#character: xanatos

[tossawary]

So, Force-users in "Star Wars" appear to have their telepathy and empathy powers mostly only when it's convenient for the plot. (And obviously different characters naturally have different natural talents and different trained skills.) The "Jedi Apprentice" series that I am slowly trying to read introduces more concrete telepathic elements than the vagueness of the films, such as both intentional and UNINTENTIONAL mental bonds between characters.

And it keeps making me thinking about the accidental Force bonds that must often exist between young Force-sensitives and their non-sensitive parents. (Note: This post is mainly about Anakin Skywalker and Xanatos witnessing the violent deaths of their respective parents.)

I used to do a lot of casual reading on toxic and abusive relationships, because I stumbled on a quote from some book and thought that it was just fascinating from a character perspective (I did also use that information for reflection on other stuff, but that's not relevant here). Children usually become deeply attached and attuned to their guardians, even if those guardians are intentionally cruel, or even if those guardians have toxic behaviors because they are stressed and a little self-absorbed or whatever. Children spend the early years of their life with no way out and just trying to survive by keeping their parent (who provides them with that survival) happy. People in abusive relationships are often made to feel responsible for the reactions of their abuser. They often have panicked instincts that demand fight or flight or freeze or fawn reactions to someone getting upset with them.

(I am summing up a LOT of stuff, I know! Unhealthy relationships are very complicated and varied! People all react differently. I'm trying to quickly establish a few points to make a later point here.)

Even adult children trying to establish boundaries with their toxic parents often meet a great deal of resistance, and are sometimes accused of being disloyal and ungrateful and disrespectful and sometimes even abusive themselves, just for doing things like asking their parents not to show up without calling first, because their emotionally immature parents regard any sort of disagreement or conflict as harmful to them and their authority. A lot of adult children talk about the mental struggle that comes with learning how to stand up for themselves against their parents, whether that parent has been intentionally or unintentionally abusive.

Which has all made me think about how much worse any relationship could get if one side of it has telepathy and empathy. Especially if that side of it is a child who doesn't know it! And the parent probably doesn't know about this either!

The Jedi Order is already kind of set up so that a cruel or neglectful Master could potentially do a lot of damage (a few months, at least) to a Padawan before hopefully being caught. Being able to literally feel your abusive Master's intentionally projected / focused disappointment or anger sounds nightmarish for a child. Most Jedi who are decent people shield themselves and do not project negative emotions at vulnerable / impressionable children, but we know from canon that there are plenty of Jedi who fail at being decent people.

(And oh, man, everything about Sith training sounds SO BAD. The mental and emotional damage that can intentionally be done by a Force-user projecting bad vibes is truly off the charts.)

Non-Force-sensitive guardians probably won't have any kind of mental shielding. Even if the guardian is outwardly the nicest parent in the world, it has to be hard that your child is (potentially) apparently constantly unhappy, and you won't know that it's because they are telepathically sensitive to all of your internal tiredness and anger and sadness. There would be no emotional privacy. And if the life situation is bad for the family, then that child is potentially going to grow up being hyperaware of the mental and emotional states of everyone around them, knowingly or unknowingly using the Force, because being able to read the room like that has been imperative to their survival.

Shmi Skywalker seems to be a remarkably even-keeled person for her circumstances. I headcanon her as being (perhaps unconsciously) Force-sensitive herself and having taught herself some degree of mental and emotional shielding due to her hard life. If someone as powerful as Anakin had been raised by someone who was constantly stressed and willing to scream about it, lash out at their child about it, then he could have been even more of a mess. He seems remarkably well-loved compared to what could have happened.

I do think that Anakin and Shmi must have had some accidental mental and emotional bond with each other. If Anakin is as gifted in the Force as everyone says he is, he probably would have naturally reached out to the minds around him, because that's what baseline senses / existence are to him. (It's fun to think about Anakin's existence being wholly unique and WEIRD, and how this causes him to clash with everyone else. It's possible that one else experiences the universe quite like he does.)

Being separated from a parent will cause anxiety in ANY child, but it's interesting to think about how things might have been heightened for Anakin, if Shmi's mind has been an unconscious cornerstone / foundation of his mental reality and his emotional keel since his birth. Due to telepathy / empathy, Anakin may have been unconsciously using Shmi as his mental and emotional ground to stand on for as long as he can remember. Losing his mother, even by separation, when he's been halfway into her head all his life, might genuinely feel like losing a piece of his mind to Anakin. He doesn't initially have the teachings to deal with this kind of catastrophe to his baseline operating system.

He DOES get teaching for these things over the course of the next ten years. (I don't think that he was too old to be trained (Luke was famously 19 in the original "Star Wars") but I do think Anakin could have probably been trained better. Anyway, if he hadn't been trained, Sidious probably would have scooped him up immediately.) But then his mother dies in a very violent and painful way when he's RIGHT THERE, when his control probably already isn't very good due to the situation, and it cannot feel good to be inside the mind of a loved one when they're dying, especially if their own mental and emotional shielding is limited.

Like, yeah, I can see why someone who has telepathy and empathy might have some kind of mental break there. Anakin is permanently losing someone who has potentially been a mental and emotional cornerstone all his life, literally. I don't think it makes his thorough massacre of the Tusken Raiders, down to the last child, in any way excusable, that kind of vengeful, murderous collective punishment is horrifying, but I understand why it might happen from a character perspective.

If were arguing that Anakin is innately more telepathic than most people, he should be able to feel the people he's attacking as well. And it's interesting to think about how someone incredibly naturally empathetic might choose to adapt an apathetic perspective to the suffering of anyone he doesn't personally care about. Yeah, of course he might try to close himself off as much as possible. The universe is already constantly screaming at him with its death and pain. If super-telepath Darth Vader cuts someone down with his own hands, then at least they're quiet now.

Anyway, this post was also about Force-sensitive children who have shitty parents who aren't in any way Force-sensitive. Which, funnily enough, brings us to Qui-Gon Jinn's other potential Chosen One: Xanatos. Xanatos even witnessed his parent's violent death, like Anakin, because Qui-Gon semi-accidentally killed the corrupt Governor Crion for trying to start a civil war and threatening Padawan Orykan.

Like, I just finished reading "Star Wars: Jedi: The Dark Side", a 5-part comic that depicts how Qui-Gon and Xanatos broke up as a Master-Padawan pair. (I wanted context for the "Jedi Apprentice" series.) They're sent there to investigate a murder and are cooperating / protecting Governor Crion, before it is ultimately revealed that Crion has been intentionally stoking the conflict and local xenophobia for his own benefit. Xanatos spends almost the entire time telling Qui-Gon explicitly that he wants to go back to Coruscant, he doesn't want to be here; all but outright saying that he's emotionally conflicted and that there's a conflict of interest here.

It's not made explicit that Crion was abusive before, but he does seem to be a little toxic, and Xanatos clearly has a very rocky relationship with this man who is trying to start a fucking war. It is very clear at the end of the story that Xanatos resents being tested like this, having watched both of his family members die violently.

And I couldn't help but relate this to Anakin: that uneven, childhood-deep Force bond with a parent (which I am presuming exists, there's no specific canonical proof of this for either Anakin or Xanatos that I have yet read) snapping back on a telepath presumably isn't great for a person's mental state. Even though he clearly wasn't too close to his sister, watching Nason die first couldn't have helped either. Merely standing in a room getting blasted with whatever bad emotions Crion is pumping out was probably bad for Xanatos. Xanatos may be vulnerable to psychic damage from this shitty guy specifically.

I get that Jedi are supposed to rise above their attachments and fears, Yoda is clear in that he thinks putting Xanatos on this mission to his chaotic homeworld is necessary to "prove" his status as a Jedi. And I get that maybe someone even presumed Xanatos's personal connections might help the bad situation, more than it might be a flagrant "conflict of interest" in any way. But MAN, does it fucking suck that the Jedi (Yoda) are kind of like, "No, you can't do literally anything else to help people in the galaxy. You have to go face your past right now or else you can't be a good Jedi. We ARE going to judge you if you bow out and cry 'personal conflict'."

To be somewhat fair to the Jedi, Xanatos WILL need to be objective to be a good Jedi Knight and they don't KNOW that Crion is a warmonger, but Xanatos is clearly not ready to see him again, and apparently only goes on the mission because he's afraid that Padawan Orykan will replace him as Qui-Gon's student. He repeatedly accuses Qui-Gon of trying to leave him on Telos IV with his father, which is obviously a fear that's weighing heavy on his mind. Usually when a kid doesn't want to go "home" that badly, it's... indicative of something unpleasant in their home life?

At the end of the comic, Qui-Gon is like, "Oh, this situation is BAD. I was wrong to bring Xanatos here. We need to get out." But Crion is killed, Xanatos apparently has a mental break, scars his own face, and then disappears into the riots? And Qui-Gon apparently assumes that Xanatos has been killed? The execution is more than a little confusing. But yeah, Jedi need to rise above their personal shit, of course, but maybe prematurely exposing this supposedly telepathic / empathetic kid to what's potentially a bunch of deep-seated triggers to "test" him was a bad idea. (And personally I think that the comic is saying that it was a bad idea. Qui-Gon clearly regrets it afterwards.)

As far as I can tell, Xanatos's main crimes here were 1) being a huge snobby brat, partially because he has glaringly obvious rejection / jealousy issues, 2) like everyone else, not really knowing what his father was up to until after things had gone to shit, and 3) having a mental breakdown and attacking both Orykan and Qui-Gon, and ultimately failing to kill or injure them.

Xanatos is flawed, obviously, but he looks pretty young thoroughout these comics. Like, he looks like a teenager? Sixteen-ish? (Every shitty thing that Xanatos does afterwards in regards to Offworld Mining and trying to kill Obi-Wan will be on him, of course!) And I keep thinking about what a child being telepathic / empathetic does to their relationship with a Force-null parent... Especially when that parent is a piece of shit. Especially when watching them die violently. Involuntary magic has really got to suck sometimes...

[furiarossa]

Little collection of sketches... just Ladan being the coolest of the Vlads. (Ballpoint pen sketches + one pencil sketch from our sketchbooks :). Featuring also "regular" Vlad and mr. Korolrkovi, aka "Monarch" Vlad )

Ladan is a character from "Danny Runner and the Phantom Crown". We're slowly posting the story here:

A03: [English][Italian]

Wattpad: [English][Italian]

★ Instagram|Facebook|FurAffinity|Deviantart|Commission prices|Tapas|Pillowfort★

[problematicsubmarine]

[jebiknights]

I would be a lot more sympathetic to people disliking Anakin if almost every single one of the haters weren't: 1) pro him going to jail or getting some absolutely awful punishment - which is not how the Jedi typically handle internal affairs, 2) him getting thrown out of the order against his will, instead of working with him and his issues - once again not how the Jedi Order typically works, 3) seems to think he doesn't suffer any consequences at all (narratively he's punished for most things he does by way of bodily injuries but that's a different post), 4) ignored the fact he was groomed - like yes he made his own choices but people act like its HIS fault for not being a better Jedi when he canonically was being set up to fail constantly by Palpatine, and 5) they always have a hard on for some other villain that's done shit just as bad, had just as much reason to be a bad guy as Anakin, but for some reason they give the other character grace when they dont give Anakin any.

[one-in-a-million-fishsticks-blog]

Hear me out, imagine......

A Star Wars AU centering around the prequel comics, where Obi-Wan and Xanatos are from the same age grouping and train together as padawans.

In this world, masters would be allowed to have more than one padawan at a time for narrative/drama purposes.

I like the idea of this dynamic because both characters are extremely morally gray (at least in fanon), but have opposite leanings when push comes to shove, with Obi-Wan favoring the lightside of the force and Xanatos favoring the darkside.

As a pair they'd be a menace to society, playing off of each other in only the most acursed of ways and using each person's unique brand of wit to to repeatedly ruin the days of those who earn their dislike.

The three way dynamic between them and their master, Qui-Gon, would be godtier drama. This dysfunctional trio are literally Shifu, Tigress, and Tai Lung..... They have so many issues.

[ariel-seagull-wings]

@thealmightyemprex @makingboneboy @amalthea9 @themousefromfantasyland

[roachsauce]

some old and new sw doodles. feemor gets to be an annoying big brother, as a treat

[halcyon-days-no-more]

Gargoyle Transformation: Fox

I'm not 100% sure this is going to be final version of a species swapped Fox.

My rule for shape shifting magic is that there's always something left behind from a forced transformation. I'm just not sure how much of Eye of Oden were-fox transformation should have carried over. Though I head-canon that Oberon's Children and their part human children are a bit more resilient when it comes to shapeshifting magic.

[tethys-the-aquatic-sea-godness]

Still not over the fact we could have had a woman cathar as Qui-Gon's first padawan and instead we got random-white-guy

[unopenablebox]

last night i had an incredibly vivid dream which was essentially, uh, an anti-rationalist-fiction spitefic of which i was acting as the protagonist? like it was extremely vividly and clearly laid out exactly which tendencies of rationalist fiction my dream was objecting to and i still remember the whole thing in enough detail that i could in fact write it out as an actual story therefore making it anti-rationalist-fiction fiction in real life

except that i can't figure out why the fuck i would possibly bother to do that

[dailycharacteroption]

Pop Culture Builds 12: David Xanatos (Gargoyles)

Woof, sorry about the late entry, folks. Got caught up in some real-life stuff last night. Expect this entry and today’s entry both today!

 David Xanatos, ah yes. A man who not only embodies the “Magnificent Bastard” archetype, but inspired the coining of another trope term, the “Xanatos Gambit”, i.e. a plan in which even failing the plan’s primary goal will result in either some objectives being fulfilled, or an entirely separate but valuable goal succeeding.

But who is he, and how can we replicate him in an RPG? Well, for this, let’s make him a Starfinder build.

Born to a humble fisherman, David Xanatos seemed like nobody special. That is, until the day he received a mysterious letter with a coin minted in the 10th century inside. This coin was worth a veritable mint to collectors, allowing David to quickly establish a financial base from which he could play the stock market and found a massive corporate conglomerate. However, the mysterious nature of that letter sparked his father’s disapproval.

Despite his wealth, Xanatos still wanted to prove to his father that he was a self-made man, and so constantly labored to improve himself and do things no other man could do.

Which is where he learned of the legend of Castle Wyvern and the gargoyles which were supposedly more than statues, cursed to remain bound in stone “until the Castle rose above the clouds”. No doubt meant to keep the curse in place forever with a seemingly impossible task.

But such curses have a way of getting fulfilled anyway, especially when a billionaire creates a money-sink project of literally moving the entire castle, brick by brick, on top of one of his skyscrapers. That must have been a hell of a boardroom meeting.

It did, however, work! The titular Gargoyles awoke from their curse for the first time in centuries, and found themselves in an unfamiliar world. David set himself up as their friend, but manipulated them into stealing technology from a competitor and betraying them, becoming their nemesis.

However, despite his unscrupulous ways, David Xanatos was not a man without principles. Sure, he was a manipulator who would lie and steal, not to mention creating an army of robot drones in the shape of the Gargoyle leader Goliath as well as a suit of power armor in a similar shape, but he would never stoop to murder or genocide, and would often side with the Gargoyles whenever a villain with such goals would arise.

Eventually, Xanatos relented in his vendetta against the Gargoyles and his more villainous pursuits. Turns out your greatest enemies saving your skin and those of your loved ones several times puts things in perspective. But a crafty man he remained.

 David is human, but it’s not super integral to his build.

For this sci-fi build, we will be using the Envoy class with the Aspis Mastermind archetype. Xanatos rarely get’s his hands dirty directly, though he can when he must. However, his plans require a lot of coordination with his minions, so being able to grant planning-based buffs to allies that follow the plan is perfect for him.

As an envoy, Xanatos has both skill expertise and improvisation abilities. Among the former, Analyst, Convincing Liar, Gregarious Mien, Reasonable Excuse, Slick Customer, Stone-Faced Liar, Well-Informed, and You Don’t Say. Basically anything that can give him a social edge and get others doing his work for him.

Meanwhile, his improvisations are more for when he is forced to do things himself, such as Clever Feint, Get Em, Sow Discontent, Clever Attack, Exactly As I Would Have Done, False Flanking, Take ‘Em Alive, Hidden Agenda, and Seize the Advantage. Basically anything that improves his chances in a fight while also making him that much more cunning.

Despite being a fabulously wealthy manipulator, assuming that David Xanatos can’t put up a fight on his own is foolishness. As such, he has several feats to shore up his combat abilities, such as Improved Unarmed Strike and others to make him a competent martial artist, as well as various proficiency feats to let him use a wider range of armaments, most particularly Powered Armor Proficiency for the Steel Clan bodysuit.

Xanatos is willing to use any equipment, be it technological or magical, to get an edge, but if there is one piece of signature equipment that he has, it would be the Steel Clan bodysuit, a flight-capable set of power armor modeled after the Steel Clan drones, which were in turn modeled after Goliath. Said drones would most likely just be reskinned or homebrew robots if he is used as an NPC, or perhaps as robotic creature companions in the case of a PC build.

But maybe you’d prefer a different build? Perhaps if you want to play up Xanatos’ various technological toys, you could go mechanic (with a Steel Clan combat drone) or technomancer. Alternatively, if you want a build for Pathfinder 1st or 2nd Edition, consider the rogue, bard, or investigator classes, as well as prestige classes that offer a lot of social and economic power, such as Noble Scion.

 Fabulously wealthy villains that spend their money on high-tech toys and manipulate others are fairly common, so don’t feel like you have to use this build for replicating David Xanatos.

 That does it for today, but look forward to today’s actual entry later tonight!

[hellisanhonourstudent]

#this is why villains are so much better when they aren’t cartoonishly evil#they made a choice

i love it when a villain is given positive traits not to make them look better, but to make them look worse

no "aren't they actually nice deep down? don't you feel sympathy towards them?", but "wait so this asshole was capable of good all along? and actively chose not to do it because it gets in the way of their goal / because they don't see this specific group of people as deserving of the same treatment / because they're too deep in the lies they told themself to justify it / etc? they're evil not because they're incapable of anything else, but because they choose to?"

[furiarossa]

Portrait for Ladan's reference sheet.

Ladan is a character from "Danny Runner and the Phantom Crown". We're slowly posting the story here:

A03: [English][Italian]

Wattpad: [English][Italian]

★FurAffinity|Deviantart|Commission prices|Tapas|Pillowfort★

[missallanea]

muses who are biters ( affectionate ) :

Agnes Drachina Reuben, Eda Clawthorne, Fish Eye, Fox, Jennifer Walters, Miyu, Persephone, Raven Branwen, Ryoko Hakubi, Vex'ahlia

muses who are biters ( derogatory ) :

Ashiok, Demona, Freya, Lunasol Galanodel, Miyu, Mystique, Persephone, Raven Branwen, Ryoko Hakubi, Scylla, Serafine Savoy, Takhisis

muses who like to be bitten ( filth ) :

Demona, Eda Clawthorne, Fox, Maximilian Calypse, Persephone, Vex'ahlia

[enbeemagical]

please someone ask me about my characters i want to share picrews

[halcyon-days-no-more]

Aged Up Character: Alexander Xanatos

Teenage version of Xanatos and Fox's son Alexander for my crossover fic. I'm thinking he goes by Xan at this point.

I know the adult future version of him was a generation xerox of his dad with red hair and a mullet, but I'm going to save the "business up front and party in the back" look for Eugene.