Sorry locked behind login, but this skeet
(I’ll describe it, “Anakin has turned blue” with a picture smiling prequel Anakin as a force ghost from the Return of the Jedi special edition).
skeeter is open, use skyview.social to bypass that silliness
Thanks! I will try to remember that. In fact, I simply bookmarked the url.
This stuff should be taken as proof that Twitter is not mainstream anymore, and any media professionals still on there “for work” are just microwaving their own brains. This is genuinely stupider (and the Malfoid shit much creepier) than anything that was ever posted to Something Awful. Obsessively posting on Internet forums needs to go back to being the niche hobby of weirdos, and then all these people need to eat a permaban + 100,000 hour probation just to be sure.
It does lend me some impetus to finally write my idea where Anakin doesn’t join Palpatine, the Jedi keep him around contingent on restorative justice to the Tuskens, and he is otherwise a glorified space tow-truck driver for ships that break down who now abhors violence.
I wondered twenty-some years ago why they didn’t just go back to Tatooine with Coruscant pocket change and buy Shmi’s freedom and set her up with a pleasant little retirement cottage or a condo in a senior-friendly complex in that Dinotopia-ripoff capitol city on Naboo. Yeah, yeah, Jedi code against attachments or whatever—but it’s not an “attachment” if she’s just not a slave anymore and living somewhere else that is not misery desert.
Anakin’s massacre of the Tusken raiders is also the wrong kind of step into evil, from a character perspective. We’re supposed to see Anakin becoming Darth Vader, and Vader is in the main a cold-blooded villain: implacable, determined, even a bit grusomely sardonic. (“Apology accepted, Captain Needa.”) An explosion of blind rage doesn’t fit. Anakin should have been a cop using excessive force, like maybe killing the alien who attempted to assassinate Amidala while trying to Jack Bauer information out of them.
Anakin’s massacre of the Tusken raiders is also the wrong kind of step into evil, from a character perspective. We’re supposed to see Anakin becoming Darth Vader, and Vader is in the main a cold-blooded villain
I’ve said for 20 years that Anakin’s fall, in the movies, comes off mostly as an ass-pull. The scene where he kneels to Palpatine and Palpatine literally seems to dream up his iconic villain name on the spot has always felt like exactly that. “Oh well, Windu fell out a window, guess I’ll be evil now!”
That’s probably why these fash weirdos are pumping the ROTS novelization rather than the movie itself, as I understand it sheds light on Anakin’s internal narrative in much more detail. I’ve always had the sense that Lucas was trying to say something about the (sadly still relevant) trend of American school shootings with both the Tusken massacre and the infamous youngling slaughter, but we don’t get enough time with Anakin in the movies to gain much idea as to why he would reach directly for mass violence. If you’re just going by the movies, the idea that he’s still carrying unresolved trauma from being enslaved carries nearly all that weight. And if that’s all you’ve got to go on, it reflects pretty badly on the Jedi not helping him with that for the 10-15 years he’s with them. The movies do seem to admit that the Jedi Order is a failing institution, but this conflicts with the shiny happy optimism of Luke growing into a Jedi in the original trilogy. Rian Johnson tried to square this circle later, but obviously he didn’t convince everybody.
If anything, Anakin’s interactions with Dooku are the most convincing bit. Hotheaded apprentice gets in over his head -> later matures just enough that he has to be pushed into taking murderous revenge. That points toward the violent-cop narrative you suggest, but we don’t spend nearly enough time with that storyline for it to breathe. My favorite fan works posit Vader as essentially being Palpatine’s slave, and thus psychologically beaten down to the point of near collapse. fialleril on AO3 is one of the most inspirational in writing this sort of stuff.
That’s probably why these fash weirdos are pumping the ROTS novelization
I bet they just heard that it’s an actual good book (sort of true, terms and conditions apply) and namedrop it so people might associate them with quality.
the idea that he’s still carrying unresolved trauma from being enslaved carries nearly all that weight
And like his time as a slave didn’t even seem all that bad, he looked like a clean and well fed kid who had time to pursue engineering as a hobby and would nerd out about local sport events.
The shape of the story feels like Anakin was aged down late in development and he was meant to cut a more harrowing figure as both a run down victim of generational slavery as well as a target of racism/speciesism all too eager to prove himself (wasn’t there a thing where the other kids were being demeaning to him about humans being too slow in the head to be good pod racers), and also old enough to catch similarly aged Amidala’s eye, instead of inadvertently turning her into a creep who ogles grade schoolers. And the jedi wouldn’t need to pretend that you must be like months old to start training otherwise it might not take, which implicitly turns them into baby snatchers.
The shape of the story feels like Anakin was aged down late in development and he was meant to cut a more harrowing figure as both a run down victim of generational slavery as well as a target of racism/speciesism all too eager to prove himself
I’ve never thought of it this way, but that does in fact make the most sense. Lucas swerved at the last minute to make Episode 1 a kiddy movie? I can’t imagine he would have needed to do that to secure funding for the then long-awaited continuation of Star Wars, but stranger things have happened.
wasn’t there a thing where the other kids were being demeaning to him about humans being too slow in the head to be good pod racers
Yes, this is a pretty critical plot point, Anakin can only participate as a human because he can use the Force.
Could be he decided it would be more lucrative to to aim for a harry potter situation, where the movies would get more serious as the intended audience grew up, while taking the older fans for granted.
The victim of racism angle also fits with him being completely ok with the empire being very much human supremacist.
I remember seeing Star Wars for the first time in '78 or something (we lived in Malaysia at the time and I believe it took some time to get there). I was dead center in the marketing targetting. And for a while I was dying to know about the Clone Wars and what Luke’s father was doing there.
God, Ep 1 was such a let-down.
I believe there are 2 kinds of nerds - those that accept that there will just be mentions of the lore and it’s basically flavor, and those that just need to know and explore the lore down to the last minutae. Let me tell you, the image I had of the Clone Wars as an 8 year old was way fucking cooler than what appeared in Ep 2. And Vader?? Please let me keep my personal backstory.
I bet they just heard that it’s an actual good book (sort of true, terms and conditions apply) and namedrop it so people might associate them with quality.
Yeah, they don’t strike me as the reading type.
It is amazing as if there is one person you should empathize with, if you are going to be weird about the movies it isn’t Anakin. It is Padme, Anakin is a failson who got shit gifted to him because of a blood test who then blew everything up because he didn’t get a promotion.
Padme had devoted her life to public duty, was elected queen, got a nice boytoy, but then everything was taken from her by one of her closest supposed allies who turned out to be a sith sociopath. And then Anakin tried to fucking kill her. I know women are not people to these people but come on.
The Bane stuff is also so weird, did they miss that when Bane has his whole anarchist speech he is lying? ‘We are giving the power to you the people’, and then the trigger man is his boss, and the judge is scarecrow. And they were always going to nuke the city. Eat less lead paint!
If Bane is anything he’s Robespierre.
if they paid attention to what they read or think, they wouldn’t be what they are.
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The non-star wars part of this reminded me of “Vivian James”, the fictional child invented by pro-gamergaters who was immediately sexualised. Except that back then, I was in proximity of far more fascist spaces than I am now, so I’ve directly seen fascists use vivian as a tool for propaganda moreso than this new character. I guess that’s a personal victory for me?
yes! it’s extremely vivian james. there is a difference in that james was created defensively: the chans came up with a girl puppet both to have a girl avatar with which to claim they were not sexist, and because they thought such an act would be understood as vaguely feminist. there’s no such pretense with malfoid. the character is explicitly racist and promulgated by self proclaimed racists
Now that I’m thinking about it more, there’s also some stuff that could be said about how the main ship you see is with harry. Fascist x cop pairing aside, back in my day you didn’t need this heteronormative bullshit, you’d just write your yaoi mpreg fic and be on your way.
If you’ve seen the above expressed in some sense before, that’s because I have successfully stayed out of this shit
Peak US election season and the best propaganda the chuds can muster is “what if cartoon villain is good actually and also my TS loli tradwife”? I’m actually glad to see it, this is pathetic.
This is the dumbest right-wing thing since the last dumb right-wing thing.
Hey, it’s Beff Jezos. I remember when I only knew him for shit physics takes.
On November 3rd, Beff Jezos writes:
Having an existential crash out at the gym listening to Anakin montage playlists and prepping 150lbs rows til I puke
https://bsky.app/profile/dieworkwear.bsky.social/post/3mzhpssfo6c26
isnt fascism about being a big tough guy or whatever lol
So admittedly I’ve kept out of the wider star wars discourse ever since everyone was wrong about The Last Jedi. (Instead I got on the Knives Out hype train early which was an objectively better choice.) But this feels like a particularly poor fit for the pattern because Anakin was redeemable and sympathetic all the way back to Return of the Jedi. Anakin’s story was already about a young man who was denied a healthy coping envuronment for his trauma, was promised unreasonable powers and privileges, then when denied them embraced hatred and fascism and destroyed almost everything he used to care about, but still was ultimately able to pull back from that edge and, at the last crucial moment, do the right thing because of the love of his family. Obviously it’s not a complete nonstarter because of how powerful and aesthetically dominant Vader is as a character, but ironically I think the story already invites you to see Anakin as a protofascist and to feel regret and pity for the path he takes. It’s easier to look at something like Harry Potter and invent “this bad guy was a powerful Nazi and that’s awesome!” almost out of whole cloth than to try and get there from “this bad guy is a sad, whiny, but poweful Nazi and that’s pathetic and horrible.”
And I don’t think that they don’t know this because when the prequels came out this was exactly why the same chuds hated them. Anakin was whiny and wimpy and the fallout kinda killed Hayden Christiansen’s career and broke Jake Lloyd full stop. I know this is part of the usual “fascists don’t take words seriously” thing but I think (I hope?) that in this case it weakens their propaganda because while they may be able to forget what they said five minutes after saying it the broader cultural consensus remembers.
If anything the clearest inversion would be to lionize the emperor as the embodiment of state power, but in fascist ideology the creepy old man who secretly seizes power to undermine the golden age out of allegiance to a poorly-understood insular ancient religion already maps pretty strongly to another stock character. I guess that’s probably why they used to try and cast themselves as the rebel alliance, even while venerating the love of power that the empire and Vader represented.
nb. andor is a very good series, and it’s probably a good thing the fash don’t have the attention span long enough to hate-watch it.
“Syril was longhoused”, they’d be split on Dedra Meero but for all the wrong reasons (gender, “too old”, etc), etc etc
they’d be crying about an abject glorification of violence as a tool of the revolution, too.
I just don’t understand at all. Like I seriously don’t relate to any of this and don’t see the appeal whatsoever. What is this dumb shit?
