Meanwhile Back on Earth...

The sound of meowing 🐾

I remember an Expanded Universe comic set immediately after RotJ where Leia tells Luke words to the effect of "Vader literally had me tortured and blew up my homeworld. What, am I supposed to feel kinship with him just because I discovered he's my dad yesterday?"

The important thing that happens in Return of the Jedi is that the Emperor dies and the planet-killing superweapon gets blown up. Vader spent the last two hours of his life doing something good after 25 years of genocide, mass murder and torture, and even then, it was partly out of vengeful hatred. Vader fucking hated Palpatine for a quarter century and never had the spine to do anything about it. It was only after his own son was being tortured to death in front of him that he chose to act - and he'd cut off the kid's hand like two years before that! That's not a fucking redemption arc.

So one, yes, absolutely it is entirely correct to take issue with Darth Vader's apparent forgiveness by the Force, there is no need for Leia to accept him as her father or to feel anything for him besides hate and contempt, redemption takes more than turning back for a couple of hours and then getting out of culpability by dying, all fair.

That said: the original trilogy is Luke Skywalker's story and the story of Luke Skywalker, on a meta level, is about being a young adult in the 60s and 70s who did not experience WWII or the depths of fascism personally, but who grew up with gaping familial wounds - family members who you never knew but who older people refer to or talk around, people they compare you to, figures who other children had in their lives but you didn't. Someone who as a child was given fantasies of heroes fighting daring battles, who was told it was all about nationhood and fighting for your people and the course of civilization, someone who internalized those principles as guiding lights for their own morality and who they want to be... and THEN finding out when you become an adult, and are permitted to know about the horrors, that it is not just honor and glory in your heritage, that you, 70s white boy, may have evil and darkness and the corruption of all your values as a potential to fall into just as your father did, the temptation to hate and cruelty and domination and atrocity. And the absences in your family are maybe not just because of death, of noble sacrifice, but perhaps instead because those people who shared your blood became monsters, severed from their family because of their terrible actions, and still live as awful hateful versions of themselves, enslaved to evil, and that could be you.

And what do you do with that? Will you strike your father down with all of your hatred, when the thing that corrupted him by his hate for its own ends is sitting there grinning and laughing, waiting to do the same to you? Is violence the answer against that creature, infinitely better at taking advantage from violence than you are? Or will you just die - and even just walking away here means death, sooner or later - and let the evil persist?

Or will you, privileged young person with ideals and hopes, with a family member who has done terrible unforgivable things but who still holds affection for you, make use of that affection to tempt them to just turn their back on that evil for a moment, the thing it will never expect from the person it made its slave for longer than you've been alive? Neither you nor he can pay back the crimes of those years, but perhaps you can stop the evil, here and now, from going on.

So you do that. And what is your reward? Is it appropriate for Luke, whose whole story has been about becoming the ideal he grew up admiring and defeating the evil that ideal had the potential to become, both halves of it embodied in the being of his father, to come back to his friends and then have the universe say to him 'your father was unredeemable, and had nothing good enough in him to deserve peace in death'? Or to say there was a darkness lifted from him, and a light restored?

It doesn’t mean people will forgive you - hell no. The things Vader did were unforgivable, and he knew that. But because of that, he believed the only path left was to keep committing atrocities, to wallow in self-hatred and anger for decades and take it out on the galaxy. He says it himself: “It’s too late for me, son”.

But what Luke shows Vader is that we ALWAYS have a choice: To be a better person, and to choose compassion. Anakin doesn’t kill the Emperor out of hatred, or even because he thinks it’ll make up for anything he did: He knows nothing ever will. He chooses to save Luke, and break the cycle of violence because it’s the right, kind thing to do.

Vader/Anakin isn’t fully redeemed by the end of Return of the Jedi: He simply takes his first step back into the light. Obi-Wan and Yoda chose to give him that second chance, but that was their decision to make. The people you hurt are by NO means obligated to forgive you - but you should still strive to be better regardless.

YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST!!!!

THE WRECK OF THE EDMUND FITZGERALD IS!!

Almost 4 1/2 yrs. on the market, and still no one wants this 2002 house in Ashland, OR. 2bds, 4ba, 11,084sqft, $4.5m down from $8.235k.

So fun fact I am currently in school to learn how to build affordable housing. They don’t teach you how to murder strip malls so I must learn this on my own. Someday the two will fuse and I will be an angel of death for shopping centers. This is my calling.

There have been attempts to turn malls into affordable housing. Sadly retrofitting commercial properties into habitable living spaces is usually more expensive than just making a new building. All that big empty space with uniform climate control is cool and all but it’s not habitable living quarters. you know what it’s GREAT for????

HYPER-LOCAL AGRICULTURE BAYBEEEEEEE

Indoor farming got a bad rep recently because it couldn’t become profitable fast enough to satisfy the capitalists funding it. But these places have loads of height for more space-efficient vertical farms, and while plants won’t need the blasted AC of most shopping malls, they probably do appreciate a steady climate (something that’s getting harder to find outdoors).

“But wait,” you say, “the food court has all those fully outfitted kitchens. It would be a waste not to incorporate that into daily living.”

hello????????? Literal farm-to-table restaurants that grow their vegetables right across the hallway are you KIDDING ME??????????????? (better keep that shit cheap tho no gentrification on my watch)

“But wait wait wait,” you say again, “how can it be *local* farming when there’s no housing nearby? Also this isn’t about food we need fucking housing????”

I hear you, man, I hear you. But you know what is right around a shopping mall? Acres upon acres of the most depressing use of land in history: fucking dog shit crusty ass empty fucking parking lots.

The amount of space these bad boys take up is STAGGERING, and it’s often enough to fit an entire neighborhood. Just check out what this one architect in Maine did to replan the Portland mall (they won an award for it):

*everything on that map that’s in color is currently flat cement*

One mid-sized mall in Maine can fit an entire downtown area WITH GREEN SPACE in its parking lot, and *still have room for parking.*

So yeah, the housing in malls idea is cool thinking. Think bigger. WAY bigger.

Think of all the space strip malls and their parking lots take up. Imagine all that space becoming housing and small businesses and third spaces and NATURE.