#the will of the plot

[inklesspen]

A thing you see a lot in Star Wars material is "The Will of the Force". It's simply taken for granted a lot of the time. Oh, Jedi can argue about what the Will of the Force is in a particular situation, but nobody (except Kreia, I suppose) is ever seriously arguing that maybe the Will of the Force shouldn't automatically be obeyed. My guess is that this has something to do with how the Will of the Force is often synonymous with the Direction of the Plot. It's certainly convenient, but it raises ethical issues with which Star Wars rarely if ever bothers to engage.

“Well, the Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It is an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together.”

I was thinking about how you can have a Jedi take direction from the Force in a way that's generally reliable (after accounting for individual error), but which doesn't require setting the Force up as a moral authority, and I came up with this:

To begin, let‘s suppose that part of how the Force interacts with sapient beings is that when you make choices — when you settle on an intent — that creates a sort of “status effect” in your connection to the Force. Even if you have no idea how to wield the Force, you‘re still leaking out that intent. And part of what a Force adept can do is basically query the intent states of sapient beings in her vicinity. This is generally done at a subconscious level. A Jedi wants to be able to intervene in unjust situations? Well, then her connection to the Force is basically running a query across all the nearby Intents, looking for someone Intending to do unwarranted harm (according to the Jedi‘s moral guidelines). This is less a "configure search agent, send it to search the net, read results later" scenario like we‘d see with technology and more like a constant feedback loop between the Jedi‘s moral instincts and the collective Force auras of everyone in town. And this produces what the Jedi senses as "the Will of the Force". (We can also say it‘s slightly acausal, allowing Jedi to react to Intents that haven‘t actually been formed yet.) But the same function that queries Intents can also “broadcast”, which is how Obi-Wan mind-tricks the stormtroopers, and part of how Battle Meditation probably works, and so on.

He called upon the Force, gathering it to himself and wrapping himself within it. He breathed it in and held it whirling inside his heart, clenching down upon it until he could feel the spin of the galaxy around him. Until he became the axis of the Universe. This was the real power of the dark side, the power he had suspected even as a boy, had sought through his long life until Darth Sidious had shown him that it had been his all along. The dark side didn’t bring him to the center of the universe. It made him the center. He drew power into his innermost being until the Force itself existed only to serve his will.

The Sith warrior, of course, has other priorities. He will certainly want to keep abreast of certain Intents in the Force, but he‘s doing a lot more spamming of his own Intent upon others. It won‘t always work, but he only has to overpower someone once, right?

Which brings me to a thing that I‘m pretty sure is just fanon — the idea that beskar‘gam can protect a mando‘ad‘s mind from jetii tricks (or, that someone wearing real Mandalorian armor is effectively a void in the Force). If this is true, then someone wearing beskar‘gam isn‘t radiating their Intent into the Force like everyone else does, though a Jedi can still sense them, if imperfectly, by the way their actions influence other people‘s Intents. Still, if you have to go up against a Force adept it‘s worth it to wear beskar if you can, because it effectively removes their precognitive sense; they can‘t react to your Intents until you‘ve acted on them in a way others can see.

So what about droids? There‘s a lot of stuff in the Clone Wars show about the battle droids being fully sapient, with feelings and fears and individualized reactions. But they‘re still networked, still driven remotely.

And that‘s because, yes, a droid can have an Intent in the Force too. Not every droid; not the little mouse droids, or at least they only have small, simple Intents. But a droid with a complex personality, like Artoo? Sure thing. He presents in the Force like any other living being. And the battle droids are getting up there in complexity.

So what do you think happens when a droid has an Intent aura, but doesn‘t do what that Intent would suggest? When a droid wants to do anything other than run headlong at the lightsaber-wielding maniac and the legion of clone troopers, but is forced to do so anyway by its programming?

I think the result is a lot of Jedi being badly served by their instincts. They know what the droid wants to do, and they want to react to what the droid wants to do, but the droid doesn‘t actually do that thing, so they have to force themselves not to react that way. They have to force themselves not to pay attention to “the Will of the Force”. And doesn‘t that sound just like something Palpatine and Dooku would want for them? The better they get at killing droid armies, the worse they get at being Jedi.

[asteroidtroglodyte]

[lgbtlunaverse]

The world exists in such a baffling state of simultaneous sex-aversion and sex-hegemony. Every social platform on the internet is trying to banish sex workers to the shadow realm but I can't post a tweet without at least two bots replying P U S S Y I N B I O. People are self-censoring sex to seggs and $3× but every other ad you see is still filled with half-naked women. Rightwingers want queer people arrested for so much as existing in the same postal code as a child and are also drumming up a moral panic about how teenage boys aren't getting laid enough. I feel like I'm losing my mind.

[tis-the-boards-season]

I just saw a theatre almost entirely full of men very audibly gasp and/or moan at the site of a shirtless Hugh Jackman and let me tell you if was a religious experience

[bethanythebogwitch]

Some writers: *meticulously plan out every plot point and the tone and meanings before they start writing*

Me:

[thechekhov]

I've had this little idea in my head for a while now, so I decided to sit down and plot it out.

Disclaimer: This isn't meant to be some sort of One-Worksheet-Fits-All situation. This is meant to be a visual representation of some type of story planning you could be doing in order to develop a plot!

Lay down groundwork! (Backstory integral to the beginning of your story.) Build hinges. (Events that hinge on other events and fall down like dominoes) Suspend structures. (Withhold just enough information to make the reader curious, and keep them guessing.)

And hey, is this helps... maybe sit down and write a story! :)

[literaryvein-references]

Writing Notes & References

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Moon: Part 1 2 ⚜ Related Words

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Terms of Endearment ⚜ Ways of Saying "No" ⚜ Yoga

Compilations: Plot ⚜ Character ⚜ Worldbuilding ⚜ For Poets ⚜ Tips & Advice

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[churrotowns]

ginger cat world domination incoming

[apollos-boyfriend]

we have GOT to kill tiktok/twitter self-censorship i just witnessed a grown adult say the word “smex” out loud to our professor

[fuckyeahgoodomens]

[lazylittledragon]

enrichment for the baby rogue

[reactionimagesdaily]

[alltears]

the intrepid heroes reached new levels of Accurate Teenage Friendship tonight (see also)

[deception-united]

Writing Tips Master Post

Character writing/development:

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[fruchox]

Come along tall goth husband we must pretend we aren’t in love