#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….

[legends-expo]

Happy 20th release anniversary to the novel Shatterpoint by LegendsCon guest Matthew Stover! This novel follows Mace Windu's quest to find his former padawan Depa Billaba who has fallen to the Dark Side in the jungle of Haruun Kal, Mace's homeworld.

You can meet Matthew Stover and many more fantastic Star Wars Expanded Universe authors and artists at LegendsCon, on September 9th & 10th in Burbank, CA.

Depa Cosplayer: Caitlin Jacques Depa Photographer: Ben Lucas & Kirk Duplicate Mace Cosplayer: Bruce Jackson Mace photographer: Angela Stokes

[themonopolyhat]

mace windu fact

[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.

[ferretrade]

it's a WIP Wednesday!

@smoosey kindly tagged me for a wip Wednesday and here I am a week later with a snippet from a whumptober prompt >:) (some calm before the whump)

"Darling, there's no need to impress me."

Cody huffs a laugh as he slices through an attack droid with Obi-Wan's lightsaber. He twirls it and disengages it before tossing the hilt to its owner. Obi-Wan lights it and demolishes another droid while Cody pulls out his blaster to shoot the last one circling them. (Force or no, he prefers the precision and distance you can get with a nice blaster.) 

"You dropped it, figured someone should get some use out of it," Cody snarks right back. The last attacker falls and the forest goes silent around them. 

Obi-Wan approaches him as he clips his lightsaber to his belt. "I didn't drop it," he insists haughtily. There's a streak of grease on his cheek and his hair's askew. "I left it for you."

"Whatever you have to tell yourself," Cody teases. His blaster goes back to his hip and he wipes the sweat from his forehead. It's still strange, not wearing his old bucket and kit, but a good strange. He's not a soldier anymore. 

"Perhaps if you got your own, I wouldn't have to share so often," Obi-Wan needles familiarly. He multitasks as he does, pulling up a map on his comm to scan for additional droids or life forms.

They hadn't expected much when they landed on this planet, if only because they'd gone through four others with no fuss. The Jedi Order had been sending them out to locate potential Sith strongholds, merely guessing at possibilities based on rumors and known temple ruins. It seems this time they've hit the jackpot—if there were droids, they were guarding something. 

"I'm not a Jedi." Cody's response is just as well worn and flippant. "I don't need a lightsaber."

[benthesoldiersjeanshorts]

[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.

[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.

[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

[wolverina2002]

Mine is Niman. Jack of all trades, the most creative and best to be individualize in my eyes. Also, every form that allows me to add two dozen weapons mounted on vembraces to the fight is great in my books.

[a-wisebear]

mace windu is amazing, he's the best, he has a purple lightsaber, the master of the order, the master of vaapad, he tried diplomacy with droids, he was going to kill palpatine, he's as bald as his commander, he's played by samuel l jackson in the movies, he's fucking hilarious, he trained master depa billaba, he's actually nice to jar jar, if you hate him you simply are stupid, thanks, have a nice night