fair enough, yeah. But also, I mean. TFA was my first Star Wars movie! And I'd been hearing from the fandom for a solid year and a half about morality and redemption and shit before I even watched that one, so I came at the OT with weird fucking expectations about who Vader would be and how his redemption would go, and I. I don't get it! Like, the movies weren't achingly complex, yeah, and the redemption wasn't really a redemption, and they never even bother to set up his conflict or give us any hint that maybe he might wanna be a better dude, and yet here's the TFA fandom throwing hissy fits about villains and who can and cannot be redeemed, and you can't have it both ways!!! You can't just have it be That Fucking Easy for Anakin, but Kylo is irredeemable garbage and people who like villains are trash! I'm being incoherent. I don't even know what my point is here, whoops. Star Wars is a toybox full of neat little bits and bobs you can do a lot of fun things with, and seeing people not do the fun things is. Odd.
I really don't see it being that hard to have like Anakin have his easy and simple redemption, but wanting something more involved and complicated for Kylo Ren's. Star Wars is a franchise defined by how absolutely inconsistent it is in terms of tone and how it takes its own mythology. I don't think I'd like it as much as I do if Star Wars wasn't actually like hundreds of different takes on the exact same setting, many of which are often written by people who hate Star Wars or parts of Star Wars. But then I'm also not a Kylo Ren hating rabid TFA fan. TFA fans are particularly fucking awful where it concerns Kylo Ren though. TFA fandom is pretty trash in general, honestly. Most of Star Wars fandom is trash. Liking Star Wars was a mistake. I made a mistake.
I want Kylo's deal to be more complex than Anakin's, but also I treat Anakin's deal in my head like it was more complex than it was because idk i don't like simplistic fairy tale morality. Is what your saying that people can like a simplistic thingy and be content with it being simple and then want a more fuck me i am not doing words good. Do people want both things out of the franchise at the same time? Simplistic space fairy tale and also grey morality realistic actions-have-consequences blah blah kinda junk? I can jive with that. I guess.
You can want more complicated takes on Anakin's morality. You can be a diehard for just what we saw in the original trilogy. You could stand behind the prequels as THE take on Anakin and hate the Clone Wars. You could adore the Clone Wars. You could be writing a 50, 000 word long fanfic about Anakin's force ghost adventures for redemption. Star Wars is so hideously flexible that you can like any one of these or all of them and it still works because Star Wars is about as consistent as my mood. Which is to say it isn't. At all. And yes there are people who want both simplistic fairy tales and more complex grey morality out of the series. There are those who only want one of those things. There are those who far prefer one sort of take on the series, but are fine with other takes. Part of the genius of Star Wars is that there are so many kinds of Star Wars that basically everyone can find something in it that they love. The unfortunate thing about that is that it leads to extremely contentious relations between types of fans. Hardcore Mando'ade HATE the Clone Wars many times, for example. While Clone Wars fans or pre-Traviss Boba and Mandalorian fans HATE Traviss style Mandos quite often. And most famously there is the war between original trilogy and prequels fans. Complete with things like OT fans very loudly booing and insulting prequel cosplayers during cosplay contests at conventions.
The way I see it, the OT is high fantasy In Space, and in that genre a single redemptive act can symbolically stand in for an entire redemption arc. Also, I think a lot of fans of the prequels come into it already feeling extremely sympathetic towards Anakin and ready to take that hint of redemption and run with it. @tinyhydra Have you read the Double Agent Vader series by fialleril? I have a feeling you would like it. @Aondeug you might like it as well.
anakin is my precious boy who i love dearly and will hear nothing about so yes i am interested GIVE ME ANGER PAIN BOY AND HIS DRAMATIC HAIR
DAV is not so much with the dramatic hair since it's set post-Vaderization, but I believe it will satisfy on the other counts. Also features Tattooine slave religion, Leia being awesome, and near-lethal amounts of dramatic irony.
Oh no I figured not since yeah. But he is my dramatic boy and I love him. And Tatooine slave religion and Leia being awesome definitely sound right up my alley.
If you like the way the religion is portrayed in the fic, you should also check out the author's tumblr! She's done so much worldbuilding and all of it is so good. She's also writing a longfic called Anabasis about an AU where Anakin was raised Sith from a young age, to be released when it's complete, which I'm really looking forward to.
Anabasis actually already exists, the author is just re-writing it. You can find it on fanfiction.net here https://m.fanfiction.net/s/3125559/1/Anabasis
I'm holding out for the rewritten version, since that one is several years old and the author has said she's making some substantial changes.
it's six months till we actually get to see her and I'm already sick of Rose discourse. Specifically Finnrose discourse. Specifically Finn isn't getting treated like a proper hero because he isn't getting white pussy and has to settle for a minority love interest discourse. Star Wars was a mistake.
tfw a steven universe fanvid looks like it was made with clips from the stevenuniversevhsrips tumblr and like the music is several degrees of separation from its original source
There is one particular young justice post that I hate because it's both completely OOC and requires willful misunderstanding of major plot points and a lack of any kind of critical thinking but I can't reblog it to complain because it's a jokey post and therefore i would just get the 'no fun allowed' robot type reactions. It also does the 'young justice cartoon is interchangeable with the young justice comic right' thing I also hate because the universes are very different and you can't actually fuse them viably and every attempt to do so is pretty much 'The comics but sometimes they use jokes from the cartoon' so it's a nightmare trying to find fic actually about the continuity I care about.
So have I ever mentioned that time I saw someone whining about how the protag of RH doesn't make enough mistakes when they used a walkthrough to never make any wrong decisions? Gee, I wonder if maybe you might have missed a few things when you avoided all 24 times you can personally cause the end of the world.
a lot of fan characterizations of frisk from undertale read as though that frisk basically used a walkthrough to avoid making mistakes and as though chara is the only reason they ever fucked up. like, that frisk is pure sunshine sparkles and love, got shit right on the first try and then never reset again. people rarely seem to consider, when making their characterizations of frisk, that frisk has the potential for the neutral and genocide routes inside them and that frisk might go through them a lot before reaching the pacifist ending and might reset after the pacifist ending.
Spoiler: Undertale spoiler talk Or rather, they have the potential for pacifist and any degree of neutral route, all the way up to the line where you cross over to genocide route: they check out and Chara takes up the wheel if you go that far, but Frisk themself can be anywhere on the spectrum from "pure pacifist" to "kills every monster they encounter"—including everything in between those extremes, such as fighting in self-defense, or killing by accident, or for that matter non-lethal forms of unkindness such as insulting monsters or leaving Undyne where she collapses in Hotland. Their character is open enough to individual interpretation that you could headcanon them as having chosen one option or another, or many different ones over multiple resets, and have a variety of different interpretations for why they would do each of those things or how reluctant they might be to, but it's canon that Frisk has it in them to do anything short of deliberately seeking out and killing every single monster in the Underground. But noooo, let's just write perfect boring pure cinnamon roll who does nothing in their life except waltz in, angelically fix the lives of all the strangers trying to kill them singlehandedly, and be perfect and pure and sweet throughout.
Most of these aren't even characterization-altering moral choices like Undertale's choices are, these are a mixture of a) honest-to-god mistakes and b) completely reasonable decisions that just turn out to have ridiculously disastrous consequences. In RH you can cause the end of the world by sending reinforcements during a battle, or by trying to track down a guy you were supposed to meet who's like three hours late instead of continuing to wait for him, or by giving bad romantic advice, or by picking the wrong person to watch the fire. That's the part that made this whole thing really stupid to me- the bad ends are barely a slap on the wrist gameplay-wise (hell, sometimes I deliberately get a couple of them so I can leave to heal, because you can jump straight back to the decision point for most of them), and their main narrative function is to explore the characters and events more deeply. Playing Undertale through enough times to see the maximum amount of content on one savefile is a pretty intensive time investment; seeing every bad end in RH from endgame takes like ten minutes, and you can't get 100% completion without seeing them.
Speaking of bad ends exploring the characters, the same person mentioned above was also under the impression that one of the least trustworthy characters in the game was the most trustworthy character, at least in part because by avoiding all the bad ends they missed the bit where she imprisons the main character in another dimension. No word on how they missed the fact that she spends the whole game trying as hard as possible to conceal important information from him and trying to get him to quit with the whole "world-saving" thing and run away.
