Allronix's Fandom Corner

Star trek AND star wars.

But also farscape, Andromeda, and Babylon 5.

Oh heck, if you liked Rogue One/Andor and aren't put off by the community theater grade production values, you'll probably dig Blake's 7.

Even if you want make the disgusting choice that the Jedi couldn't make a personal example to help Anakin in freeing his mother, Shmi helped and sheltered a Jedi knight to much personal cost to herself.

The Jedi Order owed the woman.

And there is every other excuse under the sun, it would a war with the Hutts (killing Jabba didn't seem to do that in RotJ), is morally wrong to free one slave and not all (morally cowardice you mean), and the dumbest one, the Jedi didn't know she existed!

Hutts are a lot of things. However, they shockingly pragmatic in matters of business. If they don't take Republic credits, they likely have a currency exchange on Nar Shaadaa to encourage Republic citizens to blow their cash in the casinos and other vice. So, a trip to the currency exchange would be the simplest means to not get a Hutt involved.

If you do need to involve the Hutt owning Watto's ass? Well, Hutts are again, pragmatic. They know good help is not easy to find and is not cheap. Compensating good service is part of the cost of doing business. A petition to the Hutt saying "We have encountered a dilemma, Your Eminence. This slave aided one of our own in a time of need but her lazy, stupid owner did everything in his power to delay us and refuse to do business. We would like to compensate the slave but not her owner. Surely your wisdom could help us reach a satisfactory conclusion."

(This is a Hutt. Weld those lips to the copious ass for best result)

Oh and the next excuse "We can't involve ourselves in the buying of a slave!" Well, the Jedi sure didn't seem to have much in the way of protest when assigned to be the overseer-commanders of a slave army. So between Shmi and the Clones, they seem pretty okay with slavery. Heck, if they were worried about the optics, then I'm sure someone with slightly dirtier hands owes the Order a favor and can be trusted to act as a proxy.

Or there are local slave freedom networks to work with. "Look, we can't free them all, but we have a golden invitation to free one and we can add some aid under the table to your network so you can free even more." (love the @fialleril mythos that the Lars family was in on this network because it explains a whole lot)

Bounty hunters.

Even if you want make the disgusting choice that the Jedi couldn't make a personal example to help Anakin in freeing his mother, Shmi helped and sheltered a Jedi knight to much personal cost to herself.

The Jedi Order owed the woman.

And there is every other excuse under the sun, it would a war with the Hutts (killing Jabba didn't seem to do that in RotJ), is morally wrong to free one slave and not all (morally cowardice you mean), and the dumbest one, the Jedi didn't know she existed!

Hutts are a lot of things. However, they shockingly pragmatic in matters of business. If they don't take Republic credits, they likely have a currency exchange on Nar Shaadaa to encourage Republic citizens to blow their cash in the casinos and other vice. So, a trip to the currency exchange would be the simplest means to not get a Hutt involved.

If you do need to involve the Hutt owning Watto's ass? Well, Hutts are again, pragmatic. They know good help is not easy to find and is not cheap. Compensating good service is part of the cost of doing business. A petition to the Hutt saying "We have encountered a dilemma, Your Eminence. This slave aided one of our own in a time of need but her lazy, stupid owner did everything in his power to delay us and refuse to do business. We would like to compensate the slave but not her owner. Surely your wisdom could help us reach a satisfactory conclusion."

(This is a Hutt. Weld those lips to the copious ass for best result)

Oh and the next excuse "We can't involve ourselves in the buying of a slave!" Well, the Jedi sure didn't seem to have much in the way of protest when assigned to be the overseer-commanders of a slave army. So between Shmi and the Clones, they seem pretty okay with slavery. Heck, if they were worried about the optics, then I'm sure someone with slightly dirtier hands owes the Order a favor and can be trusted to act as a proxy.

Or there are local slave freedom networks to work with. "Look, we can't free them all, but we have a golden invitation to free one and we can add some aid under the table to your network so you can free even more." (love the @fialleril mythos that the Lars family was in on this network because it explains a whole lot)

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Everyone ignored his fears and told him to never think about his mother, he had visions, he finally went to find her, she died in his arms, he killed the people who killed her and then went on a rampage to slaughter the whole village which was wrong, and then freaked out about it in front of Padmé, didn’t try to conceal his anger or the actions he took (refreshing to her after the senate I’m sure), and then broke down crying about how he shouldn’t have and he’s better than this.

what i'm trying to say is that what anakin did was of course bad, but it wasn't unusual for gffa; padme sees that at least anakin's actions were a cruel reaction to another cruelty (let me remind you that the tuskens not only tortured shmi to death, they killed 20+ people who came out to look for her and crippled her husband), and most importantly, anakin regrets his actions and even the very fact that he feels anger towards his mother's killers, anakin is honest about what happened and doesn't try to justify himself — this and the fact that anakin had never done anything bad before, but on the contrary, has a good reputation in padme's eyes (he helped save her planet, risking himself; expresses a desire to make the world a better place) are the ultimate reasons why she decided to sympathize with him. this does not mean that she condoned, justified, or even encouraged his bad actions, but she knew that he could be better and that his dark moments didn't define him, which is compassion and unconditional love

i've also seen a lot of people suggest that it would have been more logical for padme to 'hand anakin over to the authorities and cut him off', but like, let's be serious, what 'authorities' are we talking about? on tatooine, it's the hutts, and i'm sure you're smart enough to know they wouldn't care if some jedi massacred a tusken raiders village. and what else could she do? sue him in the republic? because they certainly wouldn't care about this, just as they don't care about the thousands of human trafficking victims in the same region. well, of course, she could have turned him over to the jedi council, and then anakin would have probably been expelled from the order with no one to turn to except his evil sith abuser, which i think would have been the just ending to this situation and would definitely not have had any dire consequences /sarc

All people can see is “ooh the imperial march played because he is being Evil and therefore why would Padmé want to be with someone Evil?” and it just disappears their literacy for what’s actually happening in the movie.

Padmé is a politician, she hears people minimize their cruelty every day. Anakin EMPHASIZES his in this scene. He WANTS her to know how horrible it was. He wasn’t seeking comfort, he was beating himself up about it, in fact it was almost like he was actively pushing her away, trying to see how she’d react to this horrible thing, and she doesn’t go for it, instead she gives him the comfort he wasn’t seeking, because she respects his character and his honesty.

honestly, i think hayden christensen played that scene really well, but a lot of people don't pay attention to how anakin talked about what he did, only to what he did. i know g-lucas specifically asked the actors to give slightly exaggerated performances because he wanted to make sw 'basically silent movies', which is why the dialogue can seem a little wooden or unrealistic, as the films can be experienced entirely without it. like, if you watch this scene in a language you don't understand, you can see how anakin's emotions, his facial expressions, and his body language change — even without dialogue, you can still get the basic idea, which is 'anakin did something really bad and it scared him and he confesses it to padme, who calms him down'. i mean, he starts with grief and guilt, and then, trying to rationalize what happened, he moves to anger ('it's all obi-wan's fault'), but when he gives in to anger, it scares him: he looks at his hands in shock, you see how he is shaking, how he looks around, trying to fully comprehend what he did (in the script, g-lucas writes "anakin focuses on her like someone returning from far away", which suggests that he is still dissociating), and only then does he begin to talk about what he did, and he starts sobbing right after that — this scene conveys so much guilt, regret, self-fear and self-hate :/

The GFFA has maybe half a functional government. The Republic, for all its copious fuck ups, at least has to give lip service to citizens' rights and rule of law. That makes it far nicer than the alternatives (Sith, Hutts, Vong) that don't have to pretend to give a damn about any of that. It's still de facto feudal with an hereditary aristocracy in many places. For the average nobody, the local crime boss is more a presence than their Senator. Hell, add the chaos worshiping Sith, abominations like Vitiate and Ableoth, and freaky shit like the Vong into it and you pretty much have Warhammer 40K with nicer paint and pretty laser weapons. It can be fun if you're playing a power fantasy video game, but no one sane would want to live there.

The closest anyone comes to a "good" faction is a well intentioned but ruthless bunch of enforcers who dress like monks, recruit their members from the cradle, force separations from families, and raise them in the cold brutality of institutional care to have this vague love of the concept of people while the ideal is seeing NO individual life as important - even their own. Death is something to be celebrated and embraced. Being a healer of broken bodies and blighted land is a position of failure. Killing enemies of the State to enforce the top down vision of goodness and order (everyone in their place and keeping quiet) is considered the height of goodness. Love of an individual person is treated as the highest threat - which is why they mandate the brutal forced separation of families and allow physical release but not emotional connection. No love but love of Order (in all senses of that word). Rational response for a universe constantly under Chaos, but not exactly warm fuzzies.

Tatooine is a Rakata-blighted, Hutt-run, lawless litter box even by the marginal standards of the Star Wars universe. An incidental conversation in SWTOR sums it up nicely. A citizen in Anchorhead reports being robbed and wants to speak to the magistrate. the local militia guard just laughs. "We're a long way from Coruscant, pal. Got a problem with the locals? Pick up a blaster and do it yourself."

We also know this particular set of "locals" are violently xenophobic and absolutely unwilling to negotiate with anyone, even a Hutt's slave woman bought for her domestic labor and "freed" so her new owner could legally marry his slave. (Thank goodness the EU writers made this a lot less disturbing than what it looks like, given slave wives and bride buying are things in real life) They proceeded to slowly torture and brutalize her to death for weeks just for the lulz and if the women and children weren't in on it, they were totally fine with their menfolk and warriors DOING that.

This is not a universe that values light and life, no matter how much lip service Yoda and company give to the idea. There was no justice for Shmi.

The actual Son Of God comes to Not-Israel to help them after being oppressed by the bigoted fascists, and then has to work to keep the traumatized genocide survivors from constant civil war. The major foes are Fascists who've held control over the planet and consider it more theirs than the natives, and later Collectivist fascists who see people as interchangeable and spend all their time infiltrating groups to suborn them.

The Greedy Capitalists are trusted allies and comic relief, often critical help. The Plucky Underdogs have a chip on their shoulder. The local Fascist(2) Cop is a popular support, the Plucky Doctor is an arrogant Poonhound, the local representative of Fascists(1) is a conniving spy. The Son of God gets his hands dirty to win the war.

And when everything is said and done the Son of God beats up the Antichrist and ascends to Heaven, and all is right with the world!

There were some pretty far out leftie aspects, and attracted a lot of lefties because it was a future we wanted to live in (I knew about Judith Butler from her K/S fanfic before I knew she was this big figure in Gender Studies), but overall it had little to do with the current (TikTok era) flavor of leftie. Worf, for example, is not pulled aside every three minutes and scolded for toxic masculinity (though that would have been kinda funny).

It interestingly starts turning up in literature in the period covering five major cholera outbreaks in the UK and US (this was obviously an English language Ngram search).

And peaks several times at epidemic peak points (1830s, 1850, 1880s), including its first peak in 1831/2, which corresponds with the first cholera epidemic in the UK. 

It also corresponds with the year William Brooke O’Shaughnessy discovered that a lot of people who were dying of cholera were severely lacking water and salts in their blood and urine. Dehydration was found to be a major cause of death in cholera patients. “Toast water” was suggested in the Lancet medical journal in 1832 as an initial treatment for cholera patients. 

Most of the recipes in household medicine guides I found suggest sweetening or flavouring the toast water with something if the patient could keep it down in order to cover the terrible taste.

Like. If you use the restrooms, and you touch the toilet seat... what are you going to see exactly?

What about food untensils? Hell, what about food?

If you lay in the bed of an AirBnB, are you going to know somehting you wish you hadn't?

But there was a character from one of my oldest fandoms (Galaxy Rangers 1986, which could be a bit SW adjacent, given several EU writers were involved) with this power, and oh, boy...

It also made sense when I heard the details about his home planet in KOTOR 2; the whole planet was the dump site for the redundant/unwanted children the Jedi took in as recruits but for one reason or another were not advanced to Padawan. These confused adolescents were essentially given a pink slip and a one way ticket to Telos to "seed the planet with farmers and laborers."

It looks like a good deal; low-risk, low status useful labor to support the Jedi and able to live more or less a normal life (able to have friendship and family) because colonies need a labor pool. It just gets a little messy on the details...like Force Sensitivity running in families and how much it has to suck to be one of these bewildered kids trained for a singular purpose all your life and then dumped out on the ass end of the Rim because you're no longer wanted.

You can see Anakin’s shock and horror at such a passage about the limits of civilisation being written in a a guide for young Jedi, which suggests that it is a widely excepted belief. Wait, Naboo isn’t civilised? What about Tatooine? I mean, it’s not the fault of the citizens that the Hutts and their gangs run everything. The vast majority of the population are either Tusken, farmers, or enslaved. They don’t have the means to go up against the Hutts, and govern themselves as of yet, but does that mean that the people aren’t civilised? Don’t have a vibrant culture? Seriously? Imagine being an intelligent, ambitious, multi-lingual, talented, and insightful individual like Anakin, and being told “You’re not civilised.” What?!

Now, DS9 is a rusted out dump. A former mine processing station/labor internment/seat of Cardassian occupier power over the planet Bajor. The Federation and the former colonial occupiers cut a deal no one likes; the Federation cedes some of their colonies, which...yeah, goes badly. And the Cardassians trade them a few places they were leaving anyway - like Bajor.

And here comes their doctor. Julian is just out of medical school, very full of himself and really came out to middle of nowhere to hide a few secrets of his own. And he's in his new infirmary which pretty much looks like an apocalypse bunker after the zombies ran through. He's raving about how he looks forward to being the doctor here under such harsh conditions because "This is where heroes are made! Right here in the wilderness."

That earns him the most well-deserved dirty look ever because his guide is one of the locals, who spent since she was a child fighting for her homeland. "This wilderness is my home."

Padme´s eyes(Natalie Portman) tell everything about her fear of Anakin leaving her and her child because while they are married, their relationship looked more like an affair and once kids are involved everything is more complicated, they can´t hide them as they did their relationship, she feared Anakin was going to leave them behind because the cost to him, his reputation and Jedi career as a hero of the clone wars would be in jeopardy, not talking about her own position at the Senate.

Anakin(Hayden Christensen) eyes tell everything about his conffusion of this happening because he is just coming from a long period of war, he noticed her fear of him leaving her so he said the words he knew Padme needed to hear to know he loved her. He also is worried about what this means for them, for Padme as a Senator and him as a Jedi but he ends with that beautiful smile because he is ready to sacrifice his place with the Jedi Order and even his reputation to have this family with Padme.

Anakin has significantly more to lose when Padme tells him she’s pregnant than he ever did when they first married.

He still stands by her and their child(ren).

His reaction doesn’t just demonstrate that Anakin loves Padme and their family. It demonstrates what his values and priorities are: Love, loyalty, family, compassion.