#kingofattolia

Return of the Thief will be released on October 10, 2024 and there will be TWO matched sets of all six books! Wahooo!

Way out of my league I think. Also, no Obi-Wan no party :(

so fuck whatever canon has going on, i want THIS au ONLY

I love my absolutely idiotic djinn son so very VERY much.

I HAVE BEEN TURNING THIS OVER AND OVER IN MY HEAD because it’s a really fascinating question to ask and, at the end of the day, I’m not sure there’s really an answer, partly because it’s complicated and we’re missing so many huge pieces of Star Wars and also, if there were easy answers, god knows we’d be doing them IRL already.I’ve been turning over the question, “How do you effect and keep actual social change?” and I keep coming back to one thing at the heart of it–you have to have a general public that has a majority of people onboard with it.  Without that, if the majority of the public doesn’t care or disagrees with a social change, eventually it’s going to fall through and revert back to the way it was before.  You can leeroy jenkins it all you want, but if there’s no system in place to support those changes, if there’s no public widespread demand for it, it’s going to revert within years, if not months.That’s the big problem with the Republic, that the general public was apathetic about holding senators to responsible law-making and law-enforcement.  There were pockets of people who were protesting things like the clones being a slave army (as the Propaganda book showed us) but they were not the majority, the majority of people seemed apathetic on it, so long as they didn’t have to fight.  I mean, even with Padme’s big speech to the Senate, slavery wasn’t a part of the conversation (despite that it was the perfect place to bring it up and she says nothing about this, show how little a part of the conversation this was), but instead about how “buying people is making us poor”.As important as Palpatine was to this whole process, he didn’t invent the corruption that was in the system.  I do tend to believe that the Republic could have been saved if he hadn’t been there, that the war polarized everything and took the good-hearted politician’s jobs from difficult to basically impossible, that the sheer scale of the war kept everyone from having the time or resources to do more than put out immediate tire fires and never getting time to address deeper roots of problems.  But, had the general public reached a consensus on an issue and been willing to hold the government to it, not even Palpatine’s manipulation of the system could have held up against the uniting of quadrillions of beings.This isn’t to say that individual action had no place, because people like Bail and Mon and Padme and the Jedi are working with the system, bettering it or helping people when they can, which is important to do.  Queen’s Shadow was fascinating because it did bring up the idea of going rogue politically (which was a much gentler version of what Qui-Gon seems to be suggesting), that she did basically do exactly that during TPM, she went around the Senate after they didn’t immediately act, and Padme pays for it for years, which stymies her ability to actually get anything done or help anyone, because she’s put on the outs for it.  It sets her back and she has to work really hard to gain trusted allies--and this is her full time job, to work on this kind of influence and policy-making.  And it’s difficult, but she does make some progress, she does make the galaxy a little better, through using the system so that their can actually stand.Without Palpatine’s influence, I think more instances of this could have helped steer the Republic back from the brink.  It would be harder towards the end of the war, once everything was so fucked up, but the whole point of the war was that everyone was pouring their energy in the wrong directions and becoming increasingly unwilling to listen to anyone else, so the Separatists just kept digging in their heels as much as the Republic did.  And that wouldn’t be easy to change.  For example, you know it was his influence that had the Senate voting for making negotiations with the Separatists illegal, which meant that both sides got further entrenched in their arguments.  You take Palpatine out of the equation and it doesn’t magically get fixed, but Padme and Bail and Mon’s efforts suddenly have a chance of reopening negotations, which has a chance of settling things with the Separatists.It does make things further complicated by some of the things happening in the war, though, like, a lot of people joined the Separatists because of disenfranchisement with the Republic, but they’re also part of a group that’s literally enslaving entire planets and murdering rulers.  They try to murder King Katuunko, they try to enslave Mon Cala, they funnel support to the Zygerrians who start up their slavery again, etc.  The Separatists don’t want to just be left alone, they planned to have war from the beginning, that’s how they were found out on Geonosis in the first place.Basically, once the war started, it got a hell of a lot harder to clean this mess up because the corruption got so much worse.  But I do think it was possible to have reformed the Republic through internal activism and working within the system, had Palpatine not been there.  We see glimpses of how people start to make a real difference through it (like Padme in QS, as a most recent example, or how the Jedi help free the people that the Separatists want to enslave), but the problem is that nobody knew Palpatine was evil.  We, the audience, through hindsight, foresight, and omniscient point of view know it, and sometimes it’s easy to forget that it’s not super obvious in-world, that the vast majority of people were entirely fooled by him, so their point of view looks like they have a chance to reform it through internal workings, they have a chance to make real, lasting help to people through crawling forward in progress, but they have no idea that Palpatine is roadblocking them and making it impossible.So, ultimately, the answer is yes and no.  The Republic was worth saving from the point of view of those who were in it, because the alternatives were far worse, there was no feasible alternative, the Separatists were oppressing more people, the Empire was the ultimate in oppressing people, even burning it all down and starting over DOESN’T FIX ALL THE PROBLEMS.You have to get widespread public sentiment (and willingness to actually enforce) onboard, you have to make sure the entire thing isn’t falling apart around you, you have to get the politicians to actually do their fucking jobs, and all of those are different roles done by different people and all of them need to be in place.  And, like, radical activism does sometimes have its place, but that’s when democratic options are off the table, which can be complicated to figure out when that is, but widespread public sentiment still has to be on your side for that to actually hold--like the worlds that don’t elect a senator and get a corrupt one, then, yes, radical activism might be your only option, to rebel against the non-elected government, but if the public of that world doesn’t really care, then all the leeroy jenkinsing it in the galaxy isn’t going to hold it in place and it’ll just revert right back to where you started.Without public sentiment being onboard, you’re doomed to fail.  And I think that was ultimately the far more difficult problem that never got fixed, because there’s no easy answer to it.  If there were, we’d already be living in a utopia, we wouldn’t have gone through the shit we went through in 2016 onward.  And who the public listens to, who they should listen to, who they’re willing to listen to, who has the experience to avoid a full on smear campaign, who has the experience to speak of these things and who should be governing the people, is a hell of a complicated thing.

"You don't think I can?" She didn't think he could. . . There are so many bits from this dance that I want to DRAW BUT IT'S SO HARD BECAUSE THESE CHARACTERS ARE SO VIVID AND I NEED TO MAKE THEM PERFECT. . . . #fanart #attolia #attoliaseries #kingofattolia #queenofattolia #eugenides #irene #pencilandpaper #pencilsketches #pencildrawing #blackandwhite #traditionalart #graphite https://www.instagram.com/p/B0ulU8jH61B/?igshid=o98sfr2qkf6b

y’all i really appreciate this support djkhskjhd i’m so tempted but also worried i’ll get started and then end up too distracted to finish so keep that in mind but aaaaa

It must be something about being in the field and the expectations around it that chew up Guardians and spits them back out as hyper-competent dumpster children