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@queenlua Happily! This is going to be long, so here's some set dressing first:

Eton College, for anyone unfamiliar, is a prestigious boys' school in England that has famously educated MANY MANY politicians, royals, nobility, and other assorted famous people. All you really need to know about it is that's it's incredibly posh and expensive and exclusive

The Eton Society (called “Pop” internally) is a self-selecting body of senior students at Eton that have historically held a decent amount of power at the school. If you’ve ever attended a school with a prefect system/house system etc you probably know a little bit about how obnoxious this kind of group can get. Now imagine they're all called Lord Godfrey Pickerington or something. Are you getting it? Is the set being dressed? Good.

Now that the scene is set, here’s our tale!!

I stumbled into Eton’s archives while doing research for a fanfiction and we’ll just leave that admission where it is!! It was in reading old issues of their student-run paper, The Chronicle, from 1883 that myself and @carebewear started becoming fixated on one guy in particular.

Cecil B. Gedge (from this point on known as Gedge) was a member of the Eton Society in 1883/84. He won a few Science awards during his time there (Biology!!) and seemed to like rowing during school sports events. He went on to become a barrister, which will make sense once you know more about him.

The best part of Gedge, though, is his appearances in the minutes for the Eton Society meetings. At least at Gedge’s time, the Eton Society seemed really fond of staging debates (more like loosely organised discussions) on a wide variety of topics.

Here are some of the riveting questions they discussed!

And my personal favourite: "Are Ghosts Real?"

(They were very divided)

Gedge first came to our attention in debate about the annexation of New Guinea, in which he apparently started an "abusive attack on the British army and missionaries":

Wow! Based Gedge!? He continues to spit period-typical truths about things like how we shouldn't tax bicycles actually because it would disproportionately affect poor people. YIMBY Gedge?? He would've loved light rail.

The final nail in our Gedge obsession was a debate on women's suffrage, in which Gedge vehemently advocates for women's right to vote and then gets no supporters at the end of the meeting. But I appreciate that he said it anyway and kept saying it. He is more persecuted that Christ, to me.

Here are some more, from anti-conscription sentiment to indirectly calling his classmates stupid to weirding everyone out by saying he wants to donate his body to science (his friend dissecting him for fun):

We started getting the feeling people might not have liked Gedge that much, mainly since one of the Society members wrote a poem about all his friends and Gedge isn't in it.

In 1884, there was some extended drama in the Chronicle where someone whom I groundlessly suspect was Gedge under a pseudonym ("A Socialist"), wrote to the editor complaining that the "debates" published by the Eton Society were "bad" (genuine quote) and that they should make a REAL debate society at the school that ALL boys, not just the self-selected seniors, could participate in:

To make a long story short most of the vocal members of the Eton Society threw up their hands at this and refused to do anything, basically boiling down to "Just because we're the prefects of the school doesn't mean we should have to actually DO anything!! Unfair!!" and also this quote which reads exactly like at least a thousand real tweets I've seen in my life

Liberal. Gedge, of course, was there giving practical suggestions, but the discussion was ultimately cut short because their principal died and they had to push a memorial issue of the paper. We have a working theory that the staff might've used that interruption as an opportunity to get the boys to cut it the fuck out.

Anyway it's a little unclear what happens to Gedge after that. He isn't credited as being in the 1884 Eton Society in the larger school register but it's unclear if that's because he wasn't re-elected or if he just graduated. Either way, he went on to become a barrister in London, which makes a lot of sense. Sadly though, he passed away in WW1, which we were really normal about

Thank you Lt. Gedge, for truly embodying the eternal spirit of an outspoken debate-kid, a friend to the lefties, a proto-yimby, a terminal back-talker, and the kid in a biology class that's a little too excited for the dissections. I hope your life, however short, was a rich and bright one. Thanks for the incredibly entertaining afternoon, brother 🫡

Anyways telling the kids to go collect their parental units at the end of an event is a) funny b) gender neutral and c) just refers to the person currently doing your parenting

His suits after the Merge, before he found Pixal (notice the coverage):

And his suits after he found Pixal (note the return of a deeper v-neck design and the robo chest peeking out):

Either that, or Zane just adjusts his suits to impress Pixal 🤭 Because what do you mean this shirtless design is something Pixal would deliberately do? Not to say it's not likely for her to do, but anyway, he definitely took off his gi top for her:

I really really wish that, instead, Luthor never says if the translation was real, with the implication being it was either fully made up or translated with such a negative agenda that innocent phrases were made sinister (eg. something like “I hope you find people who love you” becomes the part about taking many wives, because translations are always slightly biased and never more so than when they’re based off a single extant text of a dead language and paid for by a billionaire looking to ruin one guy’s life specifically).

Twenty-three years later, his own son fights him on a great big spaceship, cuts off his hand, and stands over him holding a lightsaber while Palapatine tells him to deliver the killing blow. Vader is now where Count Dooku was, sitting helpless while he waits for a Jedi to kill him at the word of a Sith. To Vader, it had to seem almost like justice. This is how the story goes--Sidious takes an apprentice, then orders a Jedi to kill them, and the Jedi becomes the new Sith apprentice. Sidious will win, because Sidious always wins, and the cycle will go on, because darkness always creates new darkness to destroy it. Luke will make the killing blow, because Vader's given him good reason to, and then Luke will become enslaved to Sidious and the dark, until the day he is inevitably betrayed and killed himself...

But then Luke tosses aside the lightsaber.

It must have been like light breaking through the darkness, to receive mercy in the situation where you yourself had no mercy. To see your son be stronger than you were, because back then you had not known that it was strength to refuse to use power. This boy who's so much like you found a way to break the cycle and refuse the chains that waited for him. The story doesn't have to end the way it always does. He found a way to defeat the darkness by refusing to give the darkness what it wants...