#save me original trilogy……

[moobrvoobl-moobmoob-oobmpoobroom]

me, trying to navigate the star wars fandom on tumblr and find sensible posts I agree with: damn it’s like a minefield in here

[mina-jamsin-derulo]

I had a great time working on this comic page! It took a bit longer than I expected, but I'm pleased with how it turned out. Let me now if you guys enjoyed this one ;))

The inspiration for this page came from the song "Save Me" by BTS, particularly the first few lines.

[limnsaber]

This part of @hinderr ‘s ANH liveblog made me go HUH!! Because!!! Cause that’s the decision Luke makes in every movie!!!!!! He makes it in the first third of ANH and then makes it again and again every movie after.

“It’s too dangerous.” He races home to see his family. “It’s too dangerous.” He rescues Leia.

“It’s too dangerous, Luke,” he’s told. He goes to Bespin anyway.

“It’s too dangerous.” He leaves Endor, knowing in a certain way that he’s going to die, and goes anyway.

He wins. He hurts, and he feels fear, and the Dark creeps up behind him, but he makes this decision anyway, and wins every single time.

[froglover7789]

luke and hans friendship is so fun to me and i wish it was explored a little more in canon. like they absolutely yap about their mutual fear of leia and argue about ships and han teaches luke sabaac and luke teaches han some awful tatooinian game that is like horrifying (still workshopping this part) and they go drinking and are stupid and i wish we got to see more of that.

like anh they were so fun.... yap city.... and in esb they cared about each other but also gave each other shit like true friends... i wouldve liked to see that return more post hans carbonite incident bc lets face it. he would give luke so much shit for being a jedi

[garr9988]

See, the big thing I got from the original three Night at the Museum movies was that the qualities of the best night guard are compassion, empathy, intuition, and ingenuity. Larry was good at understanding and learning about the exhibits, what they wanted and how to make them happy, how to help them get along with each other.

Kahmunrah Rises Again completely ignores that and turns it into a generic vague issue of confidence and physical capability, with the extra Deus Ex Machina hail-Mary of being able to understand music & having a smart tablet on hand.

Going by the first three movies, if Nick needed to "prove himself" as a fit replacement for Larry, he should have been shown to be able to help exhibits, not "save the world" (even if that's what happened in the 2nd movie - funny how the stakes weren't even that high in the 3rd and originally final movie. It called out the Tablet's prophecy/warning being about the end of the magic, not the end of the world).

If they wanted to bring Kahmunrah back, Nick's best way to prove himself as a good if not better night guard would be to help redeem Kahmunrah and establish a positive relationship with his family and the rest of the exhibits!

[mudkipper]

Gaz's death in (the original mw3) pains me so much in particular because it's so abrupt it's so realistic. Ghost, roach, soap, and yuri all die in fantastical ways but nope. Not with gaz. You're playing as yuri, coming back into consciousness with gaz and price. As soon as gaz picks his head up, before he can even say anything, he's shot in the head. No warning, no explanation, no extraordinary betrayal or act of self-sacrifice. He's just gone.

[aro-attorneys]

Happy to announce that my AA1 replay is going great and the need to punch Edgeworth in his face is back

[probablygayattorneys]

So the good news is I’ve finally stopped obsessing over whether or not the Professor is going to disappoint me.

The bad news is that the only reason is that my time is now being spent obsessing over whether or not Emmy is going to disappoint me.

[musewrangler]

But General Max Veers’ life had been upended about a month previous when he’d been ordered by Vader himself to bring a small squad of his most trusted men to Naboo of all the out of the way places.

He’d arrived as surreptitiously as possible to the coordinates he’d been given and found that they were high in the mountains overlooking one of the many beautiful lakes the planet boasted. Here, he was greeted by a tired looking man who looked vaguely familiar, and it took Veers long minutes to realize this was because he’d seen his face on most wanted posters in the Empire.

Obi-Wan Kenobi.

If only that had been the most shocking revelation.

A tiny blonde child with inordinate amounts of confidence was hovering nearby as Lord Vader swept in— without his mask —to inform Veers that the Emperor had just tried to assassinate them all and he, Vader, was having none of it since the mite was his son, Luke Skywalker.

[nutelly]

this new assassins creed cld be the final nail in the coffin if it goes badly and honestly im here for it, that wld be hilarious

[sapphirerogers]

The thing about Captain America: Civil War is that it's part of a trilogy about one specific man named Steve Rogers. Therefore it is supposed to be about Steve Rogers and primarily from his perspective.

It's the episode right after CATWS, and the story is supposed to directly tie in with the events of CATWS. It's hilarious (= enraging) how people just seem to conveniently overlook that little detail while talking about (or rather, shitting on) Steve's decisions and actions.

When you see him argue against the accords, you're supposed to actually remember that the government was infiltrated in the previous Cap movie and it was only two years ago. And that Steve was right in the middle of the fray.

When you see him trying to save the other supersoldiers, you're supposed to correlate that to him discovering the Winter Soldier and as shown in the last scene of CATWS, finding out everything Hydra did to Bucky.

When Steve says "He's my friend," you're supposed to remember Bucky falling from the train in CATFA, and 2014!Steve saying "even when I had nothing, I had Bucky." And you're supposed to empathise with the scrawny kid from Brooklyn who had no one but James Bucky Barnes in his corner. You're supposed to remember that Bucky would, and did follow this scrawny kid into the jaw of death.

Every single thing he does/says has a background in the previous two movies.

Now you might say "yeah but so does Tony-" yeah and tell me something, is it called "Iron Man: Civil War"? Or "Avengers: Civil War"?

Saying Steve's the bad guy in his own fucking movie is you completely missing the entire point of all three of the movies with him in the title.

Edit: I've noticed that this post is gaining a lot of traction. I'd like to introduce you (if you haven't been to my blog before) to a protest my friends and I are trying to set into motion called #ReleaseStuckyCWScene. The details to the original post are here, and the petition that you can sign to show your support is below. Please consider signing it and reblogging the original posts more.

[whollyjoly]

i just want to take a second for the absolute legend, james earl jones, who passed away today.

the voice of darth vader himself.

you defined my childhood (and, honestly, most of my adult life) in a way that cant be put into the words. the terror and fear and power you put behind vader made him such an incredible villain, but also the pain and the loss and the love for his family you voiced made him feel so real and so human, even behind the mask. it's so amazing how voice actors are able to bring such expression, emotion, and life to a character. ESPECIALLY one that solely exists in a mask! there's no facial expression, no visible emotion that we can see. all we have is some basic movements and a voice - and your voice, sir, was what made vader into one of the most iconic characters in all of film and tv history. how you were able to show such power and anger and certainty and resignation and grief and finally, relief? when all you see is a mask? its just...mind blowing.

and your love for the character was so tangible!! voicing vader in countless projects until 2016!!! almost 40 years of such an incredible legacy!!

my favorite star wars movie of the skywalker saga is return of the jedi. in it are my favorite scenes in all of star wars - luke and vader on endor, and then the throne room scene with luke facing off against darth vader and the emperor.

we see vader as such a force for evil across most of the original trilogy. hell, even in the stuff that came out later that you voiced (revenge of the sith, rebels, rogue one) - vader is fucking terrifying.

but there's such an amazing shift in vader when we see him interact with luke for the first time since the reveal of their relationship. luke is trying to convince vader to turn, to leave with him and disobey the emperor. there is such a....weight, for lack of a better term, that you give vader's responses that stole my breath away from the moment i first heard it. you managed to take this villain, this boogeyman of the star wars universe clad in black armor and machinery, and made him feel so incredibly, beautifully human.

and when i heard vader say the line "it's too late for me, son" to luke's pleading, it changed everything for me. the amount of grief held in those words, the pain that you could feel. in that moment, vader changed from a monster of nightmare into something so tragic. it was amazing. it was heartbreaking. it was beautiful.

and i think that was the moment i think i truly fell in love with star wars. and it was because of you.

(and that's not even to mention some of the other incredible lines that made vader such an incredible character!! i think of how young you made him sound in revenge of the sith - that "where is padme?" fucking haunts me. and yes there are so many classic and amazing vader "NOOOs", but the one that really gets me is the one when he decides to save luke, to find the light again, to choose his destiny. the way you portrayed that conflict and resolve with a simple two-letter word? amazing.)

anyways, just....thank you. thank you for your gift, for your talent, for your legacy. you will, quite literally, never be forgotten.

may the force be with you, james earl jones. always.

[dduane]

Is there an alphabet or lexicon of the human version of The Speech? And if so, where can I find it?

No, there's not.

(And as I've been asked about this before, I'm just going to paste the answer in here—since though the original post is buried in the depths of Tumblr somewhere, I do have my saved draft.)

Per these, which came in very close to each other:

@melbetweenstars

This is something I’ve always wondered but never realized I could actually ask about until I read through that long meta response. (go me.) How much of the Speech do you have fleshed out? Do you create it as you go on more of a need-to-know basis, or do you have vocabulary and grammar structures ready to go? Basically I’d be really interested to hear any Speech-related meta if you have the chance because fictional languages are hella cool!

and:

@sansa–clegane

I just read your post on dark wizards and field terminologies, and am totally loving the Speech translations you provided! Now I’m wondering, though, how much of the language you actually have mapped out or established? I’m very curious as to what, for example, the standard “I - you - he/she/it/etc. - we - you plural - they” conjugation endings would be– or if there even are any in a language as complex as the Speech. I’M JUST REALLY INTERESTED IN FANTASY LINGUISTICS AAAHH

Linguistics is a big deal for me too, as people who read my stuff will have guessed. And needless to say, the Speech is on my mind a lot (along with other “magical languages” and their history/histories).

So let’s take a moment to first to make it clear what the Speech is not. It’s not what’s sometimes referred to as an Adamic language  (whether you take the meaning that God used it to talk to Adam, or that Adam invented it to name things.) It’s also nothing whatsoever to do with Enochian. It’s not an occultic language, or anything invented by human beings.

The basic concept is that the Speech is the language, or the very large body of descriptors, used to create the universe (and very likely others, but let’s leave that to one side for the moment). Such words are also assumed, having been used in the building of the universe, to be able to control the bits they’ve built. Every word, therefore, when used ought ideally to sound as if it contains some tremendous power. 

Writing something like that every time the Speech is used, even for a much better writer than I am, would be very, very hard.

(We need a cut here. Under the cut: Ursula Le Guin, C. S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, J. K. Rowling, and others. ...Also a fair number of beetles. And a bear.)

It’s worth mentioning as a matter of information that I met the concept of secret / divine magical languages in Le Guin’s Earthsea long before I ran into it in C. S. Lewis. (I came pretty late to Lewis’s non-Narnian work.) Yet here Lewis, as more than occasionally before, is my master, having been over this ground right back in the mid-1940s.

There’s a point in the final novel of the so-called “Planetary Trilogy”, that big fat (now endlessly problematic but still fun-in-the-right-moods) book That Hideous Strength, where Elwin Ransom—philologist, unwilling visitor to Mars and Venus, unnerved conscript into the wars in Heaven, and Lewis’s take on both the Pendragon and the wounded Fisher King—is instructing his friend and co-linguistics scholar Dimble on how to behave in a meeting with the newly awakened, and potentially quite dangerous, Merlin Ambrosius. (The POV in this passage is that of a lady named Jane who's just recently fallen into company with the group supporting Ransom.)

“You understand, Dimble? Your revolver in your hand, a prayer on your lips, your mind fixed on Maleldil [just think “Christ” for the moment: surprise surprise, that’s the parellel Lewis is using here]. Then, if he stands, conjure him.” “What shall I say in the Great Tongue?” “Say that you come in the name of God and all angels and in the power of the planets from one who sits today in the seat of the Pendragon, and command him to come with you. Say it now.” And Dimble, who had been sitting with his face drawn, and rather white, between the white faces of the two women, and his eyes on the table, raised his head, and great syllables of words that sounded like castles came out of his mouth. Jane felt her heart leap and quiver at them. Everything else in the room, seemed to have become intensely quiet: even the bird, and the bear***, and the cat, were still, staring at the speaker. The voice did not sound like Dimble’s own: it was as if the words spoke themselves through him from some strong place at a distance—or as if they were not words at all but present operations of God, the planets, and the Pendragon. For this was the language spoken before the Fall and beyond the Moon, and the meanings were not given to the syllables by chance, or skill, or long tradition, but truly inherent in them as the shape of the great Sun is inherent in the little waterdrop. This was Language herself, as she first sprang at Maleldil’s bidding out of the molten quicksilver of the star called Mercury on Earth, but Viritrilbia in Deep Heaven.

Now if that’s not like being hit over the head with a hammer, I don’t know what is.* That moment has been before the eyes-of-my-mind for a long time as I’ve worked with the Speech.

Note, however, that Lewis does a very wise thing here. He doesn’t actually spell out any of the words out for you. Because in the reader’s mind, there’s always the six-year-old saying, “Go on, say the word: see how it sounds, see what happens…!” And when you recite the magic spell, it doesn’t work. The words come out sounding, well, like any others. And maybe not your interior six-year-old, but your interior twelve- or fifteen-year-old—the ego-state that’s about keeping you from getting hurt or looking stupid in front of other people who aren’t privy to or supportive of your dreams—says, “See, it was just another word, just a bunch of nonsense. You got fooled. Dummy!” No wise writer, I think, willingly sets their readership up for such easy and constant disappointment. It's tough enough to weave, and hold in place, the spell that is prose. Handing the audience a potential spellbreaker, over and over again, is folly. 

And by rights the Speech ought to be like Lewis’s example above. If in reality you were to hear the words used to restructure matter or undo gravity, they ought to shake the air in your chest like a Saturn V launch, they should raise the hair on the back of your neck to hear them used; they should freak you out. But a long string of invented syllables isn’t going to do that. I’m stuck with using English to produce even the echo of such a result.

Which means I have to go Lewis’s route… mostly. Here and there I’ll add in a Speech-sourced word or phrase when it supports the narrative or makes it easier for characters to talk about what’s going on—as, when working with wizardry, you do sometimes have to call in precisionist-level language for words that have no casual English cognates: just as you would if you were working in particle physics or organic chemistry at the molecular level. But that’s all I’m going to do… because if you do too much linguistic work in this regard, you constantly run the risk of your readers being distracted from the real business at hand, which is the interactions between/among the characters.

The tech inherent to a work of fantastic fiction is always an issue in this regard. Ideally L. Sprague de Camp’s very useful definition of science fiction, tweaked here for fantasy, ought to be a guideline: “A fantasy story is a human story with a human problem and a human solution that could never have happened without its fantastic content.” Yet inside the definition, there’s still a lot of ways to go wrong. Too much merely human stuff, and a work of fantasy turns into a soap with some casual magical gimmickry—all too often these days labeled as “magic realism”, when it’s not publisher code for “We’d call this fantasy if we had the nerve and we didn’t think it was going to tag us as ‘genre’ and keep us off the best-seller lists”. Too little human-problem-and-human-solution, and it turns into a modern version of what James Blish (God rest him), when writing as the gently merciless science fiction critic William Atheling Jr., used to call “The 'Greater New York and New Jersey Municipal Zeppelin Gas Works’ school of speculative fiction”, where you tour your readership through the Wonderfulness Of Your Tech (magical or otherwise) until they expire of boredom while waiting for someone to fucking do something.

You have to find a centerline between the extremes—indeed pretty much a tightrope—and walk it with some care. I’d guess that J. K. Rowling ran into the need for this balancing act; while never having read the Potter books, I nonetheless get a sense that you get the occasional Wingardium leviosa without also being burdened with long strings of magical Latin. (Though I confess that the answer to the question “Where does the magic come from? And what’s it for?” as it applies to her universe could be of some interest. I have no idea whether this ever gets explicitly handled.**) 

Anyway, it’d be way too easy for the YW books to become long discourses on the Speech and its use. This aspect of the “tech”, I think, gets more than enough time onstage. Having once established that words are a tool, indeed the tool for a wizard, the ur-Tool, making every spell they build a resonance between what they do and the initial/ongoing work of Creation—my business is to stay focused on the challenge of driving plot forward by interactions between human beings (and all kinds of others) who have conflicting agendas.

…So much for the tl;dr. I do have some very basic grammatical structures tucked away, but they’re not in any fit state for other people to look at. The Speech, I think, is really best treated as an ongoing mystery that unfolds a little at a time, as required, and leaves everybody wanting more.

HTH!

*It also leads into one of numerous affectionate nods in this book toward Tolkien, as philologist, fellow novelist, and Lewis’s good friend. It's no accident that when Ransom meets up with Merlin himself, a little later in the narrative, the question of this language—the proper name of the Great Tongue is “Old Solar"—comes up again. When discussing what language they’ll speak with each other during their upcoming negotiations [they apparently start out in a rather beat-up and denatured medieval Latin], Ransom says to Merlin about the language he’d prefer to be working in, "It has been long since it was heard. Not even in Numinor was it heard in the streets.”

The Stranger gave no start … but he spoke with a new interest. “Your masters let you play with dangerous toys,” he said. “Tell me, slave, what is Numinor?” “The true West,” said Ransom. “Well,” said the other.

Yeah, “well.” Better scholars than I have dealt with the relationship between these two, as scholars and writers and friends, so enough of that for the moment. But it’s very sweet to see Lewis do something in his books that I’ve done with mine.

**It’s always possible, of course, that in the HP universe this issue is a surd: like asking “where physics comes from”. (Well, not a surd precisely, if your spiritual life tends a certain way. Mine tends toward “Whoever or whatever made the universe, that’s who made physics. And they must really like it, because they made a metric shit ton of it!” (This answer also works for beetles, though that's a slightly different issue.) :)

But if there’s a most-fundamental difference between my wizardly universe and Rowling’s, it might be best revealed in the third question that came up for me directly after “What if there was a user’s manual for human beings/the world/the universe?” and “If there was, where would it have come from?”: specifically, “And why?”

***There's a bear in the Pendragon's kitchen. Thoth only knows what initially brought that on for Lewis, but it's a character insertion that pays off later, so (shrug) wtf.

[hollowingearth]

I'm sorry but the more I think about the Rebirth ending the more I love it actually like. The whole trilogy has been a meta commentary of sorts and, specially, Aerith's death is at the epicenter of it. She both dies and doesn't die exactly because us, as an audience, want both things to happen.

People have been clamoring to be able to save Aerith since 1997, there were fake hidden hacks, AU fictions, retellings, everything. Everyone has been at Squeenix's doorsteps begging them to let us save her. Like, it's at a point where the "Square will let us save Aerith if you pay for the DLC" joke is much more than a decade old.

On the other side, there's this very expressive unwant for any change whatsoever from the source material. It's not a feeling that is exclusive to FF7 either, there's this very clear pushback against any new remake/adaptation that deviates, even slightly, from it's original. People don't want new content, they want the old one they experienced when they were younger, but prettier, they want to both feel the nostalgia and experience everything as if for the first time again.

From that camp, I think the most prominent argument is that FF7 is about loss, right? And they're not wrong. Aerith's death is the crux of the story, it's the very thing that made FF7 as known as it is, there would be no actual weight to what it's trying to tell if the heroine doesn't die in the middle of it, an unexpected, hurtful, avoidable death. What's the point of a narrative about grief if you can just... avoid losing someone? Avoid having it be cruelly taken from you?

And yet, you see, if want someone to die, if you want something to be taken from you, are you really losing it? In the original, part of the impact was that no one could see it coming, it was a straight representation about how death is sudden and takes away opportunity from you. Aerith doesn't go into the sleeping forest willing to make a sacrifice for the greater good, she has barely started her adventure, she makes a promise to go on the highwind, the group is one location away from finding out more about her ancestry and her family.

That's not true for the remake, tho. Everyone knows about her fate, about what is going to happen to her. That's probably the most spoiled moment in video game history. I personally knew about her death before I truly understood what Final Fantasy even was. So now we have an audience that is extremely aware of what, when and how her death is going to happen. That's why the Confluence of Worlds is put at that moment, because it's the single most expected moment in the entire triology, it's the one moment that made the narrative resonate so well.

The impact is impossible to recreate now, even for newer fans of the series. People want a 1:1 retranslation but such a thing would always be a gimmicky shadow of it's original. It's why the focus shifts, now the most emotionally impactful scene is not the killing of her but of her goodbye, in the church after the dream date. "Thank you," Aerith echoes "It's been fun", a callback to her conclusion on Remake where she says "I'm grateful for all the words we shared. All the moments and the memories. You've made me more happy than you know."

So she dies and she doesn't, both at the same time. Effectively in limbo now, narratively explained by lifestream shenaningans. We put her there ourselves, by refusing to move on, refusing to accept her death but also refusing to change, allowing a different outcome. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, at least, Aerith's words sound like the very sincere feelings of the developers, who are grateful for all the love we all have powered into their work all these years.

I just love it so much, I could spend hours talking about it.

[heartofaskywalkerprincessleia]

Obi-Wan’s iconic line was originally: if my blade finds it’s mark...

(Contains spoilers for Episodes 4-6).

The other day, I was watching parts of the documentary “Empire of Dreams” and realized that one of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s most famous lines in A New Hope was altered for the final version of a scene. 

I have a very old copy of the book version of A New Hope, which contains deleted scenes and some of the original dialogue. I searched the book, and realized that there is a lot of dialogue from Obi-Wan and Darth Vader’s fight that was taken out of the final film. 

We all know the iconic line: “You can’t win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” 

Obi-Wan’s original line was: “This is a fight you cannot win, Darth. Your power has matured since I taught you, but I too have grown much since our parting. If my blade finds its mark, you will cease to exist. But if you cut me down, I will only become more powerful. Heed my words.” 

If my blade finds its mark, you will cease to exist. 

When I heard Alec Guinness deliver that particular line in the documentary, I was stunned that I hadn’t remembered that line (not yet knowing that it was eventually changed). Because it adds so much depth to Vader’s conversation with Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Obi-Wan is basically saying that, if Anakin is defeated by him and dies right then, Anakin’s soul will never be saved. 

Obi-Wan could have tried to defeat Vader. Instead, he let himself be defeated so that Anakin could ultimately be saved.

There are so many times throughout the original Star Wars trilogy when Vader mocks Obi-Wan, even telling Luke that Obi-Wan’s failure is complete when he finds out that Luke has a sister. Anakin never expected that all of Obi-Wan’s plans were centered around saving him. 

That’s why it’s so important for Luke to see Anakin’s force ghost at the end of ROTJ. Because the theme of the original Star Wars trilogy, evidenced by this original line, was always redemption. 

[velvees-archive]

Ace Attorney Investigations 2 spoilers!

The famous (and now officially translated) AAI2 line is even better than I imagined because it isn’t about Phoenix—the next sequence is.

“I know how that feels…

To lose somebody so important to you. To lose faith in everything…”

…and have that faith restored by someone who has shown me unrelenting kindness.

-Edgeworth, probably

In Farewell, My Turnabout, Edgeworth tells Phoenix that lawyers aren’t heroes; they’re human. But for Phoenix, whose identity is intrinsically linked to his role as a defense attorney (ergo, saving people from “suffering” and “pain” because it’s his moral imperative), that distinction doesn’t exist. That’s why Edgeworth’s final acknowledgement of Phoenix in AAI2 matters. He's basically monologuing that Phoenix, regular old non-hero Phoenix, was his saving grace.

While Edgeworth expresses gratitude for Phoenix’s interference in the original trilogy, it’s framed as a thank you for what his childhood friend Phoenix provided him as a defense attorney: changing his career path so he could help snap Edgeworth out of the Demon Prosecutor funk and defending him in 1-4.

Investigations, on the other hand, has Edgeworth telling anyone who’ll listen that a "certain defense attorney” or “that man” showed him a better way to live (the difference here being Edgeworth acknowledging Phoenix’s larger role in his life beyond changing his judicial philosophy or saving him in court), all without ever explicitly confirming that Phoenix—not Phoenix Wright, attorney at law—yanked him into the light.

Then comes the end of AAI2.

“Somebody was kind enough to save me from myself.”

No mention of Phoenix being a defense attorney, no fancy titles, and no mention of Edgeworth’s changing courtroom practices. This line is personal and heartfelt, speaking to Phoenix and Edgeworth as people as opposed to their standing as lawyers. In doing so, Miles drives one last point home:

Phoenix Wright the person is the one who saved him; it isn’t Phoenix’s badge that Edgeworth comes to love.