Tag: moses

I’ve never seen JJ say Finn is based on Moses. That would be different. I’ve Only seen prince of Egypt aus which seemed inappropriate.

opisrussianonmain:

themandalorianwolf:

lj-writes:

JJ didn’t say so, but the parallels are unmistakeable and blatant (link). I’m not in a place to judge whether a PoE Finn AU is appropriate, but if the ones doing it aren’t Jewish themselves I wish they wouldn’t. It would be so much better to carry forward the common themes in Finn’s and Moses’s stories to tell Finn’s own awesome story.

I personally don’t think SW characters should be written in AU’s about religious figures. That’s just asking for trouble.

But I don’t see anything wrong with people drawing Parallels and metaphors in their stories about Finn being the Moses of Star Wars. Jesus Parallels have been used by movies for decades. Anakin has been called space Jesus for years due to his conception.

If a Stormtrooper rebellion happens, Finn is metaphorically space Moses.

If you ask me then TFA is a Prince of Egypt AU, just done GFFA style.

As for the Stormtrooper rebellion being necessary to finalize that I have to disagree. For one thing it’s an “AU”, it is so to speak “based on Exodus” but it isn’t Exodus. And Finn isn’t Moses, he’s a Moses analogy.

Furthermore it depends on who the story decides to frame as Finn’s people. 

Remember Moses’ story?

Moses’ mother contrives to hide him so that he’ll survive Pharaoh’s edict to kill all male Israelite children and he ends up being found by the Pharaoh’s daughter. Now we don’t know how or when Finn ended up in the First Order, but given that he has no memory of his family and that the FO literally have baby pictures of him it’s a good bet her was tiny indeed, possibly an infant. Like Moses.

Then Moses (Finn) is raised in the house of Pharaoh (First Order) among Egyptians (Stormtroopers) but he’s not one of them and deep down knows he never will be.

And remember why Moses turns against the house of Pharaoh and have to flee in the first place? He watches as an Egyptian (Stormtrooper) strikes down an Israelite, one of his own people. He ends up killing the Egyptian, his crime is discovered and he has to flee into the desert.

You know, kinda like Finn reject the First Order with the massacre of Tuanul when the Stormtroopers slaughters the villagers. He refuses to participate and his “crime” – from an FO pov at least – is discovered and he has to flee and ends up in the desert. Where he meets this girl, like Moses met

Zipporah.

Furthermore when G-d wants Moses to be his chosen and free his people Moses at first refuses and argues with G-d about his choice. Again kinda like Finn tells Maz nope when she says that they all have to fight the First Order. (Which makes JJ’s stand in for G-d in this universe a Black woman, albeit one in alien makeup.)

So who is Finn’s people? The Stormtroopers? Or maybe its the Force worshipers? Or maybe the story will tell us its a bit of both, one does not preclude the other and when the Israelites left Egypt, several Egyptians went them.

And really it fits with many of the other characters too.

Rey is a mix of

Zipporah, Miriam and Aaron. Snoke is the original Pharaoh and Kylo Ren the one who starts as the heir to the throne, but eventually becomes Pharaoh himself and the main antagonist in the story. (This last but is why I always thought the narrative would end up doing away with Snoke one way or another and have Kylo take the reins of power fully.)

No it’s not a one to one translation anymore than Anakin was was a one to one translation of Jesus, but both stories are clearly inspired. Anakin’s story was a Messiah narrative as is so common among fantasy stories – scifi too – told by white Christians. Finn’s story on the other hand, and I still hold out hope all of the ST as envisioned by JJ – is based on Moses’ story.

Do I still want a Stormtrooper rebellion or for the story to do something with the Stormtroopers by and large apart from using them as cannon fodder? Yes, because it reframed them with the little we have of Finn’s background story, but I’ll would venture that a Stormtropper rebellion isn’t necessary for Finn to be the in-universe equivalent on Moses, nor Finn’s story be based on Moses. It already is and much depends on who the story decides to frame as Finn’s people.

This is where I find @lj-writes‘s theory about Finn possibly being from Jakku and at least being the child of a Force worshiping group interesting, it would add yet another layer as to why Finn reacted so strongly to the assault and massacre. Moral decency and the fact that he’s the male, heroic lead of the story is more than enough to warrant his reaction, but it does not therefore follow that there was never meant to be anything more to it than that.

Fandom’s main excuse for hating on Finn is basically “op literally killed the Egyptian for striking the Jewish slave but go off I guess,” with healthy doses of both sides are wrong uwu violence is bad uwu uwu. It’s funny how an enslaved soldier refusing to kill unarmed prisoners, escaping to freedom, and defending himself and others from imminent death raises more ire than the slavery and genocide he was running from and defending others from.

The First Order claims to have trained Finn from birth, according to the Visual Dictionary page that you excerpted, which leads me to wonder if he was taken very shortly after birth (like Moses) or actually born in captivity (also like Moses, who was born in slavery). I firmly believe the deleted scene where Finn lets the woman in Tuanul go (link) was meant to be a callback to Finn’s own kidnapping, at least in the sense of him wondering if this was how he was torn from his family. The woman seems to be holding a baby, from the way she clutches the bundle closer rather than drop it in her fright. It’s probably a deliberate choice to cast her as a Black woman, too.

Also does this mean the lightsaber is the burning bush? XD Finn and especially Rey are afraid of/refuse the lightsaber at first before they embrace its power. Y’know, the divine fire that burns without consuming its source…

Kylo Ren is like the Rameses character from the PoE adaptation, I think, minus the personal rapport with the male protagonist. Though he had no real relationship with Finn, there was something that passed between him and Finn at the village. Kylo also fixated on Finn and took the “betrayal” very personally in a way Snoke and even Hux were never shown to.

The PoE Rameses-Moses connection has a stronger parallel in Kylo Ren and Rey, in no small part because RJ could give a rat’s ass about Finn and his story, but it is a continuation and intensification of Moses’s story being split between Finn and Rey. Even in TFA, Kylo Ren wanted to destroy Finn but wanted Rey to join him. (In TLJ he evidently forgot Finn exists, much like RJ did.) They share an actual connection in TLJ where he further works her over, building rapport while isolating and manipulating her, all to convince her to join his side much as Rameses dreamed of ruling with Moses by his side. Kylo then becomes the successor to the original ruler, the one who had the perfect chance to end the destructive policies of his predecessor and was urged by Rey to do so, but ultimately refused and tried to kill her instead.

When Kylo was gazing up at Rey and she literally shut the door on their connection, it was a bit like that last moment between Rameses and Moses in PoE when Rameses (also on his knees, defeated and vulnerable, realizing that the link to his father has slipped between his fingers) screams Moses’s name in rage and loss while Moses looked across the divide to say a silent farewell. It’s not as wrenching in TLJ because the bond between Kylo and Rey was false on many levels and Rey feels so little for Kylo at this point, but the moment is still there where the bond is broken for good, or acknowledged as broken.

Coming back to Tuanul/the Church of the Force possibly being tied to Finn’s origins, it’s been pointed out that Finn may have awakened in the Force on Tuanul. My variation on that theory is that he is Force immune and Kylo Ren sensed this in the ruins of Tuanul (link), which Moth and @themandalorianwolf speculated as Finn being a wound in the Force like the Exile in KOTOR 2 (link). There’s also the fact that Jakku has all kinds of lore tied into it, as you pointed out re the Wadi Rum shooting location (link).

I mean if Finn is Force immune or otherwise Force sensitive as a result of trauma like the Exile, being in the middle of a massacre like one he may have experienced as a baby would be enough to activate those abilities. For me God tier is Finn being a descendant of Jedhan refugees who were Church of the Force members in the disapora. Mega Ultra God tier is Rose also being from the Jedhan diaspora. I know, I know, there are no confirmed links, but that’s a whole another tinfoil hat rant that is way off topic and will be in a separate post (link).

Moses and Tzipporah in The Prince of Egypt: A Tale of Three Families

Moses and Tzipporah’s relationship as portrayed in the 1998 animated film The Prince of Egypt is
one of my favorites of all time. While romantic, it is not a
relationship focused solely on romance. Rather the story of their love
is told through the stories of their families and spirituality, making for a well-rounded and satisfying narrative.

Moses and
Tzipporah first meet as captives in Egypt. Yes, Moses was a captive in
Egypt, I will fight you on this, he just did not know it yet. Her bonds
were imposed by physical force and visible; his were imposed by
secrecy and deceit, and came in the form of the attachments he was made
to develop to a family that had enslaved and slaughtered his people.

The
characters’ first interactions take place within full view of Moses’s
Egyptian royal family, from Ramses “giving” Tzipporah to his brother to
their mother Batya’s disappointment at the way Moses humiliated the
captive Tzipporah.

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Although there is
love in this family, it has become deeply sickened by the violence and
subjugation that its power is built upon. We see the how the
overwhelming desire to uphold that power drives a wedge between Ramses
and his father, how the rape and humiliation of a captive woman becomes a
game between brothers, and how a mother is made to keep silent at the
mistreatment of a woman she feels sympathy for. Then there is the fact
that Moses’s love for this family is built on a monstrous lie, as
discussed above.

The Egyptian royal family, whose closest
family interactions have become warped and poisoned by slavery, is a
place both Tzipporah and Moses eventually escape at their separate
times. Tzipporah’s escape and Moses’s facilitation of it is their first
positive interaction, a major reason for her and her people’s acceptance
of Moses later on. It is also a direct precursor to and catalyst for Moses’s
own departure. Helping Tzipporah escape is how he found out about his
enslaved Hebrew family, after all.

After their escape from
Egypt Tzipporah rejoins, and Moses later joins, her family and tribe.
This is where they start to heal from the trauma inflicted by their very
different periods of imprisonment, and this is also where they fall in
love. 

The choice of music is significant here; the couple’s
Falling-in-Love Montage takes place entirely within a song, but it’s not
a song about romantic love. There is no award-bait ode to romance in
this movie, your “Tale as Old as Time,” “Part of Your World,” “Whole New
World” and so forth. Rather Moses and Tzipporah’s courtship takes place
within the song “Through Heaven’s Eyes,” a song about family and faith,
and about Moses finding belonging with the Midians.

Certainly Moses and Tzipporah have no shortage of intimate moments, like this…

image

…or thiiiis… (girl you have it bad)

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…yet
their interactions always take place within the larger context of the
tribe, whether taking care of the herd or at one of the tribe’s
celebartions in full view of their loved ones. In this sense “Through
Heaven’s Eyes” could be analogous to “Fixer-Upper” from Frozen
where Kristoff’s troll family (as in actual trolls, not internet
nasties) advise him and Anna about having a relationship despite
personal imperfections, or “Something There” from Beauty and the Beast where the Beast’s servants talk about his and Belle’s growing feelings for each other.

“Through Heaven’s Eyes,” however, still differs from these third-party observations of romance in that it’s not a song about
romance–it’s about spirituality and community, and Moses and
Tzipporah’s relationship is an organic part of Moses’s integration into
the tribe. It showed him letting go of his old life as an Egyptian
prince and coming to love the deep sense of family and faith the Midians
embodied, to the extent that when he later convinced Tzipporah of his
mission from God he looked to her family as an example of the life he
wanted his people to have.

Though the story mostly focuses on
Moses healing and finding belonging, in an understated way I can see
Tzipporah healing, too. Not only does she get a neat payback in the form
of dropping him on his ass into water…

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…she
also gets to process and reclaim her traumatic experiences in Egypt
through her growing friendship and later romance with Moses. She sees
his deep sense of shame and remorse at ever having been part of the
Egyptian ruling family, and she gets to know the man who helped her and
came to her with open hands holding nothing, having discarded every
trapping of power and wealth; not the man who mocked her from a place of
power, not the man who was expected to sexually enslave her, but the
good man he chose to be, the man she falls in love with.

The
intertwining of love, faith, and personal healing in their relationship
is brought home, literally, in a later scene when Moses runs straight to
Tzipporah after he had the visitation from God. Though we don’t hear
any lines here, we don’t need words–the way he talked so animatedly was
enough. We could tell how the vision had filled him with new purpose
and changed his life, and we sensed the closeness between him and
Tzipporah in the way he could talk to her about this momentous occasion,
holding back nothing because he knew he would be heard and believed. In turn, when Tzipporah expresed her own fears after hearing him out, he listened respectfully and made his case.

image

This
scene reminded me of Mohammed, the prophet of Islam, and how the first
person he went to after being being visited by the angel Gabriel was his
wife Khadijah. Mohammed, of course, unlike Moses as envisioned in the
show, was afraid and wanted Khadijah to cover him and comfort him.
Whether the initial reaction was elation or fear, though, you can tell
that for both these men their wives were their closest confidantes and
best friends. They shared in all things including matters of faith and
life-changing decisions.

Again, though the focus was on Moses, I
loved how Tzipporah’s decision to come with him was an enormous act of
courage in the events of the show. She was in captivity in Egypt
herself, where she would have been raped and kept in servitude, unable
to see her family ever again, if she had not managed to escape and had
Moses not helped her. To go back into the heart of that trauma could not
have been easy for her. She still did, and that alone speaks to the strength of their bond.

So far Moses and Tzipporah had been captives in
Egypt and had learned to be free again with Tzipporah’s Midianite family. Now, in their
return to Egypt, healed and transformed by family and faith, they were
ready to not only be free themselves but to bring freedom to others.
Thus their story becomes a story of the journey from captivity to
personal freedom, then from there to liberating others. It is the story
of true freedom realized, because Moses could not be truly free while
his family was in bondage–and because Moses was a part of Tzipporah and
her family, she could not be truly free either. That made the
Israelites’ freedom worth facing down their fears and trauma for.

The
song at the finale, “When You Believe,” not only ties off the story and
theme as a whole but also brings Moses and Tzipporah’s story full
circle. Where “Through Heaven’s Eyes” was about Moses integrating into
Tzipporah’s family, “When You Believe” is about Tzipporah becoming a
member of Moses’s family by joining and supporting them in their quest
for freedom, enduring the dangers and uncertainty alongside them. The way
Tzipporah and Miriam lead the singing harkens back to Jocheved’s lullaby
at the beginning of the movie, her fear and grief at having to send
baby Moses away and her prayer that they will reunite in freedom.
Jocheved’s sacrifice and courage are brought to culmination by her
daughter Miriam and daughter-in-law Tzipporah, showing that Tzipporah
along with Miriam is a successor to Jocheved’s legacy. The way female
characters lead these songs of yearning and joy for freedom also squarely
centers women in the struggle for liberation.

In this way we see Tzipporah and
Moses’s journey through their three families–as captives of Moses’s
Egyptian family, recovering from trauma through love and faith in the safety of
Tzipporah’s Midianite tribe, and finally fighting for the freedom of
Moses’s Hebrew family and people. They had to know both the pain of
captivity and the process of healing from that trauma in order to stand
for others’ freedom, and that liberation in turn was key to their recovery. Moses and Tzipporah’s story as individuals and as a
couple is also a story of family, faith, and freedom, and that’s what makes theirs
such a powerful love story.

If JJ came to you and told you that you could pick one major plot/character development to be in ep9, what would you choose?

yinx1:

lj-writes:

STORMTROOPER UPRISING GOD AND JJ PLEASE LET ME LIVE

With Finn leading them.

Imagine Finn appearing on screens throughout the First Order, telling the Stormtroopers who he is, telling his story, telling them that they, too, can be free.

Imagine his image appearing everywhere, his face painted on bulkheads, his designation number scratched on a piece of equipment only to be scratched out and replaced with “Finn.”

Imagine Free Troopers with red streaks on their helmets in honor of
Finn and to distinguish themselves from the Stormtroopers loyal to the
First Order.

Imagine firefights in the corridors of Star Destroyers, Walkers turning on each other, officers shot in the back by their own troops.

Imagine Finn himself appearing among the ranks, taking off the helmet to reveal himself, and Hux ordering the Troopers to shoot him–but they raise their guns instead, parting to make way, and he walks through the parting sea of white.

Imagine the Star Destroyers empty and abandoned, scrawled with graffiti of red-streaked helmets and the words “Resist” and “Refuse.”

Imagine them going home.

Yet more parallels between Biblical Moses and The Force Awakens: Our hero, while fleeing the genocidal enslaving regime he grew up in, runs to the desert and meets the heroine, an extraordinary desert-dwelling woman with whom he forms a deep and lasting bond. Her father figure becomes the hero’s mentor and advisor, unafraid to give the younger man tough advice when he needs it.

Confession: If we’re gonna talk Jewish coding, I think Finn is WAY more Jewish than Kylo Ren.

eshusplayground:

Just because Adam Driver can be mistaken for Jewish because he’s assumed to have “the look” does not, in and of itself, take precedence over literally everything else about the other characters, especially Finn.

Finn has so many amazing parallels to Jewish heroes, particularly Moses, that it’s uncanny.

  1. Played by a Black man whose breakout role is a character named Moses
  2. Taken from his family and raised in the First Order under mysterious circumstances
  3. Had the potential to be a prince of Egypt real mover and shaker in an oppressive regime*
  4. Saves the life of an enemy of the First Order, killing some Egyptians First Order personnel in their escape
  5. Chose to turn his back on the First Order and pharoah Supreme Leader Snoke
  6. Hides in Midian Maz’s place because the First Order has him on their shitlist
  7. Goes back toward danger despite being wanted by the First Order for treason because his people/friends are in danger

*If we go by tie-in materials that state he could have been a general in the First Order one day

8. Also meets the love of his life Tzipporah Poe/Rey while on the run?

9. Said partner has a parental figure, Luke/Leia/Han, a wise elder who advises and helps Our Hero in his own journey.