#as always commentary critique and responses are always welcome as are reblogs

[narkinafive]

thots on the responses to this post but i wanted to start fresh

the best thing about fiction is how carefully you can control it. every detail has a greater meaning, including death, and if you can assign a meaning to a death, which is so often meaningless, then all the better. sw is really good about assigning meaning to deaths, usually, building up to them and then dealing with the fallout. sw generally follows a specific pattern--most often the hero’s journey as laid out by joseph campbell--and one of the steps in that pattern is the death of the mentor (obi wan for luke, ahsoka or kanan for ezra, luke for rey). in sw, that Death pushes the protag into a character breaking moment, which tests the strength of their heroic resolve

with regard to the prequels, the pt is patterned off of greek tragedy, which has its own set of steps. literary tragedies are built on characters being destroyed by their own mistakes. in this sense, Death is a sentence passed onto the “guilty” (please note that i am NOT arguing the jedi deserved to be wiped out). it’s not a total downer ending, however, because we the audience can watch luke and leia be adopted by their families and know that, eventually, all of this horror will be ended. padme, the jedi, the republic and separatists, and everyone victimized by the sith will eventually have justice when luke inspires anakin to kill the emperor.

so where does that leave us with order 66 survivors?* you can explain away various absences from the ot with “oh they were hiding” or “oh they were just doing somethign else that day,” but as @gffa points out, if you present yourself as a jedi under the reign of the empire, you are literally painting a giant, flashing target on your back, and while the empire may be incompetent, the Single most efficient branch of the empire is apparently their secret psychic police (which... that’s a whole other post right there) as they can find cal kestis, who barely slowed prauf’s fall, within a literal day. so if the ot operates under the rules of the hero’s journey, and the pt operates under greek tragedy, then the intra-rots/anh period operates under the rules of dystopia, a set of rules which are, admittedly, much more free-ranging. 

but i think we can all agree that a dystopia needs a boogeyman. vader is that boogeyman, bar none; the guy is a nigh unstoppable one-man war machine who literally has no other purpose than fulfilling his master’s diabolical commands. you can’t reason with him, you can’t escape him, and you can’t defeat him. this is why vader is used so sparingly in swr, bc you can’t have your all powerful, fear-inducing boogeyman defeated by a scrappy group of kids every week, bc it vastly reduces his effectiveness, both in-universe as an enforcer, and out-of-universe, as someone who raises the emotional stakes through the fucking roof. so far i think sw has done a pretty good job of making sure that the heroes manage to escape only by luck or someone else’s incompetence, but... i, personally, would like to see a different outcome. 

wrt luke, the presence of order 66 survivors doesn’t have to take away from his achievements. i think someone like cere junda surviving, cut off from the force as she is, could make for a really interesting story if she ever met luke in canon (and, well, he’s gotta get that idea from somewhere, right). i’m not even that beholden to yoda’s line “when gone am i the last of the jedi you will be” (despite what it looks like). imo the mounting number of survivors, rather than detracting from luke himself, detract from the clean slate that the prequels give us. again, i am the jedi order’s number one stan, but they allowed palpatine and the empire to rise; hell, they contributed to it. the old jedi order failed, and survivors who try to live in that old framework can’t succeed against the empire, because it’s luke’s attachment to his father and his sister that give anakin the final push to turn back. 

but this doesn’t mean that that failure against the empire doesn’t have meaning. kanan’s death was so impactful partly because we have evidence of its direct consequences: the destruction of the TIE factory, the lessons he taught ezra which inspired him to take out thrawn (the only competent leader in the entire imperial navy), hera’s life (and jacen’s, by extension). obi wan’s failure, too, has a lasting impact, as it grants him a higher understanding and allows him to return to luke when he needs it most. “strike me down and i shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine,” indeed

(now that i’ve written this, of course, i seem to have convinced myself out of wanting cal dead... except for the fact that vader-the-boogeyman needs a win so he stay a scary motherfucker. and i want to see that beautiful boy in pain. so it seems i am at an impasse)

*none of this applies to yalls jedi ocs btw!!!! 

[roleplay-salt]

About; Rules; FAQ

Welcome to Roleplay Salt! This is a blog for roleplayers to vent & rant anonymously about the things that peeve or hurt them in the roleplaying community.

GENERAL

Your submission will always be posted anonymously; no exceptions. (This includes positivity submissions & shoutouts.)

Your submission’s text will be placed in a graphic and then copied as plain text as its caption for accessibility purposes.

Topics must be roleplay-related. (This can, of course, include experiences with partners doing things that may be unrelated to roleplay, but would still be considered relevant if it impacts your roleplaying experience with that particular partner.)

Anyone following our blog will be allowed to leave replies on submissions, whether in agreement or disagreement, and everyone is allowed (even encouraged) to reblog submissions, with or without their own commentary. However, we will delete any spamming comments, including ones that are or are similar to “Why don’t you come off anon and say that?” Such comments provide nothing to the discussion. In fact, they usually shut down discussion and it completely disregards the entire point of this blog’s existence. No one has to “come off anon” nor are they “cowards” for seeking safety behind anonymity. Your aggressiveness with that sentiment only reinforces the reason why they want to be anonymous in the first place. ADDENDUM: We will delete salt replies that involve simply telling others to, essentially, “shut up and move on already” and “stop sending salt replies in about this”. You’re more than allowed to say this things in the comments, but we will no longer be making them a part of any future debates.

We actively edit and restructure the wording of submissions. We read every single one of your submissions and we care about consistency and readability. We will correct any spelling errors, grammar errors, and odd sentencing structure, and we will often lengthen abbreviations and slang, and we will fill out any curse words or sensitive terms that were originally 'censored' in the submissions. Do not take it personally! Again, we aim for consistency. We will never just copy/paste your submission and then post it. That's terrible.  

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The “Flour” category is reserved for any submissions that do not appropriately fit under “Salt” or “Sugar”, often involving personal confessions and storytelling.

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A callout submission is specifically speaking nastily and meanly about someone else, regardless if it’s the truth or not.  All URLs & names in a callout submission will be marked out to preserve the other party’s anonymity as well.  We are a safe place for you to release your anger, frustration and hurt, even if it’s towards someone and not something. But we cannot and will not participate in the true nature of a callout. That will need to be something that you do for yourself if you believe that it’s important for you, your friends and your fandom community.

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All URLs & names in a shoutout submission will remain visible, and the person will be tagged & mentioned on the post so as to better the odds of them seeing it.

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Currently, there is only one operating the blog: Moderator Bull.

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Unfortunately, no. To preserve our own anonymity (for many of the same reasons as the submitters), we have agreed on the terms to never give out our URLs if requested. If we are interested in your blog, then we will follow you at our own discretion!

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Of course! However, we will not remove any corresponding responses to you (except in instances where, if yours is removed, the next comment is made to look like it’s being directed to the person prior to your comment. We don’t want to cause unnecessary conflict.) We will also not be relied upon to keep deleting comments you regret leaving behind. If you’re wanting to leave a public response on submissions, then you must be prepared to have others possibly publicly disagree with you.

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If you don’t want to be associated with us, then we recommend blocking the blog so that we don’t unintentionally follow you again!

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Unless they are throwing bigoted slurs, threats, or suicide-baiting remarks at the anonymous submitter, they are not doing anything wrong. They have just as much right to disagree with your submission as you had when you sent it to us. We are, first and foremost, a place to vent frustrations or hurts behind the safety of anonymity, and we are also a free-speech blog. We are of the belief that discussions, no matter how heated, is healthy and brings the community together as a whole. Just as your submission may provide someone else with the awareness that they are not alone in similar frustrations, someone disagreeing with your submission may provide a new perspective to you and others that had not been considered before.

“How does name-calling and swearing and being mean add to a discussion? You and your blog are what are wrong with the roleplaying community!”

Just because someone isn’t being nice to you as they give their side of the argument, doesn’t mean that it cancels out their actual argument. You’re choosing to be offended and distracted by how abrasive they are, and that’s no one’s problem to deal with but your own. You have the ability to block anyone so that you no longer have to see their comments on future submissions. Why would we police what people say, the endgame of which would be to ban them from ever reblogging or commenting on submissions again if they don’t listen to us, if you’re not even willing to try solving the problem first by just blocking them? Wanting to have the last word or being upset that your submission didn’t receive the feedback you wanted is not a reason for us to step in and step on someone else’s right to speak, rudely or otherwise. If you’re not going to block them, then why should we?

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We have started tagging posts that we believe might be sensitive and controversial in nature with the tag “#twcontroversy”. We recommend blacklisting this tag. If that is still not enough, then we recommend unfollowing/blocking us. These are topics just as relevant in the roleplaying community as anything else.

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Certainly! But only if you are another community-involved blog (a blog that provides a ‘service’ to the community, such as advice, roleplay help, a place for confessions, etc.), and it must be relevant to the roleplaying community to some degree! If you want to promote a roleplay blog, then we suggest sending in a shoutout submission!

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It’s either sitting in the queue or sitting in our drafts, waiting to be queued. We have 1,200+ followers so far, and on average we’re sent 15+ submissions a night. We only post between 5 to 8 submissions at night. Your submission is on a wait list. That’s all we can tell you.

“Why don’t you just close your submission box until all the current confessions are posted?”

Because we’re a vent blog first and foremost. If we close our ask/submission boxes, then we’re no longer an option for people who might desperately need to vent or talk about something that could have happened to them that day but have no other options. We want to be a healthy alternative to just bottling it up or possibly lashing out at the wrong people.

“I don’t believe you! I think you deleted my submission because one of you didn’t like it! You’re not unbiased at all!”

We’ve posted submissions about highly controversial roleplay topics like noncon, racism, transphobia, and pedophilia. We reassure you that your salt submission about OCs, theme trends, blog selectivity, etc. is not on that same level, least of all to the point that one of us would delete it. The only submissions that we have deleted, so far, are the ones that have included racial and homophobic slurs.

“[insert OP/commenter] is obviously a rapist/pedophilie!”

If we find that you have accused someone of being a rapist, pedophile, or apologist of either because of their defensive views on noncon/pedophilic ships or roleplay, your comment will be removed and you will be blocked. These are serious accusations that you shouldn’t be throwing at people over fictional content and we refuse to to let you use this blog as a platform to spew such slanderous accusations.