#if a story detail only makes sense if i know some obscure trivia then i would consider that a story flaw

[encanto-extended-edition]

✨️Bienvenido, everyone! Thank you all for your patience with this event, we are so excited to share this with you! ✨️

To start, we are your lovely hosts for the Encanto OC Appreciation Event:

Amanda @overly-dramatic-artist & Pena @dororoxpenana!

You may recognize us in the Encanto OC community already with our OCs Angela Morales Estrada (Amanda) and María Madrigal (Pena), but you’ll find out more about them during the event! 💖

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♡ The main goal and drive of this event is to spread some much needed love and appreciation to our fellow OC creators! You are all such a gift to this fandom, and it’s more than time to recognize each other! While we will be reblogging everyone’s creations on to this blog, this event will only work as intended if you all interact with each other! We can speak for almost everyone when we say that it is entirely welcome for you to go feral in the tags and comments. Share your enthusiasm. Go wild. If someone says something kind to you, you are legally required to pass that on ten-fold (Just kidding, but please please interact with each other!). ♡

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✨️The Prompts!✨️

👋🏼 Week One (October 1-7) : Introduction. Time to share the lore of your OC! For this week, we are looking for your OC’s backstory, what connects them to canon, and who they are as a person! This can include detailed character sheets, a written backstory, drawings of them through stages of life, how you developed this character, even a ‘slide show’ of their background; literally anything pertaining to who they are.

❤️ Week Two (October 8-14) : Relationships. Let’s take a deep dive into the interpersonal relationships of your OC! Family, friends, lovers…enemies? For this week, share any works that give us a look into who your OC is connected to; it can be a family tree, drawings of them with friends, their wedding; as long as there is some form of connection, you’re golden!

🌟 Week Three (October 15-21) : Extras and Add-Ons. Have an AU? Or two? Or ten? All you full of bits of information and side stories? Share it all! This week is for you to share anything and everything you want. Any sort of obscure alternate timeline, a detailed overview of their sense of fashion, pieces of trivia like their favorite food or weather, what their handwriting looks like, comics you’ve been wanting to share. Anything and everything is game!

🫂 Week Four and a Half (October 22-31) : Share the Love. Spread around the appreciation for your fellow artists and writers! Send head-canons or thoughts about someone else’s OC, or maybe some artwork or a one-shot! Or even express your delight for another person’s creativity. We highly encourage you to engage with people you may not be super familiar with.

You are more than welcome to use older material for this event, especially for the first three weeks, but we just ask that you make a new post with this blog tagged so we know to reblog it! New creations are greatly encouraged, but we understand that making art and writing is time consuming 💖 You can also make multiple posts for each week if you have a lot to share, don’t feel pressured to cram everything into one post!

‼️Rules regarding the event:‼️

🔴Please refrain from comparing OCs against each other or to canon characters in a negative manner. This event is meant to appreciate everyone’s efforts, we’ve all dealt with enough negativity already. Be kind.

🔴We want to keep this event friendly for all ages in the fandom, so we will not be reblogging any blatant NSFW content on to the blog. You are welcome to share things of adult-theme, but just know we won’t be sharing it from our platform (we’ll drop a like though).

🔴Any content of incestuous nature will not be allowed whatsoever. This is a one strike policy. Don’t do it.

🔴No tracing or stealing works from other artists/writers. If you have commissions or artwork made by other people for you, that is more than welcome, but do not steal someone else’s work.

🔴No content made using AI

🔴Keep in mind this is not a contest or a competition; please be kind to other artists and writers. We are all on equal ground here.

✨️Please tag our event blog (this one!) as well as using the hashtag ‘encanto oc appreciation’ & 'encanto oc event' as we want everyone’s work to be shared on our blog like an archive of love!✨️

💖If you have any questions, please feel more than welcome to reach out! We want this event to be as fun as possible! 💖

[inventedworld]

WHAT I TRY TO REMEMBER

Amphidrome. It’s an obscure word describing a point in the ocean where there is no range between high and low tide; a neutral zone, so to speak. There are currents at an amphidromic point, but tidal forces are effectively zilch.

I’m not likely to visit one of these places on Earth, but then I’m also not likely to visit any of the Apollo landing zones on the Moon either. They exist; I am not there. But I like to know about them, just like events in history that I’ll never be able to visit either. (Think about that for a moment.)

The first and last note in a musical scale is called the tonic. Lemon juice will erode a marble kitchen counter if the marble isn’t properly sealed. Stare decisis not only means that legal precedent should matter, but it also cautions modern societies not to get stuck simply because things have always been done a particular way. 

These are things I remember, and things I also like to remember. But here’s what they are not, at least to me. They are not trivia. 

Trivia are like scraps of paper stuck amid books on a shelf. They amount to little, no matter how many scraps may get piled up. Random information rarely amounts to much beyond a means to win a bet, or the occasional surprise that solves an unexpected problem. The stuff I’m describing here concerns the muscles and mass that makes the world, from lowly springs that keep clothespin jaws tight to grand expressions of magnetic fusion containment systems to the way that painters mix egg yolk with pigments to achieve the unique glow that only tempera paint can provide.

I will not remember all of these things, or at least not all the details that make them live and breathe. I hang on to some, but most things continually feel at risk of disappearing into the gray mists of fading memory. I don’t need to share them with people; they are not for public display like a well-practiced bar trick. They are also not data I need to demonstrate erudition, or coolness, or even efficiency in recall.  They matter to me because they’re interesting, and having these bits of working knowledge empowers me to be more fully engaged. But often I discover they don’t last.

Nothing lasts.

Some of these things concern bits of information that simply interest me, or amuse me, or remind me of experiences and feelings. More meaningfully, some of these bits connect to other bits, and taken together their various components become greater than the sum of their parts. There’s a pleasure to understanding how the world interoperates. I enjoy a deeper appreciation for both ordinary things and extraordinary things when I can draw connections to provenance or even precedence. At a smaller scale, I derive a pleasing sense that approximates security coming from the knowledge of how to prepare the ground for planting tomatoes, or why newspaper copy written in the 20th century often ended with the number “30” before being sent off for typesetting. I like understanding why rocket trajectories tend to curve as they ascend to orbit, and I like understanding how single-point perspective creates the illusion of depth in renaissance paintings.

Language, especially in its ineffable way of absorbing phrases and expressions from other languages, presents extensive challenges and pleasures to pursue. I rarely refer to my rivals as bête noire, and the private story of my life hardly ever rings in my own ears as a bildungsroman. But when I see these terms in texts, I derive a richness in privately feeling more intimately part of the conversation when the terms resonate easily.

One of the reasons these fragments of disembodied data don’t last is that there are just more things to know than any one person can ever hope to remember. If memory is partially a function of repetition and association, it’s harder to access information that exists without much context, or at least regular use. Where a doctor may use the specialized nomenclature of blood chemistry every day, I generally do not, which means that kind of medical information doesn’t stick as easily. That’s obviously true for anything in the world, from the specialized language used in commercial aviation, to the arcane language of economic theory, to the strangely baroque argot of American football commentary (for which, I confess, I often need a translator if I’m obliged to watch for one reason or another). 

I’m aware that some of this information isn’t vitally important. It is entirely possible to go through an entire day, or even an entire lifetime, without knowing the music of Aleksandr Scriabin, or how a gear differential transmits equivalent power to two wheels that may be traveling different length paths. Taken to extremes, it’s possible to go through life without reading a book, even as it troubles me to know so many people who make just such a choice.

One might assert that art itself is not critically important to any given moment in life. It neither provides shelter, nor sustenance, nor companionship when the wolves begin to circle as night encroaches. But then perhaps that’s why art matters so much. It is the reason to preserve life in the first place, to fortify our shelters and our camp, to share sustenance with others around the fire. Art is the reason we exist. We exist to create; creation becomes the over arching beauty worth pursuing in a finite life; beauty is the reason to endure.

Which leads me back to trying to hang on to things that matter to me. While I am not suddenly compelled to listen intently to every piece of music Leoš Janáček composed, I value knowing how his moody musical ruminations influenced others. Stories about how Borscht Belt nightclubs influenced wider American culture not only make me smile, but make me nostalgic, even wistful that I cannot travel through time. I consider it vital to be able to cook a bunch of things without a cookbook, and I also consider it vital to be able to follow the big picture of endlessly dynamic global markets. While it’s unlikely I’ll be obliged to describe the difference between arabica and robusta coffee beans, I like knowing the difference when I brew a morning cup. (Although on this point, trust me: go with arabica every time.)

What matters to me is being in touch with the world, feeling it like a participant and not simply an observer.  That means appreciating that everything known was first learned by someone who spent the time and energy to learn it, to experience it for the first time, and to give it a name. When I’m gone in a few years, everything I’ve learned about everything they’ve learned will disappear with me, except for the very, very few traces of my life that might have just a microscopic chance of enduring for a few years beyond my time. Rather than convince me of my futility, that impermanence reminds me to stay engaged, to hang on, and try to remember. 

@michaelstarobin

facebook.com/michaelstarobin

[lord-squiggletits]

I'm definitely not a member of the crowd comics cater to because the way they're published actually drives me bonkers.

Like, the two other media franchises I've ever loved nearly as much as transformers (Warcraft and the Star Wars sequels) were both almost criminal in their constant retconning and placing of vital lore information in books and shit that were completely separate from the actual story medium (a video game and movies respectively). I hate that shit. My philosophy towards media is that someone should be able to boot up the video game, start on book 1, watch movie 1, etc and just consume the freaking media without having to make constant detours to read author interviews, consult a wiki, find and read some random novel, etc etc. The story should be IN THE MAIN SERIES COMPLETELY and any side materials should only be window dressing that adds depth without becoming something absolutely essential that you won't understand the main story without. And of course I appreciate it when that story is actually a story and I'm not punished for caring about the lore by companies constantly retconning shit and making me feel like trying to understand the story is pointless since I know things will just get retconned next update anyways (looking HARD at you World of Warcraft).

So it's kinda ironic that I ended up getting into a comic series for Transformers. It just drives me a little nuts how comics have multiple authors, so I can hardly make story/thematic analyses because I can't assume the authors planned for certain future plot points, and there are constant retcons and dropped storylines, so I have to just ignore things or make them up in order to come up with coherent plot/character rationales, and if I REALLY want to understand the story I have to hunt for author interviews and behind the scenes factoids to explain why the hell something was dropped or suddenly changed mid story.

It just feels like a super hostile medium for anyone who isn't the 5% of die hard fans who will spend hours researching and combing through in-universe and real-world material to get the best reading of the story. The source material is just incredibly obtuse to read as a continual narrative sometimes without knowing something from cut content and author interviews. IDW1 isn't a series I could imagine casually picking up off the shelf and being able to understand things from just reading it.

I know some people say that comics isn't about reading 100% of the story and you can/should just pick the parts you like to consider canon, but I'm not really a fan of that approach. :/ I guess since I spent the majority of my life being a die-hard novel reader, I kind of expect continuous narratives in a simple 1-infinity format where the story is planned out and doesnt get published until it's been edited to shit for continuity and quality. I guess comics just aren't for me.

[sporddreki]

"ive wrote an essay months ago about how sasoris puppets work but ive decided not to finish it does anyone want that" Ugh, I am so new to Tumblr, I was trying to figure out how to leave a comment just to say, yes, I would be interested in this.

alright here you go B) i havent touched it ever since so no promises

Guess what - I finally start writing down all the trivia I know about Sasori, because it’s been some kind of strange fixation a while ago and I will regret never having written all of this down, so… this time it’s about Sasori’s specialty: the Hitogugutsu or the Human Puppets. But only from the “mechanical” side rather than the psychological (that comes later). Some warnings: This will be dealing with gore and other pretty gross stuff, so be careful, also English isn’t my first language so excuse any possible mistakes. Without further ado, let’s jump straight into the rabbit hole!

So first things first, what are the Hitogugutsu? If you’ve read or watched Naruto Shippuden and you paid attention to what Sasori is all about, you’ll immediately be confronted by his obscure obsession with puppets that stems from his childhood. As the story went on Sasori has made his first puppet out of a human being, his best friend Komushi to be exact, and then went on with indulging in this gorey procedure for the rest of his life, leaving him with a total of 298 human puppets in his possession. In this analysis we’re going to look at the what rather than the why, how they’re created, how they’re used in battle and what distinguishes them from normal puppets.

As you heard, Hitogugutsu are made from human bodies, preserved and equipped with a bunch of puppet mechanics. His most famous Hitogugutsu, the Third Kazekage puppet, which he has built out of his former village leader, is a great example for what his creations have to be like to adequately perform their jobs - Hitogugutsu are mainly used as a weapon in battle and are a form of “eternal art” in Sasori’s eyes. Means the human puppet has to be 1) effective in physical fights and 2) match Sasori’s ideal picture of what he considers art. These are the two most important points and will become significant throughout the analysis.

Let’s talk about the battle efficiency first. The key part of Hitogugutsu is that they can contain the chakra and the kekkai genkai the “material” (the person the puppet has been made out of) used to have, which can be used by Sasori in battle. Throughout Naruto Shippuden this attribute has only been showed once by the Third Kazekage and his magnetic iron sand ability. We are left to speculate about the other 297 Hitogugutsu and whether they have kept their chakra/kekkai genkai or not - but counting on Sasori’s words, they did. Other than that they’re barely able to distinguish from normal puppets, at least fighting-wise. Keeping that in the back of our heads, the construction of Hitogugutsu will give us the following problems:

1) Easiest first - a bunch of mechanics, weapons and special attacks have to fit in them to be useful in battle. Hence the general puppet structure, which is the best way for Sasori to manipulate them as he pleases.

2) They have to be well preserved to not decay and be robust enough to not immediately break in battle. Proper preservation and a stable foundation is the key here. Additionally, they have to be immune to Sasori’s poison.

3) An intelligent ten-year-old needs to be able to make at least a simplified version of them. Sasori was only a child when he made his first one out of his friend Komushi and it looked authentic.

4) The chakra needs to not just be stored inside the body, but to be able to flow, to be released through physical attacks and to be regenerated. This is essentially the biggest problem of human puppets, since they lack the (functional) organs needed to create chakra in their own, personal chakra nature.

5) Another important detail is his “ultimate” Performance of a Hundred Puppets where he controls all of them individually with a chakra string coming from his chest, which means the mechanics of a puppet must be adjusted in a way to be able for Sasori to do that.

Sounds like a bunch of obstacles Sasori has to overcome, and we with him since that’s part of the analysis - but it’s possible, especially when calculating Naruto logic into it. Before the question comes up, I’m purposely not trying to be as exact to the canon as possible nor do I think all of this was Kishimoto’s masterplan, but i will try to find the most efficient way for Sasori to achieve all of this and stay reasonable at the same time.

*** Now heres the thing: As mentioned above, the main problem seems to be the whole chakra story and we have to question how chakra works and then how Sasori used it for his techniques. We are walking on eggshells here because nearly everything is speculation. Considering the Hitogugutsu kept their chakra inside of them and are able to release it (e.g. the Third Kazekage), they have to have some sort of modified chakra system inside of them. The problem is that this chakra is a consumable, means it’s not an infinite resource and since the bodies are dead there is no way for them to regenerate their chakra. However, Sasori is using it anyway and has pride in stating that he preserves people’s chakra in puppets eternally, so what’s going on here? Here’s the problem - the Naruto logic is completely broke here. I’ve spent days rummaging the Naruto Wiki but there’s no canon way for Sasori to do that, but we know he does it, so he somehow has found a way. If he made some kind of apperature or jutsu that can convert his own chakra to the human puppet’s nature, everything would make sense, but the canon has forsaken me here. However, there were some cases where that actually happened through some kekkai genkai or a ~fortunate coincidence~ so stuff like that is possible in the Naruto universe, for Sasori too, but sadly I can’t describe it here until now. For real, hit me up if you guys have an idea, otherwise I have no choice but to accept that as indescribable Naruto logic and get my own theories and speculation going. ***

Of course we won’t let that stop us - its just time to get our minds going and make some own theses. I’ve got two for you: One that prioritizes the battle efficiency and one Sasori’s view of art.

1) The Chakra conversion theory

The only “renewable chakra source” we have is Sasori himself. Means, if Sasori found a way to convert his own chakra to have the nature of the puppet’s chakra, it would pretty much be solved. This would require some sort of gadget or jutsu, but I won’t be understimating Sasori’s genius - **********

Assuming Sasori has built in a convertor of some sort into the puppet, it gets a little easier. To use chakra in the first place, Sasori has to store it inside of the puppet. Nothing as easy as that coming from a family that predominantly uses Fūinjutsu (or Sealing Techniques) - we’re gonna dig into the lore to make it possible that also a young Sasori could’ve used this technique with a certain effort.

May i present you: The Puppet Brigade of Sunagakure, with Chiyo as its head and a mighty forbidden jutsu in her hands - the One’s Own Life Reincarnation. You may have heard of that when Chiyo revived Gaara, but it was initially for a way different cause, and that is to give life to puppets. It works as following: The user takes their own life energy to revive a dead person, but dies by themselves in return. The brigade wanted to use it to “breathe life” into puppets for more efficiency in battle, but it was banned by Sunagakure for being unethical. You heard it - puppets, so it is possible to transfer life energy into a puppet to bring it to life, somehow. Fortunate for teen Sasori of course, who just began with his cruel passion of making Hitogugutsu. Let’s take a look at how the jutsu works:

Simple. Here comes the interesting part - Sasori could’ve modified this jutsu to store the living person’s chakra inside of the puppet, and even had access to the technique by being involved in the puppet brigade himself. He just needed to rummage through the forbidden files in there. Once you think about it it seems pretty plausible, right? Now let me explain how a modified jutsu would work:

The sealing technique stays the same, but with an extra step, which uses Sasori as its “medium”. He prepares the body as the shell and later seals the person’s chakra into it. The scroll is just a placeholder by the way, Sasori puts the energy in whatever aperture its later kept in and builds it into the puppet. It never got shown in the canon, but maybe it looks similar to his core. I believe the step of sealing the chakra away before preparing the body is important; otherwise the person would die and lose their chakra before Sasori is finished. So that’s how the chakra gets preserved inside of the puppet.

Next step, what happens to the chakra? Since Sasori was fond of collecting rare kekkai genkai users as his material, his puppets need to use their abilities in battle somehow. Not just that, here’s an extremely efficient option of navigating puppets and we can connect that to the Performance of a Hundred Puppets problem.

Each of the Hitogugutsu has an internal chakra “skeleton” (similar to those that you use for Blender models + it’s probably more complicated), which Sasori is able to manipulate using his own chakra. If the convertor idea is correct, he has the ability to let his chakra flow into the puppet to start a circulation inside and trigger the conversion.

How’s that related to the Performance of a Hundred Puppets? When we see Sasori opening his chest lid, a hunded chakra strings pop out at once and every single of them gets connected to one of his puppets. The key part is that Sasori needs only one string to control a puppet with its full range of mobility. And an efficient way to achieve that is by giving them a chakra skeleton he can manipulate, which only needs one point of connection to get the flow going.

Another thing that bugged me was the fact that he only used taijutsu when fighting with all of his puppets at once. If his puppets had their own chakra preserved infinitely and eternally inside of them somehow, he could’ve just bombarded Sakura and Chiyo with all of their jutsus at once but instead he focuses on hand-to-hand combat and weapons. The chakra conversion theory simply explains this with Sasori not having enough chakra to pour into his puppets, since he was at the very end of his battle.

This theory prioritizes the “eternal art” point, since the Hitogugutsu do stay eternally functional and usable. So tldr; the human puppets have an internal chakra skeleton that can be manipulated by Sasori letting his own chakra flow through a theoretical convertor (which might as well be the seal he revamped from Chiyo’s old reanimation jutsu), which turns it into the puppet’s chakra nature and can then be used in battle.

2) The disposable puppet theory

Now, personally, I’m not very fond of this theory since it pretty much dumps the whole “eternal art” point into the garbage, as much as the psychological aspect - but it’s way too legit and rational to ignore. The main idea is that the puppets Sasori used for his technique were “empty” Hitogugutsu with their chakra already consumed which had no choice but to fight without ninjutsu. Meaning once Sasori has preserved their chakra it cannot be regenerated and the puppet is left behind as an empty shell. The reason why I’m still going with this theory is because the Third has a special gadget in his chest that makes him special and that got me thinking - the magnetic apperatus he uses for his Iron Sand abilities.

First of all some information about the Third Kazekage - he’s known for his kekkai genkai that is the Magnet Release, which he inherited through his bloodline. The Iron Sand technique is an adaptation of Shukaku’s (the One-Tails) abilities, which he created himself. When Sasori transformed him into a puppet he kept his abilities, but noticably weakened. Sasori has been using him as his “favorite weapon” ever since he was a young man and he has shown no sign of missing chakra. At the same time he has the (so far) unique apperatus that lets him use his magnetic abilities. So why isn’t the Third emptying out?

Now here’s the thing: The chakra we’re seeing in this picture isn’t the Thirds - its Sasori’s. The puppet has an unique appeatus that artificially creates the Thirds abilities, thus making them weaker than they originally were. Since the Third is both the only puppet we’ve seen keeping all of his abilities and the only one having the apperatus, he’s basically the only actual “eternal” puppet owned by Sasori. His inner chakra system just needs to get flowing by Sasori’s input and activates the magnetism, so it works similar to electricity.

Carrying on, we can see Sasori having holders attached to his back, four in total with the first one already being used in the picture (to shoot fire out of his palms). The second one is for the Performance of a Hundred Puppets, the fourth one is for shooting water out of his hands and well… the third one? No one knows. If we follow the theory of empty and full puppets, the third scroll can be used for puppets that still contain their chakra, while the second holds the empty ones, of course. This could explain Sasori’s reckless fighting style, the empty Hitogugutsu are pretty much “waste” and serve no purpose other than overwhelming the enemy by numbers - not just in the battle against Sakura and Chiyo, but also in the attack of the Land of This. So theoretically Sasori still had an ace up his sleeve but didn’t decide to use it.

As I’ve mentioned above, this theory is logically reasonable but at the same time signs Sasori off as, well, pretty much a liar when it comes to his view of eternal art. After the chakra of one of his puppets is worn off, their special abilities become unusable and the effort of making Hitogugutsu in the first place seems over-the-top to me personally. While their bodies stay “eternal”, their abilities get lost by usage, and later recklessly destroyed by a Performance of a Hundred puppets attack. So tl;dr - chakra regeneration in human puppets is impossible, their abilities can be used once or twice before their chakra runs out, Sasori later only uses them for taijutsu and contradicts his own view of art.

[zecretsanta]

To: @therealhousewivesofhyrule

From: @silvershoelaces

Happy holidays! 

Phi didn’t have much before she volunteered to be frozen, but now she had even less.  Her foster parents, already elderly when she participated in the simulated Mars mission forty-five years ago, were long gone.  And she’d sold all her stuff on eBay when she quit college in anticipation of participating in the Decision Game.  The only things she had left were what remained of her bank account, the clothes she was wearing, and the brooch she had had since she was a baby.  She didn’t even have knowledge about the outside world, now that it had changed so much, so the street smarts she’d prided herself on for twenty years?�� May as well have been Star Trek trivia for all the good they’d do her.  As much as she valued her independence, it looked like she had no choice but to take Old Man Sigma up on his offer to take her in, at least until she found out whether her bank, which had been all but destroyed during the Radical Six chaos, would be able to recover the funds in her account.  Besides, the test results were coming in today.

Phi began to pace back and forth where she was waiting in Warehouse A, uncharacteristically anxious.  Everything that had taken place since she had been dragged into this insane series of events at the beginning of the AB Game had already changed her life completely.  But this news, knowing if she had a real, blood family, could change it just as much.  And the call was supposed to come in any minute now….

“Phido, how ya been?” chuckled an obnoxious, grating voice.  “It’s been furever, hasn’t it?”

Lagomorph.  Knowing that Sigma and Akane, two people she hadn’t known before, but now cared about and trusted, had conspired to make the thing, did not fill her with any love for it.  It was still as obnoxious as ever.  Phi spun around to see the main screen lit up with the face of that…creature.

“What do you want?”

“You’ve got a call from Master Kurashiki.  I have a hutch you’ll want to take it.”

Admittedly, she did.  In fact, that’s what she had been waiting for.  Akane was on Earth, or what was left of it anyway, and so Akane was the one who was receiving the results of her genetic test.  If she had any family—any whatsoever—she intended to contact them and see if they could help her get back on her feet, make ends meet, learn about her real parents, or whatever.  That is, if they cared.

“Yeah, put her through, Zer—I mean, Lagomorph.”  It wasn’t surprising that she had messed up the bunny’s name, since it had been nearly a year in her consciousness since she had first heard it, and less than a day in real time.  And she’d been used to calling it Zero, too.

Lagomorph chuckled with some sort of psychotic glee and disappeared as Akane’s face showed up on the screen.  In front of her was a large box with a return address claiming to be from the International Genetic Database.

“Good day, Phi,” Akane said with a gentle smile.  “I hope you are doing well.”

“Yeah, yeah, Akane.  No need to be so polite with me,” Phi retorted, knowing full well that Akane was equally polite when they were the same age, and that telling her not to be polite did nothing.  She was just like that.  “You got the results, right?”  Of course, she knew the answer to her question was already on-screen.

“Yes, I did.  Would you like me to open them for you, or do you prefer privacy?”

“Whatever, I’m sure you don’t know any of the people I might be related to anyway,” Phi scoffed. “If there even is anybody left, I don’t care if you see it.  Hell, if you do know them, maybe you can send ‘em my way.”

“If that is what you wish, I will open it for you now,” Akane said, pulling a letter opener out of somewhere off-camera.  It had a rabbit on the handle.  How much did this woman like rabbits?  What a weirdo.  Akane, obviously oblivious to Phi’s thoughts, used the letter opener to slice the tape on the outside of the box.

Inside there was a heavily padded envelope, with a memory card taped to it.  The memory card was the same type of card used in the facility, which honestly was surprising to Phi.  For whatever reason, she had assumed that all of the technology in Rhizome Nine was specially made for the AB Project.  Clearly that assumption was wrong.

Akane leaned over the camera, completely obscuring it as she fiddled with whatever device was in front of her.  Presumably, she was inserting the memory card into her computer, but Phi couldn’t tell.  When Akane finally sat down, she didn’t look Phi in the eye, instead focusing intently on the information onscreen.

“So how’s it looking?” Phi asked eventually.

Akane let out an audible gasp.  Good timing.

“I knew it,” Phi laughed darkly.  “I have no living relatives at all, do I?”  It was just her luck.  No known living relatives in the days before genetic testing could prove that assumption wrong, no living relatives now.  She was destined to be alone.

“It says here…your closest living relative is…no, that can’t be true.  His younger sister…is this what he meant?  April nineteen…”

“What?!”

“The test results say that your closest living relative is…Dr. Klim.”

What the hell?

No, seriously.  The old woman must have been more senile than Phi thought.

“What.  The.  Hell.”  Phi was ready to hear that she would never find anybody.  But this?  This was beyond her expectations.  This was insanity.

“There aren’t too many remaining members of the Klim family, but Sigma is, in fact, your closest genetic match.  You share 50% of your DNA with him.”

“What.  The.  Hell.”

“It will likely be easier for you to believe me if I provide you with the documentation, so you may look through it yourself.  There is more of interest in there, and I expect you will wish to take the time to peruse the files on your own.  I’ll mail them to you, and send the physical items to the printer in the Director’s Office.”

Phi turned on her heels and ran toward the Director’s Office, completely abandoning the conversation without so much as a goodbye.  If the old woman was messing with her, she’d get hers.  If she was telling the truth, well…Phi was sure she’d accept an apology later.

And in minutes, there it was on the computer screen in front of her.  A detailed analysis of all her chromosomes, possibilities of various genetic disorders, her likelihood of immunity to Radical Six, and a list of partial matches in the system for her DNA.  Akane was right, too.  Sigma’s DNA was a 50% match for her own.  But something else caught her eye….

“Phi, what are you doing?” asked a voice behind her.  She spun around on her swivel chair.  The spitting image of Sigma’s younger self, dressed with the robot suit covering  all but his head, was standing before her.

“Hey, Kyle.  Glad to see you.  While you’re here, help me with this.”  Phi gestured with two fingers, beckoning him closer, and he obliged.

“What do you need?”

“I got my results back from the IGD today.  Looking for any family I might possibly have.  But does this seem right to you?”  She pointed toward Sigma’s name on the screen.

“Oh my, that does seem rather peculiar,” Kyle said.  “If this is true, then this means that—”

“Sigma is my father,” Phi said, as Kyle continued, “Father is your brother.”

“How did you come to that conclusion, Phi?  From what you two have told me, you were originally the same age.  Your mind is considerably younger than his at the moment, but chronologically, you are only two years younger than he is.  So doesn’t it stand to reason that—”

“Yeah, but check this out.  Right here, on the other side of the page.”  Phi gestured at another name on the screen, a name that was also a 50% match.  Diana.

“Do you know this Diana person?”

“Yeah.  I do.  But look.”  Phi pointed to the screen again.  The word deceased was written below the name, in bolded red font, but Phi was more interested in the line in between.  “She and I also share 50% of our DNA.“

“Perhaps she is your long-lost sister, then,” Kyle said, his voice louder and slightly higher in pitch.  He sounded excited.  Phi had never seen Kyle get so emotional before.  There went her theory that his mind was secretly more robotic than one of the GAULEMs.  “And if you and Father share half your DNA, and this woman also shares that much DNA with you, then Father—”

“—isn’t related to her at all.”

It was strange to watch Kyle’s reaction to the information.  He had clearly been excited before, but although it showed in his voice, his facial expression had barely changed.  And now, although she could tell he was dejected through the rest of his body language, his face was similarly blank in expression.  He really did grow up inside the robot suit, huh?  Its face was more expressive than his real one.

“But if Father and this woman are not related, then that means…”

“It means I have to be the missing link between them.  Hence, their child.”

Kyle looked at her blankly.  Phi could tell that this particular blank stare, unlike his previous gaze, was deliberate.

“It’s not that unrealistic.  A few months ago, when we were trapped in the Mars mission test site—actually, that was forty-five years ago, wasn’t it?  Not the point.  Anyway—at the testing site, there was a machine.  Akane told me about it.  It’s the machine she and Junpei used to survive, the one she took Clover and Alice to a few days ago.  It’s a device that allows people to travel between timelines without SHIFTing.  It’s not inconceivable to send someone back, say, twenty or thirty years.”

“But even if we are to believe that such a thing is true, that means—”

“That you’re my younger brother, you dork.”

—————————————————

“—And that’s when I smacked him and told him that his story about a cat cursing him with puns of all things made no sense.”

“Ahahahaha!  I always wondered if there was a story was behind his puns, but that story is an absolute farce!”

Kyle and Phi had been sitting on the floor and talking for an hour now, and Kyle was relieved to see that Phi’s tough persona had faded somewhat.  Despite his determination to be kind and polite to everyone, he had honestly been quite intimidated by her demeanor.  He had never lived in an environment with sarcasm, and consequently had had trouble interpreting the intention of Phi’s frequent snarking.  But as she opened up to him, he found himself increasingly able to cope.

“Tell me, Phi.  What was Diana like?  She was the woman Father loved, wasn’t she?”

“She was beautiful and kind.  Kind of a softie if I’m being honest.  She was the one who probably wanted to avoid conflict the most.  And I was drawn to her when we were living together, because she was warm, and caring, and she made me feel like I wasn’t alone in the world anymore.  And that’s why it hurt so much when she betrayed us.”

Unexpectedly, tears started to slide down Phi’s cheeks, and her voice cracked on the word “betrayed”.

“I don’t understand,” Kyle said hesitantly, staring at the tears.  “If she was so kind, why would she—”

“I don’t know!”  Phi exclaimed.  “I don’t know what would possess her to throw the future of the world away and drag me out of that shelter when she knew my living would mean the spread of Radical Six.  And I can’t even ask her because she’s de—”

“It’s because she loved you very much,” Sigma said.

Kyle and Phi looked up.  Kyle’s father—no, their father—was standing in the doorway, a nostalgic look in his eyes.  He stepped into the room.

“Of course, she loved everyone she spent time with at the Mars mission test site, but our team in particular was very dear to her.  She kept telling me about it while we were working together here on the moon.”

“Telling you about herself and Phi, you mean?”

“Yes, and all the other members of the Decision Game too.  After we lived together, she said, she felt like we were a family.  All nine of us.  And I couldn’t fathom just what had gone on in there—I had just finished the AB games when I was whisked away to the past again, when my arms and eye were freshly…removed…and here was this woman who knew me, who knew Phi, and kept talking about this Carlos and Mira and Junpei, and I had no idea who any of these people were or why she knew them.  The stories were overwhelming at first.  But it did seem as if she and Phi had some sort of important connection.  And when I met them again, decades later, Diana and Phi did seem to grow very close, very quickly.  Is this about Diana?”

“Yeah, I think she’s my mom,” Phi said flatly.  Considering the circumstances, Kyle would have expected her to put more emphasis on the information, but with Phi being Phi, that expectation was…overly ambitious.  Of course, his father’s response was more emotional.

“Excuse me?!”

“Calm down, old man.  The test results are right here.”  Phi got up and sauntered over to the computer to log in again, and Sigma briskly walked across the room to try to slow her down.  Between his age and her determination, not to mention the fact that Kyle was still sitting on the floor between them, he was no match for her.  She sat down and started typing.  Sigma stepped around Kyle.

“Can you at least explain what you’re talking about?” Sigma sighed.  “Or is that too much to ask?”

“No, dad,” Phi groaned.  “I know you too well.  You won’t believe me until I show you the files.”

“Don’t dismiss me that readil—‘dad?”

Kyle couldn’t help but let out a snicker as he stood up.  “Yes, dad, you need to look at the files.”

Sigma released an exasperated groan.  “Kyle, what sort of nonsense has Phi put into your head?  You don’t have to go along with whatever she says.”  The thought of Phi conspiring with him for the sole purpose of bothering his father was even funnier to Kyle than her blatantly having addressed him as “dad”, and he laughed harder.  Phi, to his surprise, started laughing with him.

“I’m not kitten about this,” Phi smirked, invoking the cat pun for absolutely no reason at all.  “If you think I’m lion, then you should check this out.”  Phi pointed at the screen again, at Diana’s entry in the “deceased” dataset.  Sure enough, the entry read that roughly 50% of her DNA was a match for Phi’s.

“Now, unless you two are distant cousins, the fact that I also share this DNA with you”—she traced her finger across the screen toward Sigma’s entry—"means that somehow, you two got it on and I was the result.  Kind of like an antimatter bomb, really.”

Kyle didn’t understand what she was referring to with regards to the antimatter bomb, but it was true that Phi had a rather explosive personality.  And shockingly, Sigma was not reacting to Phi’s teasing with anger.  Perhaps Kyle could do the same?

“This situation, it turns out, is purrfect for Phi.  She no longer has to go back to Earth and claw her way into success.  Is it not pawsible for her to stay here, with us?”

The icy glare Kyle received from Phi indicated that he had perhaps gone too far in his puns, but Sigma began to laugh.  “Is that how you two see me?  As an old man who won’t stop making dad jokes?  Maybe you two are sort of similar after all.”  He shook his head.  “It’s not impossible, but I don’t think so.  If you two want to prank me, try to convince me of something more outrageous.”

Sigma turned around and began to exit the room.

“But if you really mean it,” he said, waving his hand over his head in a dismissive goodbye without turning around, “forward that mail to my box and I’ll take a look.  Have fun.”

Sigma left.

“Well, that was fun,” Phi said as soon as he was out of earshot.  “And if it turns out this is real, I think I’m going to have a hell of a good time teasing him.

“So you aren’t sure, Phi?” Kyle asked.

“Well, it seems pretty reasonable.  Better than anything else I can come up with, anyway.  And as much as I don’t think I’m anything like that dork, having a dorky dad is better than not having one at all.”

Kyle attempted to smile, but his face must not have been doing what he intended for it to do, because Phi recoiled slightly at his expression.  He stopped trying.  “I am glad to finally have a sibling if nothing else.  Living every day of my life surrounded by GAULEMs and no living creatures was not torturous, but it was also far from the pleasant family life I envisioned as a child.”

“I can’t guarantee I’ll be a good older sister,” Phi said, “but I can be sure to tease you now and then.”

“I can ask for no greater pleasure,” Kyle replied. “I knew we had a connection.”

[kootenaygoon]

Nobody knows the Kootenays like Greg Nesteroff.

A celebrated historian and journalist, he first made a name for himself as a columnist and reporter for the Nelson Star, eventually moving up to the editor position. He then became news director of Juice FM, a gig he inherited from veteran broadcaster Glenn Hicks.

Last year Nesteroff decided to take some time off to work on two full-length book projects — one will be a collection of his popular Place Names columns, while the other will be a biography of Sandon founder John Morgan Harris. Meanwhile he started a blog: The Kütne Reader.

Kootenay Goon caught up with Greg to chat about the world of blogging, his obsession with the past and the future of journalism.

#1. For many of the posts on Kütne Reader, a historical document or photograph ends up being the jumping off point for a deep dive into the life of some historical character most have never heard of. (I loved your story about "The Midnight Nurse", by the way.) Your investigative skill-set is honestly staggering — I can't believe you successfully dredge up some of the information you do.

It seems to me like this would be a lengthy process, and I'm curious what your strategy is when building these stories. What are your go-to sources? Are you constantly haunting the archives, or looking this stuff up in books, or some combination of both?

Gee, thanks! My hat will no longer fit. 

I had a stockpile of unpublished stories I was able to drawn on initially. I've exhausted most of them, so now I'm putting up new posts at a slightly slower pace. Although I have no shortage of ideas, it takes longer to assemble each post. You're right about a single photograph, document, or artifact inspiring a post. It doesn't take much to get me interested and headed down a proverbial rabbit hole.

Go-to sources: ancestry.com plus the ever-expanding list of digitized newspapers, particularly the early Kootenay papers available through UBC's BC Historical Newspapers site and the ones on newspapers.com. The recent addition to the latter of The Vancouver Sun was particularly exciting. I visit archives and libraries less often than I used to because so much is available online now. But I spent 20 years taking notes from newspapers and local history books (the room where I write is groaning under the weight of those books), so there is lots I can search even on my own computer desktop.  

Even though an amazing number of books have been written about this region (with more added each year) there is no shortage of subjects left unexplored or under-explored. The digitization of newspapers and books is giving us the tools to explore topics and questions in previously impossible ways. It's fun to be part of the first wave of historians to take advantage of this technology. 

Some of my posts are wholly original; you won't find anything about those subjects in any history book. Others are a matter of presenting existing information in a new way. My post entitled "15 curious things about Peter (Lordly) Verigin's death" contained nothing that hadn't already been published, but it was presented in a novel way. Whereas "A phony dentist in the Slocan Valley" recounted the life of a career criminal which had never been presented in full. 

#2. You took 2018 off to focus on writing your books. Now that 2019's staring us in the face, how much progress have you made?

Alarmingly little. I blame the blog. 

I can throw something up in a hurry without worrying too much about being artful and get instant feedback. Whereas the books are long-term projects that require more care and thought and will not bear fruit for a long time. So the quicker, shorter stuff is much more attractive. It gives me a sense of accomplishment and makes me feel productive in spite of the lack of progress on the books.

I will say that I have reorganized my Johnny Harris biography in a way that should make it more compelling. But I haven't added very much. It still sits at about 43,000 words with a huge amount left to do.

The place name series is more a matter of compiling and condensing than writing, since the basis for it has been a series that has appeared in local newspapers for the last six years. But even then, all I've accomplished so far is a sample chapter for letters P and Q.

Fortunately, my literary agent and wife are both prodding me to get going on the books before my nest egg runs out.

#3. Your other big project has been this blog, and you've been churning out content on the regular. How does it feel to switch mediums, to switch from your home in the pages of the Nelson Star and unleash your work online? Obviously there's no word count limits, which is nice, but what else inspired you to make the jump?

It was probably just a procrastination tool. 

It seemed more fun than what I was actually supposed to be doing. I had no goal initially and didn't give a lot of thought to how it would look or what it would contain. I didn't even really envision anyone reading it. (Which is not unusual, since I've written lots of things for my own amusement and never bothered to share them. Some have since been posted on the blog.) 

Now I do pay more attention to what I'm doing and actively try to increase page views, although I view it purely as a game.

#4. In a number of your historical posts you write about about the First Nations residents of the West Kootenay, including the Sinixt and the Ktunaxa. (Cool postcard of those pictographs, by the way.) This is a subject I don't know much about, and surely I'm not the only one. In your research, what have you learned about their history and how do you feel it informs your understanding of First Nations issues today?

I don't pretend to be an expert on local First Nations. But I am very interested in overlooked stories and overlooked people. 

The First Nations of West Kootenay certainly fall in that category. For generations we experienced a sort of collective amnesia, with descendants of European settlers claiming there never were any First Nations people here, or that they were only transient. That attitude started to shift about 30 years ago, and today you will hear aboriginal acknowledgements at the start of city council meetings, but we still have a long way to go in recognizing local indigenous history. 

Other visible minorities have also been given short shrift in local history, including Chinese Canadians and Japanese Canadians. For many years their stories in this area were not well told, but that has changed in the past few decades, thanks to a few key writers and curators. There is still much untapped ground: for instance, no one has ever written in detail about South Asian pioneers of this region, but I would like to. There were many Indo Canadian sawmill workers in our area, and there is even a West Kootenay connection to the Komagata Maru.

#5. I know you have a special relationship with Sandon, the ghost town just outside New Denver. (For those of you who haven't been, it's worth it just to check out the fleet of historic Vancouver buses randomly parked there.) If memory serves, you've been researching the founder — who was apparently quite the character. What is it about Sandon that initially won your attention?

Sandon has held generations of history buffs in thrall, probably because of its setting and the heights it reached before its lengthy descent into a ghost town. I am no exception. I was taken by it during my first childhood trip. Even though it was hardly an attractive place at that time, it still made a deep impression on me. I recall thinking that I'd somehow like to contribute to the study of local history, but assumed everything there was to know had already been discovered. Well ...

I became particularly interested in John Morgan Harris, the subject of the biography I am writing, when looking into myths about Sandon. There was a story he killed someone before coming to the area. I didn't believe it, but it turned out to be true. I spent a few days in the Wallace, Idaho library reading newspapers about that incident and the rest of his exploits there. 

I've also been to his birthplace and grave in Virginia.

#6. You spend a lot of time living in the past, but you also produce stellar journalism about the present day. Is it hard to switch back and forth, and do you think the two pursuits influence and inform each other?

It's not hard to switch. 

But it is nice to bring a historical perspective to a current news story, to tell your reader how typical or atypical an event is, the last time it happened, or just supply some trivia that enlivens your copy. 

In writing history I use the genealogist's toolkit more than the reporter's. The same resources people use to compile family trees I use to pursue obscure historical figures. Most of the time my subjects are long dead, so I'm not able to interview them or anyone who knew them. But I use ancestry.com and the BC archives vital events index nearly every day in addition to the aforementioned digitized newspaper sites. 

Thank goodness for those pioneer papers. Despite their biases and blind spots (those visible minorities mentioned earlier were routinely condemned when they weren't ignored), without them we would have a much poorer understanding of what went on around here.

[newstfionline]

The Secret Lives of Central Bankers

By Annelise Riles, NY Times, Oct. 20, 2018

A few years ago, a senior Japanese central banker let me in on a secret side of his life: Like some others in his rarefied world, he is a passionate devotee of Sherlock Holmes. After formal meetings in capitals around the world, he joins the other Sherlock Holmes buffs over drinks or dinner for trivia competitions, to test their knowledge of obscure plot details, or to share amateur historical research into Victorian London.

It is all very casual, but the camaraderie is important to him. Through this informal fan club, the banker told me, he had made his closest professional friendships. “I feel closer to many of these people than to many of my countrymen,” he said.

As an anthropologist, I have spent 20 years studying the customs, beliefs and rituals of central bankers around the world. They see themselves as jacks-of-all-financial-trades who solve complex financial crises before they can damage the unsuspecting public. They are as clever as the extraordinarily wealthy banking executives whom they regulate, but motivated by higher ideals. So it made sense that the aloof and justifiably arrogant Sherlock Holmes might represent for them an ideal of masculine brilliance (they are mostly still men), rationality and self-control. Like Holmes, central bankers consider their detachment an asset.

But in the real world, this high-mindedness has come at a cost. In the United States, President Trump has suggested that the Federal Reserve is not doing “what’s good for the country,” and on Tuesday he told Fox Business that the Fed was his “biggest threat.” He said that it was “raising rates too fast, and it’s too independent.” So far, the Fed chairman has remained above the political fray. But if the president persuades enough Americans that the Fed’s decisions to raise interest rates, which would make their credit cards and mortgages more expensive, are to blame for their financial troubles, principled silence may not be enough.

The acculturation process for central bankers begins early. Most of them attend a handful of elite universities--the University of Chicago, Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge--to study neoclassical economics, and their early training often involves a secondment to the central banking institutions of another country. In Tokyo or Frankfurt or New York, they operate within a closed set.

There are norms of dress: sharp, conservative suits and dark ties, but never fancy shoes. (Janet Yellen’s decision to remove her jacket at a summertime meeting once caused a stir.) And many central bankers date their lives according to memories of certain key international banking agreements: Basel I and Basel II are, for them, like the fall of the Berlin Wall or the Sept. 11 attacks.

This world is beginning to feel like an anachronism, especially after the financial crisis of 2008. When markets fail to respond to monetary policy as the science says that they should, the public loses faith in experts. And it may not be possible for the informal and secretive craft of central banking to continue its traditions in a world that demands greater transparency and accountability. This tradition of the apolitical central banker isn’t even very well established. It goes back only to the late 1980s and early 1990s, when a flurry of academic research suggested that independent central banks were correlated with lower inflation--a priority at the time for the United States.

At one closed-door meeting that I organized, a central banker from South Asia complained to the ones from the United States and Europe, in essence: You guys meet the night before at your private club, and then you show up here, and the decisions have already been made.

The man he was challenging wasn’t embarrassed. Instead, he said, in effect: Well, if you could just learn to play by the rules, then you could be part of that club. Look at the Japanese. They’ve learned all the rules, and now look where they are.

This arrogance, toward the public and even toward one another, undermines central banks’ effectiveness. One of the goals of monetary policy is to shape people’s behavior. When a central bank says it anticipates that prices are going to rise, it expects the public to take that advice seriously. If people do, and they buy things now before prices rise, then perhaps prices won’t rise as much. But central banks need credibility for this stabilizing mechanism to work.

Some countries do have this level of public trust, built carefully over decades. In Denmark, for example, central bank officials make a concerted effort, in speeches and other public comments, to tell the story of how their work contributes to the egalitarian society that Danes value. Danes love their central bank.

There are still, of course, central bankers who argue that they should preserve their mystique or people won’t respect them. Others believe that close ties among central bank officials benefit everyone: The 2008 crisis, for example, might have been much worse if they did not have such open lines of communications. One central banker I know, from one of the Group of 7 countries, spoke movingly about how much he valued his deep personal relationships with leaders at the People’s Bank of China. He said both sides shared quite sensitive information and did whatever they could, within the boundaries of their professional obligations, to support one another.

In an era of increasing economic nationalism, this cosmopolitan culture may be difficult to maintain.

Holmes never worried about this sort of thing. In “A Study in Scarlet,” upon being told that the earth in fact revolves around the sun, Holmes declares, “What the deuce is it to me?” Dr. Watson is shocked, but Holmes insists, “If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or my work.” His central banking acolytes may not be so lucky.

[briangroth27]

Rogue One Review

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story wasn’t a tale that needed to be told—we already knew the original Death Star plans were stolen by Rebel spies—but it was definitely told very well! My favorite characters were Jyn (Felicity Jones), who provided a strong grounding force and emotional through-line, K-2SO (Alan Tudyk), who was excellent comic relief without being a buffoon, and Chirrut (Donnie Yen), whose belief in the Force despite not being Force-sensitive was an interesting addition to the mythology. And Darth Vader (James Earl Jones)…Vader unleashed was terrifying! Forget Boba Fett, I’d like a Vader solo movie. Rogue One had a wealth of well-choreographed and varied action, the scope was as epic and wide-reaching as it needed to be while keeping the story focused, and the additions to the Star Wars canon didn’t needlessly complicate or overwrite anything (though some lines and moments are certainly re-contextualized).

If nothing else, these standalone films should explore different sides of the Star Wars universe; show us new points of view rather than rehash all the same circumstances and belief systems we’re already getting from the main trilogies, and Rogue One did just that. Jyn felt totally different from fellow “plucked from obscurity” leads Luke, Anakin, and Rey. I enjoyed seeing a more morally gray side of the Rebellion through Cassian (Diego Luna). War can make things murky, even when you’re fighting on the right side, and Rogue One definitely showed that. Riz Ahmed’s Bodhi gave us a different flavor of defector than we saw from Finn in Force Awakens, so it’s good to see they aren’t resting on familiar characterizations when introducing people of similar backgrounds. Chirrut’s belief in the Force despite not being a Jedi displayed a new way of thinking about how the “common man” relates to it, which was cool. Since the Force flows through all living things, it makes sense that different people can tap into it—or at least be affected by it—in different ways (much like the Night Sisters on Clone Wars). I definitely want to see more Force “denominations” that challenge the Jedi and Sith “all or nothing” approaches. I’m hoping to see similar variation in Force-use in Rey from Luke’s training, since he wasn’t raised or trained with a strict Jedi upbringing. 

I love that this series is giving us more female leads! While the women of Star Wars have generally been great characters, there are too few of them. I’m glad Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) got to speak more than in the original trilogy, but I would’ve liked to see more than four women in the movie (and then, only Jyn had a major role). It wouldn’t have been hard to make one or two other members of Rogue One women. Still, good on them for such a diverse cast otherwise! I’ve gone back and forth on this, but ultimately I felt we got enough personality from all the characters to understand and care about them. The possible exception is Baze (Jiang Wen), who I didn’t get a great feel for outside of his relationship with Chirrut (which I read as romantic, but that wasn’t confirmed). Saw Gerrera (Forrest Whitaker) didn’t get much screentime either, but he’s been/will be fleshed out more on Clone Wars and Rebels. His inclusion here was a neat bridge from the animated shows to the films; if only Marvel Studios would do the same with their television and movie sides.

I liked that there was no opening crawl; it helped set this apart from the main story films, though I do wonder if people new to the saga were thrown off as to where this takes place in the timeline. I didn’t think I’d like a story about complete strangers whose fates were all but revealed in the opening of A New Hope, but Rogue One really won me over! I’ve seen it discussed elsewhere that doing these prequel stories could lead the Star Wars braintrust to always play it safe and tell tales about familiar mythology rather than truly expanding the universe; Han Solo could easily be about winning the Millennium Falcon from Lando and doing the Kessel Run rather than some totally new adventure from Solo’s past, and I hope they don’t fall into that trap. I don’t need every bit of world-building trivia in the original trilogy to be its own movie; that’d make these characters’ lives very small. Instead, they should think outside the Episode 4-6 box and invent new legends and adventures. Just because looking back worked for Rogue One doesn’t mean they should box themselves in completely.

If you haven’t seen it yet, Rogue One is definitely worth seeing before it leaves theaters!

4/5

Major Spoilers…

I really thought Jyn was going to be revealed as Rey’s mother, but obviously that’s not the case. I’m OK with things going this way; I enjoyed her arc through the film and the way she ended up inspiring the Rebellion into real action and getting them their first win. Galen (Madds Mikkelson) giving Jyn a Kyber Crystal necklace was a nice touch given their use as a Death Star power source, even if it seemed set up as something important that wasn’t quite paid off later on. I was surprised she didn’t get to kill Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn); that definitely felt like where her arc was going, but having Cassian do it instead didn’t rob Jyn of her agency or the dramatic weight of avenging her father. Jyn still got to complete her father’s mission, after all. Vader’s castle being located on Mustafar was a nice touch, since Palpatine will want him constantly angry and unfocused. I wonder if the reason for his bacta tank dip in his first scene will be revealed at some point; routine maintenance or the result of something like his battle at the end of Rebels season 2?

I didn’t expect them to fire the Death Star at all, so seeing minor attacks from it were surprising, effective and impressive. The whole Battle of Scarif was really well-paced and intense, while the dogfight above the shield was especially well-choreographed. Almost everyone had a mini-mission too, which was cool. Even though everyone went out fighting, the movie didn’t feel grim or depressing. I don’t know if it’s because we know they’ve helped strike the death blow against the Death Star, that they all went out fighting in honorable/meaningful deaths, or some combination of the two, but I didn’t walk out of the theater thinking things were pointless or hopeless. It’s entirely possible Carrie Fisher’s cameo specifically calling out the hope they’d won played into that, too.

Thinking back on the film, I really like how it re-contextualized and justified parts of A New Hope. If Leia’s lie about being on a diplomatic mission (to peaceful, weaponless Alderaan, no less) were supposed to be taken as a believable facade, why would they be firing on a Star Destroyer and fighting the Stormtroopers through the entire ship? They wouldn’t, but if they’re in the middle of a running chase and Vader has her dead to rights (he already knows there’s no ambassador on board), it makes more sense and makes her lie that much more brazen and gutsy. That Leia was intentionally going to Tatooine to pick up Obi-Wan for Bail also makes more sense than her randomly coming across the planet he was hiding on (and how, with the whole planet at their disposal, the droids “happened” to land right near where Ben was living). The Death Star’s massive design flaw being an intentional addition also works better than Imperial incompetence IMO. Technically, the transmissions were beamed to the “mother ship” and then given to the crew of the Tantive IV before it disconnected, but I don’t mind that bit of narrative flexibility in Vader’s Episode 4 line.

I don’t have a problem with fan service and character cameos—it can be a lot of fun if done right—but I do think Dr. Evazan and Ponda Baba being on Jedha was too much. They added nothing to the movie. Beyond that, I was happy with all the shout-outs to the canon (Here’s a handy guide to all the other cameos and Easter eggs!). For example, learning just why the Rogue Five position was open for Luke was a nice touch. It also makes sense for characters like the team in Rebels to have been present for the Scarif fight, given the Rebellion was very small at this point. I wonder if we’ll see the Battle of Scarif from the Ghost crew’s point of view at some point. Especially after Carrie Fisher’s tragic death, I’d love for Leia to become a recurring character on Rebels to detail her other early adventures with the Rebellion; it didn’t seem like this was the first time Bail sent her on a mission.

Here’s an interesting look at the large wealth of footage from the trailers that didn’t make it into the final film. I’d definitely be interested in seeing how that version went down! I also find the method of editing this film—cutting together scenes from other movies to gauge how long they typically are—a little bizarre. Those scenes should be however long you want them to be in your movie; there’s no need to look to other’s films. Visualizing the movie this way could lead to a lack of originality in basic film composition, and that’s something we definitely need to avoid.