#vaapad

[adragonsfriend]

Choke (and die): Mace Windu is inherently more violent than other Jedi and that’s why he’s good at fighting

Broke: Mace Windu uses Vaapad as the main mechanism to manage his anger

Woke: Mace Windu is cooler than everyone, and that’s why he can use Vaapad where other people can’t

Bespoke: Mace Windu spent many years learning to manage his emotions, including an especially complicated relationship with protective anger, before ever thinking about developing a new lightsaber form, and that’s why the council was willing to grant him the exception to study Juyo and why he was able to develop Vaapad and use it better than anyone else

Also,

Broke: the Jedi council is rigid and unwilling to make reasonable exceptions

Even more broke: Mace Windu and Ki-Adi Mundi were both the recipients of massive exceptions but this is because of favouritism. The reason the council didn’t want to give Anakin whatever exceptions he wanted is because they hate him

Woke: the council is perfectly willing to make exceptions when the person asking for them is trustworthy and responsible enough to handle them

[archeo-starwars]

Ask the Master by Pablo Hidalgo [Star Wars Insider #92]

[sillyromantic4ever]

Chapter III: "Jedi-Killers" from Beneath the Armor, Vol. II

Excerpt: "[Talia's] ears are filled with the sound of something that she had not expected at all. During the Clone War...this particular noise has haunted her... It is a buzzing sound, like a mechanical bee flapping its aluminum wings. It hums in a sharper pitch than her lightsaber, and dread settles in her stomach. As she stares at the stacked container’s open entrance, she sees a blueish-purple glow illuminating from its metal depths. Her green, Force-sensitive crystal...in her necklace’s pendant, begins to radiate warmth. It is almost as if it remembers battling these particular droids when it was housed in her first lightsaber.

...

"'Not these,' she whispers as the buzzing echoes louder and the purplish glow brightens. Then, to her alarm, the noise increases in number, no longer reminding her of one bee but a full swarm."

Read here: Beneath the Armor, Vol. II - Chapter 3 - SillyRomantic4Ever - The Mandalorian (TV) [Archive of Our Own]

[obiwanwhat]

New chapter!

Chapter Snippet:

The Sith holocron weighed heavily in Obi-Wan’s palm, its smooth surface far warmer than it should have been in the cool room.  The heat and weight of it against his skin nauseated him; the Dark Side pulsed around the holocron in a smooth rhythm.  He wanted nothing more than to throw the thing into a corner and never think about it again.  But at the same time….he had a duty to Anakin, to do whatever he had to in order to save him.  And he had a duty to Ahsoka, to give her the hope that she so desperately needed right now. 

Slowly, tentatively, he allowed his breath to settle into a meditative pattern, reaching out to the Sith holocron with a wave of the Force in the same way that he would have opened a Jedi holocron.  It hummed in his palm, but nothing else happened.  Frowning, he reached out again, focusing the Force more intensely on the closed holocron.  It lifted into the air and began to rotate slowly, but stayed resolutely closed.  Again and again he directed waves of the Force at the object; again and again they did nothing.  Frustrated after numerous failed attempts, he allowed it to finally drift back down into his palm.

Staring at it again, he felt somewhat foolish.  Of course a Sith holocron wouldn’t open through the Light Side of the Force.  He should have known that the moment he felt the thing’s miasmic black aura.  He’d spent so much time debating whether to access the holocron that it had never occurred to him that he might not actually know how to open the thing.  

He would not use the Dark Side.  There were some lines that simply could not be crossed - not for Anakin, not for anyone.  The teachings of the Jedi Order were clear: once the first step was taken down a dark path, the Dark Side would consume you until there was nothing left. But there were Jedi who had figured out ways to direct the Dark Side without ever actually touching it. He’d never studied Form VII in depth, but Mace had once taught him a few of the Vaapad katas that he’d created years ago when he invented the form.  Maybe….

[sw5w]

...And as Powerful as Master Windu

STAR WARS EPISODE II: Attack of the Clones 00:28:32

[mrs-mandalorian]

Me af

[perfectharmonyloveschaos]

Something I feel like no one ever brings up but I feel like could be very important for Ezra’s character going forward is the fact that he is Mace Windu's great-grand-padawan. Mace Windu; the creator of Vaapad.

Because this never comes up in Rebels. We learn that, yes, Kanan’s master was Depa Billaba who was the former padawan of Mace Windu. But they never actually use it for anything. Why would Filoni make Kanan the grand-padawan of Mace Windu, and as a result make Ezra Windu's great-grand-padawan if not to use it for something. They could've made him any old Jedi's padawan, but Filoni choose Depa to be Kanan’s master.

What if this comes into play with Ezra’s character going forward and leads to him learning Vaapad? We don't know the state of the force and how it functions where Ezra has been trapped for the last decade, so what if they left Ezra in a place strong enough in the force that he could communicate to Depa Billaba and Mace Windu through the force?

Having Ezra go through so much with the dark side and learning to control it, while at the same time making him the heir to Mace Windu's lineage and the perfect candidate to carry on Vaapad which Windu himself choose who was taught it, is too much of a coincidence for nothing to be done with it. They've already tied Ezra to the World Between Worlds, why not give him some other way to interact with his grand-master and great-grand-master?

I would kill to see Ezra actively fight against Baylan and Shin using Vaapad and channelling their anger and power against them. Carrying on the legacy that Kanan never got to and carrying on Windu's knowledge, adapting the lessons from Windu, Depa, and Kanan and using them/potentially teaching them if he ever gets his own padawan.

[happycattail]

Wheezing (if I don’t I may strangle someone instead). Got into a debate with an anti Jedi person about the Jedi code. Managed to get it across to them the code doesn’t fucking promote Jedi to become emotionless.

They then decided to take a different angle where they claim the code is wrong because it could be misinterpreted and that many council members misinterpreted to mean you have to be emotionless. I proceed to ask them to name me a council member.

Guess who they named guys? Guess which council member they named as someone who thinks the code means you can’t show emotions and abide by that interpretation?

FUCKING MACE WINDU.

[bikananjarrus]

in the cooler better version of ezra’s adventures in wild space, he’s trained in vaapad by windu’s force ghost

[dankovskaya]

I wish Depa Billaba had a canonical birth year so that I figure out approximately when she was Mace’s padawan so I could figure out if it was feasible that he trained another padawan after her who would be the age that I want Yefet to be.

[adragonsfriend]

Purple Lightsabers: a new* interpretation

*It's possible this has been proposed before, but if it has, I haven't seen it.

Getting too deep into color symbolism of lightsabers isn't my favorite thing, because it often devolves into "wow look at my OC's rainbow lightsaber," (meanwhile said OC is straight for some reason…) but sometimes I have a thought about it that really gets me. This is one of those:

A common interpretation of purple lightsabers is that they symbolize a balance of the good and evil sides of the force, based on the fact that purple is a mix of blue and red, but as many discussions of gray/dim jedi have established, the idea of using both the evil-side of the force and the good-side is stupid and contradictory to the themes of Star Wars.

I propose that the purple of purple lightsabers are not a mix of blue and red, but a mix of blue and pink.

Thematically,

Blue lightsabers supposedly indicate a Jedi who is focused on saberwork and strong in using force abilities,

While (the first result on google says), "the color pink is often associated with qualities such as compassion, love, inner strength, and nonviolence, all of which are embodied in characters wielding pink lightsabers."

I am guessing that's a Legends or High Republic lore because they tend to get more into lightsaber colors than any other material, but I'm willing to take it and run.

Doesn't that combination sound like the perfect description of Mace Windu? Like yes he's focused on saber work--he created an entire lightsaber form about it, and he's probably the best duelist in the Order--but it's all in spirit of and service of compassion, protection, and fierce love. Vaapd is a form that requires immense inner strength as well.

It's a combination that is very much about what can physically be done to help people.

Color Mixing,

From a sheer color theory point of view, you cannot get this bright a shade of purple from mixing blue and red--you can get vibrant darker shades that way, but to go lighter you have to add white, and that dulls down the color really quickly:

If you mix blue and magenta on the other hand, it stays much brighter even when you add white:

Now tell me which of those better resembles this:

And before anyone comes at me with the children's hospital thing, yes, I'm aware that it's a very reasonable first assumption for purple to be a mix of red and blue--that is the over simplified to the point of inaccuracy factoid we are taught in schools (in reality, there is a reason it takes most languages a long time to develop a separate word for purple, and it's at least partly because solid clumps of bright purple are actually pretty damn uncommon in nature. Most bright purple dyes are artificial).

In conclusion,

A blue-pink purple works better than a blue-red purple thematically, visually, and socially as well. Going with this interpretation cuts out any need for the idea of Mace and Vaapad actually drawing on the evil-side of the force and the implication of him being somehow related to the Sith. It allows the narrative to focus on the idea of him as a protector rather than the vaguely racist idea that he has inherently more underlying anger than other Jedi.

[charmwasjess]

I'm continuing to love this Mace Windu book for how it portrays the Jedi lifestyle (and also, it's just a fun and engaging read):

The continued emphasis on the Jedi “discipline�� as not a stuffy, fun-hating rule, but something the culture chooses and enjoys and finds soothing, a common form of self-care for psychic empaths, hooked mentally into the overwhelming all-powerful energy source at the heart of existence. It makes sense, I love it.

Once again, a Jedi going off on a mission of personal importance rather than Official Jedi Business and the Council is totally fine with it, Yoda even encourages Mace to go and gives him a pep talk to stay at it when he's feeling discouraged on said personal trip

 YES I KNEW JEDI PRACTICED THEIR FORMS ALONE UNARMED/WITH THEIR LIGHTSABERS OFF I KNEW IT - really, Mace's relationship to Vaapad is depicted right out of my lightsaber form loving dreams. It's SO personal. It's such a big part of his life.

Oddly touched by Mace thinking about how much sleep he gets (usually six hours) and then getting cranky and disoriented when he’s having insomnia/bad dreams and it gets knocked down to three-ish. Y'all know I have a weakness for Jedi running up against their normal living being physical limits despite being fancy space wizards.

[shootingstarpilot]

Do you have any advice for writing Mace Windu?

Hello friend! I've been sitting on this for a while, because everyone's got their own interpretations, but mine is based on an idea I was struggling to put words to.

(Caveat that I have not read Legends material, that people can write what they like, etc. etc.)

The way I see it, Lucas specializes in writing stories in terms of themes and archetypes. This is why certain dialogue choices or the development of certain relationships can be... clunky, let's go with that. Characters (Obi-Wan and Anakin fall into their own category, sure) are written primarily as archetypes. You have Yoda as the wise old sage, Sidious as the ultimate evil-

And Mace Windu as the ultimate good.

We see this in the Chancellor's office, right? During the final showdown. This is the moment where Anakin makes his choice- stay in the Light or Fall- and the characters visually representing that choice are Palpatine and Mace. He's the Master of the Order. He's raised a Padawan who sits on the Council with him. He's an incredibly skilled swordsman- hell, his fighting style of choice (Vaapad) epitomizes how clearly he's mastered the art of internal balance!

All of that to say- his whole character is built around the idea that he is the Good Guy. That would be the one piece of writing advice I would give. If you're wondering how to write him, start with that idea- that he is written to represent the absolute opposite of Sidious. He's the ultimate good. He is the illuminating Light to Sidious' corrupting Dark. This is why antagonistic portrayals of him never ring true to me- they're coming from a foundational understanding that I simply do not subscribe to. It reeks of a fundamental misunderstanding of his character and of the whole saga's themes.

(And also racism. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the racism that too often plays a significant role.)

All of that being said, what might it look like to write from the foundation of Mace being the representation of ultimate good? The good thing about characters being written as archetypes is that it gives us fans a significant amount of freedom in determining what those characters look like when they're written as characters. Different people will have different takes, but for me:

Well, first off- he's the epitome of a Jedi. So all of what that entails- he is fundamentally kind, fundamentally compassionate, and fundamentally in control of himself.

He's funny. I think he has a very dry sense of humor, and that he finds joy in the smallest things.

He loves so much. He loves his Padawan, he loves his friends, he loves his family, he loves the Republic- he loves the galaxy enough to go to war for it, and he loves the men who'll kill his people.

There will never be a situation where he has the capacity to help and chooses not to.

And last but not least, I choose to believe that this man can bake pastries with the best of them. In my heart of hearts, he's a stress baker, and he mends his socks with purple thread.

Hope this helps!

[obiwanwhat]

I would like to apologize to anyone who knows literally anything about Vaapad who will eventually read the chapter of As We Fall that I am currently writing because i am pulling so much stuff straight out of my ass, i do not know how to write things about lightsaber forms

[inquisitor-apologist]

Thinking about how, at the end of the day, at the fatal moment, the sunset of the Republic, it wasn’t Yoda, or Obi-Wan, or even the Chosen One himself standing in the way of Palpatine. It was Mace Windu.

Mace Windu, the inventor of Vaapad and Master of Form VII, the Jedi's strongest duelist, the only person to ever defeat Palpatine in combat. Mace Windu, Master of the Jedi Council and the youngest Master ever appointed to it, the revered leader of the Order. Mace Windu, who forgave even those who tried to kill him, who risked his life over and over again for his troops, who, after 3 years of desperate war, tried to negotiate with battle droids. Mace Windu, who knew the clones were created by the Sith and chose to trust them, who saw every Shatterpoint in the Republic, and loved it still, and fought for it until his last breath, until he was betrayed by Anakin, who he believed in and trusted despite everything.

Mace Windu, High General and hero of the Republic, the embodiment of the Light, the last and greatest champion of the Order, the best Jedi to ever live.

[gffa]

*slams The Glass Abyss down on the table* OKAY, I HAVE FINISHED IT AND I HAVE SOME THINGS TO SAY.

In a lot of ways, this was a complicated read for me and I think the best way to describe my feelings on the author's take on Mace is that we diverge at the fork in the road that is, "Who is Mace Windu without his internal balance/his connection to the Force?" but that, as we walk along separate paths, I can still see the author clearly from where his path takes him and where my path takes mine. Like walking on separate sides of the street, still in view, just not perfectly aligned.

Further, I think my biggest criticism of the book is one I have to give a caveat of my caveat to, where I very much felt the absence of the Force in this book and as a presence in Mace's life. That, as he's being unbalanced and has trouble reaching the Force, it's not a bigger deal. That there's very little sense of spirituality connected to Mace's connection with the Force.

But the caveat about this is--that's kind of necessary for the story that the author is telling, because I think this is a book about Mace walking alongside the road of another life that he could have had, that he finds a connection with the people and romance (which I think is furthered by how thin the romance felt because it was serving a point about Mace's life more than it was a fully-fledged romance, in my opinion) and family--and that that life is valuable, that that life has love and warmth and connection and righteousness.

And that Mace Windu still chooses the Jedi.

That he would not be anywhere near as complete a person as he is without the path of the Jedi.

I think ultimately the point of the book is to give Mace that other path so that he can realize, yes, he did choose the Jedi, yes, the Jedi were loving and fair with him, yes, the Jedi are his family, yes, being a Jedi is what fulfills him even when there are other options. That those other paths are valid and yet the Jedi is the path for him.

There are things I would quibble with in the writing (primarily that I think there has been more joy in Mace's life than the author writes), but beyond that I think this book is incredibly thoughtful towards what I really needed it to be--that, while it may not mean the same thing in a galaxy far, far away, we're still reading it from our society and Mace Windu is a Black man and that comes with a lot of underlying context, especially when it comes to his anger.

This book felt to me like it was always aware of that, that the author (probably as a Black man himself) didn't shy away from that there was a riot of feelings in this character, that he felt protective anger and was a lethal warrior, while also being stern of face much of the time, things which are often demonized in this character, but here it was always in service of how that gave Mace depth and made him both a worthy central character and a good man. Mace cared deeply and part of that care was his anger that he turned towards Vaapad (which has been recanonized now!) in a way I ultimately found very fitting on a grand scale.

I was nervous going into this book, because Mace is a character that I'm so invested in and feel protective towards because of the shit that gets flung at him, and I feel like this book and I were at the very least in the same chapter and often even on the same page together with regards to him. I always felt that this book loved Mace as a character even if I might disagree on some particulars, and let me tell you that was a joy to read.

There are so many moments in this book that were an absolute joy to read (there are two different scenes between Mace & Anakin that sent me over the moon), so much of Mace's value of the Jedi and his path as a Jedi are at the heart of the book--even when it might not seem like it, ultimately the point is that, yes, Jedi can and do question their path, because they want their people to be certain this is the right one for them. This is a book about separating Mace out from that path, both physically and psychically, and having him rebalance himself and recognize that being a Jedi just is who he is and who he chooses to be, every day.

I can only give my view of this book and I will admit to stumbling a time or two with it, but by the end of it, I felt it was incredibly supportive of Mace as a character, that it was very Jedi-positive (even when it might not seem like it, it's usually going somewhere with the structure, somewhere I was vindicated by), and that the author wrote some absolutely banger lines that I'm going to be screaming about in a liveblog and that the worldbuilding was so good, I wish the author had had more space for building Jedi stuff.

It's an absolutely wild ride of a story (the action was really good and the harshness of the fighting added a necessary edge to the story that I thought worked really well for what the author was building with Mace's character), the story sailed right along smoothly, and I'm satisfied with what we got of it, I would definitely recommend to Mace fans and even Jedi fans. A few caveats about how I would let the story play out if you get wary in the middle, that it's not perfect, but that it's good and it loves Mace Windu as much as we do.