#i don't necessarily miss who i was then

[olive-is-a-jim]

vent below.

vent below.

i look back and think of all the people on here i used to be close and/or friendly with.

I look at a list of deactivated blogs or changed urls and i feel confused, lost in the supermarket again.

There's people I still follow who still reblog my stuff. I don't know how you have changed over the years and yet i feel guilty.

I try to look for the old messages but clicking one closes the stupid tumblr messaging button each time and i can't just easily scroll down.

I think the most about who i was back in 2017-2018. And what I think of "her"... I hate the most.

I had good friends. Good prospects. A horrible path. A downward spiral. A fragile psyche.

I was a fucking basket case who was in "her" early teens. I thought I was tough shit. I was growing more and more detached from my life.

And I miss those I'd then call friends. And I feel bad for all the perfectly good people I should have not bothered. All because I was young and stupid and crazy.

One fateful day it all snapped. Nothing life-threatening happened, I just shaved my head but it was enough apparently. I wiped my old phone and all the art and texts and memories from old friends who were getting tired of my spiraling and neediness and drama and emotions and

On the 31st of January 2019 i was checked into a small mental institution and ended up staying there for 4 months, being released only a few weeks before my 15th birthday.

I was there voluntarily in terms of what was written down but. It still was hell. A silent hell. One where you're told to see things positively and not talk about your pains to peers. One where you're almost gaslit into thinking you're not ready yet.

And I wasn't, in all honesty. But that doesn't mean I came back better. I came back with different problems. And it was like that for a while.

A lot of other stuff is foggy, mostly because it was just. life? that or it's the trauma-blocking from just. everything. I knew I couldn't make a month without crying from either guilt, getting in trouble, random other shit that'd make me cry, or the general cycle of falling apart and putting myself back together.

Things did turn around when my family moved out of our old town an into the city. A new school, new set of IRL friends that soon spread out into new digital friends. I had new hobbies, new passions, new room, new problems.

school still sucked I'd struggle getting grades good again, and it was a new set of pressures and meltdowns and panics and

I had support systems, people who would work with me on these sorts of things, designated adults and whatnot. It was getting better but you could tell that shit was still amiss.

Thennnn the pandemic hit and everything had a new set of problems!! :)

failing "zoom school" grades, stupid hastily made websites for submitting work that took too much mental effort and more and more issues with me even having the drive to do anything productive besides art and fucking around online.

But then. I was given an option, when being told that I wouldn't make enough to graduate with a highschool diploma. a GED.

I didn't like it at first I wanted to be able to graduate. But over time I did get into a program for it. I had all the knowledge for getting it I just. Fucking sucked with standardized education and the whole homework rigmarole and blah blah blah blah blah blah

Point is, I got my GED and was able to attend the graduation ceremony with my peers at the highschool and it was everything. I made a cool design for my cap (i cannot recall if I posted it I highly doubt I did).

I also started (and am still doing) courses for transitionary education, basically seminars and stuff for things to help young adults with "alternate education paths" get jobs and be able to have resources to live independently some day.

It's good. I like it. And I've grown so much.

I grow incrementally rather than a steady and ever constant line, and those increments can have horrible spiraling chasms between them and those increments can suddenly bring me to functionally being a different person in many regards although not literally.

This all seems good here these last few paragraphs but. There are new problems and because it's all so recent in comparison I.

Somehow

Have trouble thinking about it. Like getting it to even appear in the forefront of my mind. But maybe I'm trying to look too big picture on my issues. Maybe my mind is just foggy forever. Maybe I'm just not

Actually fuck that noise. I am myself in this moment writing this dumb post and crying my eyes out surrounded by 3 cats. I am crying for my past, tearing up about what I have now, and weeping for the future like everyone else does.

I miss my friends and there's some I know I won't be able to have back. But I'm not going on a wild goose chase for people who might have simply just deleted their blogs and made new ones, or people who just don't remember or want to talk to me or whatever valid reason. I have the ones that I do know, ones I've gained and reforged over the last 4 years, and ones I've made recently.

I have people I'm no longer friends with and I'm, surprise surprise old me, okay with it.

One of my biggest faults was abandonment issues and the varying chance of falling apart in front of someone IRL or over text. They can still be my faults at times in the present but. I have newer, more independent ways to deal with myself before anyone else has to. And also by the very benefit of being a future version of myself, I'm just.

Better at this living sort of thing than I was.

I'm 18. I'm Miki. I feel alive. I'm ready to catch back up with people, if they so choose.

And as always...

:D

[i-didnt-quite-get-that-now]

I'll just put this here and reblog it again when it's 2029 and I'm proven right

[icewindandboringhorror]

What would you choose? :0c

(note: original image is from HERE (link) - but I edited it to add a wider variety of options.. also added $3 extra to the total, even though I know that makes it more uneven lol, I thought if you're adding 10 whole extra items, the money to spend should at least be increased slightly, if that makes sense..)

[jacksprostate]

the prototypical child and or grown man who greatly misinterprets fight club has a preternatural hold on most tumblr fight clubber's minds and i think it's time we all let it go... firstly if you're imagining a 13 year old please realize that dunking on 13 year olds because they have bad critical reading skills is more and more pathetic the older you get. secondly even if these people exist they're not on tumblr and will not be disturbed by your actions because they'll never see them. thirdly, defining yourself and your interpretation in Opposition to another without taking care to understand why that interpretation developed beyond 'well they're just evil' will only leave you cut off from people. it is better even, to understand exactly why they think terrible things, what leads them to it, than to just dismiss it and position yourself as the good to their bad guy, defined by doing whatever you consider opposite. fourthly? fourth? using 'this movie is GAY and or liked by women actually, ooga booga, you're gonna HATE that hahaha' as an argument reinforces the idea that these things are stigmatized and things they should hate, and even contributes to the (very flawed) perception that these things are 'stealing' from them, and once again reinforces negativity. it's pointless. certainly, write your analyses and reference the interpretation, even analyze it, but take care to consider whether you're acting on solid ground or performing against an unpresent bogeyman for the cheers of your peers, and consider whether you want to gain cred by shitting on others, even if it's the conceptual ghost of a shit person.

[lesbionia]

Contrary to popular belief, being a lesbian and being a feminist are not the same thing. I deliberately refer to myself as a lesbian and a feminist—rather than a lesbian feminist—to denote the separation. 

I think that most radical feminist works about lesbianism are homophobic to some degree because they posit lesbianism as a political choice, which it is not. Homosexuality might be politicized, but it is an innate and unchangeable characteristic, which makes it inherently apolitical. To me, there is little difference between the claim that being gay is a choice that comes from radical feminists and the one that comes from the religious crowd, in a sense that neither speak to my truth. 

I still consider myself a radical feminist because I believe in women's liberation and dismantling male supremacy, and I don't believe in throwing the baby out with the bath water. But I do think that being a lesbian and a radical feminist is sometimes a strange and frustrating experience, and that it's good to talk about it once in a while. 

[heireign]

meta question : how did her mother's death impact how she viewed her father ?

send me character development questions. ( @sinworn )

first, i don't think there's ever really any blame in regards to it when it comes to viserys purely because it's ? as a child the circumstances of it would have been so absurdly normalized that the only real red flags about it that would have impacted her views on him from it would have been the implications around the court that ' perhaps aemma had been bedded too young', and that being the reason for why she had the complications with her pregnancies that she did which, she may or may not have overheard at court - and if she did, i don't think at the time she would've entirely understood the implications of what that even meant. and there is also the likelihood she would not have even heard it at all unless she walked into a room unannounced or around a corridor to people discussing it, or it was being spoken about when she was believed to have been out of earshot -- i don't really believe that anyone would have purposefully said that infront of her, so it would have needed to have been something she accidentally overheard if she'd heard it at all.

i do believe she would have heard him call her his great joy, but that a brother was a brother, because he was said to have said often, which means she was more then likely in his presence to hear it at least once. the fact that he loves her was never a question, the fact that he valued and cherished her was never a question, but there's a precursor of feeling not quite enough that stems from the fact her parents doted on her as a child - how she was treated by them was not affected by the fact she wasn't a son, but the fact she wasn't quite the child they needed meant that her mother suffered, and above all she would have noticed how the pregnancies and subsequent losses continued to wear on her mother and how they affected her mother. she was effectively being treated as his heir, but she could never occupy that space, and that meant that viserys only had daemon as a successor, and no son to succeed him. and like the fact a girl could not succeed her father would have been wholly normal then, too. she would not have felt slighted for the throne as much as she would have felt wholly helpless that she could not help her parents who were struggling to fill this space and she was ? thinking that if only she had been born a son, maybe they would have been able to stop with trying with how badly her mother was being affected, with her as the heir and daemon as the spare. this is important because it's what largely impacts her feelings toward him when her mother dies and she's made his heir.

she's eight when aemma dies. he becomes infinitely more important in regards to her feelings of inner security and stability - because at that point he is the only parent that she has left. then she's made his heir and she's ? confused and a bit frustrated, and more then a little overwhelmed because it seems so completely pointless all of a sudden; because if she was worthy of being his heir now, she could have well been then, and then she would still have her mother. she doesn't even know how to want it at first because actually being content she had the position would feel too much as if she were celebrating a tragedy, that she was glad to have profited off of such a devastating loss and like, she wants to make him proud in turn. she doesn't want aemma to be remembered as someone who failed in her duties as a wife and queen. and if she's the heir, and if she actually somehow gets to sit her father's throne, then she won't have been. she would have given him a successor even if she wasn't male.

but like, it also incidentally changes the relatively close relationship she had with her father and makes it one that is two-fold. now she's not just his daughter, she's his heir. it makes things very stiff between the two of them for a while as she settles into the role. she's less inclined to display vulnerability around him due to fearing that he might find it too much for her, and take it. they can't quite talk as they used to due to the fact she's afraid that whatever she might say to him might make him upset and take it from her too - and after he remarries and begins to sire children with alicent her fear of being replaced personally manifests itself in a drive for her position - and this is because this is something she can actually tackle, and solidify her place in, and prove her worth in a way she has always struggled with personally because she has always been loved, but she's never been particularly useful in regarding to filling the place she now occupies. i think her proving that she is is her best attempts to both give her mother a legacy to be proud of ( one that speaks of not just success but actually something historic in her being the first queen regnant ) and solidify those anxieties with her father that she might be set aside in a personal sense, because for a while the notion of her being replaced in her position would have felt more then a little like an inevitability and less like something that may or may not happen. the security and comfort she would have derived from him as her only surviving parent rises and then it plummets again when she's made heir because she doesn't know how else to regain control of a very overwhelming situation that people are now looking at her in a whole different way because of. and there’s this whole new facet to their relationship that’s serious and scary and important and it’s nothing she wants and now it’s everything she wants because of what it could mean for her mother.

[widowshill]

Character bingo: Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, the woman the myth the legend

Her.

[kushanna]

i hate this type of red truth cause it's not specified whether the red sentence by itself is a truth for the murder we're talking about atm or for the game board as a whole. genji and nanjo were not killers? if you're telling me they can't be killers at all in the first game board then that's a huge bummer for me

also hate this one cause yeah?? does she guarantee that the unidentified corpses are actually corpses though?? i do understand that yes, since she did say "there were no body double tricks", but GOD that's such a ridiculous play with words. get out of here

[ruvviks]

made the realization my vampire story would work best as a video game and now i can't stop thinking about it

[prowerprojects]

Nine is very angry and hurt and reacts to everything strongly, basically the opposite of Tails (the way they present him in the flashbacks) who's very mellow and reserved.

Interesting though that in the og Sonic 2 manuals it's strongly implied if not outright stated that Tails was like super depressed before he met Sonic, but when he started trying to imitate him, it led to him kind of turning his life around and becoming more energetic and optimistic, somehow. I guess he just saw Sonic living his best life, thought "I want that" and then worked for it and kinda got it?

I think it's sweet, it's not just about Sonic physically beating up Tails's bullies, but about inspiring him and giving him hope simply by existing, with Tails literally learning how to fly being a good metaphor for it. (Which is why I wish they didn't show that Nine could already do that. Missed opportunity. They do kinda have shades of this with his lab being underground and him crawling around like spider, but I wish they'd commited)

[nat-20s]

Being weird with ur gender is 100% contagious btw in a very cool and fun way. Turns out that when you live ur best "you can do whatever you want forever" life in general it's contagious. This is why being a weird little freak is also contagious I always loved hanging out with sorority girls bc something about my personality made it so I was the one that they felt completely comfortable being like "my secret shame is that I can do a REALLY fucking good Billy Crystal impersonation and I have to suppress it so that I'm not in Billy Crystal mode constantly" I'd just be like "ok girl well let's hear it!" And it was pretty solid

[companion-showdown]

Option 1 was suggested by @intodarknes

Option 2 was suggested by anonymous

The generic line up will be changed to include companions who have been specifically requested (their may be other changes depending on the tournament, for example option 1 would be a whole new line up, or including robots who don't wear clothes wouldn't make sense in a tournament judging fashion)

Lucie Miller will replace Josie Day (requested by @thenugking)

Hex Schofield will replace Sabalom Glitz (requested by @thenugking)

Alison Cheney will replace Kate Stewart (requested by anonyomous)

If you want to suggest a companion you'd like to join the general line up or just the line up to a specific tournament, either leave it in the notes of this post (or any really, but for the purposes of me being able fo find it easily it'd be nice if you left it here), or send me an ask. This includes anyone who I've swapped out, who you think should stay. I'm especially interested in almost / could have been companions, theres so many I'm sure I'll miss your favourite whenever we eventually get round to that tournament

If you'd like to suggest a tournament then similarly

You can find all suggested tournaments, my ideas, and requested companions under the tag #future tournament ideas

[the-far-bright-center]

‘Revenge of the Sith may be the greatest work of art in our lifetimes...’

(an excerpt from a long-deleted blog post, archived here)

“Revenge of the Sith is still (and probably always will be) the greatest thing that will ever come out of the Star Wars franchise. I always go further, in fact, and say that it’s the greatest thing that will ever come out of big-budget, action/fantasy cinema at all. George Lucas’s final contribution to his Star Wars legacy—2005’s final prequel offering—was not only an artistic, cinematic and operatic masterpiece, but it was the ultimate, consummate manifestation of everything Star Wars was capable of being and, for that matter, everything that big-scale cinema is capable of being.

It literally does not—and probably can’t—get better than this ever again.

Lucas, who himself pretty much set the standard and invented the genre in 1977, had now taken us to the absolute zenith of what that genre of film-making could produce.

Epic, ambitious, stunning, moving, nuanced, and everything else, it was the glorious completion of Lucas’s original Star Wars saga that I had been waiting for—and something for which I will always be immensely grateful George Lucas came back to film-making to give us. I have already made the case at length for why Revenge of the Sith was an absolute masterpiece of staggering proportions, so I’ll refrain from re-stating here all the ... reasons I eternally bow at the altar of that film and its unfairly maligned architect.

People who didn’t get it or still don’t get it probably never will get it.

I’ve given up arguing with those on the tedious backlash bandwagon, those who join in with the Lucas-bashing for the sake of YouTube channel views, or those who, like [spoilt children] throwing a tantrum, bitterly disavow George Lucas and whine about how the prequels ‘ruined Star Wars’.

Someone who did get it, however, was the noted author and social critic Camille Paglia: she of course famously declared a few years ago that George Lucas was the greatest artist of his time and specifically that Revenge of the Sith was the greatest work of art in the last thirty years.

The respected, if often controversial, academic Paglia didn’t argue that Episode III  was merely the best movie of the last thirty years… but the best work of art in any genre and in any medium.

[...] Predictably a lot of people either assumed Paglia was being sarcastic or they simply pooh-poohed her conclusions. Paglia, however, was not trying to be ironic, and she has reaffirmed and defended her position over and over again and with a passion—Lucas’s final Star Wars film, she maintained, is the greatest work of art in the last three decades.

[...] I cannot think of any film in any genre that has been as absorbing or as immaculate (or as ambitious). Even just conceptually, what Lucas tried to do with the prequel trilogy was staggering and is without any parallel. And while we could argue that the execution was off-the-mark in certain places, the sheer visceral power and broad artistic value of what he did manage to create—even with its various failings—puts Lucas’s saga (and ROTS in particular) into a different stratosphere entirely.

In her own view of it, Paglia especially focuses on the final act of the third prequel—the climactic finale centering on the extended Anakin/Kenobi lightsaber duel against the dramatic lava backdrop and the extraordinarily powerful way that the birth of the Skywalker twins is juxtaposed with the ‘death’ of Anakin and ‘birth’ of Vader. That latter sequence, by the way, in which the death of the mother coincides (and even feeds into) the birth of the ‘dark father’, all of it underscored by John Williams haunting, gothic choral/hymn composition, is just one example (among many) of Lucas’s extraordinarily acute and nuanced levels of vision.

‘The long finale of Revenge of the Sith has more inherent artistic value, emotional power, and global impact than anything by the artists you name,’ she said in this interview with Vice. ‘It’s because the art world has flat-lined and become an echo chamber of received opinion and toxic over-praise. It’s like the emperor’s new clothes—people are too intimidated to admit what they secretly think or what they might think with their blinders off.’

Speaking to FanGirlBlog, Paglia continued her celebration of Lucas’s final masterwork, saying, ‘I have been saying to interviewers and onstage, "The finale of Revenge of the Sith is the most ambitious, significant, and emotionally compelling work of art produced in the last 30 years in any genre—including literature".

Paglia’s assertions flowed from her 2012 book Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars, which in part addressed the problem of modern cultural ignorance and the author’s worries that 21st century Americans are overexposed to visual stimulation by the “all-pervasive mass media” and must fight to keep their capacity for contemplation.

In the book, Paglia discusses twenty-nine examples of visual artwork, beginning with the ancient Egyptian funerary images of Queen Nefertari, and then progressing through various artistic works, including creations from Ancient Greece to Byzantine art and Donatello’s ‘Mary Magdalene’.

She explained, ‘Lucas was not part of my original plan for Glittering Images, which has 29 chapters crossing 3000 years. My goal was to write a very clear and concise handbook to the history of artistic styles from antiquity to the present. When I looked around for strong examples of contemporary art to end the book with, however, I got very frustrated. There is a lot of good art being made, but I found it overall pretty underwhelming. When I would happen on the finale of Revenge of the Sith, I just sat there stunned. It grew and grew on me, and I became obsessed with it. I was amazed at how much is in there—themes of love and hate, politics, industry, technology, and apocalyptic nature, combined with the dance theater of that duel on the lava river and then the parallel, agonizing death/births. It’s absolutely tremendous.’

Paglia also entirely recognised the sheer scale of Lucas’s creation and the value of even its various constituent parts as important or worthy works of art. ‘The fantastically complex model of the Mustafar landscape made for the production of Revenge of the Sith should be honored as an important work of contemporary installation art,’ she argued. ‘And also that Lucas’ spectacular air battles, like the one over Coruscant that opens Sith, are sophisticated works of kinetic art in the tradition of important artists like Marcel Duchamp and Alexander Calder. No one has ever written about George Lucas in this way—integrating him with the entire fine arts tradition.’

The problem is that Lucas and the prequel trilogy have become so widely misrepresented as ‘bad’ that most people don’t know how to deal with someone like Paglia sincerely proclaiming “Nothing in the last 30 years has been produced—in any of the arts—that is as significant or as emotionally compelling as Revenge of the Sith…”

[...] In fact, contrary to widespread misconceptions about how the Star Wars films are viewed, a Rotten Tomatoes poll ... found that Revenge of the Sith (and not Empire Strikes Back) scored as the best-regarded of the [Lucas] movies according to aggregation of archived reviews. So the idea that everyone dismisses the prequels seems like a misconception; but it is fair to say that a substantial body of people —including a lot of people who, rather incongruously, regard themselves as Star Wars fans—do completely dismiss this film along with its two predecessors.

As I said at the start, people who didn’t get it or still don’t get it probably never will get it.

But what has always struck me as pitiful about the whiny ‘Lucas Ruined Star Wars’ attitude is that it seems to flow from the premise that Lucas—a man whose stubborn commitment to his own singular vision gave an entire generation from the late 70s and early 80s unparalleled joy—somehow ‘owes it’ to those same people to do things precisely how *they* deem acceptable. That’s essentially what it comes down to—that he, as the artist, should make the art that the fans or the public want and not follow his own creative vision.

What people don’t realise, however, is that if he had done that from the beginning, there never would’ve BEEN an original Star Wars trilogy at all—and arguably all of these huge blockbuster SF/fantasy films that people spend their money seeing today wouldn’t exist either. What a lot of people also don’t realise is that Lucas was never setting himself up to be a populist or even mainstream filmmaker. On the contrary, he was the avant-garde film geek, the rogue, the outsider. The fact that Star Wars spiraled into a billion-dollar behemoth was an accident; and when the first Star Wars movie was released in 1977, it was an oddity that no one in the film industry understood or believed in.

But Lucas had stuck to his own creative vision—a vision that was largely incomprehensible to everyone else at the time the film was being made—and his singular vision hit the mark big-time and accomplished something unprecedented.

By the time of the endlessly-maligned The Phantom Menace in 1999 and everything that followed, Lucas was still doing exactly the same thing—following his own vision, trying to create something extraordinary and largely ignoring contemporary trends or opinion. The only difference was that the vast fan-base he had acquired from the original films were older now, far more jaded and over-saturated with blockbuster movies (most of which were influenced by Lucas’s pioneering work in the 70s) and they essentially didn’t *want* something new, creative or challenging—they just wanted the same thing they’d had when they were kids.

In effect, they weren’t interested in Lucas the artist or Lucas the pioneer—they only wanted Lucas the Popcorn Movie dispenser. But Lucas the Popcorn Movie Dispenser had never existed—he was simply an illusion created by the extraordinary commercial success of the Star Wars Trilogy.

What Lucas had in fact envisioned—and created—with the prequel trilogy, especially Revenge of the Sith, was something that transcended the whole summer blockbuster ennui, transcended genre, transcended the very medium of film itself, and could be discussed in the same breath as Shakespeare, Virgil and the Aeneid, Julius Caesar, and a number of equally fascinating and endlessly debatable works of serious and complex gravity.

But there was an audience of millions who were instead looking for something that could be discussed alongside Jurassic Park or Terminator 2. Which is fine—Star Wars of course can also be discussed just as validly in that latter context too; but it also exists in a stratosphere beyond it. And because Lucas’s process and vision was in that higher stratosphere a lot of the time, there was a frequent disconnect that occurred, whereby a lot of people were unable to meet him halfway or relate to the films on those kinds of levels.

But Lucas pushed on with his long-envisioned trilogy; and by the time the final installment of his Star Wars saga arrived in 2005, a sizeable proportion of the old fan-base had either departed or were by now just coming to the party for the thrill of seeing Darth Vader one last time. Some dismissed the film the same way as they’d dismissed its two predecessors, some were full of scathing mockery, while others were ambivalent. Some were suitably entertained, but didn’t take it much further than that.

Another group, a smaller minority—myself included—had just seen something of epic, overwhelming proportions and had the greatest cinematic experience of their lives.

But great art is like that.

Great works of art divides people, provoking endless debate [...] An argument could be made that the greatest artist will go all-out to create something special and substantive, even if it won’t appeal to everyone. Said artist would follow his own creative vision and not compromise it to the committee of consensus or demand.

Lucas, it should be borne in mind, never made ANY of the Star Wars films with film-critics in mind—even the Original Trilogy movies were not critically approved, despite becoming cultural landmarks. And interestingly, the hang-ups of many of those who were scathing about the prequel movies—ROTS included—were virtually identical to the hang-ups of the critics in the early 80s who either just didn’t get those original Star Wars films or were unwilling to praise a rogue filmmaker who was rebelling against Hollywood at the time and who was making something entirely out-of-step with contemporary trends and sensibilities.

Fittingly enough, the Lucas who was out-of-step with the sensibilities of the time during the late 70s and early 80s is the same Lucas who was equally out-of-step with sensibilities and trends at the time of the prequels too. In both eras, Lucas rebelled against the sensibilities of contemporary cinema and carved out his own piece of utter magic according to his own stubborn vision—the difference is that so many of the same people who adored what he had done in the first instance couldn’t understand what he was doing in the second instance.

Even though what he was doing was essentially the same thing.

For that matter, I always suspected that one of the main reasons so many people failed to appreciate (or in a lot of cases, to even understand) this film is precisely because it isn’t contemporary. That’s a key thing to understand about the Star Wars prequels—they were not made in a contemporary style.

Lucas doesn’t make contemporary cinema. Both of Lucas’s Star Wars trilogies are written and designed specifically to NOT be contemporary, but to have a more timeless quality, steeped in traditions from the past.

Lucas, you have to remember, has never been a contemporary or generic filmmaker, but a more avant-garde artist and experimenter who foremost specialises in tone and impressionism. The fact that he invented modern blockbuster cinema is purely an accident. As he himself once said, “None of the films I’ve done was designed for a mass audience, except for ‘Indiana Jones.’ Nobody in their right mind thought ‘American Graffiti’ or ‘Star Wars’ would work”.

 [...] They were not contemporary or generic at all—consequently, a lot of people didn’t understand or relate to what they were watching: because they couldn’t find a point of comparison in popular culture.

To really understand these films, you have to go back to some of the historical epics of the fifties and sixties, particularly films like Ben-Hur, Cleopatra or Spartacus. If you watch any of those films (and all three are timeless, truly marvelous cinematic works) and then watch the three Star Wars prequels, it will suddenly make much more sense. The acting style, the dialogue style, the themes, the epic scope and settings, the vast mythologizing, the way the films are scored, even the intricate costume design—all of it.

There’s nothing surprising about that. After all, it’s easy to overlook the fact now from our current vantage-point, but the original Star Wars trilogy movies weren’t contemporary in style either—they were stylistically based on things like Kurosawa, Flash Gordon and the Saturday matinee serials of the 1930s and 40s. The original trilogy films made no stylistic sense in terms of contemporary cinema or sensibilities in the late 70s or early 80s—they were, in style, a homage to a long-gone era.

So too were the prequels—just a different homage to a different era.

[...]

When you look at everything that makes up Revenge of the Sith, the scope of vision along with the degree of artistic nuance and juxtaposition is breathtaking.

There’s lots of action, yes, as you’d expect; but the action, like so much of what Lucas was doing by this stage, is almost transcendent. Sure, the acting or delivery is off in a few places; mostly due to some of the actors having to perform in non-existent CG environments—remember Lucasfilm and ILM were breaking new ground technologically in these movies, which we take for granted now with all our CG and digital filmmaking, but which at the time were bound to cause some teething problems. But Ewan McGregor is superb in this film, while the maligned Hayden Christensen....in fact does a solid job in any number of key scenes.

And there’s everything else. The special effects aren’t just good, they’re actually often beautiful in a way that most special effects don’t aspire to be. The level of detail and artistry in the visuals mean you could turn the sound off and still be captivated. Some of the backdrops could make extraordinary paintings that could hang convincingly in art galleries. And Lucas is the absolute master of the establishing shot and the scene transition, turning it into an art every bit as nuanced as in a piece of music.

For that matter, the music is extraordinary—and actually if you look at how underwhelming or non-existent the music is in the post-Lucas ‘The Force Awakens’, it becomes clear that Lucas and Williams had a collaborative process that really influenced how these films were scored (and which is now no longer the case). Lucas himself said that the music was 50 percent of what mattered in these films and that is certainly evident.

Much of it, particularly the climatic Kenobi/Skywalker duel and that final act with the birth of the twins, death of Padme and creation of Vader, almost isn’t cinema at all—but opera. This could’ve been something Wagner was composing if he had ever existed in the cinema age.

In fact, the final few scenes of the film don’t even have any dialogue, but are purely musical and visual. Even some of the most stirring parts earlier on in the film are without dialogue; take, for example, the breathtakingly beautiful sequence of Anakin and Padme trying to silently sense for each other across the exquisite, sunset cityscape—it’s all visual, tone and subtle music, pure emotion with no dialogue. A scene like that could almost be part of a silent movie; and it’s also like an impressionist painting in motion.

Even that Kenobi/Skywalker duel itself is more than just an action sequence. With Williams’ epic, stirring, choral score, it too is opera. But it’s opera married to performance art: the level of intricacy, fluency and speed of Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen’s dueling is insane, having required an immense amount of prep and practise. The choreography takes it onto the level of dance; of true performance art as opposed to disposable cartoon violence or cheap blockbuster action.

Everything here—to the last detail—is choreographed like a ballet and it is spellbinding.

Yet while other filmmakers would try to sell an entire movie on such an exquisite centerpiece, for Lucas all of this—all of this poetry, opera, dance, music, visual art and everything else—is ultimately mere constituent part to a greater whole: a Shakespearan epic of a tortured fall from grace and a Greek tragedy... wrapped within an even larger epic about the fall of a Republic, the fallibility of religion and the genius of the Devil and failure of the angels.

[...] What Lucas created in fact was the ultimate expression/culmination of the art of the epic itself—fittingly enough, in order to conclude the defining epic of our modern times (what Brian Blessed once described as the Shakespeare of our age). The Shakespeare comparisons aren’t trivial. The evident Star Wars/Shakespeare resonance has even prompted things like Ian Doescher’s book William Shakespeare’s Tragedy of the Sith’s Revenge: Star Wars Part the Third—a retelling of Revenge of the Sith as if it had been written by William Shakespeare for real.

[...] Various observers, including academics, have noted the obvious fact that Lucas’s story is also a retelling of the fall of the Roman Republic and birth of the Roman Empire. Lucas himself admitted this, pointing to how Revenge of the Sith in particular is partly a story about democracies become dictatorships and citing the historical stories of Caesar and Augustus. You can quite easily watch the prequel trilogy alongside I, Claudius or something like HBO’s brilliant Rome series.

But none of those references or allusions are the important part. Even the fact that the prequel trilogy—and again, ROTS in particular—is quite clearly in part a story about false-flag wars, banking conspiracies, the corporate and military-industrial complex, the Bush administration and the Iraq War, etc—isn’t particularly relevant to the issue of why it’s such an epic work of significance.

Lucas is the author and architect of our preeminent modern mythology—as interviewer Bill Moyers asserted during his fascinating and revealing 1999 interview with Lucas (for the release of The Phantom Menace). Partly inspired by his friend Joseph Campbell’s thoughts on mythology, but moreover informed by his own careful distillation of elements from various cultures and civilisations (what he has referred to as our collective human ‘archaeological psychology’), Lucas is every bit as influential as Virgil, Homer or Shakespeare were in their respective times, and has crafted out the ultimate mythological saga.

Revenge of the Sith is the final, completing piece of that saga—the piece that gives the saga its full scope and true soul, and the piece that makes every one of the other films count for so much more.

And it does it so well—with such vivid and breathtaking quality—that, even having written an article as long as this one now is (and another before this), I still don’t feel like I’m adequately able to explain its full brilliance.

Neither could Lucas himself, I suspect. I’m not sure Lucas even realised how masterful it was; but, as Paglia and others note, the guy is so mild-mannered and self-deprecating that it simply wasn’t in his nature to boast about his own work. Instead he just took in all the abuse and mockery with mild bemusement, shrugged his shoulders and walked off into the twin sunset, knowing that with Revenge of the Sith he had finished what he’d come back to do.

In fact, what Lucas did was so extraordinary, so complex and so nuanced that it may take another decade or two for people to even appreciate it properly—assuming they ever do. As film experts like Mike Klimo have noted, some of what Lucas did in ROTS and the prequels may have been so sophisticated that he deliberately didn’t talk about it, but just left it there, not knowing that anyone would ever even notice.

This, as I said earlier, goes beyond cinema, and possibly even beyond Star Wars itself. Lucas genuinely outdid himself, and it is unlikely anyone will reach that height again—firstly because no one is going to be in the position Lucas was in again in terms of total ownership of a property, and secondly because no one is going to have that kind of ambition again, especially having seen how much of a backlash Lucas received from the legions of popcorn munchers, YouTube profiteers and ungrateful fans who were really looking for something much more in keeping with a generic, formulaic, standardized blockbuster formula.”

[uraharasandals]

Is it just me or does no one else comprehend why the fuck Mashiro was reinstated as lieutenant of the 9th? I presume this is Kensei’s doing because as Kyoraku says, lieutenants are captains’ business and they can do whatever the fuck they want, but like, why would he do this? 

We see their relationship 110 years ago in the Turn Back the Pendulum Arc. It’s clear that there’s no love lost between her and Kensei - sure, he tells her to stop exposing herself so much when she naps, but that’s human decency and his own brand of manners. Mashiro doesn’t seem to be particularly good at Division work - this much is proved by how much she slacks off 110 years ago, and even in the present (Hisagi does all the stuff that a lieutenant is supposed to do and this is clear). She’s a decent fighter, but not to the point where Soul Society actively needs her. She’s also the source of many of Kensei’s vein-bursting moments, and I’m sure many people would agree that his temper and patience would actually improve if she wasn’t there. (Kensei even questions why he took her on as lieutenant 110 years ago) So why the hell is Mashiro one of the lieutenants there? Did Kensei think Hisagi couldn’t handle the work and brought his former lieutenant to ‘help’? Because from what I’ve seen, she just makes those two’s workload increase rather than decrease. The only possible thing that she was even remotely useful for was training Hisagi in the woods, but that’s about it.

I would love to hear people’s opinions on this, actually

[fluxweeed]

yes I agree that you’re implicitly required to rec a fic you’re involved in which is why it HURTS WHEN PEOPLE DONT like oof. you said yes to work on it but then you didn’t like it that much hey. obviously I’d rather that than people rec something they don’t actually like, I’m not saying it should be disingenuous, it just hurts you know? ouch

nahhh i don't think ppl should feel obligated to do marketing for a fic they've already put time and energy into helping the writer with!

[smolbeandrabbles]

Linzi’s 2022 Thank You Post

How did this come around so fast? I still remember making last years!!

So, in true New Year spirit this blog will once again be changing around in 2023... I’ve already started changing my layouts but there’s some other stuff coming 😁✌ Just gonna take me a while to figure things out! (No URL / pfp changes though, so - I’ll still be me!)

And uh, hopefully I might post some actual writing in 2023, because this year I posted exactly 2.

Gotta say thank you to The Band Camino. It’s always an incredible feeling to find a band that can articulate what you cannot whether you’re at your best or your worst, and this year they helped me through some difficult months... And to Starset, once again topping my most played artists, as they should! 😁

Anyways, enough about me! I would as ever like to say thank you to everyone for still being here! 

And especially to those of you that have put up with me over the course of the year through jumping around fandoms and all my DMs 😉

@mandy23b @sufferthesea @sagitariusrising - Thank you so much for everything in 2022 - for getting me through the lows and for being so many of my highs! Looking forward to where 2023 takes us already! ❤💜💙

Ahhh... we couldn’t close this out without doing what I did last year so, I present... my 2022 Men Of The Year! Yes, most of the characters I wrote for, no I didn’t post any so mayyybe in ‘23 you’ll see them?