#the last Jedi discourse

[artist-issues]

And besides, the Star Wars “Tropes” that you really should’ve been there for were all fulfilled!

“The Greater Good is Always Worth Fighting For”

Luke is already the kind of character who wants to be part of something good, and bigger than himself, in the first Star Wars movie. Ben Kenobi is an old man who’s still fighting the Empire and answering Princess distress calls in the face of terrible danger. The Skywalker Twins both jump in with both feet to combat an evil much bigger than themselves, at great personal cost, and they wind up teaching Han to do the same. By contrast, Han starts out selfish and fighting only for himself; both Luke and Leia criticize him for being unwilling to fight for something bigger and better, or caring only about money and his own skin. But all these characters grow to demonstrate, through their risks and their sacrifices, that the greater good is what’s constantly worth the fight. Just like how in The Last Jedi:

A former Stormtrooper, who was literally raised to see fighting as an aggressive duty only used to inflict pain, establish control, or crush spirits, learns that fighting is about saving what we love, not hurting what we hate. Even sacrificing himself “just to make them hurt��� was portrayed as the wrong thing to do, because it wasn’t motivated by love; it was still motivated by a selfish feeling of hate and revenge.

Even after what Rey wants most—finding out that she means something to somebody who understands her (like Kylo Ren or her parents)—is taken away, she still chooses to go back for the Resistance and save them.

Luke starts the movie having lost all hope—in his own merit—and then ends it by choosing to sacrifice himself, not just for his friends in the Resistance, but for his nephew’s future.

DJ contrasts Rose Tico, who is willing to give up everything from her sister to her treasured keepsakes for the sake of the greater good. But DJ, on the other hand, won’t give up anything for anybody. Which is portrayed as a scumbag way to live.

Poe starts the movie fighting for the moment, not for the greater good. He thinks only as far as the next-big-hero-move. Then the movie teaches him that losing a battle in order to keep the greater good going is what leaders do, even if it means “failing” in the moment.

“Nobodies Can Make a Significant Difference”

Star Wars doesn’t open from the perspective of a Princess or a mighty warrior or even the protagonist: it opens from the perspective of a little maintenance droid and his fretful friend, who just so happen to be in the right place at the right time to carry galaxy-saving information. Luke is introduced as a farm boy, going nowhere. Not famous. Not noticed by the Empire. Han is a lowlife in a crappy-looking ship. Nobody expects him to save the day. Ben Kenobi’s former greatness is forgotten and barely mentioned; he’s introduced as a possibly-crazy old hermit. They’re all nobodies who make a huge difference when they do the next right thing. Just like how in The Last Jedi:

Rey is nobody. From nowhere. She wants to be somebody, from somewhere, and she’s just…not. No matter what she hopes or what she tries. She doesn’t JUST find out that her parents were nobody important and she has no great destiny: She starts out the movie “looking for my place in all this,” and learns that a) she’s not going to get to be Luke’s real apprentice and b) the best she can do, at the end of the movie, is just lift rocks out of the way. No big hero moment of bringing Luke Skywalker back, or Ben Solo back, or resurrecting the Jedi Order. Just…doing the next right thing. And it saves the day.

Poe, again, wants to be a big hero. He doesn’t just want to do the next right thing—he wants to win. But he’s slapped, sidelined, and ultimately taught that its not all about him.

Rose Tico is just a maintenance worker. She’s not a pilot, not a warrior, not a general or a Princess. She’s nobody important’ s daughter or granddaughter. But she saves Finn and demonstrates the most important theme of the movie.

BB-8, just one little droid, saves the heroes twice, first on Canto-Bight by bringing the ship, and then on the destroyed flagship when Poe and Rose are about to be overwhelmed.

Finn is just one wayward Stormtrooper, who used to be a janitor; a coward who keeps trying to run away. But it’s that cowardly janitor who faces down and defeats Phasma, one of the most feared faces of the First Order.

Luke chooses not to be the Legend who prevented more evil by killing a flawed legacy; instead, he chooses to be “what the next generation grows beyond.” Humble, modest, just a link in a greater chain.

Broom boy. He’s a slave in squalor, with nothing but stories of great deeds and heroic last stands…but he has the Force—the potential to make great changes when he grows up. There’s no better symbol for small things becoming significant than a child. Especially when you add the Force.

“There’s Always Hope For a Good Change”

This one’s easy. The original Rebellion exists based on this principal. Leia keeps fighting after Alderaan is destroyed and never gives up. Luke loses his family and instead of saying “the empire is too strong to beat” goes and fights them…and refuses to give up on the potential good in Han, the potential good in his father—heck, he even believes Ben Kenobi is a “great man” though everyone else scoffs. You could even argue that Han sees a potential softness in Leia that she’s too mission-focused to show all the time. The point is, the original Star Wars is full of characters who have every reason to give up on, or ignore, the hope for a good change. But instead, they go on hoping and acting in faith. Just like how in The Last Jedi:

Rey has seen Kylo Ren murder her only almost-father-figure, almost murder her only close friend, torture her, and promise to destroy her next almost-father-figure. He also reveals the most heartbreaking crushing of her dreams anyone ever could—she has no parents. But one glimpse of his turmoil and Rey refuses to give up on him. She won’t even kill him when she wakes up first after he refuses to turn good and promises to destroy her friends all over again.

Rey also won’t give up on Luke, and he’s super mean to her and won’t help her friends. But still, she only leaves him to try and inspire him by doing what he did; going and saving someone from the Dark Side.

Kylo Ren has no reason to believe his mother will love him, or accept him back, or ever come around to his point of view, but he still won’t kill her.

Poe gets half the Resistance fleet killed with his recklessness and almost destroys their escape plan, but Leia and even Holdo, who he led a mutiny against before she sacrificed her life, but refuse to give up on his potential as a leader. Holdo doesn’t even hold it against him before she dies. She looks at his tranquillized troublemaking self and tells Leia, “I like him.”

When Rose meets Finn she thinks he’s a hero, and meeting him makes her smile even though she’s grieving her sister—and then he destroys her idea of him by turning out to be a coward, lying to her, trying multiple times to escape, and believing that abusive planets like the one she grew up on are charming. But she still saves his life basically the whole movie long, and is always teaching him. Even though he insulted everything she believed in by trying to run away from a fight her sister died in.

Best example: by only coming back as a projection, Luke Skywalker managed to inspire his sister so she wouldn’t give up, inspire Rey to be a Jedi anyway even though he’d spent all their interactions discouraging that, and, most importantly—he made it impossible for Kylo Ren to murder another family member. By sacrificing himself, he made a difference, without letting his own death be one more thing Kylo Ren would have on his record of evilness. That’s better than what Ben a Kenobi did when he died in A New Hope, letting Vader strike him down. Instead, Luke doesn’t let Kylo Ren “strike him down.” He pretends to give him the option, just to buy his sister and the Resistance time. But he never really gave him the option to kill his own uncle. Because just like he believed there was hope for change in Anakin, he still believes there’s hope for change in Ben.

The Resistance ends the movie as thirty or so people, packed into one freighter with a juvenile Jedi, a broken lightsaber…and they’re still going to keep fighting. Heck, they just held off their enemies with busted mining speeders.

Those are the real Star Wars Tropes. Those things are the real “magic of Star Wars.”

And they’re beautifully portrayed at every angle in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. If all you’re looking for are

spaceships that follow specific rules

legendary magic-wielding family-reveals

practical-effect alien designs

all-powerful god-villains

a world that has an airtight canon that’s never been tampered with

then you never really got Star Wars. And I do accept criticism. And I will literally prove it further if anyone argues with me.

"Rian Johnson was mocking Star Wars fans for expecting Star Wars tropes in TLJ!"

No. Star Wars fans just happened to have the exact same flaw that the character, Rey, had: too much focus on her parents. That made her easy to relate to. But the whole point, down to the first movie she was introduced in (which WASN'T written by Rian Johnson) was that her parents were never important.

Star Wars fans should've expected that reveal. It was already set up. Maz literally tells Rey in the first movie to quit focusing so much on her parents. The filmmakers literally told you "she's wrong to put so much stock in who her parents are" in The Force Awakens. He just carried that theme on and y'all weren't ready for it because you never wanted to accept it in the first place.

=

Same thing with Snoke. Kylo Ren was introduced as a character who only wants one thing: strength. He thinks that strength will solve his emotional frailty. He's insecure. (Because reasons, to do with his family and their lack of faith in him.) Rey straight-up discovers that his biggest fear is "never being as strong as Darth Vader" and says it out loud so that the audience will get it.

You really think, when he was introduced as a character who believes killing mentor-father-figures will make him feel stronger and therefore more secure, that Snoke ever had a chance of getting past the second movie alive?

=

They straight-up introduced these characters with certain flaws, which lead to certain motives, which so happen to lead to different conclusions than common Star Wars fan theories.

Because that's the beauty of the Sequels. They acknowledge the legendary status of the Original Trilogy Tropes, then grow beyond those tropes.

Or at least. They were starting to. Until Star Wars fans threw continued hissy fits because they didn't want a story, they wanted a 💫 Star Wars Checklist Cleverly Disguised as a Story.💫

Then the powers-that-be were like "okay they're really not looking for a good story, just give 'em the checklist they were looking for." And you got exactly that in The Rise of Skywalker.

But Rian Johnson wasn't mocking you. He was just taking the next logical, compelling step in the previously-established arcs of well-written characters. And carrying on the Sequel's initial trademark of "appreciate the past by growing beyond it." Y'know. Like a good writer.

[sjbattleangel]

Special thanks to @agramuglia for inspiring this awful joke.

Everyone: "Steven Universe/She-Ra/Avatar: The Last Airbender/The Legend Of Korra/Star Wars: The Last Jedi/The Last Of Us/The Last Of Us Part II/The MCU/G. Willow Wilson's Ms. Marvel run/Gail Simone's Birds Of Prey run/The Dark Crystal: Age Of Resistance/The Persona games/The Sandman/X-Men/The Simpsons/Everything by Dan Slott/Everything by Tom Taylor/Everything by Jason Aaron/Everything by Donny Cates/Everything by Brian Michael Bendis/Everything by Devin Grayson/Everything by Jonathan Hickman/Everything by Scott Snyder/Everything by James Tynion IV/Everything by Joshua Williamson, etc are anti-intellectual, regressive, pro-status quo, far-right Trojan Horses pretending to be "diverse and progressive" just so they can take advantage of naïve leftists."

Me: "No. That's Velma".

[some-brave-apollo]

It's very funny to see people complain that Mickey 17 is "Too in your face"/"Not subtle enough" and then ignore major plot points and make criticisms that only make sense if you aren't paying attention to the film. Like Mickey 17 is not a subtle movie in the slightest but it's so obvious they only care about that when it goes against their own political beliefs.

[matt0044]

I'm very... burnt out on Fandom negativity, especially on YouTube.

It’s always “Here’s how it doesn’t work for me” yet they hesitate to ask, “Why does this hit the spot for others.” There’s a lack of curiosity to look outside their bubble despite insisting that they’re not closed minded.

Like CinemaWins released his video on The Rise of Skywalker, a unilaterally hated movie, and explained why he liked it. He also explained his understanding of why others didn’t like it and it was so much better than the millionth video of somebody thrashing it.

Even if you don’t like something, that doesn’t mean opposite perspectives aren’t valuable. Craftsdwarf on YouTube has videos exploring Sword Art Online and takes it seriously compared to a lot of the hatedom that formed around it.

I don’t fully agree with them myself but it was so much more refreshing than the dime a dozen hate pieces. There’s a market for positive stuff out there but negativity, by its more unfiltered nature, draws more attention by “saying the quiet part outloud.”

[aripithecus]

"Luke Skywalker was poorly written in The Last Jedi!", they whine. "You mean you're furious that he was written as a person with flaws and not some legendary perfect hero, is this not the very opposite of what you wanted for Rey?"

[maybeamiles]

Okay first of all OP I'm sorry for continuing discourse on your funny meme post block me if you find this annoying

But while Last Jedi Luke COULD be an interesting, accurate version of his character, I do not believe the writers have any interest in making him an interesting version of a fallen hero, because the viewers of Last Jedi are supposed to laugh at him.

There is an inherent drama in the plot beats of Luke's story in the sequels. Our famous hero does something that goes against everything he stands for, and isolates himself from the galaxy he once saves. He stands by and does nothing while the galaxy falls into turmoil, until the next generation shows him hope.

And Last Jedi does not play into that. Instead, Luke becomes the Yoda of the trilogy. He's a funny old man who does weird inexplicable things and who Rey needs to fight in order to get training from. It's funny that Luke completely destroys the drama of his reintroduction by casually throwing away his father's saber. It's funny that he drinks gross blue milk or uses a feather (? I haven't watched the movie since it came out so the details are a bit fuzzy) to trick Rey into thinking she feels the force. The ghosts play him for a fool when he burns and then saves the sacred texts. The writing treats him like a Rick and Morty character. It doesn't want you to feel the tragedy, it wants you to laugh at it. Any narrative similarity to the og trilogy is a complete accident.

(Of course there's also his death but I still cannot wrap my head around that years later and i do not want to subject myself to the misery of rewatching anything from the last jedi).

me remembering that luke and rey didn’t even have a good relationship and we didn’t get to see them as a parental relationship or even as friends

[ohnoitstbskyen]

Seeing that Luke post get thousands upon thousands notes is giving me hives. How does one become this fandom brained? I know the jokes are "don't mess with fans of X they don't even watch/read/listen to their own film/show/etc." and any fandom is going to cause some amount of ooc behaviour for the sake of jokes and memes and stuff, but surely at some point the character is so bent out of shape you stop to ponder what you're doing.

Who is this Luke Skywalker, collector of wayward orphans? Why would he want to be Reys dad? You get the feeling she might want it at the start of TLJ... And then the rest of the movie happens, going into great detail, at times in overly didactic ways, as to why that's a Bad Idea for her personal growth and the galaxy at large.

Even in older Legends material, where he ends up having actual kids, most of the lauded and beloved portrayals of his character are things like the original Thrawn trilogy, and in that he spends all three books struggling with if there's any place for him in the galaxy after the emperor died. The supposed definitive alternate sequel trilogy is, at least for Luke, largely about if he even should restart the jedi order, since his own training is incomplete and he has a deep fear any students he has are going to eventually succumb to the dark side, and how if they do it'll probably be a direct result of his incompetence. He does naturally, much like in TLJ, overcome these feelings of inadequacy and re-emerge as the definitive hero of the story, but spending a few years wallowing is just a very Luke way to deal with problems in life.

Like yeah I wonder why a bitter, self-isolating old man who views his life as a colossal failure wouldn't be jumping for joy when a younger, more naive version of himself shows up to his house uninvited.

For how desperate to venerate the Nostalgia the sequel trilogy project as a whole is, only TLJ really feels like it actually gives a shit about the story it's supposedly continuing. I didn't think you could look at Lukes death and not feel the overwhelming love and care for him specifically. I always shed a tear when binary sunset kicks in and I'm not even that into the originals. I was a prequel defender in 2010, Luke is the 20th character I think about when people mention SW.

Do people just not engage with the source material at all? Is this a product of the whole fandom tourism boom in the last 5-ish years? I genuinely don't want to be mean. After all, fandom is all of us playing with our toys, and you should always try to avoid a "old man yells at cloud" scenario, but like... It's a movie for 12 year olds that's very deliberately laying out all the cards. A slightly more nuanced and emotionally mature movie for 12 year olds than you might expect but... A child could get it, it's been focus grouped to hell and back so any given child on the planet should get it... How are you as an adult asking why the story had conflict?

I also broke out in hives a little bit when I found out that my addition (?) had made that thing go around. Or maybe it wasn't my addition, I'm actually not sure, but I worry that it was. The OP turned off reblogs, and I can only assume it was because people starting doing absurd bullshit discourse on the post which... hhhh I don't really like being part of inflicting that on anyone over something as unimportant as Star Wars opinions.

Also, the thing I was reacting against really wasn't the fact that people have headcanons about who and what kind of character Luke is - like, that's just normal and generally a good and fun part of fandom. I reacted against the idea of The Last Jedi being thoughtless about his character. It interprets Luke in a very specific way, but that interpretation is, I think objectively, deeply grounded in the history of his character and the thematic throughlines of the Skywalker-focused movies. So it annoyed me a bit to see people treat the depiction like it was some kind of failure to engage with the original material. I think that's not quite fair to what the movie was, and I think it leads to weak criticism of its flaws.

I think that the better angle for critique of the whole sequel trilogy and Rian Johnson's contribution is that obsesses far too much about the original trilogy, and is at its best in those few scant moments when it breaks away from it. If the sequel trilogy hadn't had the corporate mandate to be a kind of Frankenstein remake of the OT, perhaps a kindly old grandfatherly Luke could have been a fun and interesting interpretation of the character's future. Luke is what he is in TLJ because the trilogy absolutely fucking had to recreate the narrative beats of Dagobah, and therefore absolutely had to have Luke learn another lesson from Yoda about learning to let go of his attachments to and fears about the future and be present in the here-and-now.

Johnson is clearly a fucking nerd-ass Star Wars nerd, whose greatest mistake was assuming that other Star Wars nerds would engage with the material with good faith and an eye towards appreciation and discovery, rather than product-brained, screaming entitlement to their supremacy-affirming nostalgia security blanket.

To be clear, here I am talking about the culture war grifter assholes who poison the world, and not fandom people who have a cozy headcanon about Luke as a cheerful old community dad. I don't think it's fandom tourism to have a headcanon about a character, or a favored interpretation of them, even one which feels somewhat divorced from the original source-text. If I had to take a guess, the people on the original post developed that headcanon through fandom - by way of fanfics and fanposting and fanart, by way of fix-it fics and excited speculation. If I had to take a guess, they got their headcanon about Luke the same place everyone gets their headcanons about popular characters: from some combination of appreciation, projection, and a desire to see the thing you love tell a story that you need to hear. That's just human, and I don't think you can spend any significant amount of time in fandom without developing those attachments to certain stories or characters.

[penny-anna]

like to me a lot of The Last Jedi discourse feels like if i mentioned really not liking The Courtship of Princess Leia and someone retorted with 'oh you just don't like that it said Han and Leia's romance wouldn't be smooth sailing post canon' and I'd be there like no that's a whole new sentence. i know what i didn't like about it and it wasn't that.

[artist-issues]

Also can I just point out that from the beginning, the door for Kylo Ren to return to the light and save the galaxy from the First Order was wide open?

I mean. The people who created the story with new Bad Guys? Had them blow up the entire government of Good Guys in the first movie. The former heroes are all tired and dropping like flies. The new ones are untried and afraid of the Force. Good Guys need a miracle, overnight, so they put all their hope on Luke Skywalker.

Without him, what do we have?

The scavenger - she’s strong with the Force.

The former Stormtrooper - he has insider’s info on the First Order.

A gutsy pilot - he’s got training and guts from legendary heroes.

Oh but you know who has all those helpful elements combined, if only he’d be on the Good Guys’ side?

(And as awesome as that gif is, they did not redeem him early enough in the third movie, so the door started slamming shut.)

[lizardsfromspace]

What's the worst thing about fandom in the last 20 years, and what's the worst thing about fandom that's always been true of it?

The worst thing about fandom in the last 20 years has been the incentivizing of fandom-as-conflict: not merely as a field in broader culture wars but as the field for endless intra-group battles.

This manifests in many ways: as seven hour videos complaining about The Last Jedi, as Twitter backlash campaigns, but also as stans defending their faves from any and all criticism real or imagined, as the endless boom-and-backlash cycle to any fandom meme or joke you see on Reddit, and as the drive for people to look for evidence other people discussing a thing they like are hysterical illiterate dolts, before anything else.

Or, in other words: a lot of fandoms are full of assholes these days, whose main interaction with fandom is using it as a reason to be an asshole, and to defend being an asshole. The actual “fandom” part of fandom no longer really exists for them. The discourse more or less is their fandom; someone whose main fandom activity is sharing videos about how Steven Universe is a fascist (?) isn’t in the Steven Universe fandom, they’re in the videos about how Steven Universe is a fascist (?) fandom. I mean, the chief fandom for many people is their side in the fandom war. What type of fanfic you write is secondary to what your affiliations are vis-a-vis battles over fanfiction

(One trend I've noticed is people who aren't at the stage where they only talk about what they hate and not what they love, but are at the stage where they can only talk about what they love in relation to what they hate. "I love this movie...and it proves this other movie is bullshit made by a hack". No ability to say just "I love this movie", period, end of sentence. This is how like two-thirds of Film Twitter talks about film, the remainder are all the grindhouse people going "man you've GOT to see Wrong Turn 5")

Another one, that I think is related, is that fandom’s become...more transitory, maybe? There’s Big Fandoms that are inescapable and then everything else feels like it’s here for a weekend and then it’s gone. And we’ve always had fandoms that endure and fandoms that vanish quickly, when the show runs short or turns out to be bad/boring, but we did use to have a lot of enduring if small fandoms for Okay shows most people hadn’t heard of and now you don’t really. Or they burn themselves out fast.

So we’ve reached this stage where fandoms are either so big they have seven hour long discourse videos, or they’re a smattering of fanart over the course of two weeks last August. But that isn’t really the fault of fans so much as modern media release schedules.

A lot of fandom activities of old are just...impossible now, with many shows? The slow build of speculation and fan works and in-jokes and theorizing and analysis simply can’t exist in a world where the premiere comes out the same day as the finale, and you can’t talk about the finale because you have no way of knowing if the person you’re talking to binged it all in one weekend or is still on episode four. That was the kind of thing that sustained the fandom of something that wasn’t a big hit, or even something that was. My fave fandom experience ever was watching the online Lost fandom wildly theorizing for all six years of Lost, and we’d never get “and what if the Smoke Monster is a dinosaur but only the head?” under a Netflix release model. Now at a base level, we either have shows nobody can discuss because nobody’s sure who’s seen or what, or shows where everyone just discusses the finale right away, and where you get One Week of Show and then a massive hiatus, which either kills all momentum or...drives fandom in the direction of hyper-analyzing everything and fighting because, well, what else is there to do? And that plus the outrage cycles of social media plus the fact that “man who yells at Star Wars” is now a viable career choice result in, well. *gestures upwards* All that

(Really, shout out to Cartoon Network for engineering the Steven Universe fandom to Be Like That through their inscrutable strategy of dropping episodes during one random week every five months or whatever)

As for something that's always been with it...cliques and a certain fannish elitism, like, that sees engaging with media in a fandom sense as more creative or analytical or intelligent than your average person. You see it now in the form of, like, people holding up fanfic above published fiction as more representative or authentic (I’ve seen more than one post on here strongly implying queer rep doesn’t exist in mainstream non-fic storytelling???), or going “well, we think about shows, unlike those normies watching sports”. But that was probably way more pronounced a thing in the past, in the 40-50s sci-fi fans were calling non-fans "mundanes" and calling themselves "slans" as an in-group signifier (a reference to a book with superintelligent psychic mutants known as slans). Like at the very least we should be happy no one’s calling non-fans “muggles” anymore. In the evolution from “mundane” to “muggle” to “normie” normie’s probably the least bad one

[dykerightsmp3]

the fact that Reylo discourse is now almost entirely 'is this ship toxic :)' always throws me off so much because I genuinely think the MUCH bigger issue with Reylo was that it pushed a black man to the side as Not Love Interest Material in favor of a white nazi. Like the issue is that shipping Reylo arrived transparently because people did not care about the black man – which I know, because the ship became popular before we even had The Last Jedi! When they'd barely interacted! If Kylo were black and Finn were white, Reylo would not be popular and it would never have become canon in any way, and I do think a refusal to grapple with that is honestly very embarrassing.

[offsidetracked]

I've been thinking about how I'd go about byler in S5.

When I got hooked on byler it was the same way I got hooked on every other ship; it's heavily supported by subtext, regardless of if it's confirmed by the text later on or not. Sasunaru, reylo, bkdk... all are ships that have intricate and beautifully woven subtext that made us fans speculate for years. In some cases discourse is still ongoing. That's a hallmark of some great writing as far as I'm concerned (all of these ships crashed and burned in different ways but until they did the writing was truly stellar).

Stranger Things and byler are in the same league. I just believe that this time the outcome will be a lot more satisfying. So how do we get the GA to root for it when it happens? I'm not the Duffers but I know some things I would do to help it along:

Dial up the homophobia. When byler becomes canon there can be absolutely no question; the bad guys of this show are the bigoted close-minded homophobes. It must be explicitly shown how mindlessly cruel this specific type of hate is and that it's incompatible with viewing yourself as a hero or good guy. I'd continue to spin the thread from last season and have the town blame pretty much all that goes wrong in Hawkins on your resident nerds, outcasts and misfits. Mix that with the aids crisis and the Reagan administration and next season is gonna be brutal. But it needs to be to drive home that in Stranger Things, if you're a homophobic bully, you're the monster.

Make the subtext hornier. One of the things I adore about Rian Johnson and Masashi Kishimoto is how they do subtext, particularly sexual subtext. Funnily enough dudebros in both the Star Wars and Naruto fandom, just like a lot of Milevens, didn't pick up on any of it. The Last Jedi is filled with Freudian sexual imagery. From Rey falling onto a hairy seaweed-filled cave hole to Kylo's light sabre design, yoni-shapped doorways and their joint fight towards the end—all sexually loaded and masterfully tongue-in-cheek. Naruto had a much longer run and was consequently more parsed out with it's subtexual imagery. Still it's not hard to find if you know how to look (there are some really excellent accounts on here if you wanna dive into that rabbit hole). Stranger Things has the beautiful benefit of being a horror; a genre that excels at showing our suppressed desires in grotesque and weirdly relatable ways. Phallic monsters, fluids everywhere, exposed scratched up and damaged skin, tending to wounds in intense and intimate ways, grime and dirt, panting, moaning, grunting through pain... It's up to the Duffers how in the face they wanna be about it. But it would be a missed opportunity if they don't crank up this type of imagery at least a little. Also, I want to see Mike suffer. Let him sweat and have a nervous breakdown over allegory.

Show that repression = impotence + harm. Freud, no matter what you think of the guy, is all over horror. This quote from Men, Women and Chainsaws sums it up pretty neatly; "Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways". Well bitches, now is later and it's time for the subconscious to come out of the closet and ruin everyone's day. Will is gonna be stuck in the victim part of the Final Girl trope until he fully embraces his queerness by having his feelings reciprocated by Mike. Mike, on the other hand, will probably actively find himself and the people closest to him in dangerous and harmful situations as a direct consequence of all the shame, fear and desire he's bottled up. Until he too, embraces his queer self by confessing his feelings to Will. Poetic cinema. However the Duffers go about it, the lesson everyone watching S5 needs to leave with is that forced conformity is harmful to you and everyone around you, and that there is no greater horror than the horror we subject ourselves to when we deny and repress the truth of who we are.

Well there you have it, this is what I would do to promote byler, get the GA on board and tie together this wild, wonderful, nerve-wracking ride we've been on for the last ten years. Godspeed to all of you, however it goes.

[the-far-bright-center]

#LUKE WAS RIGHT #everybody is like love is what made ani fall BUT NO #love is what kept anakin sane #it is what kept him in the light for the longest time #that even palpy was like i gotta remove all his loved ones from the picture and isolate him #love brought anakin back to the light #LOVE saved the galaxy #Padme was right and so was luke (via @brilliantlymad)

I think there’s something rather strange going on with all the folks who insist that the Jedi Order in the PT was right and didn’t forbid love and Anakin should just have followed their teachings when the whole point of the prequels is that they are prequels. They come before the OT, and the OT proves the Jedi wrong. They literally do not make sense if they don’t do that.

Luke, in the original trilogy, gains his ultimate triumph, his ultimate victory, because he loved in defiance of the teachings of the old Order. He quite literally had the ghosts of the past telling him, explicitly and without ambiguity, that he has to put his love for his father aside and kill him, as is the duty of a Jedi. Luke has the weight of millennia of teachings weighing down on his shoulders, telling him they knew and know better than a young, inexperienced man barely out of his teenager years. That he should follow their teachings or be destroyed. That is an immense weight to carry, and many people would and explicitly have given in to it in-universe. What are your feelings and ideals in the face of such immense legacy, after all?

But Luke doesn’t give in.

He doesn’t bend.

He says “I may be young, and I may be new, but I believe to my heart and soul that love matters more than this legacy. Matters more than your teachings.” And he says this to the ghosts of his mentors. That is such a powerful moment and one I can’t believe George Lucas didn’t create it deliberately for even a second. This young man, being told he has to kill or die trying for a system that is dead or dying itself, that couldn’t survive itself, and refusing to do so. He is the living refusing to continue the violence of a dead generation. He is the young man refusing the draft into a war the old generation started, saying “peace and love matters more than you being right.” He is the embodiment of breaking the cycle.

And the movies vindicate him.

The main villain vindicates him with his last dying breath.

Darth Vader, dying, says “You were right.” and admits he and his were wrong. The main antagonist, Luke’s nemesis, in the face of his son’s immense, defiant love, gives way and does the impossible: he comes back to the light and dies a Jedi. The very thing the old Order says was impossible.

They were wrong. They have to be. The narrative demands it, the movies don’t make sense without it.

The solution was never to continue the cycle of the old Order, or Luke would have failed there, would have failed when he said “I am a Jedi, like my father before me.” And claimed that defiant, deviant, condemned definition of being a Jedi over the one presented to him by the Grandmaster of the old Order. If the old Order was right, Luke would have to be wrong. Be wrong about love, be wrong about laying down the sword, be wrong about refusing to fight. He would have to be wrong.

But the old Order is dead, explicitly killed by a monster, in some part, of their own making. It’s members only existing as bones in the ground or ghosts speaking from beyond the grave. They did not deserve it, it should not have been inflicted on them, but the narrative is clear on this: “The old way is dead, and was dying for a long time before that. Long live the new.”

Luke is that new. Luke is the breaking of the cycle, the reforging of swords into ploughs, the extended hand. Luke says “I don’t care how much I was hurt, I refuse to hurt you back, and you don’t need to hurt me either.”

“We can end this together and choose love instead.”

And Darth Vader, killer of the Jedi, End of the Order, lays down his arms as well, and reaches back as Anakin, saying “You were right.”

It wasn’t Obi-Wan, Yoda, Mace, Qui-Gon, or even Ahsoka who achieved the ultimate victory in the end, following the tenants of the old Order. It was Luke. Young, inexperienced Luke, who saw that the age of legacy handed to him was only history, that the sword handed to him as his life was only a tool, and that the decrees of the dead were only advice. And he took it all, said “thank you for your experience, but I’ve got it from here,” and laid it all down to instead extend an open hand towards his enemy.

And his victory, his ultimate triumph, his vindication, was that he was proven right when his enemy reached back and became just another person. Just another person, just like him.

The Jedi did not deserve what happened to them, and they did not deserve to die. But the story is clear on this: the Jedi of old were wrong, and the Jedi of new, the Last Jedi, was right. No sword or death will ever end the rule of the sword or end the bloodshed. But love?

Love can ignite the stars.

[aripithecus]

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[mycroftrh]

*puts my hand gently on your shoulder*

The characterization and complexity of the characters and institutions in Clone Wars is adapted to the medium of a weekly action-adventure youth-targeted show.

Anakin is bold and rebellious and cocky because the brokenly-traumatized fundamentally-obedient hubristic-but-self-hating character we see in the movies doesn’t work as a long-form action hero. He acts a moral agent - someone with the capacity to independently, and without coercion or immediate overwhelming trauma, choose to do things that set off the Imperial March (or the reverse, for that matter, active moral choice towards good) - instead of just reacting and following orders because the latter, again, is great for the protagonist of a tragedy and bad for an action hero.

On a more surface level, he talks differently because the awkward stilted variable-diction speech of both the OT and the PT doesn’t make for good quips and post-kill one-liners and child-targeted dialogue - PT!Anakin’s best efforts at battle banter are “You’re shorter than I expected” and “My powers have doubled since we last met, Count” and OT!Vader’s is “The circle is now complete… Now I am the master…. Your powers are weak, old man.” Not to pull in yet more versions of him but as much as I love (and I DO) “Be careful not to choke on your aspirations” and “All I am surrounded by is fear and dead men,” OT!Vader would never say something that clever or cool. James Bond or Ethan Hunt or Indiana Jones would never say something that could viably come out of the mouth of either PT Anakin or OT Vader.

And I sincerely apologize for stepping into Jedi Discourse, but Yoda and Mace and the Jedi as an institution are, well, nicer, and more ethically sound, because their narrative role is very different. They’re central characters that we need young people who are identifying with Ahsoka and Anakin to see as The Good Guys over a long period of time. Their narrative role in the Prequel Trilogy, whatever we may think of them as characters, is as secondary antagonists, and in Clone Wars it is not, and therefore their characterization differs.

Obi-Wan’s a cool older brother because the repressed, emotionally withdrawn, commanding dad-uncle-brother of the PT is not someone young audiences can appreciate without getting, well, resentful towards, like teenage Anakin does. It takes practice and emotional maturity to understand how he expresses love, and to not find his Master-ness oppressive. And also if he were as commanding of Anakin as he is in the PT (including RotS!) it would reduce Anakin’s agency to a point where, again, Anakin wouldn’t be a viable long-form action hero.

Also something to be said about how the need for a child protagonist screws with Anakin’s overall arc about not having authority, agency, autonomy, and institutional power (and being childlike/stunted college-age during Revenge of the Sith - he was a teenager, and an emotionally immature one at that, when he became Ahsoka’s master, but he can’t properly act like one, because, well, the narrative needs him to be Ahsoka’s master), but that’s a larger topic.

And those are all very valid (and necessary) choices for the medium, and it’s also super valid for those to be one’s favorite versions of the characters, and they definitely shouldn’t be discounted in overall analysis, either; but they are different, medium-dependent versions.

[fantastic-nonsense]

okay I am engaging in some public accountability because I have a ridiculous number of WIPs and I actually want to get some of them done. so I'm going to list out all of the WIPs I consider to be active, and by the end of the year I hope to have at least 5 of them finished and published

DCU:

Batfam PJO AU [outlining+writing stage, 500 words in]

Bruce, Harvey, and the RY1 Aftermath Fic [ideas stage, outlining]

Damian and Tim Time Travel [ideas stage, outlining]

Dick and Donna-5 Stages of Grief [ideas stage, outlining]

Donna and Tim Space-Time Road Trip [ideas stage, outlining]

Grayson+Ric Arc Fix It ft. Tim Trauma Run PART TWO [ideas stage, outlining]

Jason Paranormal Detective Agency WIP [outlining+writing, 1k words in]

Leave Me and Live (Jason) [writing, 7k words in]

Bruce Wayne Religion Discourse Fic [ideas stage, outlining]

The Rise of Oracle [outlining+writing, 800 words in]

To Look for Herself in the Sunrise (Cass) [writing, 5k words in]

universal donor (Dick) [ideas stage, outlining]

WW Antiquities Repatriation Saga [ideas stage, outlining]

Six of Crows:

Ghafa Parents Twoshot [ideas stage, outlining]

Horse Racing AU [outline done, 2k words in]

Kanej Snow Queen AU [ideas stage, outlining]

Kaz-Wesper Wedding Gift Fic [writing, 900 words in]

on the seas and in the city [outlining+writing, 4k words in]

Forced to Choose fic [writing, 19.5k words in]

To Build a Legend (Inej Knife Fic) [final editing stages, currently being published]

to love him is freedom (kanej) [writing, 7.6k words in]

Unorthodox Methods for Parenting Criminal Children [writing, 3k words in]

Other Fandoms:

Meanwhile in the Galactic Senate (Star Wars) [ideas stage, outlining]

The Last Jedi Reworking (Star Wars) [outline done, 3.5k words in]

De Rolo Trauma Electric Boogaloo (Critical Role/Legend of Vox Machina) [ideas stage, outlining]

De Rolo Favorite Siblings (Critical Role/Legend of Vox Machina) [ideas stage, outlining]

Susan Stays AU (Narnia) [outline done]

Problem of Susan Character Study (Narnia) [writing, 750 words in]

30 Years Later Interview (Hunger Games) [writing, 600 words in]

Endgame Revamp WIP (Marvel Cinematic Universe) [outline done]