself and deciding to announce to the general public that I want to shoot myself. Every time I point out to myself that my faith says I’ll be okay because God’s always there for me, another, deeply cynical part of me points out that He was also there for me when I had sepsis, and if I’m being honest, that was the most horrifying experience of my life.

Knowing that I can come back from anything really just fills me with existential dread, because you know, I have seen a fair share of ‘anything,’ and I don’t care for it. I don’t want to know that I can survive anything. I want to be safe from anything happening to me.

Historically, I am the person who ends up eaten by a whale. Or I guess it wasn’t actually a whale? My Bible literacy is made of fail, but the point is, me and God are still in the “Do I have to?” phase of our relationship.

The current unwanted task is living.

To which the answer is no, I don’t have to keep living. However badly I screw this up, there’s an eternity waiting for me, and I can flip the switch whenever I want.

This life doesn’t have an eternity. It’s a unique, temporary, instant of existence.

Putting off forever for one more sliver of that instant, just to see where it goes, isn’t that hard. I do it by accident all the time. I go to bed, and wake up breathing.

I like my bed. It has a tiger bedspread. It’s thinner than it used to be, and I can’t make myself make the damn thing, but it’s snug, it’s mine, and I don’t see a problem with it. I feel pretty confident in saying that death would irrevocably change the interaction I have with my bed.

It’s temporary, so I should make the most of it. No one else is going to care about my bed or how my bookcase is organized, and even though I have days I don’t care either, there are days when I do, so what the hell.

Everything hurts a lot right now. I have zero control over the physical. Again, miracle needed, so I can just relax and coast and. you know, suffer. A lot. A real awful lot. An unfair lot.

...Yeah, no happy silver lining answers for the bad days or moods. They’re bad, I tolerate them badly, and I scare people. But I’ve been having a bad day for months now, and it hasn’t stopped me from doing things that aren’t so bad. Infinity War was amazing. I wrote 9000 words of a hs au my brain is convinced no one cares about. Several people have told me they enjoy it, so I know my brain’s lying about that, but believing that no one cares means that, while no one’s cared, I’ve written 24k words of story in a handful of months. Story I kind of dig. All while being horrifically depressed.

I think that turned into a silver lining answer.

Fuck, I don’t know, man, if I’d offed myself I wouldn’t get to write about Ymir wanting to bang a cheerleader, and that’s clearly the pinnacle of what I should be doing with my life.

I can never remember any of that during the bad times, and that sucks, but hey, maybe writing it down will make the memory a little deeper.

So, uh, positives.

Despite certain inclinations, I have not actually committed murder. Every tiny setback right now feels like the end of the world, but being able to wake up in the morning and hate the world would seem to indicate that it’s still there, so it’s just a very, very bad feeling, not real.

I have very little concept of what’s real or not, since my emotions sort of exist in peekaboo limbo. Babies have no concept of object permanence, and right now, neither do parts of me. On the one hand, awkward, on the other, it means that the tempest of rage is only summoned when provoked. Yay team.

Less positive, it is not good that suicidal rage has developed as a coping mechanism to doing slightly poorly in a video game, and once it’s started, it’s hard to shut off. I get it. I don’t feel like a person, so I judge myself based on accomplishments, and because of my health, those accomplishments are things like doing slightly okay at a video game, and I’m letting my entire sense of worth hinge on that. Along with other external factors.

This is bad, and unhealthy, and since I hate myself, I’m probably going to keep doing it. Not in a, “oh you scamp, haven’t you learned yet?” way, it’s just entirely possible that the fact that I can sometimes aim in a video game is really the most positive thing I can say about myself some days, and I can’t see a way to delicately switch myself over to understanding that it really doesn’t matter without losing one of my few bright spots.

But I am clearly overly investing in certain things, and I need to get into the habit of just turning the damn game off if it’s making me that angry. I know the moods come on fast, and I know I have delusions of conquering them before they go anywhere, and sometimes, I even break through the other side.

Oh well. I don’t like feeling like that. I hate that feeling enough that I should get into the habit of cutting my losses at the first sign of self-loathing. I know I feel like there is nothing else I can do with my time, but there is. I can watch anime. I can play other games. I own a game where the entire strategy revolves around killing yourself. I love it, and it keeps failure entertaining. I have other outlets.

Also, obsessive cycles have tripped me up my whole life. This is just one more, and it needs to be handled the same as all the others. No, it won’t be fun, and maybe I will be bored out of my skull, but that’s better than frothing with rage.

And I really should be watching more anime. I don’t know what it says about my mental health that I am actively avoiding things I have a long history of loving, but I’m guessing it’s nothing good, and even if I can’t fix the underlying problem, I can address the symptoms. Go watch more cartoons. Write more. Any day now, I can lock myself in my room and finish my Lego X-Wing (Poe’s, so it’s black, and so very badass, and no, I don’t know why it’s been collecting dust, but again, I’m sure it’s a sign of nothing good).

So the argument that I need to keep doing the things that make me angry is moot, because it isn’t actually all I have. It just feels that way, and all of my feelings are wrong and damaged, so I should stop listening to them.

...In a healthy, rising above way. No a repressing way. That is at least half of the reason posts like these end up happening.

None of this is really making me feel better right now, since I’m in a moment where I’m less than sure I have feelings, but that isn’t the point. I learn better when I put things into my own words, and I haven’t been taking care of myself lately. I don’t know that it’s even possible for me to do better than I have been, but the end result is the same, and the end result has me really tired.

This is like a benign to-do/ponder list. Maybe it will make an impression, maybe it won’t, but at least one more time, I went through the motions of trying to sort life and its greys out instead of painting the whole thing black.

Hopefully that something something. I dunno, I’m kind of a wreck, and I lost my perceived point more times than I want to count. I think I’m done here.

Except for saying thanks to the people who responded to the more... head explodey post. I’m bad at saying thank you, and letting people know how much they mean to me in general. I get embarrassed. Usually, when I hit my meltdown point, I know, on some level, I will find my calm again. Receiving kindness when I could have kept my mouth shut and gotten over it makes me uncomfortable. Especially when I know it’s probably going to happen again. People help me out so much, and with such regularity, and it kills me that it’s not enough, because it’s more than I could have ever asked for. I don’t know how to say thank you without feeling ashamed the next time. It’s like I failed, and dragged all of you down with me by letting you believe you helped me.

When that’s a really, really incomplete view. It helps. It always helps. It isn’t the magic bullet, but it always means the world, and it always bolsters me for whatever the next thing waiting for me is. I really wish I could say that more often, because it would be great if you guys could know it. But, you know, shy. Cagey about being vulnerable. Suicidal ponderings okay, heartfelt appreciation of someone’s value is overly mushy and something to fear. Obviously.

Also, I’m me. I let loads of stuff go unsaid because with the important things, there are times I feel it strongly enough that the thought of bringing it back to earth where you need to tell people that it exists for them to know that---unspoken understandings shade a lot of my relationships. Then I end up horribly insecure because I don’t know how many boundaries I made up or we actually both agree on, so I don’t know why I keep thinking it’s a good way to treat people.

What I mean by all of that, is thanks. For being a large part of why I’m still here. I wish less of you knew what I was going through. I hope things improve for all of us, and I hope we’re all around for a good long time to share the evidence of that.

#x is totally a fandom

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mojorising74 · 7 years ago

Text

I am a Monster. Let me tell you why.

So, I have had many people really want to know why I didn’t enjoy The Last Jedi and I’ve held back answering because the film is fresh and I don’t want to ruin anyone else’s experience. I did post a four word review of the film on Facebook (”That was... not good.”) and I was stunned to discover that this opinion was not a popular one. Literally stunned. So stunned I actually began to question my own thoughts on the film.

And taking some time away from the film and considering all the moments in the film I can recall, (I’ve only seen it once) I’ve decided to alter my review.

That was... really not very good.

So, here we go. I’m gonna break this down in the order as it was experienced by me. I’m not gonna go back and edit this, so I apologize for typos. But I really don’t want to spend any more time on this then I have to. This feels like my eulogy to Star Wars. And I don’t want to linger here.

First off, the opening crawl. This is a weird one, contested by many, except those in the theater with me. The crawl was slanted, drifting slightly off to the right of the screen. It was weirdly noticeable by everyone in my group. We were slightly off to the left of center in the audience, but measuring the distance at the top of the screen to the scroll on our side vs the distance on the other side made us feel really confident that that the scroll was in fact slanted. Like, Rian Johnson was putting his own slant on things (I see what he did there). Or maybe the projector was tilted. Either way, I missed the entire opening crawl because my brain opted to obsess over this detail. I’m willing to accept most of the responsibility here, but yeah. Slanted crawl pulled me out of Star Wars and made me think about how crawls were shot on a plate and how easy it would be to tilt the camera to give it a new cinematic flavor and blah blah blah. Basically the slanted crawl had no bearing on my overall enjoyment of the film, other than I had retained nothing from the crawl going in and the movie was going to have to stand on it’s own cinematically, with no summary backstory.

Good or bad, in the interest of full disclosure, I present this fact for your judgement.

Yeah, it’s gonna be that kind of review.

Right off the bat we get the first ESB call back of an evacuation shuttle leaving a planet while the First Order looms in the background. From the trailers, I’m already expecting an AT-AT walker snow planet battle, so immediately I’m put on the defensive that the film is not gonna learn from criticisms of The Force Awakens and is going to attempt a rehash of “greatest hit” moments from the greatest Star Wars film. George Lucas referred to this as “poetry” when he recalled certain elements in the prequels, saying “They rhyme.” The new films seem to be seriously leaning in to this theory, but it feels like fan service rather than nuanced storytelling.

I’m disappointed by this but it is in no way a deal breaker. Back to the movie.

Poe, by himself with no squadron waiting, decides to face off the First Order’s new weapon (The Dreadnaught) by flying his tiny x-wing to meet them. We are then subjected to a laurel and hardy routine sponsored by Verizon Wireless, where General Hux is made out to be a total buffoon and completely incompetent. (People will remember that one of everyone’s favorite part of the prequels was how the robot army was totally incompetent and easily out smarted by our clever heroes. Or, the opposite of that.)

But this scene also made me wonder about the intelligence of our hero as well. He flies out to meet the star destroyers and only then does he decide to charge up his boosters for his daring plan? “But Carl, he was playing it by ear!” No, the generals on the resistance ship clearly know what his plan is and disapprove. So, Poe actively decides to show up for this fight completely unprepared. But whatever. That’s a nit pick. I know that, but these things start to weigh on me. See, it wasn’t a story element that he needed more time to charge the boosters, it was a purposefully extended scene to stretch out a “can you hear me now” joke at the sake of plausibility.

Disagree with me? Think of the scene like this.

Hux gives his speech about how he will not take prisoners (instead of just shooting the guy out of the sky which would have delivered that message so much more succinctly).

Poe says his first line “I’m holding for General Hux.”

Hux looks confused for a moment, but quickly realizes he’s being played. “Blow him out of the sky!”

Cut to: Poe’s ship where his engine charge is ready and he blasts off and away.

All the same story beats with a quick, satisfying laugh that doesn’t stop the story or undermine the competency of the characters involved.

Speaking of competency, that brings up my next note. Poe is a fucking Mary Sue. Holy shit. The next sequence of Poe destroying ALL but one of the cannons recalls one of my least favorite moments in Force Awakens. That one shot where Finn is watching Poe fly around bulls-eyeing something like NINE tie fighters and several ground troops without even breaking a sweat. It sets up this ridiculous expectation, that either Poe is that much better than everyone else in either the Resistance or First Order, making everyone else depressingly bad at their jobs, or him impossibly good. Either way, it’s lazy story telling.

We’ve seen good pilots in both of the previous trilogies, all of them having force powers to help them fight at elevated levels, but I’ve never felt, watching any of the other films, that one pilot was enough to single handedly sway any battle. Battles in the previous films always felt epic and sweeping. Poe feels like an OP video game character. The kind that inspires patches to reduce his power because he kills the fun of playing the game and takes away the sense of menace from the foes he faces.

So, we’ll skip the next few nit picks; (bombs “falling” in “space”; why are space bombers slow when there is no gravity or atmosphere? Why are bomb bays triggered by a single button garage door opener? Why would you waste bombers on a mission that clearly calls for a missle or.. an unmanned vehicle blasting into hyper space? We’ll get to that later cuz holy fuck.)

I want to point out that I’m getting nit picky at this point, but watching the film, I have NOT checked out. Still engaged. Still excited. There is some Star Wars shit happening and I am in for the ride! Woo hoo! Snoke is pissed and is gonna murder the fuck outa that buffoon Hux for letting the Resistance escape into hyper space.

So, the rebels come out of hyperspace and Leia casually mentions that she has a tracking device to help Rey find her way home.

LITERALLY MOMENTS LATER, the First order leaps out of hyper space and everyone starts screaming “They tracked us some how!” My brain, which has been literally processing story elements that are fed to me as they are fed to me immediately makes the connection between the First Order tracking the Resistance and the bracelet on Leia’s arm. Those mother fuckers are tracking that shit, and that means they can also find Rey, which means Rey and Luke are in danger as well. Hux even says “We have them tied to the end of the line.” And this is further cemented as what is happening when Snoke suddenly forgives Hux like he’s the best general who ever lived. Like maybe he just explained to Snoke that they found the tracking signal and he’s about to serve up Luke Motherfucking Skywalker.

Except, that’s not what happened. What actually happened is that the First order had finally perfected some 50 year old Imperial technology that was briefly mentioned in Rogue One. Hux didn’t have a clever plan that pleased Snoke. He had some technology. Technology that Snoke would have already known about. Snoke sent Hux back to work like he nailed it, when he should have been like “You fucking idiot, you are the luckiest son of a bitch in the world that you completed that technology cuz we should have finished these guys already. I’m taking a body part. Get back to work.”

And the secret space tracker that Leia had? Didn’t need it. Finn steals it briefly in a cowardly attempt to save the girl he has a crush on, But other than that, it has almost no bearing on the story. Rey uses her connection to Kylo to fly back and surrender to him. The tracker was only used as a plot device to introduce Rose, and to show Finn in a most unheroic light. Again. A familiar bell rang many times in The Force Awakens.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves, because the best moment in the movie happened before this and I want to talk about it.

Kylo and the first order have caught the resistance with their pants down and they are fucking shit up. Kylo cruises in on the lead cruiser, aims at the bridge, and suddenly senses his mother standing there. Overcome with emotion, Kylo realizes that he can’t kill his mother. That doing that would mean there is no chance for his redemption. And he CHOOSES TO SPARE HER LIFE!

But oh shit, two other fighters are cruising with him and they dont hesitate to fire on the bridge. There is an explosion and Leia is sucked out into space.

Ladies and gentleman, this was possibly the greatest moment in Star Wars history. Leia was dead. Her death had powerful meaning. In the moment of Kylo’s redemption, he has it stolen away by others. His path to forgiveness destroyed. He will never be forgiven by the other characters in the film. he is doomed to fight as evil because the forces of good will give him no quarter for killing their general. He is a cursed man. His guilt will know no bounds.

I sat there in the cinema, speechless. Completely destroyed emotionally, openly weeping. Carrie Fisher leaves the film, her character arc complete, her death a meaningful and truly shocking moment in the film. Absolutely stunning.

And then she opens her eyes. And I start crying for a different reason. She holds out her hand and force pulls herself to safety, ignoring the other heroes on the bridge who were also blown out into space. She chooses to use her magic powers to save herself and let everyone else die.

Like a fucking hero.

I was stunned at how terrible this moment plays on screen. Truly stunned. Leia had literally just given a speech on how soldiers die heroes but never commanders. Her first chance to put her money where her mouth is, she ignores her own advice and saves her own skin instead.

This also gave me the stunning revelation that Leia would not be dying in this film, because as bad as Rian Johnson is at Star Wars, he’s not so bad to miraculously save a character only to kill her off later because her epic heroic death is still waiting in the wings. Knowing that Carrie Fisher had died made me feel like her character would never get the incredible exit from the saga that was just missed in the preceding opportunity. Princess Leia will die off screen between films. Or she will be digitally reincarnated. But neither of those things serve her memory or her character. The Force Awakens had a lot of missed opportunities, but none of them like this missed moment here.

Meanwhile Rey is trying to convince Luke Skywalker to come back and he insists that he has no intention of ever returning. WHY THE FUCK DID YOU MAKE A MAP TO WHERE YOU WERE HIDING? WHAT THE FUCK AM I WATCHING? WHAT THE FUCK! WHAT THE FUCK!

While we’re here, Chewie eating Porgs while they gather around him to ponder the deaths of their kin is nothing less than horrifying. These creatures are sentient and aware they are bing eaten, and instead of running for their lives, they stare sadly at the creature eating them. These creatures are not long for this world. This is my only note on Porgs.

They’re... fine.

Also, ghost Yoda can shoot lightning bolts? Is that something they could always do? Why the fuck are we fighting a war when theres an army of lightning powered ghost warriors wandering the cosmos. Hey Ghost Yoda why don’t you make yourself useful and ghost your way into a star destroyer and lightning the fuck out of power core?

Ghost Yoda shooting lightning fundamentally breaks Star Wars.

Moving on...

Seriously. We’re just getting started.

Back at the resistance, Finn has decided to sneak off the cruiser with Leia’s bracelet. Now, remember, at this point in the film, I’m still thinking the bracelet is the way the First Order is tracking the resistance. The whole “they must be tracking us through hyper space” plot line feels super thin and the only thing holding it to reality is a passing reference in a film that takes place roughly 50 years before this one. Remember, there is literally no reason, that I as a casual movie goer, should think that the First order has in fact figured out this new tech and are not following this bracelet instead. Nothing about Snoke’s response or Hux’s response suggest this is the case.

So, I’m thinking, fuck yeah. Finn has figured this out, and he’s gonna try and lure the First Order away by pretending he’s Princess Leia. Like a hero. This is gonna draw the First Order off the Resistance and put Finn in a lot of danger. Danger that’s gonna get super cool when Rey follows the beacon home and discovers her friend captured by storm troopers! What a crazy action packed reunion that’s gonna be!

Oh wait. Finn is sneaking off to lure Rey away from the First Order, so the two of them can be together after the resistance is destroyed, or something. Like a... hero? Is this really the conclusions a hero comes to? I mean, i get it, the movie calls him out on this, but like, didn’t we already do the “Finn is running away” plot line in the last movie? Didn’t we already resolve that he’s not a coward and willing to fight for what’s right? He knows Rey won’t be cool with this move. What the fuck is he doing? WHAT THE FUCK!

Ok, so, he tells Rose what he was really up to, and she magically understands the quantum mechanics of tracking a ship through hyper space. Finn and Rose, the janitor and the repair girl, within moments of being presented with a problem come up with the most far fetched solution that could possibly be, WHILE IGNORING THE MOST OBVIOUS PROBLEM IN THEIR HANDS (I mean honestly, even if someone had briefly looked at the tracker and said “What about this”, followed by a quick explanation and I could move on, but in the 2 1/2 hour run time there just wasn’t enough time to address this obvious plot hole).

So, Finn, Poe and Rose decide to disobey orders and embark on a mission after being told that there is only one man in the galaxy that can hack into a first order star destroyer. This man, will be identifiable by his flower pendant. That he always wears. At all times. So he can be identifiable. To people sent to him to hack secret codes. You know, just in case. Also he is always at the high stakes gambling tables. Not eating. Not reading the paper in his apartment. He exists in a constant state of high stakes gambling.

Sigh. Fine. Let’s go find this guy.

Finn and Rose leave in a shuttle and are immediately identified as a shuttle leaving the ship by the First Order but they are told to ignore the shuttle and to continue chasing the main ships. This scene is really fucking important for later on in the movie so let me reiterate on this point: A shuttle left the resistance ships and was immediately tracked and identified by the First Order. Yeah, you know where I’m going with this, but let’s just leave it here in your fucking brain for a minute, the way it sat in mine for the rest of the movie.

So, now we get a weird story arc for Rose. Rose hates everyone who lives in this city. Why? Did she live here? No. She was a slave growing up in a mine somewhere else. But rich people who live in this city built weapons from stuff the slave children mined so fuck this town and everyone in it.

This,’rich people were mean to me so I hate all rich people’ storyline feels like a super weak attempt to make a political statement about classism and suggests that future Star Wars films are going to be about the poor people rising up and defeating the elitists who are literally getting rich off of watching us kill each other. This is a clumsy metaphor for what’s happening in the world. (It also completely ignores that this city is also home to the sometimes lover of one of our main resistance heroes, so maybe not everyone is so bad?)

But fine. Clumsy metaphor. Poor people good, rich people bad. Got it.

Rose and Finn find the man they are looking for but are immediately arrested and thrown in jail. The absolute worst jail in movie history. First off, they are locked up together. But not only together, with a third person. A magic person who claims (and actually does) he has the exact skills the duo is looking for. Skills our characters have been told do not exist outside of the man with a flower on his coat.

This new man breaks them out of jail with items he snuck in (deus ex incompetence), only to discover that BB-8 has already dispatched the guards and was literally moments away from rescuing them himself. I point this out because none of the suspension of disbelief required above was necessary to get out of the situation. The movie just did it. Inexplicably. Just crammed in a moment to waste our time.

Which I suddenly realize is a recurring theme in the film. Cramming in moments that have no bearing on the story to fill time.

Fine. They escape. But they do not try to reconnect with the guy they saw at the casino. They instead decide to scrub the mission and head back. I’m weirdly on board with this because this whole plan was incredibly contrived from the beginning. Anything to get back to the story at hand.

But this new person they met in jail just keeps forcing himself on them, rescuing them at the last moment from... I’m not sure what. Going back to terrible jail? It’s not hard to break out of. They’ve already decided to leave the planet empty handed so, I’m not really sure what the stakes are for this camel cat chase scene are supposed to be. Like, it seems to be a crazy desperate escape from being temporarily hindered. Whatever. All your friends are dying in the slowest chase scene across the galaxy ever, but this action packed chase scene has almost zero stakes. Think about where you’re investing your story moments, people.

Shake it off, there is still a lot of movie to get through, but at this point, the movie is actually working against me.

Ok, so Finn and Rose escape the gambling city, leaving the slave children to be whipped and beaten for their participation in the escape, and all of the camel cats are immediately round up and returned to the stables, to be also whipped and beaten for running away. (This is proven fact when we revisit the children later on and find them still working in the stables, sweeping straw. If the camel cats were still gone, there would be no need to tend the stables and we already know the slavers are not opposed to beating the children or the camel cats.)

But hey, none of that matters cuz “Game on!” We have a hacker! Who claims he can do the thing. With zero credibility or references. But by god, this is our only hope. Cool. Lets break into a star destroyer.

I wanna pause here to point out there is a storyline happening between Kylo Ren and Rey that is STUNNINGLY good. Like it’s happening in a different movie. It’s layered and nuanced and tragic and heartfelt. Love love everything in this storyline up to the point that Kylo Ren pulls a Homer Simpson trying to murder his omnipotent son, Bart, in that one Tree House of Horror episode just before Bart turns him into a jack in the box.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4T8x7T4Vao

Kylo Ren is moderately more successful then Homer and manages to kill off Snoke by cutting him in half with my favorite move from the Star Wars video game. And then comes the dance fighting ninja guards who are TERRIBLE at their jobs. Just terrible. There’s no other way to explain what happened to human resources. The outcome of what happened in that room is going to reflect very poorly on the Royal Guard.

But the movie insists I need to watch the Rose Finn stuff so it sends me back to them sneaking onto the star destroyer, where they are immediately identified by an astro mech who spots BB-8.

Moments later they are caught by the First Order, but BB-8 is not captured. Even though he is with them and was the reason they were caught in the first place. Somehow, he isn’t captured with them. the movie suggests it’s because he is hidden under a box, but the Star Mech saw him through the box and the astro mech is present for the capture, but has now apparently forgotten about BB-8.

Sure. Fine. Moving on.

Now, I forgot to mention something because during the throne room fight, the movie felt like it was winding down, but I remembered from the trailer that Captain Phasma still hadn’t shown up in the movie and was getting worried that Phasma might be under utilized in this storyline (unless there was some big reveal coming up that totally legitimized her involvement in the film. Spoiler alert: there isn’t.)

Seriously, why is Phasma in your movies? Are you trying to make a statement about Boba Fett? That the only thing a villain needs to become iconic is a cool costume? Is this a bet you guys made with the original trilogy guys?

So, Phasma shows up, escorts the prisoners to the hangar (not the brig) in order to immediately execute them. Not interrogate them. Not hold them prisoner. “But Carl, they knew Finn and Rose would never talk so no need to question them! Also, the hacker already told them everything they wanted to know.” Ok, first, hacker John only told the First order about the ships sneaking off the spaceship. Information he was only privy to because he was allowed to be a part of a top secret mission briefing by Poe leading a mutiny against Laura Dern. And also, master interrogator Kylo Ren is on this ship. He can mind rape these kids and get all their secrets. There is NO WAY execution is the next step in the plan. Zero chance.

Hang on. Hold up. Let’s talk about Laura Dern who has picked the absolute worst teaching moment that any officer could choose. The resistance is in tatters. The main general is in a coma. Your captains are going down with their ships one at a time. DON’T BE COY WITH THE DETAILS WHEN DEALING WITH YOUR BEST PILOT!

Also, what the fuck is up with your hair and wardrobe? Purple hair? That’s it? You were like “Space movie lady? Purple hair, right?” and everyone was like “Sure. That sounds right.” Lazy lazy lazy.....

Whatever.

So, Phasma is gonna execute these fools but KABOOM! and Phasma and her troops disappear. Finn is surprised by this and decides to make his escape. But then suddenly out of the smoke comes (wait for it) CAPTAIN PHASMA!

Wha...? Where did she go? Did they all run off for a second and then suddenly go “Wait. Did we kill those guys? Do you guys remember why we came in here? Fuck. Lets go back and kill those guys before we leave. We got the order all mixed up again.” Just... baffling. They jettisoned her out of the scene, just so she could reenter the scene dramatically. Just because the shot of her coming out of the smoke looked cool. That’s it.

So, now Finn and Phasma fight. And the backstory between these two characters is thick, and by thick I mean, non-existent. Nothing feels earned in this battle, including Phasma’s incredibly lack luster “death”. So, Finn the janitor lucks into victory against the hardened warrior... again.

Man, have we ever seen Finn win a fight in these movies? Have they been trying to sell us an incompetent hero? What exactly has Finn done to help the resistance in either of these films? Is Finn the worst character in Star Wars? Talk amongst yourself.

But before you do, I want you to consider one thing. After watching the film, I was pretty vocal about how Finn, Rose and Poe’s plan did absolutely nothing to affect the outcome of the film. Their adventure was completely pointless.

But I was wrong. They did cause one thing.

On the Resistance ships, 30 evacuation shuttles are slipping away, under the assumption that the First Order won’t be able to see the shuttles. This is a stupid plan, especially since the movie goes out of it’s way to explain that the First Order can ABSOLUTELY track shuttles flying away. (Editor’s note: its been pointed out to me that the shuttles were using cloaking technology, cloaking technology that the First Order had no problem seeing past, simply by possessing the knowledge that it existed. Lazy lazy lazy...)

But let’s buy into this. The resistance is escaping, and Finn, Poe and Rose have handed a traitor over to the First Order and directly caused the deaths of 23 of the 30 ships flying away. Two thirds of the survivors were killed because Finn, Poe and Rose didn’t follow orders.

Now, this is fucking dark. Holy shit, hubris killed the resistance.

But in the next scene, Poe is leading the goddamn charge against the walkers.

YOU DON’T GET TO DO THAT. You disobeyed orders that killed off almost 300 of the remaining 400 soldiers. You are summarily executed. Not the hero of the final battle. After Poe and Finn’s bullshit, the entire resistance can fit in the goddamn Millenium Falcon.

These characters are not heroes.

So, lets skip over the nit picky shit (Finn can suddenly fly a ship? When did he learn? He’s been in a coma since the last movie and one of the main plotlines of the last movie circled around Finn not being able to fly a ship. Why drop a battering ram so far away from it’s target? Why not blast the base from space?)

So, then Luke Skywalker shows up and fools everyone into believing he’s actually there, when he isn’t. It’s magic and shit. No one can touch him. (Except we’ve already established that you can indeed touch him through the void, but Nvmnd).

This scene is annoying for two reasons. One, it’s lame. Two, the director went through so many lengths to set this up. He showed a shot of Rey looking at a drowned x wing, so when Luke shows up magically at the end of the movie, folks are like, “He must’ve force lifted the x-wing out of the water and flown it here.” It was such an easy head fake explanation that utilized information the audience knew from past movies along with necessary story elements to make something believable.

There are so many head scratchingly stupid moments in this film, that it absolutely stuns me this much thought went into this sequence. To maintain my suspension of disbelief in this moment, the director offered a single well thought out visual to sell Luke’s silly plan to the audience.

So that tells me that the filmmakers were perfectly capable of taking moments established in previous films and building on them smartly. They just... didn’t.

It’s like when my teacher would give me lower marks then the rest of the class, not because my paper was worse, but because I was capable of so much more. Yeah, it seems unfair, but fuck you. Life isn’t fair. You get to direct endless Star Wars movies for the rest of your life. Try not to piss in my mouth while you do it,

Which brings me to my final example of why this movie completely fails. Laura Dern decides to save the resistance by launching a ship into hyper space directly into the main star destroyer.

Are you serious? Has this always been an option? It literally destroyed the ship with the hyper space tracker. All of the other ships could have escaped if that first bastard who went down with his ship would have done this. Every death star could have been destroyed with a single freighter. Holy shit, we could build a canon that shoots things at light speed and destroy everything.

If this has always been an option, it’s ridiculous that it is only thought of now.

Also, if the First order only has one ship that cant track the resistance ships, why not just everybody scatter into hyper space in every direction? They can’t follow everybody. if 10 ships are left, 9 get away. there are literally dozens of different ways to get out of this situation that even the most inexperienced leader could have sussed out, other than abandoning ship to everyone’s immediate execution.

Heroes are supposed to be great. There are no great heroes in The Last Jedi.

So that’s it. Not a good movie. Soup to nuts an utter failure. On par with the worst of the prequels. And once everybody has had a little time away from the film, you’ll all agree with me. Just like you all loved the prequels for a little while, until some sober son of a bitch walked up and pointed out a few failings.

And then the whole goddamn thing comes tumbling down.

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