Tag: meta

lj-writes:

It’s so funny that people who talk about Finn “fixating” or “obsessing” unhealthily over Rey fail to recognize that Rey fixated to a far greater extent on Finn. Remember Takodana? Finn was the one who accepted Rey’s decision not to come with him and walked away from her like a normal, healthy person does because he is not an abusive shithole who tells her she’s nothing trying to manipulate her into compliance. Rey was the one who didn’t want to part with a guy she had just met but she also did not assault or belittle him to make him stay because she is not, despite her trauma and abandonment issues, an entitled and unbalanced woman who thinks it’s okay to impose her will on others. Yeah, Finn went back for her when it was clear she was abducted and in imminent danger, like a good and brave person does for someone they love. How is that unhealthy or weird again?

But Rey? Did you forget the part where she searched the woods on Starkiller Base to find a wounded Finn, except it wasn’t to rescue him or anything–the planet was disintegrating around her and she wasn’t looking for the Falcon, trying to carry Finn to safety, or even drawing attention so a passing Resistance vessel might see them. At the end of her mental and physical resources, having retraumatized herself in the fight by confronting her greatest fear, she gave up hope and simply lay down on her beloved friend (whom she had known for a day), crying. For all intents and purposes she had found him to die with him.

To be clear her reaction is fully understandable and sympathetic, like mentally ill lovestruck teenager helloooo, but if you want to talk about an unusually intense fixation on a new friend that’s clearly Rey toward Finn way more than the other way around. My weirdo space nerd girl out-weirds out-dramas her gorgeous space hero any day of the week and I love her for it, okay?

image

Listen I get what you’re saying, but also consider: she wasn’t just willing to die with Finn, she searched through the woods to find him (leaving Kyle to get blown up alone ha ha), flip him onto his back, check his heartbeat–faint, so faint, but there–and then collapsed onto his chest sobbing. What kind of magnificently overdramatic Ophelia shit… ok actually more Hamlet shit, but you get my drift.

Consider further: She didn’t even try to find the Falcon on her own and get help for Finn. She had a handy-dandy light-generating doohickey right on her in the middle of a very dark wood, yet did not try to wave it for passing ships to see. If the wood cover was a problem she could have climbed a tree and we know she can climb. And while I’m sure carrying Finn was a daunting proposition especially in her state of complete exhaustion, literally her first appearance had her dragging very heavy scrap parts on a starvation diet. Finding the Falcon or flagging down a passing ship would have been better options in terms of time and effort, but carrying Finn wasn’t impossible if she couldn’t bear to let him out of her sight (or arms).

The scavenger Rey, the survivor, would have thought of all these options and ten times more in less time than it took you to say “character arc!” Who knows, maybe she was running through them in the back of her mind. But she was tired, so tired, and what’s more, Rey the survivor was surviving for a reason: to wait for the people who would come back for her. And now someone had, and she was with him at last, and not only was she too tired to try anymore–she saw no reason to. She had what she wanted, right there, even if he might not be able to smile or laugh or cry with her, or hug her. There’s no more thought of going back to Jakku, of trying and striving and hurting. Here in enemy territory on the verge of annihilation she is safer than at any time in memory, and she just wants to stay right here in this moment that is about to melt into forever.

It’s a beautiful and bittersweet culmination of her story, and it is very much her death–one of those situations where the character has chosen death and is for intents and purposes dead but plucked out by divine machination, as you said, for the need of the next film/episode/book. She, like Finn, has found something bigger than survival, because what they really wanted to live for was love. Now that they had found it they found it was worth dying for. They found it in each other.

It’s so funny that people who talk about Finn “fixating” or “obsessing” unhealthily over Rey fail to recognize that Rey fixated to a far greater extent on Finn. Remember Takodana? Finn was the one who accepted Rey’s decision not to come with him and walked away from her like a normal, healthy person does because he is not an abusive shithole who tells her she’s nothing trying to manipulate her into compliance. Rey was the one who didn’t want to part with a guy she had just met but she also did not assault or belittle him to make him stay because she is not, despite her trauma and abandonment issues, an entitled and unbalanced woman who thinks it’s okay to impose her will on others. Yeah, Finn went back for her when it was clear she was abducted and in imminent danger, like a good and brave person does for someone they love. How is that unhealthy or weird again?

But Rey? Did you forget the part where she searched the woods on Starkiller Base to find a wounded Finn, except it wasn’t to rescue him or anything–the planet was disintegrating around her and she wasn’t looking for the Falcon, trying to carry Finn to safety, or even drawing attention so a passing Resistance vessel might see them. At the end of her mental and physical resources, having retraumatized herself in the fight by confronting her greatest fear, she gave up hope and simply lay down on her beloved friend (whom she had known for a day), crying. For all intents and purposes she had found him to die with him.

To be clear her reaction is fully understandable and sympathetic, like mentally ill lovestruck teenager helloooo, but if you want to talk about an unusually intense fixation on a new friend that’s clearly Rey toward Finn way more than the other way around. My weirdo space nerd girl out-weirds out-dramas her gorgeous space hero any day of the week and I love her for it, okay?

Can I geek out about K.J. Harper for a second? I have to admit, in her first appearance I wondered “What the hell kind of show is this?” when she was shown to be a lush and daytime drinker whose job performance was suffering for her habit. I wasn’t used to women characters being presented this way, especially Black women professionals.

Then the more I got into the show the more I understood her, though I’m only on Episode 3 so I’m sure there’s more to come. It’s a timely and necessary portrayal, too, with mental health and substance abuse being a problem in the legal profession. PTSD among professionals who deal with the suffering of others, from EMTs to reporters, is an underappreciated epidemic as well.

And the layers on this woman, just wow. You get a glimpse of her brilliance and passion behind the burnout and the cynicism, the up-and-coming prosecutor she must have been before the work got to her, and then you can see the trauma slam down behind her eyes and it’s in the way she talks, in the way she can’t make eye contact all of a sudden… Clare-Hope Ashitey’s performance is a standout here and I am riveted.

lj-writes:

Ohhhh NO NO NO NO DON’T DO MY FEELINGS LIKE THAT HOW DARE

SPOILERS FOR SEVEN SECONDS

Now this is actually a good, as well as tragic, twist, because there was plenty of foreshadowing that Brenton was going to live. He was found alive in the first place, right? And medically things were looking up! Latrice felt his hand squeeze hers! There’s his complicated relationship with his father, the mystery of what he was doing at that park in the first place. All of this pointed to Brenton waking up and dealing with these plot points.

But no, sometimes things just take a bad turn and there are no guarantees in life. No one gets to have all their loose threads tied up neatly before they die. Things just… stop, stories are left unfinished, and hearts are torn apart with grief. Every death is unfinished business, though this may be all the more true with lives taken away as abruptly and unfairly as Brenton’s.

And now the consequences are amped up to the max and no one, especially his parents, could ever stop asking if things could have been different if Brenton had been taken to a hospital immediately instead of abandoned for hours in the snow. This show truly does not fuck around or flinch back, and I both love and hate that.

captainsaltymuyfancy:

Finn is not your uwu soft boy cinnamon roll. Being deeply compassionate doesn’t make him an enormous, useless, buffoonish sap. And frankly this whole idea of Finn being this pure, soft, naïve baby robs him of his character. When people treat Finn like he’s a mindless little good boy it degrades the significance of Finn’s decision to leave the FO by treating it like it wasn’t a decision. It presents Finn as though his defection wasn’t a choice, like it would inevitably happen because hes uwuwuwu such a cinnamon roll.

Finn is intelligent, rational, tactical, and pragmatic. He has a brilliant mind and is incredibly skilled. He was in the top 1% in all tests out of all stormtroopers in the FO. His decisions are calculated and he develops plans quickly and effectively. He was Phasma’s first choice for promotion to the rank of officer. The only reason he wasn’t promoted was because he regularly made compassionate and merciful decisions in combat simulations.

He understands politics on both a micro and a macro scale. He knows what his best interests are and how to achieve them. He knows how to pursue his own unique, individual desires and concerns. And yet he STILL chose not to kill, to defect. Finn could have easily worked his way up the FO power ladder and gotten himself a position of prestige and privilege. Yet he chose to leave it all behind and run head-first into a galaxy he barely knew, knowing he would have nothing except his wits and physical abilities to cling to.

Finn isn’t a great character because he’s a precious little dopey uwuwuwuwuwuwu soft boy who was destined to defect because of his “nature”, Finn is a great character because he’s brilliant and capable and could have had everything, but he chose leave it all behind at immense personal risk because he knew it was wrong. Stop making Finn into a sappy dunce and degrading his agency, especially in order to justify or uplift a ship.

425599167:

Rewatching The Last Jedi, it astonishes me how many opportunities the movie chose to squander. I have never seen a sequel so determined to do absolutely nothing with any of the setups or characters from a previous installment, or to remove the scenes that would carry the most emotional weight, and it’s really, really depressing to me. 

  1. It retreads the Empire-Rebel conflict. The setup was there for a small, outmatched First Order, which had lost most of its resources with Starkiller Base, up against a mostly-intact New Republic, but I guess no one in the NR cares enough about the state of the galaxy to fight back. The NR is completely ignored and never even seen as a functioning entity, and everyone seems to use “Rebels” and “Resistance” interchangeably.
  2. A Force-using protagonist was introduced who’s shown to be quite aggressive and reckless, potentially making her a more morally-grey character, then she turns out to be good by definition no matter what she does because she only exists to balance out the evil antagonist.
  3. A former member of the Evil Army of Evil, who turns out to be one of the most empathetic characters in the saga, who used to be a cog in the machine, deserted them on moral grounds. You want subversion, there it is. A faceless, disposable mook became the deuteragonist. Or he was. Now he has his experiences as a child soldier played for laughs by making it seem like he was the entire First Order’s janitor instead of an capable, promising soldier who rejected them.
  4. They had an antagonist who’d modeled himself after Darth Vader and was deliberately shown to reject redemption when offered, then the second movie is devoted to showing he’s potentially redeemable only to reiterate the same point.
  5. There’s a journey to the first Jedi temple. Nothing is learned about the origins of the Jedi, or who the first Jedi were. The original Jedi texts are present. They are never read from. Very little information about the Jedi can be gleaned from this location, aside from what appears to be a focus on balance between the light and dark, judging from one mosaic. Luke’s criticisms of the Jedi apply to the order during the prequels, he doesn’t explain anything about how they began.
  6. The temple has been watched over by a group of caretakers for an unknown amount of time and for unknown reasons. They appear in two scenes, both of which are comic relief, and answer next to nothing about them or their culture.
  7. Rey’s training under Luke consists of two lessons (out of three he had promised, the third was deleted) and swinging a lightsaber around, unsupervised, for about thirty seconds.
  8. Rey picking up the use of the Force so easily was a waste. Characters training in fiction is a great opportunity to see how they face and overcome challenges, and in the case of fantastical settings, to build up the mechanics of the world and how scifi/magical elements work. This is why Luke’s training with Yoda in ESB was so interesting. We can’t see Rey siphoning the skills from Kylo’s brain, we need to be told that’s what’s happening to explain how she got so strong so fast. The fact there’s an explanation for it doesn’t make it interesting to watch.
  9. They didn’t even go all in with making Rey a completely independent character. If you want to contrast her with Kylo, being someone with no significant background or family vs someone born to a legacy and loving family who spat on it all, show why she’s worthier of it. Now instead of showing she’s a better heir than Kylo while having no blood relation to Luke, her interactions with him are tense at best and physically violent at worst. Instead of the expected outcome of her being important because she’s related to Luke, she’s important because the Force made her Kylo’s antithesis and dumped a bunch of power on her. Another character is still the source of her involvement in the narrative, just for a different, less-interesting reason. Instead of having the torch passed to her by her father, Rey gets shackled to a Neo-Nazi school shooter. 
  10. They wanted to show a hero coming from an unassuming background, and did nothing with Finn, whose background is unknown, never implied to be important, and considering the FO probably doesn’t bother to keep detailed records of its child soldiers, potentially impossible to find out.
  11. Didn’t have Leia mourn Han at all, and removed his funeral from the film despite initial plans to include it.
  12. They deleted the scene showing Luke grieving over Han’s death.
  13. They deleted the scene that develops Phasma by exposing her cowardice, develops Finn by letting him be the one to confront her over Starkiller’s destruction, and develops the stormtroopers by depicting them as real people with their own doubts and the potential for revolt. All that was gone in favor of “Let’s go, chrome dome”.
  14. They deleted the scene set during the evacuation depicting Connix warning Poe that they needed more time to escape, which is what motivated him to go against the FO fleet and buy time, showing his devotion to his comrades and willingness to throw himself in danger to protect them. This is cut, and Poe is repeatedly implied to be hot-headed and glory-seeking despite his actions being based around the aforementioned motives and no alternative scenes were included, we’re just told he was being reckless despite his behavior in both movies being inconsistent with that. Poe’s actions cost the bombers, but it took out the dreadnought and saved the people on the transports.
  15. With all the talk about the core theme of “failure”, instead of having the Resistance attack on the dreadnought fail, it succeeds. They could’ve shown the plucky, rag-tag fighters utterly fail against the First Order’s indomitable war machine, but instead, they accomplish their goal. Yeah, they lost their bombers. Costing about 50 casualties and the most incompetently-designed ships in the franchise doesn’t matter much compared to 215,000 enemy combatants and the FO’s second-largest warship getting taken out. That’s a damn good resource exchange and I don’t know how much better than a 4000:1 kill ratio Poe would need for people to stop criticizing him. It’s probably higher than that already depending on how many people went down with Starkiller Base. The attack on the first Death Star cost all but three of the fighters sent to destroy it, suffering heavy losses doesn’t make it a defeat.
  16. With Paige dead, and the movie treating the successful destruction of the dreadnought as a disaster and entirely Poe’s fault, Rose never confronts him about how he led her sister into the battle that killed her despite interacting after Rose’s introduction focused on her grief. 
  17. Rose is established as a mechanic, and never shown making use of those skills.
  18. Admiral Ackbar is killed after giving him a single line anyone else could’ve delivered. Yeah, he’s liked by fans almost solely because of the “It’s a trap!” line, but that’s no reason to do absolutely nothing with him.
  19. Jessika Pava and Temmin Wexley are just gone, apparently. They were minor characters, but they were still there, they could’ve been interesting, and now they’re gone. They’re either dead, which sucks, or they’re off with other Resistance forces elsewhere, which undermines the FO’s single-minded focus on the fleet we’re shown. A sequel should not rely on people being ambivalent to characters from previous installments to make sense.
  20. Finn and Poe are prevented from interacting by separating them.
  21. Rey and Finn are prevented from interacting beyond a hug, and they deleted a scene where Finn sees Rey’s parting promise to meet him again, shown to him by BB-8, who tries to comfort Finn. Like with Poe’s deleted scene, this provides context to his actions and was removed to make the character look worse, even though we can infer his motives from his development in the last movie.
  22. Luke and Leia are prevented from interacting by putting Leia into a coma.
  23. Leia is put into a coma so she can’t do anything else, either. When she’s finally out of the coma and calls for help from her allies across the galaxy, no one responds. Leia Organa, the last princess of Alderaan, who was present at the biggest battles of the Galactic Civil War, who led the Resistance against the galaxy’s would-be oppressor, can’t inspire anyone to action.
  24. It’s asserted that the Jedi do not own the Force, which is a well-established aspect of the universe in many other Star Wars works. Then no new insights into it unconnected to Jedi teachings are provided. The film ends with Rey carrying on the Jedi’s legacy anyway.
  25. Maz Kanata, a Force-sensitive non-Jedi, appears for a brief cameo and is not connected to the whole anti-Jedi bent the film’s on at all.
  26. Both Rey and Kylo state they’ve had visions of each other’s future which inform their actions and expectations of each other. Neither are shown or described in detail. In Kylo’s case this might be understandable because he’s almost never the viewpoint character, but Rey was shown visions of herself by the Force in that cave, something could’ve been added there.
  27. What happened to Luke’s green lightsaber? I assumed it was destroyed when that hut collapsed on him in the flashback, but I can’t find any confirmation of that. It’s the saber he constructed himself and wielded after losing his father’s, it’s relevant to his character, but it’s completely forgotten. Including by Luke himself since he Force-holograms up the old blue one.
  28. No information is provided on the Knights of Ren and the film doesn’t even acknowledge their existence. They are presumably other students of Luke’s, but neither they nor the other Jedi-in-training they presumably killed are seen. Apparently they were considered as replacements for the Praetorian Guards, but were cut because that wouldn’t make sense and there was no room for them otherwise. Here’s a thought: if Kylo Ren is taking over the First Order from Snoke, have him fight the guards alongside the knights.
  29. No information is provided on Rey’s parents aside from their irrelevance. If what Kylo said was true, have the guts to show the damn drunks explicitly and stick to that explanation if you’re going to do it. It also doesn’t address who was on that ship in Rey’s flashback in TFA.
  30. No information is provided whatsoever about Snoke, including him being completely absent from the flashback scenes showing the moments before Kylo Ren destroyed the new Jedi despite his explicitly-stated relevance to Kylo’s development around that time.

It’s nothing. This movie is nothing. The problem isn’t “subverting expectations”, the movie actively doesn’t use what it’s given and then replaces potential payoffs with nothing. These are all setups provided either by The Force Awakens or The Last Jedi itself, and the movie either ignores them or cuts them out for the sake of time. It’s become a cliché criticism to bring up the milking scene, but the fact they left that in while cutting out all those deleted scenes shows how monumentally fucked up Rian Johnson’s priorities are. What really hurts is that it could’ve been great, but everything that could’ve had emotional weight and character depth was deliberately stripped out.

Honestly Jonathan Kasdan calling Han “the least chaste character in the Star
Wars saga” is such a disaster. Pretty much all his characterization in the OT and especially ESB falls apart if you interpret him that way. Yes, I know Lawrence Kasdan wrote ESB and is writing Solo with Jonathan. No, I don’t care because Kasdan Senior’s was not the final word and he was overridden at crucial parts, such as the “I love you”/”I know” exchange and even whether Han lived or died.

See, the core of Han’s character up to ESB is that he’s a giant dork
TRYING to be this suave, smoldering sex icon–the man he thinks Lando
is, basically (”you’ll like him”). You can see that with his fumbling
attempts to win Leia over. He cares so much, so helplessly about this crazy girl that he shadows her during the evacuation of Hoth for fear she might commit suicide by enemy. Yet when he’s faced with her all he can really do is argue, knocking his head against the closed door of her heart and howling, let me in.

Han in ESB is a guy who’s got it bad for Leia but doesn’t know how to tell her how he feels. He’s an earnest nerd who wants to be a smooth flirt because he thinks there’s no way Leia, or anyone, could love him for who he is. They could love Lando because everyone loves Lando, Han himself most of all, but not Han Solo.

Taking that away makes Han’s scenes with Leia the machinations of an accomplished lady’s man instead of the embarrassing struggles of a dork resorting to everything but interpretive dance trying to communicate how he feels. And look, I’m not the biggest Han x Leia shipper but even I can see how terrible that is, how it hollows out Han’s character and the very heart out of the movie.

Because every good character arc should confront the hero with his deepest fear, obviously Han must come face-to-face with Lando in this movie, the last person he wanted Leia to meet because holy shit how can he compete after she’s seen the real thing, and likely the last person Han himself wanted to meet even while desperately wanting to.

You can see from the first how hard a time Han has composing himself with Lando, with Lando taking charge of the interaction like he takes charge of everything while Han can just barely follow. And yet the wave of charm and warmth sweeps Han up in spite of himself and he remembers again why he loves this man so much, why everyone loves him.

And, of course, unlike Han himself Lando flirts effortlessly with Leia, treats her like the princess she is as Han only wishes he could.

image

But Lando has changed, too, shucked off
the scoundrel costume that Han is still struggling to fit into. Han
doesn’t know what to make of that, this new maturity in the man who has
been for so long his ideal of sexy devil-may-care manliness. Han thought
he had that made when he won the Falcon from Lando, but it’s never fit
comfortably. Without the Falcon Lando is still the sexiest man in the universe, has
grown into himself so much more in fact, in a way that’s forever leaving
Han scrambling to catch up.

Then it comes together for Han, through the revelation of the feet of clay on a man
he can’t stop loving anyway. The whole time Lando was just as much the charming con man Han remembered, but there was nothing good in it. Lando himself did not want that role, but was playing it trying to save Cloud City’s inhabitants from the Empire’s wrath. (It has been only three years in-universe since the Empire destroyed Alderaan for one person’s disobedience. The Death Star might not be around at this point but Lando’s city is on a literal gas planet, you do the math.)

That revelation liberates Han. He doesn’t need to put on any airs or be
anyone except who he is; Leia has loved him the whole time exactly as he
is and a part of him knew it all along. It might already be too late,
but he finally knows and at least he gets to tell her before what might be the end.

Han being treated as some debonair sex symbol always makes me laugh because the entire point of his character, what made ESB work as a movie, is that he was trying to be exactly that and failed epically. In that failure he became something much greater: Himself.

I haven’t seen an interview with Kasdan saying Qi’ra was the love of Han’s life, but I did see an interview with Games Radar that his relationship with Qi’ra is the only time we’ve him truly attracted to a woman which seems bizarre to me, wasn’t he truly attracted to Leia in ESB? And the fact that he keeps Qi’ra’s dice in a place he’d always be seeing them for over four decades after she dies and didn’t really seem to keep anything from Leia after they split…Well the inference is there :/

deltasquadformingup:

lj-writes:

Do you mean the interview where Jonathon said “Han is the least chaste character in the Star Wars saga, so we saw
making a young Han movie as an opportunity to really deal with a
romantic and sexual relationship where he’s truly attracted to a woman
and it’s a big part of the dynamic?“ He didn’t say it was the only time, but it does have a weird vibe seeing how we thought we already had “an opportunity to really deal with a
romantic and sexual relationship where he’s truly attracted to a woman.” He’s trying to sell it like it’s something new when it isn’t.

There’s also a passage in Harrison Ford: The Films where Lawrence Kasdan is quoted saying he did not like Han and Leia’s relationship (found via this forum), and he was supposedly behind the decision to break them up in TFA, so pushing Han x Qi’Ra might be a natural result.

but whyyyyyyy, in Legends Han was not only a good guy but also a good man, like even before ANH Han wasn’t like sleeping around so why this sudden insistence on changing the character? And really? How can you be against Han and Leia as a couple??

I thoroughly disagree with the assertion that Han is the least chaste character in the Star Wars saga. The core of his character up to ESB is that he’s a giant dork TRYING to be this suave, smoldering sex icon–the man he thinks Lando is, basically (”you’ll like him”). You can see that with his fumbling attempts to win Leia over and how taken aback he is at Lando’s effortless flirtation.

But Lando has changed, too, shucked off the scoundrel costume that Han is still struggling to fit into. Han doesn’t know what to make of that, this new maturity in the man who has been for so long his ideal of sexy devil-may-care manliness. He thought he had that made when he won the Falcon from Lando, but it’s never fit comfortably and Lando is still the sexiest man in the universe, has grown into himself so much more in fact in a way that’s forever leaving Han scrambling to catch up.

And then it comes together for him, through the crisis, through the revelation of the feet of clay on a man he can’t stop loving anyway. He doesn’t need to put on any airs or be anyone except who he is. Leia has loved him the whole time exactly as he is and a part of him knew it all along. It might already be too late, but he knows that now.

Just what level of “don’t ever fuck with us” is Starfleet? I mean I used to think Jem Hadar and Klingons being these fierce warrior races was something of an Informed Trait when they kept losing in face-to-face fights with mild-mannered Starfleet officers. But then I realized… it’s actually because Starfleet officers are just that tough.

Just how motivated and ambitious you have to be, as someone coming from a post-scarcity society, to sign up for such arduous training and potential danger? I have to wonder kind of people decide to go through years of rigorous education, constant work and travel, and the possibility of a nasty death when they are guaranteed lives without fear or want right on their home planets.

Could it be that Starfleet may, in fact, be a place for malcontents? Not the kind of small-time malcontent that turns to destruction and exploitation, but the kind of malcontent that is stifled on some level by the cushy existence of their home planet (even while being willing to die to protect it) and wants something more. Something out there and anywhere but here.

Such people are dangerous to the preexisting system unless they have an outlet for their energies. Just to name a few headliner captains, leave the James Kirks, the Jean-Luc Picards, the Kathryn Janeways, the Benjamin Siskos, the Philippa Georgious with nothing to do but enjoy life, and chances are they’d get restless. You can see their innate drive in the paths they didn’t take and in alternate universes: Picard has a brother who was perfectly content to run a vineyard at home, living a comfortable rural existence. Picard could have had that or any of a million other career paths, but he still chose the uncertainty of the stars. The 20th-century version of Benjamin Sisko had a burning ambition to write groundbreaking science fiction despite being struck down over and over again by racism. Georgiou was goddamned Emperor in the Mirror Universe, and Burnham and Lorcas wanted her throne. Clearly these are not people who can sit content and let the world be; they shift the very earth they stand on and reach for the stars any way they can.

So what do you do with world-shakers in paradise? You could choose to kill them or lock them up and “reeducate” them, but that goes against the Federation’s ideals. You could let them live free and potentially climb to the top, but they might make too many changes and disrupt the whole comfortable arrangement.

Or, you could give them a way out–infinite ways out, in fact, into space. Their boundless energy would be structured and channeled in morally acceptable directions by the strict rules and directives of Starfleet, and their ambition to be better than others and be judged by their abilities would find expression in rank and promotions.

These are, of course, the same individuals who would die to protect the Federation when it is threatened by a race of fierce warriors, a mechanical collective, or vast theocratic empire. The same people who would have felt stifled in civilian life and could have threatened the whole system become its fiercest defenders. It’s a brilliant system, really, that meets everyone’s interests and turns a society’s potential threats into its greatest assets.

I don’t think it’s any wonder, looking at these incredibly trained and driven people who can take down Klingons in single combat and engineer their way out of alternate timelines, that non-Federation worlds–and maybe more than a few Federation ones–hover somewhere between suspicious and outright terrified of the Federation’s intentions. Starfleet is one of the major reasons one can make a case for the Federation being a “soft” empire, and I can see why peoples ranging from the Ferengi to the Klingons are so suspicious of them. Because you do not ever fuck with Starfleet.

corellian-smuggler:

To me Luke Skywalker will always be the young man who rushed to the aid of a girl he’d never even met—whose selfless courage and desire to help defined both the beginning of his journey, and its end.

To me Luke Skywalker will always be the character who was disbelieving and angry to learn that the apparent mercenary he’d met was choosing money and self-preservation over the rebellion—the PEOPLE—who needed him. He’ll always be the character to whom it was unthinkable and inexcusable to abandon those in danger, to refuse to fight for what’s right. He’ll always be, “They could use a good pilot like you. You’re turning your back on them.”

In my eyes Luke Skywalker will always be the man risking his life for the cause—for the galaxy—so that others might one day live in freedom and peace. He will always be the pilot, the rebel, the soldier who would not let tyranny stand unopposed.

And to me Luke Skywalker will always be—indisputably—the character who would never forsake his loved ones. Who would never give them up, and never give up on them. He’ll always be the character whose loyalty—to his friends, to his family—was unfaltering. He will always be, “I’ve got to go to them.” Will always be, “They’re my friends. I’ve got to help them.” Always, “And sacrifice Han and Leia?” Always, “That is why I have to go.”

Luke Skywalker will always be hope. Irrevocably and without question, Luke is the very embodiment of it. To me, Luke Skywalker will always be the character who says, “I can’t kill my own father.” The character whose belief in the Light and in humanity is so true and so strong that he saves the galaxy—so powerful that he saves his father’s soul.

Luke Skywalker is “Never! I’ll never turn to the dark side.” He is, at his heart and in my heart, the man who sees so clearly, who understands so completely, that he casts aside his lightsaber rather than fight to save his own life—not because he’s given up or because he’s weak or a coward, but because of his faith—because Luke Skywalker will die sooner than give into hatred. He will lay down his weapon sooner than turn to darkness.

To me, Luke Skywalker will always be this truth. He will always be the hero that realized the TRUE meaning of the Force, who understood what, for all their wisdom and good intentions, his masters did not: that it is love, not detachment, that saves. It is the strength of love, the belief in love, the power of love that saves us. Luke Skywalker will always be this, for me. He will always be this love, this faith where faith seems impossible, and this enduring hope where it seems that all hope has been lost.

And most importantly of all, to me Luke Skywalker will always be not only the character who loved, who hoped, who had faith, but the character whose story tells us—implores us, promises us—that this love is not in vain. That such faith is not foolish. That GOODNESS like that—because to me, Luke Skywalker is and will always be goodness—is not weakness, but strength that overcomes all else. Luke Skywalker is the Light Side. He is the hero we all need to believe can exist—the hero that reality—that war and violence and maliciousness—so cruelly tries to tell us could never be.

That is Luke Skywalker. He is this beacon. Luke is the hope that prevails. The faith that is rewarded. The journey that tells us that love can and will overcome evil even against the most impossible odds. Luke Skywalker is the story that begs us not to give up, that leads us to take a stand against oppression, and hatred, and hopeless darkness—the character who tells us to believe as we all, as human beings, so desperately want to.

To me, no matter what, Luke Skywalker will always be,

“I am a Jedi, like my father before me.”