Danse Macabre

Die becoming The Vampire Lestat was not on the v-kei bingo card I didn’t know I had I until about two days ago.

How am I supposed to stop them?

Thinking about the destruction of Ilum again, thinking about a planet that’s been sacred to the Jedi for millennia after millenia, thinking about all the kyber crystals that were there, that they’re semi-sentient rocks, they feel joy and pain.  That Luke visits Ilum in the most recent comic and there’s nothing left as the Empire strip-mines it, only pain and suffering now.  Luke is a child of the Jedi, who has been stripped of his heritage through the Jedi’s genocide. Cal Kestis visited Ilum only five years after the Jedi Purge, where the Empire has already desecrated this place that he says was once so beautiful, that he remembers Master Yoda taking the younglings there and how the light would shine into the caves and you can hear how much it meant to him.  And you see the devastation all around Cal, that there’s still a kyber left for him, but the planet is dying. Ilum is a planet that is home to the kyber crystals, the planet itself must be in synch with the Force that they grow so readily there, more than anywhere else in the galaxy.  And the Empire is destroying it, to harvest crystals against their will (the crystals won’t reveal themselves to Jedi unless they’re meant to be found, unless they want to be found, which the Jedi respect, but the Empire just bulldozes and scrapes and claws and rends their way in, taking them heedless of what the crystals are screaming at them) and killing the planet. Even while Jedi can sneak onto the planet, feel the dying of it all around them, they can’t do anything.  And that’s horrific, to take all those crystals just to make a planet killer weapon. But what really hurts is knowing what happens to Ilum.  Once all the kyber has been stolen, the Empire abandons it, leaves it out in the unknown territories, until the First Order finds it.  The First Order finds it and turns it into Starkiller Base. Another desecration of a planet that was once so very alive and connected to the Force, a planet that was beautiful and spiritually sacred. And then it’s blown to pieces because the First Order made it a star systems killer. Whatever healing Ilum might have done, whatever chance it had to regrow itself, to let go of all the pain and suffering it had been through, to find its way back to balance and harmony, whether it took a thousand years or a million years, that chance is gone now. Ilum can never heal, because that’s what the galaxy did to it.  And I’m sad about Star Wars planets again.

What also gets me is that it it’s not just a symbol or a lifeless chunk of rock, but that those crystals had a form of life in them. The Empire and the First Order aren’t just destroying a symbol of the Jedi–though, that’s all it is to many of them (aside from Palpatine and Vader and maybe the Inquisitors, but that the crystals were borderline sentient is a bonus for them)–they’re destroying something that was full of song and joy and purpose and connection to the Force. They’re causing the kyber pain, they’re torturing the crystals, whether making them into Sith lightsabers or using them for evil purposes, to kill other life in the galaxy, to kill all that life on Jedha and Alderaan, two more planets that can never recover or regrow themselves, all for the sake of their own greed and power. The Empire uses living things and creatures and people all like they’re nothing, and it doesn’t matter how much they scream in pain, the Empire just keeps mercilessly tearing them apart until there’s only a dull husk left.  And then the First Order takes even that one last spark and causes it more pain and death and makes sure it can never grow again.