Cassius Eternal

Is the best part that he got doxxed? No.

Is the best part that he got tracked down by a local and beaten? No.

Arrested on state at federal charges, looking at up to 5 years and 50K? Nope.

The best part is the local city council's reaction.

After the incident, another video went viral showing what appeared to be that man getting a beating. The Maui Police Department said they had no record of any reports of disorderly conduct or assault related to the monk seal incident.

"Closing your eyes, jumping off a cliff without a parachute, and hoping for the best."

...Okay. I need to begin by advising all here that I have Opinions about this whole concept.

In the YW universe: These opinions are based on the understanding that when working in the wizardly mode, such an approach is operationally invalid. If you're doing a spell, you must first build a Speech-based diagram (or speak it in the Speech) laying out your intentions and the spell's intended results (or use a preconstructed spell that does that). If you're planning a intervention, you must first construct a plan with a beginning and an ending, however brief and hasty that plan may be. If you need to alter that plan while it's being enacted, well, of course you can!... but with the understanding that doing so won't be terribly safe. (And your partners will tell you that you should have spent some more time on the planning stage.)

This isn't fairytale magic, where you can just do any old thing and see what happens. This is wizardry.

The Powers that Be—who gave you access to this power—in turn require you to at least think out something concrete about what you're doing with it before you act. To attempt to act in the wizardly mode without any kind of plan suggests that you have given inadequate consideration to the likely consequences of your actions.

That, so to speak, won't fly.

...And speaking of flying: People possibly need to know (and God knows, @petermorwood would remind me of this any time I showed signs of forgetting it) that actual pilots—of whom P. was one, for the RAF—people who've ever actually sat in the pilot's seat of an aircraft and flown it into the air, consider the "flying by the seat of one's pants" concept to be the least effective and possibly most dangerous known mode of flight: potentially deadly not just to yourself, but to any passengers stuck in the plane with you.

"You may think you know where you're going," Peter would say, "but when you look out the window and get a look at the landmarks, whoops, if you're in a fast enough aircraft you're already ten miles past there! Or else you're in the wrong place entirely. And when you look up again, dear dear, you're about to crash into that cliff! You should have done what pilots who want to live long productive lives do, and used a map. ...And whoops, wait, here's an air force base all of a sudden, and why are those missiles tracking on you...?!"*

Additionally: as for discussing this concept in the literary mode (should this discussion veer off in that direction): Every single time P. would hear about someone using the "pantsing" term in the literary mode, he would cover his eyes and moan, "Where the hell'd they get this overromanticized crap?" And then immediately answer himself: "Don't tell me. Movies." And he'd scowl. "Don't blame this stuff on us! Where I come from, 'flying by the seat of your pants' is nothing but a quick way to die."

...I warned you that I had Opinions about this whole set of concepts. (And should anyone be curious, as regards wizardry, this take was settled firmly in place long before I met Peter. Just another of the many ways we were routinely in sync.)

Now. Do I feel that it's okay to sometimes act on impulse, or see where impulse takes me? Sure. And in the general literary sense? If pantsing works for you, it's not mine to judge! (I'm an outliner, myself. Scooby-Doo did it to me, and at this late date I don't see any point in trying to change.) 🙂

But when other people's safety is at risk... specifically in the wizardly mode? Nope. Hence the hard line on this. Fly yourself into a cliff? Mmmf, fine, if you must. But use up the power the Powers gave you for that, and possibly harm someone else as well? Nope.

Make a plan. Get a map. Save a life.

HTH. 🙂

call upon an eldritch machine god to make you younger

make a vampire addicted to cocaine

connect with trees. not metaphorically, literally connect your mind with them

build a robot army

construct elaborate traps to boil supersoldiers alive

restore a polluted ecosystem

make your cave morlock people fuck real good

sew tophats from Overpowered God-Creature leather

commit space piracy

construct a ranch/farm that'd make even Stardew Valley blush

create Christianity: The Revengeance of Christ

have a blunt rotation

become royalty

torture royalty

Cowardice, to me, implies that you can and should do something, but didn't due to wanting to save your own hide or avoid some inconvenience to yourself.

But there was actually nothing he could do anymore, all his plans had failed.

He was defeated. Out of options. Impotent. There was nothing he could do & it didn't make a difference if he was there or not. He was up against a sheer force of nature... and was all but stomped in the ground in that contest.

(If you wanna be cheeky you might even say that "the end was inexorable, the outcome set, whether [he] remained or not")

Far from "giving up without trying", he is, if anything, consistently characterized as refusing to accept the inevitable / not giving up when some would say he should have. (particularly since we have the contrast of Vespa calling it folly to keep fighting & just deciding to wall herself off)

The Plan was already a desperate Hail Mary / last resort to "break the laws of nature" after all other options had been exhausted, & something he likely never would have considered without a figurative gun to his head. He had to swallow his morals, compromise ideals, ruin his marriage and sacrifice his most loyal, most competent underlings...

And it still didn't work. He just made everything worse. (and laid terrible burdens on the 2 kids he had in the process - well, the 2 that he knew of.) - and he knew it, too.

An egomaniac who thinks he's always right & can do whatever he wants wouldn't feel guilty or ashamed; They certainly wouldn't give all the credit to the 4 sacrifices while he thought the plan worked (judging by the monuments) only to place all the blame on himself when it failed.

Did ppl just not get the implication that what seems to have haunted him the most in the end (besides the obvious stuff with his family) was the memory/thought/impression of his faithful, loyal underlings patiently waiting for him to come with a solution that he just didn't have? ("We will wait...") - the actual retainers are of course dead all over the ancient basin, he never did make it back to them.

But that's not cause he didn't give a fuck. If anything the thought of them was probably the main refrain playing in his mind in his last days. He just couldn't save them no matter how much he wanted to. No matter how much he was willing to give everything. Nothing lasts forever & allat, its like, a whole theme?

He was probably always the one with the plans & the visions & all the answers, but this time, there wasn't an answer, & he couldn't deal with that. Probably cracked his whole self-concept - who needs a King who can't protect his people? Who needs an engineer who can't fix the problem? Or a God of Enlightenment who doesn't have answers?

And that's without getting into the whole implication that he most likely offed himself to create the charm you find on him, to buy one last faint theoretical chance of a future.

If he was a coward he would have taken the handful of people he cared about the most & ran off to greener pastures somewhere.

Or just forcibly exiled all the moths from his Kingdom. "Sorry guys, you may have been loyal to be since the founding and i know i promised you stuff, but this scary lady who is more powerful than me says you belong to her & I don't want her wrecking the rest of my shit to punish yall."

Din: you’re only mentioning this now?

Boba: It was a long time ago. Ten, maybe twelve years ago? He used to have quite a sizable bounty on his head too, Cal something or another. Bright red hair, hard to miss.

Din: What happened to him?

Boba: As far as I can tell he married a nightsister and fucked off to the other edge of the universe.

Din: The hell is a nightsister

Boba: They were witches who performed some freaky magic from Dathomir. If you’ve never been, keep it that way. Most of them were wiped out during the clone wars though. Pretty certain she did some sort of magic because now if you follow the bounty puck all it leads to is the Koboh Abyss. Any bounty hunter with half a brain threw their pucks away after that. I figured he’d died in there or something until I saw him briefly a while back with a daughter.

Din: You’re telling me the space sorcerers and witches are mating now? Dank farrik there should be laws against that.

Or alternatively I saw someone make a joke that Saw Gerrara just assumes all Jedi know each other- so it would be sorta hilarious if on a mission Kanan and Ezra are working with Saw and he just mentions some ginger Jedi with a poncho like it’s no big deal and Kanan just does a double take. Because wdym his lab partner for space chemistry 101 survived the purge?? AND does his rebel missions in a cool space yacht instead of the equivalent of a barely functioning kitted out mini van??

That's it. That's my answer. Endor.

@oh-tobeafrog thank you for inspiring me with this galaxy brain take on my two favorite marvel heroes :)

Link is not scared of him, is not impressed by him, and KNOWS that he can fuck around with Zonai toys and turn shit up in the Depths until he decides he's bored. Link thinks the Malice was a cheap shot, and he knows that Ganondorf can bleed. Link had his number right there, that's why the camera highlights it.

I don't think that Link ever thought Zelda was gone for good, either. His sole motivation in the game is finding her, that's the actual final quest for him. Ganondorf is just some asshole in the way.

Yeah yeah yeah, Demon King, Imprisoning War, hears the exact same story like six times, secret stones, cool. The Tears? He immediately knows she's safe and somewhere, gets the backstory, changes nothing, don't mean anything else to him. UNTIL that final Tear, that's when it became personal.

The story is big and dramatic, but hardly involves Link at all because it's all in the past. The actual gameplay, the part the devs put front and center, isn't even connected to the story. The Zonai toys are so much more emphasized than the story elements, they're telling you that Link is free to fuck around.

Like, first thing you have to know about that lore is that it was written by Karen Traviss. Traviss is fairly infamous for writing a shitton of military wank and really hating the Jedi, portraying them as cruel, cold, fascist idiots, who are much, much lamer than the cool Mandalorians, who are badass military types and definitely haven't carried out multiple genocides in the past (they have). She was also known for not exactly playing ball with other writers, and ultimately ragequit the franchise when TCW started to include Mandalorians and portrayed them differently. This was not a detail that basically any other writer in anything Star Wars ever actually backs up.

And like, here's the thing... this exists.

That's a Jedi using the Force to deflect bullets with her bare hand.

This is Tutaminis. And/or Force Deflection, it's not really clear whether they're the same thing or not. It's a pretty standard Force ability that a bunch of characters have demonstrated. Obi-Wan blocks both bullets and a flamethrower with it in the 03 Clone Wars microseries. It's how Yoda catches and redirects Force Lightning during his duels with Dooku in Attack of the Clones and Palpatine in Revenge of the Sith. It's how Vader absorbs Han's shots with his hand in The Empire Strikes Back.

It's also evident from the amount of times that the Mandalorians fight the Jedi with normal blasters instead of breaking out their "anti-Jedi" weapons for their ancient enemies. And the fact that the Mandalorians lost their wars against the Jedi.

If solid-shot guns/slugthrowers were the amazing anti-Jedi weapons that totally always worked against Jedi, then we'd see a lot more slugthrowers and a lot fewer Jedi. We see the CIS' Droid armies fight against the Jedi for three years, we see the Clones being designed from the get-go to kill the Jedi at the end of the war and being highly successful at it, we see the Empire hunting Jedi for the next 19 years and the rest of the Galactic Civil War after that, and y'know what they have in common? None of them use slugthrowers. They all just keep using blasters.

The answer to "How to kill a Jedi" equation has traditionally been depicted as "Use more blasters than they can actually physically deflect."

There's also the detail that Jedi are precognitive space wizards who can move with superhuman speed. If you're actually in range to shoot one with a gun, they'll sense you, evade or block with the Force, close the gap before you can chamber the next round, and revoke your Hand Privileges.

Even the "You'll kill them with a spray of molten metal from the melted bullet!" thing doesn't actually track with what we see on-screen. At the climax of Revenge of the Sith, we see Obi-Wan and Vader fight in the middle of an active volcano. They get splashed with showers of lava a couple of times, and at the end of the fight, both of their clothes are scorched and burned from the embers. Obi-Wan continues to wear his charred robes throughout the rest of the movie. And he's fine. No lava burns. Neither of them actually gets hurt by the lava until Obi-Wan cuts Vader's limbs off and he can no longer move or protect himself, and even then, Vader survives getting burned to a crisp by being really fucking mad about it.

Raising your arms to block your head exposes the rest of the body to fire from the side. And even if a Jedi can move fast enough to protect themselves in this situation for a while, they're still mortal, they can't keep it up forever.