#screen analysis

Ncuti Gatwa is the 14th Doctor, y'all 10 fans can fight me if you want.

Tennant's second run should be counted as similar to the Fugitive or War Doctors. Therefore:

Petition to call this regeneration "The Broken Doctor". The whole regeneration happened because the Doctor's powers got broken, after all.

Next, to the people I've seen saying they didn't understand the whole space train bit:

13's time began on a train, with a pseudo-organic tentacle being.

13's time "ended" with a train, on which there was a pseudo-organic tentacle being.

The whole opening was a callback, it even had one of them falling to the train. Just like 13 did in her first episode.

And finally, yes, the BBC are cowards, let there be gay kissing on screen. But also: are the actors/actresses comfortable with kissing each other? Do they want to do so on screen and have everyone losing their minds forever, whether good or bad?

And even putting that aside, frankly this is the best ending for 13 and Yaz. They know it's going to end, and Yaz knows herself well enough now - thanks largely to travelling with 13 - to understand that whatever comes next, she won't be able to follow.

She will always love 13, and she finally has the closure of knowing 13 loves her in return. But whoever the Doctor is next, they won't be "her" Doctor. So she walks away, having made her peace with what has to happen, accepting that it was always going to end with one of them unable to keep going.

And she gives 13 that same closure. The certainty that despite it all, despite how badly things have gone, there was and will always be at least one person who was there for it all. Who saw the best of her and the worst of her, and loved her regardless.

This is a set of headcanons I developed for Speechless about how sign works in Star Wars. I do not know any sign languages myself, but that's because I've found I have difficulty picking up new languages in general. I read up on a lot of theory and ran this past a few people who have more experience in real world sign language than I do, so I think it mostly checks out.

That said, if a disabled person (specifically deaf or with a speech disability) has some ideas on how to refine this to be more realistic, or would like to point out something that's offensive, I'd greatly appreciate it.

rex is some kind of special forces officer attached to anakin’s unit, which is why he is able to command the entire 501st but sometimes takes responsibilities down to the level of a sergeant

And I just wanted to make a note publicly that this is why I'm adjusting (some of) my Rex interps a bit, going forward, so I don't forget to credit once the fics actually go up.

This is an excerpt from the fic I'm currently working on, where I apply (a variation of) this concept, centering around how ARC-trained troopers seem to work a little to the left of standard troopers:

I don't want to downplay Anakin's trauma? But I'm pretty sure a major driving factor in how he reacted in canon was that Shmi had been tortured for a month prior to her death. And even if Sidious had been behind that and the visions, Anakin's rage is enhanced by him blaming himself for not coming earlier because he could have saved her, both in terms of life and in terms of Not Being Tortured.

I just. He'd be angry! He'd maybe try to insist that, IDK, if it was a drunk driver, then the person get jail time. Maybe picks a fistfight. If it's a parts malfunction, maybe he'd try to sue the manufacturer!

But Shmi not getting tortured for a month would be a major factor, I think! The death not being a result of senseless, prolonged cruelty would be relevant! Anakin’s decision to commit a massacre was a result of a lot of factors, but I feel like he’d be a lot less ‘let’s kill everything’ if his mom’s death was just... a normal thing. A speeder crash. A heart attack. A natural disaster. Like it sucks and he cries and he’s dealing with a lot, but he’s probably not committing mass murder, on account of there being fewer people to blame, and it being a lot less intentional.

Okay so Opinion time

They have the Jedi, which allow for precision strikes and higher efficiency, and are high-level combatants themselves.

The clone soldiers themselves are more efficient than normal soldiers, having been trained from the tube to be good soldiers, rather than growing up 'normal' and then entering training at age eighteen like the real world.

Equipment is more powerful and sturdy than real-world equivalents. IRL we know that it's a lot easier for one person to kill [significant number of people] than it would have been in, say, Ancient Sparta.

There are ways to handle battle that don't involve actually sending soldiers. The drone strikes that cause so much trouble IRL are very normal for a setting that has astromechs and the like. They need soldiers for plenty of things, but there's a lot that can be done with technology.

While this war does cover an entire galaxy, that galaxy is mostly dead space. Sure, there's lots of planets, but most of them aren't inhabited, or even inhabitable. Some of them are used as hiding spots due to said dangerous environment (e.g. Mustafar), but as much as it's worth noting how big the galaxy is, most of it isn't actually in play.

Hyperlanes mean that interstellar traffic is heavily regulated (see: why they needed Hutt cooperation). It's why Grievous's assault on Coruscant was so successful: as a general rule, there's not a lot of ways to get to the next system without resorting to FTL travel, and FTL travel requires hyperspace, and hyperspace requires hyperlanes to avoid blowing yourself to bits. If there's only a dozen ways into the Core, then there's only a dozen routes that need constant monitoring, and those routes can have the space equivalent of a police road block on just one or two points.

Wars are expensive for BOTH sides, and Palpatine and Dooku both have reason to cause the most chaos for the least cost. Palpatine wants power, but he doesn't want to waste all the money he has access to on the armies. If Dooku kept his army small, then so could Palpatine. The fact that this is a coordinated effort is important.

The war, such as it was, was for 'freedom from the Republic,' and the way they intended to achieve that goal, from an outsider's POV, was by harassing/killing/capturing the Republic's citizens until the government gave in to prevent further bloodshed by deciding the war was killing more people than the CIS's freedom(-to-engage-in-slavery-and-similar) would.

Subset of points 5 and 6, the war was apparently only fought on a handful of planets at a time, and usually there was no apparent need to retain a presence on-planet to protect it from being attacked again. Each of those planets, due to points 1-4, didn't need more than a legion or two to be dealt with other than in extreme cases.

Okay, so the question is:

Do you think togruta markings are purely genetic or partly genetic and partly influenced by the environment?

e.g. a stressful adolescence leads to more complex markings/breakage

This conversation was had in large part on discord with @atagotiak and @dracothulhu.

This week, I watched Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite. The South Korean film revolves around a low-class family, the Kims, as they con their way into working for the wealthy Parks. The main element that distinguishes this film from American cinema is its development of genre. Typically when we see an unconventional mixture of genres such as comedy and thriller, it is carefully integrated, often creating satirical humor and maintaining that tone throughout. Nevertheless, Parasite breaks this boundary by altering the genres as the plot develops rather than keeping elements of all of the genres throughout. For instance, the beginning of the film leans heavily on the comedy side with moments such as Ki-woo and Ki-jeong climbing on top of their toilet in attempts to obtain a wifi signal. We also get more humor when Ki-woo asks if the painting Da-Song made was of a chimpanzee and Yeon-gyo responds that it’s a self-portrait. However, exactly halfway into the movie at 1:05:00 when the old housekeeper turns around and asks “want to come down with me?” the film’s tone changes drastically and becomes a dark-thriller. From this point forward, the film becomes increasingly more terrifying, ultimately resulting in a more dramatic and intense ending. With this said, while incorporating elements from multiple genres including comedy, dark-comedy, thriller, horror, satire, mystery, and drama, it doesn’t bind all of them throughout the course of the film, but rather evolves into different genres throughout. This makes Parasite in the beginning and end of the film feel like two completely different movies in its tone alone.

Parasite also doesn’t fail to make socio-cultural references to life in Korea. For instance, they point out that most Korean homes have bunkers to protect them from potential attacks from North Korea and also satirically reference Kim Jong Un. The film also relies on themes of capitalism in a different way from American films. For instance, when the Parks pleasure each other while role-playing as poor, it is the film’s way of showing wealthy people’s fetishizing poverty. In addition, the film is very direct in what is happening in its dialogue, whereas American films tend to rely more on subtext. Throughout the film, the situations were very clearly stated and nothing was left for the audience to gather through clues. 

The odd wormhole did shave time off of their travel, but as far as I could tell, it was implied to only take off about half a year of it. If we assume that a decaphoeb is about a year, and use the four years sequence in the Earth flashbacks as a reference point, then they still spent roughly a year in transit.