#how I would do it is have her actively plot against jw

[fortune-maiden]

Random TGCF Thought of the Day

The urge to frankencanon Ling Wen’s revised backstory to keep all the cute moments with Bai Jing but still have Ling Wen be actively responsible for Jing Wen’s pseudo-death and somewhat responsible for Xuli’s downfall

(preferably with swd & pm’s backing)

#tgcf #ling wen #random tgcf thoughts #I am still mad about that one change in the revision #was it a censorship thing? lw can’t get away with everything in the end if she murdered someone? #everything else about the backstory is great but I refuse to acknowledge this part #how I would do it is have her actively plot against jw #she knows xuli’s downfall is coming no matter what so she decides to speed it up #after BJ refuses to withdraw for her she finds some conflict to keep him busy #and makes arrangements for other kingdoms to start invading - BJ can’t be everywhere after all #and then in the confusion actively starts burning JW’s temples #(possibly pm helps here) #(or for more fun it’s swd who borrows PM’s men and makes him complicit) #while lw stays in heaven and waits for jw to weaken enough so she could kill him #(but he manages to survive like in the og novel) #i like the idea of lw trying to keep bj safe at first but then settles for just having him elsewhere #but the general feng conflict happens anyway #and her temple burners spiral out of control #and target her own temple as well - but BJ protects it #also picturing a scene where lw warns swd about pm (who he’s kinda friendly with) #pm is a xuli man and owes jw some favors #so if swd starts an open conflict with jw he should expect PM’s help #*shouldnt #(lw is wrong about this - pm wouldn’t help jw and would prefer to stay out entirely) #(but he also doesn’t actually like jw) #(the favor jw did for him? help clear his name after the failed rebellion) #(pm never asked for that and it caused the beautiful tale to spread) #(however I do also see pm in a sort of lxc-style peacemaker role for lw swd and jw)

[gurguliare]

things I thought sucked in the Last Jedi:

Hux slapping Finn LOL !

...

Anyway uhhhh

wish Luke had been in that movie. Don’t really see how a character gets from like. “in a moment of madness, for just a second, I activated my lightsaber IN SELF-DEFENSE AGAINST A MASS MURDERER” to “in a moment of madness I almost killed a teenager.” Whatever your enjoyment level of Snappy One-Liner Grandpa in this film, I think any solution to a mystery (how did Kylo Ren turn?) which then introduces a new and much vaster characterization mystery...... is a bad solve. Sorry. It sucked. It was awful. “Oh, Luke was so exhausted by the cleanup efforts after the collapse of the Empire that his whole worldview shifted 90 degrees to the left” sure if you had another three films to do this in I guess. Not to mention that everything leading up to the temple debacle is left unimaginably vague: it adds The Barest Nothing to our understanding of Kylo from the first movie, and it gives no interesting insight onto his resolve at the end---so the unwriting of Luke’s character doesn’t even pay dividends in some kind of functional, minimalist, plot-sculpting way

...............

Hey, hate to say it, but that was philosophically incoherent! I miss when “The Dark Side” and allegiance thereto was defined by evil actions, such as murder, rather than “a sexy indefinable presence full of mirrors!” Sensing good in Vader meant sensing literal reservations and self-doubt; sensing darkness in Ben meant ....... uh ... smelling puberty? Smelling brainwashing? Smelling the future? COOL I saw someone speculate (with Scant Grounds To Be Honest) that Ben had already planned on destroying the temple and recruiting some students, and that plan was what Luke picked out of his mind: why on earth would your response to that be to execute the teenager preemptively

Finn dragged on meaningless lengthy B-quest. to no purpose other than quite incidentally knocking Phasma off a tall thing? The surviving touchstones of his characterization seemed to be “cares about Rey” “comic relief” and, to offset, “hypereffective and knowledgeable in First Order-related areas,” which I would appreciate more were it paired with literally any interest or concern for his relationship to his own past, lmaoooooooooooooo. @crocordile has a better post about this here. His crunchy “banter” with Phasma! Oh man!

Rey had no arc or development so that’s cool. It’s very funny to me that people have been blasting/lauding this one for being less OT-derivative when Rey’s stuff is like... yoked to Luke’s ESB/ROTJ plot in a way that makes it impossible for the movie to make any meaningful comments about her. At least “A New Hope” was legitimately generic! In this case, because they were so proud of their Twist at the end, even the c/p’d “[x] had good in him all along?!?!?!?” (which made no sense as executed) was revealed to be as utterly fanciful and childish as it sounded, stripped of context and endlessly reproduced---which, like, okay? That means what for Rey, exactly? ESB was about Luke discovering a path all his own, unlike anything demanded of him by others; TLJ is about Rey wandering around a bit on one of the two ways signposted for her, before being informed that no, the second way was inappropriate to the circumstances, it’s time to go back to the first now. Okay. Cool. She can relax.

The mutiny was unbelievably contrived and seemed to consist largely of annoying parables strung together with twine. It required above-romcom-levels of snap assumptions and information withheld; additionally I fucking hate being expected to be grateful for the revelation that more than one older female authority figure can be competent at a time. Holy shit. Hey, was there some reason Holdo waited until five transports were left before ramming the First Order ship? JW

Speaking of which, hahahaha it’s really funny how they turn Leia into a gruff smiling mannequin in this movie in a way that would only be remotely excusable if they were setting up for IX/the climax of the trilogy to be all Leia-Kylo shadow war except then Fisher died. not that the climax of the trilogy was ever going to be Kylo vs Leia. Oh haha Kylo couldn’t bring himself to kill his mom despite all his boring grandstanding, his mom is definitely ready to kill him, that could go somewhere---AHAHAHAHAHA RIGHT WHAT AM I SAYING

Oh Leia is strong in the Force thanks good reminder. Imagine being an air molecule intimately caressed and reeled in by General Princess Leia’s psychic corpse

“my son is truly dead”

Oh I... I have more complaints but I think I’m actually running out of steam now. Sorry. I should have stopped before.

The “what is the Force” montage was really embarrassing

Hux got dialogue argh

The one consistent throughline in this movie was that all actions and ideas entertained were pointless or misguided; the protagonists were lucky, however, in that authorial fiat canceled out their ‘choices’

Force-sensitive newsie children? Why

things I thought were good in the Last Jedi:

there was a man sitting in the row in front of us with his upturned popcorn bucket over his head

#tlj spoilers #star wars spoilers #sorry this is a scramble but