#before anyone asks yes I have seen a lot of people suggesting Mark Hamil for Mutran too

[kanohivolitakk]

One thing I noticed is that while most fans have drastically different ideas on voice claims for various Bionicle characters lacking canon voices, the idea of Mark Hamil and Steve Blum being the voice claims for Vezon and Takadox respectively seems to be a nearly universally agreed upon headcanon.

[sophygurl]

For my first Meta Me prompt, @c-l-ford​ asked me to expand some on the stuff we talked about at the Themes of The Last Jedi panel I moderated at WisCon, which is lovely.

Since I’m no good at taking notes while actually being on a panel myself, I send you to check the # where folks at the panel were livetweeting if you want an overall picture of what my amazingly thoughtful panelists had to say over here.

What I’m gonna do here is just riff off my own pre-panel notes and maybe dig in to some of the stuff I didn’t get to at the panel since I was more concerned with letting my panelists get their say in.

My interest in suggestion and then volunteering to be on the panel, and about it specifically being about the themes of the movie, and about focusing specifically on The Last Jedi itself, was threefold. First is the controversy around the movie and why so many people had a bad reaction to it, secondly my interest in trilogies themselves and how difficult the second part of a trilogy can be, and thirdly just digging into the narrative themes of a story in general is exciting to me. 

So, firstly, let me get into my opinion on how TLJ fits into the wider SW universe, because I think a lot of the criticisms of the movie fell into this category. 

There absolutely were parts of the movie that felt off to me? Some of the humor didn’t feel SW-ey to me, and the fight choreography was a little strange (that whole red room scene just kills me - IK SW is always a bit extra but that was extra squared MIRite?), and even the theme music felt ... different in ways I still haven’t been able to really contextualize. So I sympathize with people who didn’t like the movie or just felt it wasn’t good AS a Star Wars movie even if they did like it generally. 

But I also disagree with them. Because while some of that stuff felt off to me, those were small things in comparison to the overall narrative. And I feel like a lot of the complaints about the movie were ~about~ that narrative and how they didn’t feel like it fit within the SW framework well. And I disagree wholeheartedly with that. I think if you compare TLJ with the second parts of really any trilogy - not just SW ones - you’ll see that it’s doing what it’s supposed to do.

So what is the second part of a trilogy supposed to do, you ask? It’s supposed to crush you. It’s supposed to crush the spirits of the characters. It’s the big awful climax before the reversal of fortune that starts to set things to rights again.

Think of it this way: 

Part 1 is all about setting up the characters and the world, introducing us to what the struggle is about, showing us how our protags are going to fight back, etc. It’s going to be hopeful by it’s very nature because why tf would we care about the story if we’re not invested in the outcome being favorable to the main characters in the end, right? 

And Part 3 is all about the resolution. We’ve finally figured out how to actually win the good fight, the romantic arcs are coming together, families are reuniting, whatever themes the narrative has set up are coming to fruition, etc. So this one is also full of hope and optimism. Even if it’s not an overall happy ending, there will be some kind of ray of light at the end - a coda showing how the characters might someday recover from their trauma perhaps, or how the human race might prevail because of the sacrifices of our protags, whatever. Something to show it was not in all vain. 

So what is Part 2? Part 2 is the shitshow. Part 2 is everything falling apart for our heroes - especially at the end. I think about another of my favorite trilogies - The Hunger Games. And at the end of Catching Fire, we have Katniss confused, angry, betrayed by one of the few people she ever allowed herself to trust, one of the other few captured by the enemy, and her entire home district burned to the ground. Super dark ending. There’s a little slip of hope there - her other trusted friend is alive, her little sister is alive, and they’re all safely underground with heretofore unknown allies. But it’s still pretty bleak.

And it’s bleak because it’s not the end. There’s still an entire book (or 2 whole movies whichever way you look at it) of fighting left to do. We need Katniss motivated to stay in the fight, so having someone she loves to save is a good thing to give her. And we need her to remain conflicted about the fight, hence her continued and quite reasonable distrust of ... just about everyone and everything. And we need to be, as the audience, a bit confused and conflicted about what’s going on because - here’s the crux - we need to remain invested enough to pick up that third book (or go see those next 2 movies). 

Same with a Star Wars trilogy. If we could see from episode 8 how the resistance was going to save the day, how invested would we be in episode 9? I mean, yea, lots of us will watch anything SW gives us to watch, so they wouldn’t necessarily be hurting for movie sales or anything. But to really keep the fandom truly invested, truly glued to our seats waiting anxiously to see how the story unfolds, episode 8 has to end on a fairly bleak note. 

Compare it to episode 2, Empire Strikes Back. Luke has just found out who Vader is to him, he’s lost his hand, they’ve lost Han in the carbon freeze, Lando has betrayed them, and they have no idea how they’re going to pick up the pieces and move on. All they know is - they’re going to try.

And here we come to the end of episode 8, TLJ, and the resistance is down to minuscule numbers, we’ve lost Luke, we the audience know we’re gonna have to lose Leia (I’m not crying - YOU are), and it all feels bleaker than bleak.

But then. But then. We have Rey asking Leia - how do we do this, how are we going to build a resistance out of this? And Leia smiles softly and says “we have all we need.” Does Leia know some secret strategy she’s not shared with the others? Does she have a cache of weapons and other resources stashed away? Has she somehow heard that their allies from far away places are coming to their rescue? Eh, we don’t know, but likely not. 

What Leia knows is that even their small band of rebel fighters has the ability to overcome the terrible odds because she’s seen it happen before. She knows that even if this group of fighters in this generation don’t win, the resistance will live on and eventually the tyranny of the First Order will be brought down. 

And what do we see in the very next scene? The little slave boy who Rose and Finn met at Canto Bight has Rose’s ring, and he’s telling stories of resistance and hope to his fellow slaves, and ooop - what else? He’s force sensitive. He might not even know that about himself yet, but WE see the broom fly a few inches in the air towards his open hand. This is a kid who is going to join the fight as soon as he’s able. And he won’t be the only one. 

Where ever there are downtrodden, there will be a spirit of resistance. THIS is what Leia knows. And this is the small light of hope we the audience are meant to take with us into the third part of this trilogy. 

Our heroes in TLJ, like our heroes in ESB, have no idea how they’re going to pick up the pieces and move on. All they know is - they’re going to try. And that’s enough to keep us engaged. That’s enough to keep us wanting more. So did TLJ do it’s job as the second installment of a trilogy? My vote is yes. Yes it did.

So what of the themes of TLJ themselves, and how they fit in to the SW universe? Hope is a major theme of any Star Wars movie, and as a panel we found that TLJ was indeed about hope, but it was also about failure. And more than that, it was about how the two interplay with one another.

As far as failure goes, we have plenty of characters who have failed or felt as if they have failed or been failed by someone.

We have Luke feeling he failed Ben, Rey telling him she thinks Ben failed him, Rey feeling she failed at getting Luke’s cooperation, Luke feeling he’s failed Rey as yet another student, Yoda talking about the failures of the Jedi and explaining to Luke how failure itself can be a lesson, and a teacher. 

We have Rose and Finn failing to find the codebreaker, but finding DJ instead, and all of the reversals of fortune that happen with that story back and forth. We have Poe failing to learn from his mistakes, finally learning at the end just as he fails to impart that wisdom to Finn. We have Rey and Kylo failing to turn one another, Kylo failing to enact revenge on Luke, and Luke failing to get through to Kylo even at the last. We have the resistance failing to get through to their allies. We have Holdo failing to save her people even as she sacrifices herself. 

But we don’t only have failure. We also have Luke finally deciding to get involved again, and making the hard choices to sacrifice himself for the resistance. We have Rey letting go of the idea of saving Kylo and rejoining the resistance efforts, saving them all on Crait with the Jedi rock moving trick. And to be fair, we had Rey and Kylo fighting together to kill Snoke. And we have Rose saving Finn with her message of love. 

But mostly, I think, we have Luke back as a *symbol* of hope. He’s always been that for us. One of the most difficult parts of TLJ for a lot of fans (and seemingly for Mark Hamill himself) was how hopeless Luke had become. Luke not only felt like a failure, he felt as though his failure was the cause of everything bad happening. Going further than that, he felt that any interaction he might take in the world would only make it worse. 

Rey coming to him on Ach-To terrifies him. He can’t be her teacher - look what happened the last time he had the audacity to teach! He can’t save anyone, all he does it make things worse. He may have held his father’s dying body in his arms in an act of redemptive love, but he still acknowledges that the evil Vader was capable of runs in his veins. He’s absolutely petrified by the very idea of being a symbol of anything to anybody at this point.

When he was young, he may have messed up a lot, but he always got back up and dusted himself off, and kept trying. He knew he could do great things in the world and he did - he did them. He blew up the death star, he allowed his father a redemptive death, he stopped the evil Empire, he became a Jedi. It took, well, it took arrogance to do those things. It took hubris to accomplish those things, something the young are good at. 

As an older man who has born witness to more failures, who has failed his beloved sister and best friend’s child in the worst way possible, and who has sealed himself off from the world and the force within himself as well - he is no longer filled with hope. He is now scared of the very hubris that allowed him to do great things in the world. So when a new youngster, full of the force, full of the kind of hubris that says “I won’t fail you!”, full of the arrogance of the young who know deep within themselves that they have the power to beat the stronger forces opposing them? He fails once again, through his fear.

He fails to step up. He fails to take on the teaching of Rey. He fails to come back to speak with the nephew he’s failed. He fails to reach out to his sister and his friends and his allies. 

And so he also fails the audience’s expectations of him, as our great hero, as our symbol of hope and willingness to fight back against the monsters who face us. 

Does it make all the sense in the world for Luke to feel the way he does? You betcha. Does that ease the sense of disappointment that Rey, and R2, and us in the audience feel? Not really, no. But that’s all part of the narrative of TLJ. Reversals of fortune, failure and trying again, hope and hopelessness, light and dark, and finally, maybe, hopefully - balance? 

Luke does finally step up, though, right? He gives comfort to his sister and the other rebels on Crait. He takes a stand against Kylo. He makes it clear that he knows he can’t save him, but instead is going to fight against the evil that he helped to create with his own failure. It’s his job to give the world that fighting chance again, and so he does it. He does it with all of the drama and panache of a Skywalker. And he uses up all of his force strength and energy in the process.

In the end, we lose Luke; but we also get him back. He’s our hope again. He shows us that it’s not too late, it’s never too late, to take a stand and fight for what’s right. He shows us that we can stand and face our mistakes and do our best to make them right. He shows us that even if we can’t make them right, we can try. See Yoda? Sometimes there is such thing as trying, and sometimes that effort is what counts the most. 

Also, of course, we know we haven’t seen the last of Luke. We’ll see his force ghost, I’m sure, before this story concludes. And now that he’s regained his own sense of hope and strength in the face of failure - he can pass that on to Rey, and anyone else who might need such a message.

Luke is not the only character who regains some sense of self and hope in the face of oppression, of course. We have the iconic moment when Phasma tells Finn that he’s just a bug in the system, that he’s always been scum. Her intent is to weaken Finn’s sense of self. But Finn has found, through his journey with Rose, a new resolve to fight back against the First Order and those who enable them. So his reply to Phasma telling him he’s scum? “Rebel scum.” 

Finn’s journey from the first moment we see him has been about reclaiming his own identity. He’s struggled with it, though. He wants to fight back, but he wants to escape the First Order more than that. What he ends up wanting even more than escape, however, turns out to be the safety of his new friends - Han, Rey, Poe, and now Rose. He cares for these people and abandons his quest to get as far away from the First Order as possible when he finds that any of them are in danger. 

And finally, in Canto Bight, he realizes that it’s not just these few individuals that he’s come to know and care for that are in danger. It’s worlds full of people who he was, unwittingly, a part of oppressing as a stormtrooper. And when he and Rose ride the fathiers through the corrupt city, tearing it apart and freeing the abused animals, he feels enough satisfaction that even though he feels sure that they’re about to get caught - he says it was worth it. 

Finn, whose only goal since we met him was to be free of oppression himself, looks around at how he’s upset the applecart around him, knowing himself caught and about to be jailed or possibly killed for his actions, and he says: it was worth it. Damn. That’s powerful. 

Add that to his reply to Phasma, his claiming the title of “rebel scum”, tying his identity to the resistance, and deciding once and for all to truly fight against the First Order, and well -  I think we have another great symbol of hope here. That Finn immediately goes and tries to sacrifice himself in the battle on Crait, and is then saved by Rose who tells him we won’t win by fighting what we hate but by saving what we love, just gives us even more hope and light to see by. 

So we have:

Luke’s sacrifice and re-imaging as a symbol of hope

Leia’s soft promise that the resistance has all it needs already

Rey saving her friends with her force strength despite her lack of training

Poe learning his lesson about listening to his superiors and how that impacts his own leadership

Finn claiming his identity as part of the rebellion 

Rose’s message of love

Yoda’s message of redemption through the acceptance of failure - for individuals as well as for the Jedi religion

Holdo’s big sacrifice 

The hope that some of their allies are still out there and coming to help

The hope of future generations, as seen through the slave boy on Canto Bight

Was The Last Jedi a hopeful movie? I’d argue that, ultimately, it is. Was it also bleak as fuck? Yup. The two can exist together. Just as Luke can symbolize failure and success, hope and hopelessness, hubris and disgrace; TLJ can be a bleak movie with a hopeful message. 

We’re still in the second act here, folks. Things will get brighter soon enough. We just have to be patient.