#i literally have a whole nother document filled with fun ideas | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

4e7her · 5 months

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OK SO

i just made myself a huge like masterlist p much in discord with all my fics in it. i’ll need to put tumblr stuff in it too later but THE HOPE IS. that since i will be able to easily scroll through all of it. (google docs mobile is hell and i usually write on my phone) i will actually be able to SEE ALL MY FICS. and not forget about what i am working on.

i’m also keeping track now of what i currently want to work towards and what i have in my inbox over here. before i was kinda just checking every so often and then forgetting and then checking and then forgetting etc

WITH ANY LUCK. this will mean more consistent posting. i CANNOT promise anything because i am a human and thus flawed. BUT I WOULD LIKE TO GO BACK TO WRITING MORE.

i have five twstober prompts left to write and eight requests in my inbox and then i will open requests again. i will NOT be hosting any request EVENTS for the near future - twstober will be the only event i am planning on regularly participating in. i would like to instead focus more on my full fics and my ocs as they bring me very much joy. please ask me about my ocs i will love you forever /platonic. i will also add something to my request rules for asks about ocs because i will take any and all excuses to talk about them

CHEERS I HOPE THIS WORKS BROS. I NEED TO GET A WHITEBOARD OR SMTH FOR A REMINDER IN MY PHYSICAL SURROUNDINGS TOO FOR MY BRAIN

#i am one of those people that likes timeblocking in my calendar #but that doesn’t work for me for writing #i write when the writing mood strikes #which isn’t very often unless i am hyperfocusing or am reminded of my wonderful beautiful boys (my ocs)#white board would be ideal so i can write down like top three priorities for writing and work on those for a week and then cycle through #i think we might have one somewhere #i still haven’t unpacked all the way from when we moved six months ago 💀#i’m doing my best #anyways tonight has been a lot of ranting #i love writing i just kind of forget about everything that isn’t placed in front of me regularly #so scrolling through years of google docs on my phone doesn’t really work #they’re organized into folders on google drives. but the folders don’t translate to docs.#it’s terrible.#solution?#make a discord server into a masterpost #this is also a useful way for me to store small ideas without clogging up my drafts #fnaf laundry fic has like five pages of notes of fun things that could happen and then has like a chapter or a half a chapter done #so i can move stuff over #and for something in the water #i literally have a whole nother document filled with fun ideas #wyn is my baby girl you don’t understand #i have literally 16 current fics you can’t blame me for forgetting about them if they’re not all there okay

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ladililn · 5 years

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What Rogue One taught me about the Jedi, despite no Jedi actually appearing in it

So I initially started writing this for @rogueoneanniversary last year, and then Real Life happened and I disappeared from Tumblr and then Tumblr disappeared from me and now here we are, a full standard year later, and guess who still has (now very belated) Thoughts she wants to share? This girl! Because guess who still hasn’t gotten over this movie? This me! (Not sure whether @celebraterogueone is the correct place for this now?)

The first time I saw Rogue One, I completely missed the fallen colossus in the sands of Jedha. I just thought it was an overhead shot of some weirdly-shaped mountain. The second time, it took a moment for my brain to register and make sense of the image, and then I wondered how I'd ever missed it.

This one object, one blink-and-you-miss-it set piece, tells us so much about Jedha and the "ancient religion" of the Jedi and themes that run through the entire saga and even, I think, characters who aren't even in Rogue One (there's a reason the fallen Jedi statue looks exactly like Old Ben). It immediately calls to mind Shelley’s Ozymandias:

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert…Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies[…]

[…]Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

To return for a moment to Admiral Motti’s “ancient religion” line in ANH—I’ve seen people point that out as a plot hole, or at least an early inconsistency, given that the Prequels show the Jedi faith alive and well a mere nineteen years earlier, which doesn’t seem very ancient. I find that charge specious for several reasons—first of all, “ancient” doesn’t mean “dead." I think you could easily and accurately refer to Judaism or Christianity as “ancient religions,” and both of those are alive and well now. The religion began a long, long time ago; thus it is “ancient.” I’d also argue that we hardly needed the Prequels to belie the idea that the Jedi Order was beyond human memory. We know in ANH that Obi-Wan used to be a Jedi Knight, and although Alec Guinness looked (and was) older than Obi-Wan’s actual age, there was nothing in that movie or the other two OT movies to indicate human lifespans differ significantly in the GFFA.

Still, I see the disconnect. On the one hand, we have a not-that-ancient man who was once one of the “guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic.” On the other, you have Luke, who’s never even heard of the Jedi, and Han, who doesn’t believe in the Force. Again, some see these as errors, considering Han was already ten when the Republic fell, meaning the Jedi were still getting up to their incredible and well-documented feats when he should’ve been old enough to be aware and remember.

Explanations for this seeming disconnect can be found across the franchise, and they boil down to two main points: the Jedi’s (relative) lack of reach throughout the galaxy, and Order 66.

Here’s a fun figure: how many Jedi were there in the galaxy before Order 66? 10,000. Ten fucking thousand. That’s a ridiculously tiny number. A laughably tiny number. A Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale number. An entire galaxy, all those planets and star systems, billions and billions (trillions? quadrillions?) of sentient beings, and you could name every single Jedi in a few hours. Put them all in the smallest NFL stadium, and they couldn’t even fill half the seats.

Sometimes I find the Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale-ness of the GFFA frustrating (although IMO the “why is this galaxy filled with the same 10 people?!” complaints fans like to toss around ignores the history of the mythic storytelling tradition Star Wars is very much a part of and how the franchise fits into/plays with those genre conventions, but that’s a rant for another day). But in this case, I fucking love how ridiculous a number 10,000 is. I think it’s perfect. Our view of the Jedi’s relative size and stature in the galaxy is warped by the lens through which we see the galaxy; up until Rogue One, we’re pretty much just hanging out with Jedi. Not only that—in the Prequels and TCW, we’re hanging out with the best of the best, the council members and the freaking Chosen One. They’re the elite among the elite. The 1% of the 1%, only more like the .001% of the .0000000000000001%.

There’s an excerpt from the Rogue One novelization that I think illustrates my point perfectly. This comes from a section of the book that’s meant to be “supplemental data [from the] personal files of Mon Mothma,” a document entitled “Short Notes on the History of the Rebel Alliance Navy” (side note: how much do I love in-universe archival material? a whole fucking lot) (all emphasis mine):

What worked in the Clone Wars cannot work again: the partnership of Jedi Knights and Kaminoan clone armies constituted a peerless weapon that no longer exists.

Consider a brigade of clone troopers served by a Jedi commander: Such a unit might penetrate a world’s orbital defenses and seize control of the entire planet while taking (and inflicting!) minimal casualties… [W]hat blockade could be thorough enough to keep out a handful of determined star fighters and a single clone drop ship?

...With the Clone Wars’ end, the destruction of the Jedi Order, and the decommissioning of the Kaminoan cloning facilities, the self-proclaimed Emperor and his military advisers determined that the future of warfare was in large-scale naval weaponry—in a fleet of battleships and battle stations that could atomize any enemy, whether on a planet’s surface or among the stars. They rebuilt a military not for precision strikes but for hammerblows… No potential rebellion could dare eschew infantry altogether, but—lacking the elite support of the Jedi or clones—the cost in lives would be abominable…

From an in-universe perspective, the Jedi are OP as shit. Guys, these are a tiny handful of beings with the ability to move shit with their minds! They can run and leap insane distances at inhuman (yeah, I know that’s an impossible term in the context of a galaxy filled with humans and aliens, but you know what I mean) speeds, they can move in ways other people could never imagine, they have the sort of reflexes that allow Anakin to participate in a sport other members of his species, the most populous in the galaxy by far, physically cannot. They can manipulate the environment around them telekinetically. They can manipulate people telepathically. Their weapons can cut through anything. It’s been said before, but it bears repeating: they are literal space wizards. I know this is all obvious, but think about it from the perspective of your average galactic citizen: here is a microscopically tiny group of people who can literally do magic.

Why are there so few of them? Well, the Force moves in mysterious ways. But also, there don’t really need to be more. Talk about casting an outsized shadow: 10,000 people holding the entire galaxy together. Like Mon Mothma says, one Jedi (and their handful of trusty clone troopers) = an entire fucking battle station in terms of military power. And with the Sith so long in hiding (side note: the Rule of Two makes the Order look positively overpopulated), the Jedi have had no real opponent of their own stature and ability level to contend with for a long, long time. (We see, especially in TCW, how difficult it is for a non-Force user to be made into a credible threat for the Jedi in any circumstances. Those plotlines almost always require characters to be nerfed, either by having to hide their powers (because undercover), being restrained by the Code and not wanting to harm civilians (a Jedi’s primary weapon—though obviously not their only weapon—is hard to make nonlethal, or at least non-maiming), or conveniently forgetting most of their powers.)

Now, it could be argued that there do “need” to be more, because are they actually doing such a great job guarding peace and justice? Are they successfully holding the galaxy together? Even before the Clone Wars, we see in TPM that their power doesn’t extend all the way into the far reaches of the galaxy. Of course, you could also argue that the lawlessness of the Outer Rim has less to do with the Jedi’s inability, in terms of sheer forcible (sorry) power, to do anything about it, and more to do with the politics of the Republic, and you could be right. But that’s part of the point. The Jedi are enforcers of peace, not rulers. They’re not supposed to be making decisions on galactic policy. (That “supposed to” is key, but again: a story for another day.)

So my point is: sure, on Coruscant in the year 20 BBY, you’re not going to have anyone blinking and saying “Jedi who?” It’s a Core World—the Core World—and most of the characters we’re familiar with in the Prequel Era are by necessity among the upper echelons of galactic society, or at least moving in circles that bring them into contact with the upper echelons. High-ranking politicians, rulers of various worlds, heads of planetary militia—people who have reason to be interacting with the Jedi. (Even the criminals they interact with are top-level, crime bosses and legendary bounty hunters. You’re not going to call a Jedi to arrest a petty thief.)

99.999% of the galaxy’s citizens have never seen a Jedi in person. (We’re going to leave beside the issue of the media in the GFFA, because that’s a whole ‘nother kettle of, uh, mynocks?) The farther you get from Coruscant, the farther removed you are from galactic high society, the less you probably know about the Jedi. Han, growing up on the streets of Corellia, has no reason to be an expert on Jedi. I’m sure he’s heard rumors, but he is perfectly justified in being a skeptic, particularly once the Jedi disappear seemingly easily.

Which brings us to the Jedi Purge. Here’s the thing: Order 66 wasn’t just about literally killing all the Jedi and burning their Temple down. It was a planned cultural genocide as well. A revision of history. We all know the line from 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” Palpatine destroyed the memory of the Jedi as surely as he destroyed the Jedi themselves. We’ve met, in various canon sources, history professors who lost their jobs because any mention, scholarly or otherwise, of the Jedi Order had become verboten. We’ve seen kids studying for their galactic history class in which one of the questions concerns Mace Windu, leader of a “criminal gang that interfered with a legal execution on Geonosis and sparked the Clone Wars.” Talk about revisionist: that goes against everything Palpatine himself said and did during the Clone Wars, a not-insignificant timespan of at least three years of his own personal history he has to revise, but in his role as Emperor, he can pull that off. This is what totalitarian governments do. We already see it begin in RotS, when Palps tells the Senate all about the Jedi Order’s attempt at a coup. And it’s effective! Five years on, Tarkin himself says the Jedi already feel like a distant memory.

And of course it’s fairly ludicrous (though not, I suppose, impossible) to assume that the statue on Jedha fell and was partially buried in sand within the last 19 years. But that’s one of the things I love most about Star Wars, something it’s particularly famous for: its Used Future aesthetic, the continued reminders that this is a galaxy with a history, one as complex and mysterious and tangled in its own legends as our own. That fallen colossus is one of many clues throughout canon that the Old Republic, the Jedi Order, belief in the Force—all were in decline long before the events of the Prequel Era.

Similarly, it’s clear that Jedha itself, once among the most holy sites in the galaxy, was also only a shadow of its former glory long before it got wiped off the map entirely. From Wookieepedia (again, emphasis mine):

As more of the galaxy was mapped, more direct hyperspace routes were discovered. These new passages made the old, winding routes, such as those connecting with Jedha, obsolete. The once-popular Jedha became an antiquated curiosity rather than a relevant destination, a location for those who desired spiritual guidance, a deeper purpose, or to simply exile themselves from the larger galaxy.

It’s typical Imperial excess to take the idea of Jedha’s long-buried secrets lost to the sands of time and literalize it by blowing the damn thing up. Horace Smith’s Ozymandias is less famous, but as (if not more) relevant to our discussion (“The City’s gone,” anyone?), and I leave you with its last stanza:

We wonder,—and some Hunter may express

Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness

Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,

He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess

What powerful but unrecorded race

Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

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