PatrickKingBlog

The Chosen One

Ignacio RC

YO BUDDY, STILL ALIVE?

My work crunch is over, I’m back and I have ANOTHER MUCHA ACE COMBAT PIECE.

Except I’m sorry Mucha I took multiple artistic liberties.

Anyways, wouldn’t it be great if we were jousting with our planes but then our cockpits kissed, jkjk…UNLESS…👀

Bonus points if you can see the Zero

Duncan Hills Coffee

Do you folks like coffee? Real coffee From the Hills of Colombia

TeePublic

REX,

REX TREMENDAE MAJESTASIS,

QUI SALVANDOS SALVAS GRATIS,

SALVA ME, FONS PIETATIS.

The final piece [FOR NOW] of my Ace Combat Mucha set, ITS MOBIUS-1 WITH THE STEEL CHAIR. The opening scene of megalith lives rent free in my head.

ANYWAYS.

If you would like to get these as actual prints, I will be at CARRIERCON 2024, March 9th!

The convention is on the USS Hornet, artist alley IS IN THE AIRCRAFT HANGAR HOW COOL IS THAT.

YO BUDDY, STILL ALIVE?

My work crunch is over, I’m back and I have ANOTHER MUCHA ACE COMBAT PIECE.

Except I’m sorry Mucha I took multiple artistic liberties.

Anyways, wouldn’t it be great if we were jousting with our planes but then our cockpits kissed, jkjk…UNLESS…👀

Bonus points if you can see the Zero

Ukraine Air Force

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Lucas described Vader as being in "a walking iron lung". That simile is no accident.

Before the development of the polio vaccine in the 1950s, iron lungs - monstrous tanks enclosing the whole body below head level, which left their users lying flat on their backs and mostly immobilized - were the only means of keeping people alive if polio paralyzed their lungs. Polio was absolutely terrifying, and Lucas grew up in the 1940s and 50s, so he'd have known how feared it was. But until Jonas Salk developed the vaccine, there was no alternative to the iron lung, aside from never catching polio in the first place.

Likewise, although there was medical treatment for burns including the use of skin grafts, extensive burns were very often a death sentence. But since the 1960s, burn treatment has come a long way, allowing patients to survive injuries that at the time of World War II would have been fatal. Silver sulfadiazine was developed in the 1960s as a topical cream used to prevent infection, which revolutionized the survivability of burn injuries. According to this article, in the 1950s, being burned over 50% of the body meant at least a 50% chance of death; by the 1990s, the equivalent burn level for the same odds was 80%.

Vader's suit was conceived with these older standards of medicine in mind: he survived full-body immolation in a way that should by all rights have killed him, and would have, had he not been put in a life-support suit. There was no alternative. His options were the suit or death. 

But these days, medical science has advanced so much that such a drastic intervention being Vader's only option for survival seems unrealistic. Few people remember the days before the polio vaccine or silver sulfadiazine. Iron lungs are no longer even manufactured. So the idea that the best medicine the GFFA can come up with isn't up to 21st century medical levels seems alien to a lot of younger writers. (Especially since the GFFA also has things like seamless prosthetic limbs.)

As a result, there's a perceived need for there to be some explanation for why Vader's suit isn't up to modern standards of care. Which is why we now get the concept of Palpatine deliberately making Vader's suit a torture device, designed to leave him permanently in pain in order to fuel his anger and rage, as well as keeping him from challenging his master. Fandom in particular has taken this idea and run with it, but it also crept into things like the novelization of ROTS, as well as encyclopedia-format "official" SW works coming after that film.

Now it’s recounting Elon’s lies for people too