thewhills

[thewhills]

Thanks for this blog! Prob too late to it but sometimes I get wistful wishing SW had done some more democraticizing wrt the Force and this is the kind of content I was looking for

thanks for the ask! researching and curating for this blog was pretty fun and it’s great to know people still stumble on it and enjoy the content :D 

[thewhills]

Anything new coming?

Not at the moment, no! And probably not anytime soon either, sorry. I have a number of things in drafts, but i’m kind of on semi-hiatus from the SW fandom, and tbh I just don’t have as much time to pour into regularly searching and making content for this sideblog.

[thewhills]

More watercolour practice.

[thewhills]

Ahsoka Tano’s Underworld Journey | Dave Filoni’s art for Topps cards shown during Ahsoka’s Untold Tales panel, at Celebration Europe 2016 (x)

DAVE FILONI: I did a series of images for Topps [...] [They] start to explore visually, metaphorically, what the end [of the second season of Rebels] is about. They’re all just red and black. And white. So you could stare at them for hours and try to figure out... what does it mean. [...] [The third and fourth pictures] are the most revealing, the most interesting I think, because this starts to get into really... this kind of psychological subconsciousness, what does this journey into the underworld mean? Because it’s obviously Ahsoka in that doorway [at the end of Twilight of the Apprentice], what does that mean? I know. And so this is going to tell you a little bit. If you stare at these... It’s not like if you stare at them, the images become something else, it’s not a magic trick, it’s just to try to understand the metaphors and the symbolism and the meaning of this journey, which is a very classic journey. (x) 

TWG: The Ahsoka Topps cards. [...] Is there a correct order or...

DAVE FILONI: That seems like it’s such an obsessive thing, a correct order. It’s like, how do you read Narnia, do you start with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, or you know, the correct order... [...] 

TWG: Well, does that have anything to do with why Ahsoka went in her portal rather and not with Ezra?

DAVE FILONI: No, because the reason why she doesn’t go is that she’s savvy enough to know that you can’t. You can’t just leap out of your time. And, unfortunately, in the middle of this running, I had different bits of exposition, but it’s like, ‘Ezra, I can’t go with you, because if I do, this is really bad!’ It’s like no, we just need to just get away from the fire. Sometimes you write this stuff, and then you stage it, you watch her running and you’re like... no, when I’m running from fire, I’m just like, ‘I can’t go! I’ll see you when I get back!’ and you have to distill it down to, okay, that’s very real, because if she stops to have exposition she could burn up in a blue ball of flame. 

So [Ezra] doesn’t get the explanation, but I tried to portray her -- I talked to Ashley [Eckstein], she doesn’t know what this place is, but she has kind of instincts about it because she’s older and has experienced more -- and she’s been on the weird side of things before, especially. She’s like, oh this is like [Mortis], I’ve been down that road before. And she knows that you can’t break those type of continuities, for the lack of a better term. And so she’s pretty much figured out that, ‘I have to go back where I came from, you have to go back from where you came from.’ Because you can’t just... If she leaps in there to service the Rebellion where Ezra’s at now... I get that that might be a good idea as a good person, but it’s also cheating. Because she doesn’t know what she’s skipping, and who then she’s not going to help, or what she has to do independently of all that. 

So the only things that were a constant were that she went down that staircase, and the Topps cards were just me trying to explore visually... where are we going with that, and I tried to do it all in a very... symbolically, suggestive way, and there are lot of elements in those images that are trying to be evocative of a transformative nature in a journey, which is kind of a symbolic journey, of a transition from death back to life. Going through an underworld is a theme in a lot of mythology, having a great wound, coming to an understanding that challenges you and your makeup, and having to walk through the world of the dead into the world of the living. It’s a very hard journey to then make real, because it’s a journey you need to think about more than actually experience, and so that’s why we haven’t really experienced it. My favourite part about it was just leaving her where we last saw her, so you know she’s in the door, and you really don’t know anything more, but you know a little bit more. That really appealed to me. (x)  

[thewhills]

That the Jedi had raised their Temple over [an ancient Sith] shrine had for a thousand years been one of the most closely guarded secrets of those Sith Lords who had perpetuated and implemented the revenge strategy of the Jedi Order’s founders. Even the most powerful of Dark Side Adepts believed that shrines of the sort existed only on Sith worlds remote from Coruscant, and even the most powerful of the Jedi believed that the power inherent in the shrine had been neutralized and successfully capped. In truth, that power had seeped upward and outward since its entombment, infiltrating the hallways and rooms above, and weakening the Jedi Order much as the Sith Masters themselves had secretly infiltrated the corridors of political power and toppled the Republic.

Tarkin Chapter 9, James Luceno.

UNBOUND WORLDS: Your book is the first place I’ve seen anyone discuss the idea that the Sith shrine under the Jedi Temple was partly responsible for the clouding of the Jedi’s minds during the war. Where did you get that idea from?

JAMES LUCENO: It made sense to me. This has happened time and time again in history. Let’s take an example. Cortez comes over with his army, he lays waste to the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan, and one of the first things they do is they raze the Aztec temples and they build churches. There’s a certain thinking in Mexico that the strength of those temples is not entirely occluded by the churches that have been put on top of them. I thought, “Well, that’s an interesting analogy for what’s going on here.” The Jedi tried to cap the power of this shrine, but there’s leakage. It’s not just Sidious; it’s the power of history, it’s the residue of what’s left of the dark side there.

That’s the way I see it, and that’s the way I have Sidious interpreting it. It’s not fact, but it certainly could be. (x)

[thewhills]

Nesta Term from Rogue One: A Star Wars Story for Day 5 of Ladies of Star Wars Appreciation Week (Theme: Favourite Underrated Characters). She’s a Jedha civilian with a really cool backstory who appears in the Rogue One Visual Guide. She’s a nun who worships chaos and death and I love her.

[thewhills]

1. Overview of Force-related sites (post here)

2. Observations

Okay here comes the actual meat, which is a series of notes from my in-progress whills meta, made semi-legible. With more maps but of the really ugly kind. 

Keep reading

[thewhills]

The Clone Wars S03E15 Overlords Concept Art | Anakin's test (x) (x)

[thewhills]

✸ Star Wars worlds : Dathomir  Dathomir was a remote, neutral planet in the Quelli sector and the home of the Nightsisters. The planet, lit red by its central star, had numerous continents that were overrun with vegetation, forests, and swamplands. The Nightsisters, also known as the Dathomir witches, made their home in the swamps, and wielded magicks fueled by Dathomir’s own power. Dathomir was also home to the Nightbrothers, Zabraks who were ruled by the Nightsisters. During the Clone Wars, Dathomir would come under attack multiple times due to the machinations of Mother Talzin and her rival Darth Sidious, leading to the destruction of most of the inhabitants and settlements on the planet by the Confederacy of Independent Systems after conquering it. Asajj Ventress, a Nightsister trained by Count Dooku, returned to Mother Talzin after her master betrayed her, drawing Dathomir to Dooku’s attention and concluding in a battle where all the Nightsisters but Ventress and Mother Talzin were killed.

[thewhills]

@sulfisreen, whom I cannot thank enough, pointed to me this tweet about the minefield issue of what Lucas’ VII-IX would have been, something on which i do have Opinions A NEW LUCAS WHILLS QUOTE!! That doesn’t happen everyday. And wow, what quote. 

Context first: the quotes come from the James Cameron’s Story of Science Fiction book, which accompanies a four episodes, ehr, documentary series of the same name – I haven’t watched the series or read the book and wouldn’t have without that quote, but I’ll be doing that in the next weeks. Both are quite recent, google tells me the series was release in April (2018) and the book in May. In all likelihood the quotes used in the book come from interviews conducted for the TV series.

As a disclaimer of sorts – “Lucas on future stories and how much they’re planned” covers a range of quotes that go from fully honest to intentionally misleading and chart many changes in the conception of that future through the years. Without anything corroborating or invalidating it it’s hard to know where these new quotes fall. They also come from an interview not particularly focused on Lucas’ would-have-been ST and conducted what, five years or so after he stopped working on it. Basically some fuzziness is to be expected, and imo it could hardly be more open to interpretation.

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[thewhills]

Hi have a two parts monster meta 

1. Overview of Force-related sites

Ahch-To | Unknown Regions

A world shrouded in myth, held by some Jedi scholars to be the location of the first Jedi temple (CL : 100).

Ahch-To Temple | Held by some Jedi scholars to be the first Jedi temple (CL : 100).

Keep reading

[thewhills]

✸ Star Wars worlds : Malachor Malachor was a rocky, hellish wasteland planet shrouded in mystery. At some point, the Sith were able to establish a presence on the planet, constructing a massive temple beneath its surface. It was the location of an event known as the Great Scourge of Malachor, in which the Jedi Order launched an all-out assault against the Sith when the temple’s weapon misfired and petrified everyone on the planet. After these events, Malachor was made forbidden to the Jedi, though stories of what had happened were passed down, forming the basis of many legends.

[thewhills]

The Empire Strikes Back Concept art | Dagobah’s dark side cave thumbnail sketches, Ralph McQuarrie (The Making of The Empire Strikes Back, J. W. Rinzler)

[thewhills]

The Empire Strikes Back Concept art | Thumbnail drawings of Luke’s encounter in Dagobah’s dark side cave, Ralph McQuarrie

[thewhills]

The Empire Strikes Back Concept art | Darth Vader’s metal castle, Ralph McQuarrie, Dec. 1977 (The Making of The Empire Strikes Back, J. W. Rinzler)

[thewhills]

The Empire Strikes Back Matte paintings | Dagobah, Ralph Mc Quarrie, Harrison Ellenshaw (The Making of The Empire Strikes Back, J. W. Rinzler)

[thewhills]

The Empire Strikes Back Concept art | Dagonah landscapes sketches, Ralph McQuarrie, early 1979 (The Making of The Empire Strikes Back, J. W. Rinzler)