#though because of my own interpretation and the whole canon thing of ren not chasing him anymore i didnt turn this into a fight scene

[yingren]

“You look like shit, man.”

HURT / COMFORT : STARTERS / accepting.

“ that’s bold coming from you. ” might be bold, but it’s not entirely untrue. there are certainly days when ren isn’t at his best - days like this, when everything he’s been avoiding finally catches up to drag him down. the weight on his shoulders is heavy: the persistent lack of sleep, the looming threat of an inevitable headache, the ever-present shadow of the mara festering within him. though he’s been doing better recently, or so he likes to believe, there are still challenges to this slower, unfamiliar rhythm that he continues to wrestle with even now.

irony clings to him every time he’s near the archivist, carving that filthy hollow within him even deeper, a grave he’s unwittingly shaped over the countless years spent in pursuit. the hunter locks eyes with his prey, fleetingly wonders what flesh might taste like between wolfish canines, then shakes the thought loose as if banishing an unwelcome whisper, continuing as though nothing ever happened. over & over again, ren adjusts to this cursed truce he has sworn to uphold. if there is one unyielding truth about him, it is this: ren will honor his word, no matter the recipient or the reason, unflinching even when the stakes run impossibly high. dan heng is safe. not out of affection, but sheer obligation.

predator lies quiet, restrained in the aftermath of past conflicts, sparing its prey. for now.

any other man might wrestle with regret or lingering thoughts about his past choices, especially when faced with someone tied to a shared history as bitter and fractured as theirs. but not ren. the memories that surface are not a wistful montage of lost camaraderie or futile attempts to mend what was broken. instead, they are a relentless bloodbath, a carnage where every body is his own and every spear piercing him is one of his own making - wielded by the reincarnation of the very man to whom it was once dedicated. a grotesque, abhorrent cycle of disgrace and ruin.

ren harbors no grand delusions about his own standing. this isn't about knocking him down a peg, the hunter does not sit atop some imagined throne of superiority, though it might occasionally seem that way. when the mara takes hold, and it strikes hardest when dan heng is the spark, the dynamic shifts. a flicker of irritation crosses his crimson eyes as ren exhales slowly, the weight of the moment palpable. the scales have tipped dramatically since that fateful day, since his relentless pursuit ground to a halt, since dan heng seized the upper hand in every conceivable way. ren is a cursed man, perpetually adding to his own affliction.

“ what do you want ? you come to bother me as if it is a new hobby of yours. unbelievable. surely you are more creative than that. ”

[sl-walker]

This one’s not new, I’ve already posted it on LJ and Arts and Ends, but I did some fine-tuning for fun. I love these guys, individually or side-by-side.  I probably can’t quite describe how much I love drawing Turnbull in his regular duty gear.  We never took away his goofy, we never took away his ability to be an occasional clutz, and we never equated his silly-sweetness and goofy with stupid, either.

This might get spoilery for Arch to the Sky, so if you haven’t read Midnight Blue and learned the basic facts from Mike’s POV (most, though not all of them) of what tragedy befell Ren Turnbull and, indeed, the entire Nipawin Detachment, Guy Laurent and concentric circles throughout their lives and town itself, you should probably just smile at the picture and keep going.

Like I said last time I was waxing poetic about Mike there, we wrote Arch to the Sky jumping back and forth across Ren’s entire timeline.  As we’d learn a new piece, we’d hop back in time to see where it had originated.  Sometimes we just talked about it and noted it down, but sometimes we wrote it into a story.  Exploring Nipawin kind of became inevitable because we really did need to know why.

We’ve never bought into the Paul Gross interpretation of the Mounties.  Like I said before, I was married to a cop.  My Mom was a cop.  My uncle was a cop.  I came a hair’s breadth and a budget freeze from being a cop myself, and I managed to beat over a thousand people for my spot in the civil service lineup with no curve; I was pretty much guaranteed a call back if they’d decided to hire.  I’ve known more cops than I can count on two hands, including police chiefs and K-9 officers.  I’ve known good ones, and I’ve known bad ones, too.  Not just the one I was once married to.  Police culture is a topic I could expand on for hours, especially when you’re surrounded by it, and man, domestic violence behind the blue line is a special kind of awful.  But I digress.

Being neck deep into that life means groaning a lot at police procedurals and stuff, but it also means wanting to do it right.  due South showed Mounties early on doing their regular jobs, but that tapered off over time; red serge became the norm, and they got more and more outlandish with every encounter, so you can imagine my eye-rolling there.  Every Mountie needs to spend three years in general duty, so when it came time to explore Ren Turnbull’s general duty experience, we dropped the magical and just went with the realism.  After the hell of Depot, but before the hell of (early) Chicago, there was this idyllic period in this little town in NE Saskatchewan.  It’s a real town, I’ve really crawled the whole thing on street view, too. XD

I’m going into Turnbull because that was where I first got to know anything about Mike Chase, so you gotta talk about one to get to the origins of the other.  Without Turnbull, there’d be no Chase.

Nipawin really was kind of our apology to Turnbull for canon and our own timeline with Depot, and Mike was a big part of that, though we didn’t know that at first.  Instead of taking a still raw, exceptionally green, somewhat accident prone and deeply jumpy Turnbull and making it worse, Mike was exactly what Ren needed after Depot.  Patient and steady, professional, calm; a good sense of humor, but not a lick of malice.  Genuine, honest.  He doesn’t buy the sabotage bull in Ren’s file, and it takes him no time flat to decide that he really likes this kid a lot and sees a ton of really good potential there.  It takes Ren literally months to stop waiting for Mike to turn on him, but by the time he’s off of the books, he’s kind of realized that all of that patience was a real thing and hey, his FTO did a damn good job preparing him for patrol work without ever resorting to hazing or bullying tactics.

Fact was, after that, Ren stuck Mike up on a pedestal.  I can’t quite call it hero-worship, but it was definitely a pedestal.  He did the same to Russ, but he was never as attached to Russ as he was to Mike, and for Mike’s part, he never quite stopped being Ren’s FTO even long after field training ended.

Anyway, though, there was a pedestal problem for both of them, in a way.  Ren looked up to Mike as a fine example of what a cop should be, and Mike subconsciously responded to that about like any hyper responsible type would and tried to live up to it.  It’s sweet in part, but it’s sort of heartaching, too.   I think Turnbull woulda given in and gone curling with Mike next season, when Mike asked.  And I think they would have slowly dismantled the mutual pedestals, if the bridge hadn’t happened; they would have eventually made it to being friends.  But the bridge did happen.

I wrote Mike on his wedding day, two years before Turnbull becomes his ninth rook, and his dynamic with the prior rookies is a whole different thing.  They’re friends.  They rib one another.  Brett and Cathy not only call Mike by his given name without a blink, they’re also entirely willing to embarrass him, manhandle him around and treat him like a colleague and friend and brother, even though he had been their teacher.  Brad Wright, his last rook, was probably a little more like Turnbull in how he viewed Mike, but even he wouldn’t have hesitated to call Mike by name.  A lot of that was time; it was four years between Brad and Ren, but a lot changed in Mike’s life (and the man himself) in that time; he wasn’t in the busy, crowded chaos of the LMD anymore, he was not only in a small town, but he’d gotten comfortable there.  He was friends with Sandy and Russ and half of the firefighters; he had a house and a wife and in-laws and 414 and a lot of stability, and in turn, came to represent stability to Ren.

Geez, there’s so much more to all of this, but imagine years later that this guy you admire, who represents a stability you needed when you needed it, who you believe will always be there to have your back, who is principled and disciplined and honorable is party to a cover up of the worst moments of your life.   Ren trusted Mike.  A lot.  And from his POV, the FTO he trusted has been a party to hiding what happened on that bridge.  From Ren’s perspective, skewed horribly by PTSD, it was because Mike was ashamed of him, and when Ren was transferred out and Mike didn’t say goodbye, it was like the final crushing of what was already his broken heart.  No wonder he picked Chicago; Ben Fraser was a whole world of difference from Mike Chase, but he was a good man who kept his principles when the last good man Ren knew apparently hadn’t.

But on the other side, that’s not how things were at all.  Russ maneuvered his very stand-up corporal by appealing to that deep protectiveness Mike had of Turnbull and put the cover up in place before Mike even knew about it.  And then he willfully and intentionally pinned Mike between protecting Turnbull and sticking to his high ideals, and he leaned on how much Mike had come to trust him to do it.  And Mike let him.  And it upset him so bad he spent the better part of a week in shock.  It was only Turnbull coming back on duty that got Mike to shake off the devastation enough to snap back into gear.  And even at that point, even hurt, he still trusted Russ himself and he spent an absolutely unhealthy amount of time trying to get Turnbull back together.  If he could save his rook, he could maybe claw some good back out of this god-awful badness.

And in the end, he couldn’t.  Mike tried well past when other men mighta quit.  When Turnbull couldn’t handle patrol, Mike worked double shifts off the clock so he could cover his and also stay through midnights to back up his rook, but he usually ended up answering calls himself because Turnbull would lock up.  Then, when it was clear that Turnbull couldn’t deal with being alone in a cruiser and trusted to function, Mike rode with him in 420 on midnights.  Then he got Russ to move Turnbull to afternoons, and it went back and forth, trying different things.  Breaks from patrol with desk work.  Mike never quit, but it was kicking the hell out of him; he was exhausted and he was starting to make mistakes and get behind in his own files because everything in him was trying to save Turnbull. 

Wow, I kind of run off on tangents, don’t I?

Backing it up, Mike wasn’t really meant to be quite so deeply tangled in Turnbull’s story as he actually ended up being.  He wasn’t really supposed to be such a dynamic, breathing guy himself that he’d keep haunting the story after it had moved on.  Erin and I were writing to an end: Ren in Chicago, eventually Turnbull/Vecchio.  I think the first hint of the sheer devastation left behind was in Radio Silence.  The next spring after Turnbull’s transfer, been out of Nipawin for months, and Mike’s sitting in Turnbull’s cruiser for a moment, and it aches how much this has affected him.  The next major hint was See What Happens, where Guy goes back to Nipawin and here are both sides of Ren’s life there, the personal and the professional, and both of them have their ghosts.  There’s a hint there that Mike Chase is in some kind of trouble, though you don’t really quite get the scope of how badly his life’s fallen apart in these three years unless you read Midnight Blue.

Then we start on Arch to the Sky, the title story of the whole arc, and the devastation comes home to everyone.  Guy, having lost Drew, went to find Ren.  In Nipawin, Mike Chase is chasing something too big for him alone, but his trust in his own Force and in himself is so rattled that he’s overwhelmed and a mixed ball of depression and anxiety.  And in Chicago, Ren Turnbull has a life and is healing from his damage, but Guy brings home his ghosts.

And then it all crashes down; Mike’s gunned down in the middle of the night, left on death’s door with a whole case in his head and enemies who no doubt will look for the opening to finish the job.  And Ren gets that call, he goes to Nipawin.

I don’t know exactly how they will deal with their hurts and their pedestals.  But I hold out a lot of hope that they will; OC or not, Mike’s a deep part of Ren’s story, and honestly, vice versa too.  There’s a lot of love there, I’d like to see it come back around to good for them.

[nirikeehan]

Power, Politics and Star Wars: Armitage Hux Edition

I read this article that tried to explain what Hux did in TROS and justify it and I was just not feeling it so I wrote a whole thing about it. So I thought, why not post it.

https://dorksideoftheforce.com/2019/12/22/star-wars-tros-general-hux/

I just wanna start by saying yes, I understand the logic of what happened in the film as explained by this article. I'm just here to challenge exactly what happened, why, and the article writer's attempts to justify it, because I don't find them to be an accurate summation of Hux's character. 

"It’s not hard to miss that the way The Last Jedi framed his character was very different from what we saw in The Force Awakens. At first, it almost felt as though he was a completely different character, having gone from Nazi-like general to an officer everyone refused to take seriously."

Right, and I think it's worth trying to examine why that shift in portrayal happened – behind the scenes. The writing changed hands from TFA with Lawrence Kasdan & JJ Abrams to Rian Johnson. So, clearly Johnson decided to go in a different direction with Hux. But why? Was it a continuing ploy to "subvert expectations" like he did so much in TLJ? Hence, if Hux was big and scary in the first film (obvious Nazi parallels in imagery and speech, commits literal genocide while hordes of stormtroopers look on), he had to be... silly, ineffectual and easily mocked in the second? Why?

Maybe it fits into a larger theme with Rian Johnson's writing, like... it seems like authority figures can (and should, maybe?) not be taken seriously? Think of all the authority figures in the Last Jedi. With the notable exception of Leia (who has such an iconic history) and Holdo I guess (random insert without much substance in my opinion), every single character who is, could be or once was in a position of power is cut down to size in some way. 

Luke Skywalker - crotchety old man. 

Poe - too hotheaded, needs to learn his place. 

Kylo - emo boy in a mask. 

Hux - butt of yo mama jokes. 

Snoke - literally cut in half. 

While I like this technique in some ways (I think I'm in the minority as someone who actually liked Luke being a disillusioned asshole lol, I thought it made him more interesting; and pointing out the obvious that Kylo is a conflicted try hard made him way more human and relatable to me), doing it to this extent was excessive. Especially in a film series that is supposed to have clearly defined villains. While I like the murder of Snoke because it was unexpected and it let Kylo actually have some agency to try to take over the galaxy on his own, you can't do it with every villain, or the audience isn't going to think anything is at stake anymore. So it always played really weird to me that Hux was taken from General Genocide to the target of slapstick humor. Which brings me to the next point...

"Looking back, it’s possible to interpret this as the result of how other characters viewed and treated him from that point forward, rather than an actual drastic change to the way he was portrayed. It’s possible that after Starkiller Base, the masses lost great respect for him — on both sides. He is no longer a man to fear. He’s General Hugs. He doesn’t scare anyone."

I just don't see how this is possible, to be honest. Like yeah, Starkiller base was lost, but surely not before it destroyed the entire Hosnian system, which, from what I understand, contained the entire seat of New Republic government. So I assume that means the president, vice president, whoever else was in the executive branch, all of the Senate, etc etc. Like imagine some terrorist leader called down a laser from space and obliterated all of Washington, D.C. while the President and all staff were in the White House, Congress was in session and the Supreme Court was hearing cases. We'd be like, oh my god, everyone's gone, we have no federal government, what the fuck. Even if the American army managed to destroy the weapon that did it, there'd still be basically irreparable damage to the very structure of the government and its ability to function. (Sounds like the plot of a future Michael Bay movie, but I digress.) 

The point is, whoever was responsible for the attack would probably still be pretty fearsome to the masses. And in Hux's case, considering his goal in TFA seems to be to usurp the New Republic and replace it with the First Order, at the end of the first film, he seems to be in a perfect position to do exactly that... which is why I was super confused as to why he spent TLJ chasing down like 30 rebels, who were already basically defeated?? Like, now would have been the time to take over! Don't just leave that power vacuum sitting there, buddy! Someone else is gonna fill it if you don't! (More proof I don't think Rian Johnson has cracked many history books, but the lack of coherent political framework is a major failing of the sequels in general, so it's not all entirely on his shoulders. He did seem like he was trying to engage with some of these ideas i.e. Canto Bight illustrating the evils of the military industrial complex, but they fell so flat because he just wasn't that informed about the socio-political commentary he was trying to make.) 

"This is further evidenced by the way Kylo Ren treats him the moment he becomes Supreme Leader of the First Order. Kylo quite literally begins pushing him around, constantly putting him in his place, belittling him, and making him look incompetent and expendable."

LOL this is such a fundamental misinterpretation of Kylo and Hux's relationship at the end of TLJ. Kylo didn't start pushing Hux around because everyone had lost respect for his authority. Kylo starts pushing Hux around because Kylo killed Snoke and took the Supreme Leader role himself, giving himself a BIG promotion over Hux. He went from like, army commander to freaking king. He's on a power trip, trying to assert his authority not just over Hux, but literally everyone in the First Order. The dialogue (handily linked by the article above) between them after Snoke's death very clearly states this:

Hux: Who do you think you're talking to? You presume to command my army? Our Supreme Leader is dead! We have no ruler!

Kylo: *starts choking him* The Supreme Leader is dead.

Hux: *choking* Long live the Supreme Leader. 

Kylo is subduing Hux by violence and coercion and filling the power vacuum himself (see, that's what happens to power vacuums, usually the most brutal asshole around arrives to fill it!). That's not something Hux brought upon himself in any way; it's something Kylo took by force. Hux isn't the only one following Kylo's orders by the Battle of Crait, the rest of the First Order army is also because they're all too terrified of Kylo to question him. Somehow making this only about Hux and Kylo as individuals is a really narrow-minded, boring interpretation of pretty much my favorite part of TLJ. 

"And here lies the deep change within Hux that leads us into The Rise of Skywalker. General Hux knew he would never regain anyone’s respect. He knew that Kylo Ren would continue to publicly humiliate him. He knew his chances of ever being able to regain power in the traditional sense were lost."

I still don't see how this is possible, especially since as far as I know there's no supplementary canon material to back this idea up. The article writer is grasping at straws trying to make sense of TROS's nonsensical character choices for Hux. There's all sorts of ways Hux could still regain power. I don't even know what "in the traditional sense" means? Hoping for a promotion, maybe? Sure, he could suck up to Kylo and make himself invaluable to Kylo's continued status as Supreme Leader (this is the route I took in my fanfic, since it seemed pretty plausible; Hux is set up to be the brain to Kylo's brawn). He could have Kylo assassinated and take over himself. He could recruit a whole faction of people to mutiny against Kylo. He could even sell out Kylo to the Resistance, sure, which I guess is what he was doing in TROS, but all of that is still in service of regaining power for himself.

"Hux is so angry with Kylo Ren, and filled with so much rage toward all he is and all he stands for, that he decides it does not matter which side of the war wins as long as the Supreme Leader isn’t on the winning team."

Again, I don't think this has shown to be true at all before TROS. By all appearances, Hux's goal has always been obtaining power, and the supplementary canon with his backstory seems to support this. There's so much with his father being an old Imperial and Hux growing up with the old imperial ideology and the belief that returning to some semblance of the Empire would be the most ideal outcome of the First Order's war on the New Republic. And by this logic, shouldn't Hux be thrilled by the (totally outlandish) possibility that Emperor Palpatine himself would come back to rule? Imagine all the Nazi holdovers after World War II finding out Hitler had RISEN FROM THE DEAD. They'd probably be pretty excited, no? 

But this is why reducing Hux's character to some petty asshole who has no personal values or larger ideology and just "wants to see Kylo Ren lose" is so dumb and boring to me. It means he literally no longer cares about his own personal ambitions or that of his larger ideological ones. Everything he worked for his whole life, countless hours of blood, sweat and tears, deciding to commit genocide of billions of innocent people to get the galaxy to fall in line with his vision........ amounts to literally nothing. As long as Kylo loses their little schoolyard tiff. 

Nah, I don't buy it. 

But this just speaks to generally larger problems in the sequel trilogy with the writers not having a strong grasp on the mechanisms of political power in the universe they're working with. In the films, who's fighting who and why has always been painfully vague and often confusing (why wasn't the Resistance just the New Republic army in TFA? etc), but while at least Rian Johnson used TLJ to try to engage with some of these questions of politics and power – albeit at times with cringeworthy naïveté  – TROS abandons it completely. It never once clarifies who's actually in charge here. Ostensibly it should be Kylo since he’s still got the title “Supreme Leader” in the opening scrawl, but he's running around chasing zombie Palpy! And the First Order is still very obviously still just a military operation focusing on the Resistance, so are all of the galaxy's sectors just... self-governing right now? If so, why? 

TROS's complete abandonment of the notion that anyone in this universe could even want power was completely baffling to me. It's always about power. The original trilogy was about power. Even the prequels were about power (to a micromanage-y, super boring degree. Embargoes! Trade disputes! Senate meetings with votes of no confidence!) To bring Palpatine back from the dead to make him some weirdo with a death cult who just wants the whole galaxy to die (I guess?)... none of that's compelling to me. And it seems to completely misunderstand (or willingly sidestep) any kind of interesting real world parallels, of which the original trilogy had plenty (and the 90s era EU/Legends novels in particular were really good at engaging with, probably why they're my favorite entries in the whole franchise). Which does play into my cynical suspicion that TROS was deliberately sterilized of any potential political commentary by Disney to appease the increasingly authoritarian governments in their international market. Can't have those pesky human rights cutting into their profits. :/