Baúl de los conocimientos inútiles

The Queen Dowager goes into cardiac arrest due to her own resentment. She is choked by her own snake skin. The Consort Dowager is afflicted by the spiritual version of the poison she fed her granddaughter. The King faked a curse that turned into reality on his own children. 

They are all haunted, but they cannot be killed by spirits. And nobody was ever gonna hold them accountable, even though Saeng-gang vowed kill the Queen Dowager. These are the three most powerful people in Joseon. The King. The Royal Mother. The Mother of the King. 

But they are miserable. None of them get what they wanted, and sometimes that is enough. 

for a long time, i believed that anakin's story was synonymous with mankind's fall into sin, redeemed by the perfect son. that interpretation told me that ani was good, darth vader was evil, and anakin contained both and chooses his path. this was a product of my upbringing. i've been working my way to a new understanding. ani is fundamentally good and right. the individuals that he trusts with his dream of doing good are effectively gods. they hold all the power and are unchallenged, and they expect him to treat them like gods. they shame him when he does good, teaching him that good is evil, that he is evil, that he must be at war with himself constantly, and that the force is a weapon.

to right this wrong, the force reunites him with someone from before that happened, with padmé, who we've been shown is also fundamentally good and right. anakin is a representative of individual morality, good and evil, and padmé is a representative of systemic morality, right and wrong, or, at her job, legal and illegal. i like to think of it like one of those graphs with good and evil as one line and legal and illegal as another, and actions can be placed anywhere. for example, the rebels do good even though they are acting illegally, so they'd be in one quadrant of the graph. opposite to them would be the empire, who does evil even though they are acting legally. the spiritual and the material, cosmic justice and real world justice. in a balanced galaxy, life is fair, a divine union of morality. anakin and padmé are meant to fall in love. they are equals and counterparts. the force uses both of them to bring balance to the galaxy. they are two perfect representatives of their respective ideals, facing their corrupt institutions, the jedi order and the republic. church and state, if you will 🤪 in an imbalanced galaxy, which we are told is what this is, life is unfair. what's good is wrong and what's evil is right.

just as they're reuniting, evil catches up to them, demanding to be stopped and repaired. shmi, who anakin chose to leave behind and never came back for, a former slave tortured to death by the sand people, whose lifestyle i consider to be a natural conclusion of living somewhere the republic doesn't care about. shmi and anakin weren't just failed by the jedi but by the republic. in anakin's mind, his mother dies because he chose to abandon her for the jedi and trusted them more than himself. this creates a paradox within him. the gods, who claim to be good and who he believed to be good, were wrong, which makes them evil. he was right, which makes him good. because he is failed by the jedi, who do not teach him effective tools for this level of confusion and grief, he replicates that paradox externally. someone who is fundamentally good does something fundamentally evil. someone who is fundamentally right does something fundamentally wrong. now, he is in alignment with his institution, imbalanced. he returns with his mother's body, grappling with what this means about him and his gods. he opens up to someone outside of his established community, to someone who understands.

padmé's god is the republic, but just as the jedi are false gods, so is the republic she's serving. in the phantom menace, we see that she acts in alignment with its ideals and stands in solidarity with her people as queen in a way other leaders do not. she is a chosen one too! she is chosen by the people in a legal process. she also chose to become a senator the way anakin chose to become a jedi, in the hopes of doing good. she knows what it is to be devout like he does, to struggle with human desires and responsibility, but she was not raised by the jedi. loving him validates for her that neither of their desires are evil or wrong. they're both human, and that's allowed. she tries to right the jedi's wrong and remind anakin of his humanity. the problem is that, whether she likes it or not, she speaks for the system. her failure to define his actions and words as wrong is unjust. it means that she doesn't just call him good. she forgives his wrongs, which is not her place. she is only in solidarity with him individually as a victim, not with his victims systemically. the republic has done to her what the jedi did to anakin. they've watered her down. her definitions have also been switched. she now acts in alignment with her corrupt institution.

ideally, they would have reset these definitions for each other. the force brings them together, but it allows them to make choices. essentially, this moment puts anakin and padmé in the reverse position, like tarot cards. anakin goes first, the individual. his evil is supposed to be stopped and repaired by the system, padmé. i'm not saying she needs to do his work for him, but she does have more systemic privilege than him. she is older, she was raised in the republic, he's technically working for her, she was never a slave, and she has much more community than he does. they are equals spiritually, but in the system, she has more responsibility. naming what he did as wrong and helping him repair the damage is what the system is supposed to do for victims. they both fail. anakin and padmé lose their internal war just in time for an external war. their union is still divine. their experiences are so similar that they can't identify the truth for each other. but, as individuals, they are now reversed just like their institutions. they willingly act on behalf of those institutions. though they still have moments of struggle, the urgency of the war as well as their separation, furthers imbalance within them and within the galaxy.

palpatine is in the middle of the spiritual war between the jedi and sith as well as the material war between the republic and the separatists, meaning he is the foil for their divine union. he exploits anakin's vulnerability and isolation, claiming to worship the same gods. he gives anakin a scapegoat for not just his personal trauma but for the war, which resonates because the jedi were responsible for anakin's internal war. palpatine also claims to care about saving padmé. anakin doesn't just want her to live. he needs her to live, which doesn't mean he loves her less. the jedi taught him that he had to get permission from an external source to be good. because she gave him permission to call himself good after he did something wrong, if she dies, she takes his goodness with him. he has to face everything he's done alone, potentially expelled from the jedi order and responsible for a child. this is why it's not just as simple as running away. she's going to die in childbirth. his fears are rational because of what happened to his mother.

anakin chooses to replicate his trauma again, believing he is bringing balance, essentially lighting his reversed tarot card on fire. i cannot fully blame him. the jedi have been a shitty, hypocritical community. he is so isolated and exposed because of their behavior, not his failure to put up with it with a big smile or his unwillingness to forgive them. you can't forgive someone who's not even sorry. trusting obi-wan got his mother killed. if they leave, it means padmé is even more likely to die. "he should just accept her death." genuinely, do you actually love anyone? an inability to accept death, especially when you know it's coming, especially if you already have trauma around it, is not a "just do this" situation. he is not evil or arrogant or selfish because he doesn't want his wife to die. that very common and amoral fear is exploited by palpatine. he is desperate, and he is used. he makes choices i do not condone, but that doesn't mean we need to act like his desperation was evil. so, by the end of revenge of the sith, darth sidious is victorious. he has complete power over the material and spiritual worlds. the representative of the ideal republic is dead, and the representative of the ideal jedi is his weapon. padmé's death mirrors the loss of the republic in the material world, but anakin and the jedi are not physically dead. they are few and far between but not gone forever. more importantly, darth sidious has no idea that padmé gives birth to luke and leia, who are not in reverse. no one starts off in reverse, and they are also the product of a divine union.

darth vader does evil so much that it is what he becomes. "anakin is gone." until he is empowered by a new god, standing in defiance of his first false gods. not just his son but padmé's, a boy whose community came with the catalyst of leia asking for help. "the biggest problem in this universe is nobody helps each other." luke helps leia, and now he will help his father. when luke throws away his lightsaber, he embodies the ideal jedi. he is right, and he does good. his actions initiate the momentum that restores balance in the spiritual world while leia, who, if you ask me, has always embodied the ideals of the republic, fights in the rebellion to restore balance in the material world. luke sees the good in anakin the way his mother did, and leia sees evil the way her birth father saw it in himself. luke and leia choose to not only right the imbalance their parents created but that which was already present during the phantom menace in the corrupt forms of the jedi order and the republic.

but now we reach my problem. return of the jedi ends with yoda, obi-wan, and anakin in the same afterlife. the children are forced to clean up their parents' mess with the rest of the galaxy, even though they did absolutely nothing to create it. this is unjust to me, and i could let that go if "bringing balance to the force" wasn't the entire point. what this tells me is that the problem lies with the person who has the ultimate say over what's balanced and fair, with the god of star wars himself. i say that writers are gods because they have all the power. characters literally cannot make choices.

i believe in restorative justice. i believe that we have inherent worth. we can do good, and we can do evil. when we do evil, it's important to name that, to change the behavior, and to deal with the systems that were partially responsible. everyone who made the mess is dead. luke and leia have to do all the work. "well that's what makes them good." that idea is partially why people think anakin's love for padmé is selfish, why he can't be a victim, because he's not a perfect one. i cannot get past anakin being in the same afterlife as his abusers because he wouldn't have fallen so far if they had consistently treated him well instead of creating a literal war inside of him.

we are shown by god that palpatine is irredeemably evil, so he is killed. we are shown by god that luke is good and that he is right to defy the jedi, so he is rewarded. we are shown by god that anakin is good, becomes evil, but chooses to redeem himself. he is rewarded for doing good by the force, but when it comes to the evil he did, he's not there to repair, which isn't his fault. he didn't ask to die. we are shown by god that the jedi order do evil. they never take responsibility for this. the massacre at the temple is not the force holding them responsible. that is anakin's action. taking responsibility is not something that happens to you. what they do is hide and encourage luke to kill his father. they are not expected to redeem themselves like anakin is. "that's because they didn't do such awful things." they directly contributed to his awful things. ani would never have done this. he trusted them, and they destroyed him. they also abducted children, isolated them, separated them from their families, and indoctrinated them into a religion under the guise of keeping them safe. literally right before anakin redeems himself, they show absolutely no interest in owning up to their part in creating darth vader. how can someone who has to redeem himself from not only his mistakes but theirs end up in the same afterlife with people who can't even admit that how they practiced their religion was fucked up to themselves? that puts him ahead of them spiritually.

not only does anakin never get an acknowledgement of the harm they caused him, we as the audience are not given that. with the prequel trilogy being written after the original, it's still worth including a moment where obi-wan or yoda say that the jedi order itself was a big part of the problem. that would make it more clear to the audience that anakin was a victim of his community. god breaks his own rules for obi-wan and yoda in the same breath that he says balance is restored. this is not fair. for anakin, for luke, or for the galaxy. that means that the force is either inherently unjust or that george lucas thinks this is what fair looks like, and i think it's pretty reasonable to assume it's the latter.

i do not think it's a coincidence that the first major star wars film where we are actually told that the jedi order failed anakin, by a character that both god and the audience consider good and right, was met with such vitriolic hatred. obi-wan does say "i have failed you," and yoda says "failed i have," but this is an individual acknowledgement, and i believe the institution itself is the problem. i believe return of the jedi's ending is partially why fans have responded so viscerally to anakin, to the actors, to each other, and to the sequel trilogy, not because they're "stupid" or "confused" or "don't understand star wars," but because god himself told us one thing and then did something else. that is allowed to be confusing in a universe about balance, fairness, and justice.

a movie is a reflection of everyone involved, but writers and directors are often given singular godlike power, especially in star wars, and especially if you're george lucas. this creates a situation where i kind of have to put the blame on one individual because of the way he chose to write and direct. he was given godlike impunity and authority by his success, so he came into the prequel trilogy with ultimate authority. i won't scapegoat him for everything that's wrong with our world, but i'm not going to deify him. i'm not going to imply that everything i like was his intention and that everything i don't is my problem for not "understanding it right." this isn't just about george lucas. this is a problem with the christian god, who has been weaponized so effectively by colonizers. these tropes come out in our entertainment, so we should be aware of them or we end up carrying them forward.

my defense of anakin was, in large part, a way to process my experiences with religious and emotional abuse. i still struggle to believe my version of events because i was indoctrinated into the idea that abuse is the result of a few evil individuals rather than the truth that the system itself is abusive, and everyone contributes to an evil impact unless they put in effort to counteract that system and build something new. we recognize with words that abuse fundamentally changes people, but victims are still expected to manage their symptoms alone or face cultural punishments like social isolation and humiliation, unemployment, medical neglect and abuse, forced hospitalization, starvation, homelessness, imprisonment, and death.

the system is built to create victims and exploit them in an endless cycle. abandoning individuals, particularly those who "don't do it right," means that they often have no choice but to get help from the only people most willing, abusers, who exploit that desperation for their own agendas. that's why it's so important to me to defend anakin. it is neither of our faults that the people who claimed to want to help us only treated us well if we treated them like an authority figure. if you treat someone like they are a problem, they will start acting like it. the concept of a self-fulfilling prophecy is victim blaming, as if a person's thoughts determine their reality more than the people who hold systemic power over them. if you put in the effort to take care of people without expectation, they get better.

for a long time, i believed that anakin's story was synonymous with mankind's fall into sin, redeemed by the perfect son. that interpretation told me that ani was good, darth vader was evil, and anakin contained both and chooses his path. this was a product of my upbringing. i've been working my way to a new understanding. ani is fundamentally good and right. the individuals that he trusts with his dream of doing good are effectively gods. they hold all the power and are unchallenged, and they expect him to treat them like gods. they shame him when he does good, teaching him that good is evil, that he is evil, that he must be at war with himself constantly, and that the force is a weapon.

to right this wrong, the force reunites him with someone from before that happened, with padmé, who we've been shown is also fundamentally good and right. anakin is a representative of individual morality, good and evil, and padmé is a representative of systemic morality, right and wrong, or, at her job, legal and illegal. i like to think of it like one of those graphs with good and evil as one line and legal and illegal as another, and actions can be placed anywhere. for example, the rebels do good even though they are acting illegally, so they'd be in one quadrant of the graph. opposite to them would be the empire, who does evil even though they are acting legally. the spiritual and the material, cosmic justice and real world justice. in a balanced galaxy, life is fair, a divine union of morality. anakin and padmé are meant to fall in love. they are equals and counterparts. the force uses both of them to bring balance to the galaxy. they are two perfect representatives of their respective ideals, facing their corrupt institutions, the jedi order and the republic. church and state, if you will 🤪 in an imbalanced galaxy, which we are told is what this is, life is unfair. what's good is wrong and what's evil is right.

just as they're reuniting, evil catches up to them, demanding to be stopped and repaired. shmi, who anakin chose to leave behind and never came back for, a former slave tortured to death by the sand people, whose lifestyle i consider to be a natural conclusion of living somewhere the republic doesn't care about. shmi and anakin weren't just failed by the jedi but by the republic. in anakin's mind, his mother dies because he chose to abandon her for the jedi and trusted them more than himself. this creates a paradox within him. the gods, who claim to be good and who he believed to be good, were wrong, which makes them evil. he was right, which makes him good. because he is failed by the jedi, who do not teach him effective tools for this level of confusion and grief, he replicates that paradox externally. someone who is fundamentally good does something fundamentally evil. someone who is fundamentally right does something fundamentally wrong. now, he is in alignment with his institution, imbalanced. he returns with his mother's body, grappling with what this means about him and his gods. he opens up to someone outside of his established community, to someone who understands.

padmé's god is the republic, but just as the jedi are false gods, so is the republic she's serving. in the phantom menace, we see that she acts in alignment with its ideals and stands in solidarity with her people as queen in a way other leaders do not. she is a chosen one too! she is chosen by the people in a legal process. she also chose to become a senator the way anakin chose to become a jedi, in the hopes of doing good. she knows what it is to be devout like he does, to struggle with human desires and responsibility, but she was not raised by the jedi. loving him validates for her that neither of their desires are evil or wrong. they're both human, and that's allowed. she tries to right the jedi's wrong and remind anakin of his humanity. the problem is that, whether she likes it or not, she speaks for the system. her failure to define his actions and words as wrong is unjust. it means that she doesn't just call him good. she forgives his wrongs, which is not her place. she is only in solidarity with him individually as a victim, not with his victims systemically. the republic has done to her what the jedi did to anakin. they've watered her down. her definitions have also been switched. she now acts in alignment with her corrupt institution.

ideally, they would have reset these definitions for each other. the force brings them together, but it allows them to make choices. essentially, this moment puts anakin and padmé in the reverse position, like tarot cards. anakin goes first, the individual. his evil is supposed to be stopped and repaired by the system, padmé. i'm not saying she needs to do his work for him, but she does have more systemic privilege than him. she is older, she was raised in the republic, he's technically working for her, she was never a slave, and she has much more community than he does. they are equals spiritually, but in the system, she has more responsibility. naming what he did as wrong and helping him repair the damage is what the system is supposed to do for victims. they both fail. anakin and padmé lose their internal war just in time for an external war. their union is still divine. their experiences are so similar that they can't identify the truth for each other. but, as individuals, they are now reversed just like their institutions. they willingly act on behalf of those institutions. though they still have moments of struggle, the urgency of the war as well as their separation, furthers imbalance within them and within the galaxy.

palpatine is in the middle of the spiritual war between the jedi and sith as well as the material war between the republic and the separatists, meaning he is the foil for their divine union. he exploits anakin's vulnerability and isolation, claiming to worship the same gods. he gives anakin a scapegoat for not just his personal trauma but for the war, which resonates because the jedi were responsible for anakin's internal war. palpatine also claims to care about saving padmé. anakin doesn't just want her to live. he needs her to live, which doesn't mean he loves her less. the jedi taught him that he had to get permission from an external source to be good. because she gave him permission to call himself good after he did something wrong, if she dies, she takes his goodness with him. he has to face everything he's done alone, potentially expelled from the jedi order and responsible for a child. this is why it's not just as simple as running away. she's going to die in childbirth. his fears are rational because of what happened to his mother.

anakin chooses to replicate his trauma again, believing he is bringing balance, essentially lighting his reversed tarot card on fire. i cannot fully blame him. the jedi have been a shitty, hypocritical community. he is so isolated and exposed because of their behavior, not his failure to put up with it with a big smile or his unwillingness to forgive them. you can't forgive someone who's not even sorry. trusting obi-wan got his mother killed. if they leave, it means padmé is even more likely to die. "he should just accept her death." genuinely, do you actually love anyone? an inability to accept death, especially when you know it's coming, especially if you already have trauma around it, is not a "just do this" situation. he is not evil or arrogant or selfish because he doesn't want his wife to die. that very common and amoral fear is exploited by palpatine. he is desperate, and he is used. he makes choices i do not condone, but that doesn't mean we need to act like his desperation was evil. so, by the end of revenge of the sith, darth sidious is victorious. he has complete power over the material and spiritual worlds. the representative of the ideal republic is dead, and the representative of the ideal jedi is his weapon. padmé's death mirrors the loss of the republic in the material world, but anakin and the jedi are not physically dead. they are few and far between but not gone forever. more importantly, darth sidious has no idea that padmé gives birth to luke and leia, who are not in reverse. no one starts off in reverse, and they are also the product of a divine union.

darth vader does evil so much that it is what he becomes. "anakin is gone." until he is empowered by a new god, standing in defiance of his first false gods. not just his son but padmé's, a boy whose community came with the catalyst of leia asking for help. "the biggest problem in this universe is nobody helps each other." luke helps leia, and now he will help his father. when luke throws away his lightsaber, he embodies the ideal jedi. he is right, and he does good. his actions initiate the momentum that restores balance in the spiritual world while leia, who, if you ask me, has always embodied the ideals of the republic, fights in the rebellion to restore balance in the material world. luke sees the good in anakin the way his mother did, and leia sees evil the way her birth father saw it in himself. luke and leia choose to not only right the imbalance their parents created but that which was already present during the phantom menace in the corrupt forms of the jedi order and the republic.

but now we reach my problem. return of the jedi ends with yoda, obi-wan, and anakin in the same afterlife. the children are forced to clean up their parents' mess with the rest of the galaxy, even though they did absolutely nothing to create it. this is unjust to me, and i could let that go if "bringing balance to the force" wasn't the entire point. what this tells me is that the problem lies with the person who has the ultimate say over what's balanced and fair, with the god of star wars himself. i say that writers are gods because they have all the power. characters literally cannot make choices.

i believe in restorative justice. i believe that we have inherent worth. we can do good, and we can do evil. when we do evil, it's important to name that, to change the behavior, and to deal with the systems that were partially responsible. everyone who made the mess is dead. luke and leia have to do all the work. "well that's what makes them good." that idea is partially why people think anakin's love for padmé is selfish, why he can't be a victim, because he's not a perfect one. i cannot get past anakin being in the same afterlife as his abusers because he wouldn't have fallen so far if they had consistently treated him well instead of creating a literal war inside of him.

we are shown by god that palpatine is irredeemably evil, so he is killed. we are shown by god that luke is good and that he is right to defy the jedi, so he is rewarded. we are shown by god that anakin is good, becomes evil, but chooses to redeem himself. he is rewarded for doing good by the force, but when it comes to the evil he did, he's not there to repair, which isn't his fault. he didn't ask to die. we are shown by god that the jedi order do evil. they never take responsibility for this. the massacre at the temple is not the force holding them responsible. that is anakin's action. taking responsibility is not something that happens to you. what they do is hide and encourage luke to kill his father. they are not expected to redeem themselves like anakin is. "that's because they didn't do such awful things." they directly contributed to his awful things. ani would never have done this. he trusted them, and they destroyed him. they also abducted children, isolated them, separated them from their families, and indoctrinated them into a religion under the guise of keeping them safe. literally right before anakin redeems himself, they show absolutely no interest in owning up to their part in creating darth vader. how can someone who has to redeem himself from not only his mistakes but theirs end up in the same afterlife with people who can't even admit that how they practiced their religion was fucked up to themselves? that puts him ahead of them spiritually.

not only does anakin never get an acknowledgement of the harm they caused him, we as the audience are not given that. with the prequel trilogy being written after the original, it's still worth including a moment where obi-wan or yoda say that the jedi order itself was a big part of the problem. that would make it more clear to the audience that anakin was a victim of his community. god breaks his own rules for obi-wan and yoda in the same breath that he says balance is restored. this is not fair. for anakin, for luke, or for the galaxy. that means that the force is either inherently unjust or that george lucas thinks this is what fair looks like, and i think it's pretty reasonable to assume it's the latter.

i do not think it's a coincidence that the first major star wars film where we are actually told that the jedi order failed anakin, by a character that both god and the audience consider good and right, was met with such vitriolic hatred. obi-wan does say "i have failed you," and yoda says "failed i have," but this is an individual acknowledgement, and i believe the institution itself is the problem. i believe return of the jedi's ending is partially why fans have responded so viscerally to anakin, to the actors, to each other, and to the sequel trilogy, not because they're "stupid" or "confused" or "don't understand star wars," but because god himself told us one thing and then did something else. that is allowed to be confusing in a universe about balance, fairness, and justice.

a movie is a reflection of everyone involved, but writers and directors are often given singular godlike power, especially in star wars, and especially if you're george lucas. this creates a situation where i kind of have to put the blame on one individual because of the way he chose to write and direct. he was given godlike impunity and authority by his success, so he came into the prequel trilogy with ultimate authority. i won't scapegoat him for everything that's wrong with our world, but i'm not going to deify him. i'm not going to imply that everything i like was his intention and that everything i don't is my problem for not "understanding it right." this isn't just about george lucas. this is a problem with the christian god, who has been weaponized so effectively by colonizers. these tropes come out in our entertainment, so we should be aware of them or we end up carrying them forward.

my defense of anakin was, in large part, a way to process my experiences with religious and emotional abuse. i still struggle to believe my version of events because i was indoctrinated into the idea that abuse is the result of a few evil individuals rather than the truth that the system itself is abusive, and everyone contributes to an evil impact unless they put in effort to counteract that system and build something new. we recognize with words that abuse fundamentally changes people, but victims are still expected to manage their symptoms alone or face cultural punishments like social isolation and humiliation, unemployment, medical neglect and abuse, forced hospitalization, starvation, homelessness, imprisonment, and death.

the system is built to create victims and exploit them in an endless cycle. abandoning individuals, particularly those who "don't do it right," means that they often have no choice but to get help from the only people most willing, abusers, who exploit that desperation for their own agendas. that's why it's so important to me to defend anakin. it is neither of our faults that the people who claimed to want to help us only treated us well if we treated them like an authority figure. if you treat someone like they are a problem, they will start acting like it. the concept of a self-fulfilling prophecy is victim blaming, as if a person's thoughts determine their reality more than the people who hold systemic power over them. if you put in the effort to take care of people without expectation, they get better.

a snippet from clone wars: siege that made me laugh

Yeah sure let's send the 14 year old to the battlefield yipeeee

(+ 1 fatal lesbian situationship)

Let everything burn

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So another Skywalker Twins Comic begins!