Thinking about stars. And wars. And Star Wars. Let me explain.
So light travels at a fixed speed, right? We're seeing the light of, say, Betelgeuse, about (approximating for time's sake) 650 years after the star put out that light. This goes for everything emitting light.
Space battles. The light of the Battle of Yavin will travel across the galaxy for a thousand years, like every other battle. Is it a part of the weather forecast? 'And if you turn your scopes towards Ord Mantell this evening, the light of a large naval conflict from about two thousand years ago will be reaching us.'
Is it a hobby? Are there people who try to seek out the light of these battles? What does it feel like, to witness the deaths of beings who died thousands of years before you were born? Is there an echo in the Force to see it?
A hundred, a thousand years after Alderaan, after Yavin, is there a pilgrimage? Do people go to Alderaan and turn scopes and scanners towards Yavin to witness the destruction of that which destroyed their ancestors? Does it feel like victory? Does it feel hollow? Does it feel wrong to watch death like this?
What does it mean, to live in the ripples of warfare? Sure, some ignore it. Probably many do. But for those who watch, who witness - what does it feel like to see the past?
And you who fought in the battle - are you comforted to know you’ll be witnessed? Can you feel the eyes of the galaxy? Cynics and dreamers alike, what does it feel like to know that no matter what the victory tapes say, no one can edit the light of what happened here?
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
it's been a minute since i last made a bug girl, and i felt it was Time. i picked a beetle mostly because i wanted to see if i could make separately articulated wings & wing covers look nice, and it spiraled from there.
i'm not sure where the porcelain inspiration came from, but i think i've seen ceramic beetles with floral patterns before. the patterns are cut ot from napkins, with some additional handpainted details.
i don't usually give my bug girls hair, but i recently thrifted a package of blonde curls and wanted to use them. i suppose having Traditional Doll Hair extends the joke of her being a porcelain doll.
thistle is one of my favorite flowers, and i figured it would also make a nice little flower fairy. this is one of those projects where everything just lined up quickly and effortlessly; had the idea on day one, sculpthed the doll in one sitting on day two, and after printing also painted her in one sitting. it's one of the reasons i love these kinds of organic shapes; they just flow. i was a little dubious about making the flower out of acrylic yarn wefts at first, but i think in the end it captures the vibe of thistle better than fabric would have.
Maybe for the swords face cards, you could do notice/caution/warning/danger? They're not pictograms but there are four levels of increasing severity which matches with your other suits
Today's a very important day, it's World Eel Day!!
European Eels have a fascinating life cycle, starting out in the sea as little leaf-shaped larvae, riding currents into Europe as they grow, and then finally returning to the sea as full-grown eels!
You can learn more about these slippery fish and their conservation efforts at EelSuitcase !
(Psssttt, I'm selling prints of this here, the original A3 gouache painting will be going up for sale on my website soon)
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
#every time I see this picture I am briefly overwhelmed#this piece of art outlived its context and milieu#but. but. in reality there is no such thing#because art is made anew with every glance. it comes to life. awakens laughing#and time compresses. softens. the past is not so much a mystery if we remember we weren’t the first to dance.#this is what art is for#this is what it can do#it doesn’t only speak to us of our own humanity#it reminds us that humanity is shared. this girl isn’t dancing in a mirror. she is dancing with a friend.#paintings don’t simply show us the world. they help teach us how to live in it. (via @robotmango)
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
“If I had time travel I’d kill Hitler” “If I had time travel I’d stop my favourite politician getting assassinated” you’re all thinking way too small. If I had time travel I’d stop Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin from dying on the moon due to Soviet sabotage, kicking off the Great Nuclear War and devastating half of the planet.
This is such a classic trainwreck post that has the vibes of a 2014 screenshot posted to Pinterest and then the last addition is just last Tuesday I can’t even
if anything is going to move me to watch the clone wars it's finding out there's a goddamn star wars version of picasso's gernika painting. i am going to lose my mind. what the fuck could this possibly mean in the context of star wars
like look at this thing. what the fuck is this supposed to mean
this is based on a picasso painting called guernica:
and i am absolutely obsessed with what symbols they chose to keep
okay, so, the context of the painting itself is important:
the spanish civil war (1936-1939) is SUPER complicated but the two sides were basically the spanish republic (current government at the time; took over after the king abdicated) and the spanish nationalists (wanted to return spain to more "traditionalist" values; led by Franco and allied with fascist Germany & Italy)
a german & italian airforce bombed a small town in basque country (northern spain) called gernika in order to help the nationalists. over 100 people died and massive amounts of damage were down to buildings. most of the men were off fighting so most of the victims were women and children.
(gernika is the basque name of the town and what i'll be using going forward. guernica is the spanish name and what the painting is generally called in english)
the republic commissioned picasso (who was living in paris) to make a painting that both paid homage to the victims and rally the rest of the world to sympathize with spain's current plight
the painting was first shown at some.... international convention in paris & became one of the most important paintings of the 20th century
what we see in the star wars version (yes i am AWARE the person who made the SW version likely did not put as much thought into it besides possibly "make anti-war art" as I am about to, but massively over-reading things IS THE POINT OF FANDOM):
i don't know what the history of the mandalorians is but this mural is in the home of whoever the heck governor pre vizsla is
the lightbulb has been replaced by a whole-ass mandalorian. the english wikipedia article says the lightbulb represents "the sun" but every spanish language source i've consulted (which isn't a LOT but it's more than two and includes my spanish art history professor) says that the lightbulb represents scientific/technology advancement and also how that advancement aids the massive destruction of modern warfare. This interpretation might be more common among Spanish speakers because the spanish words for lightbulb (bombilla) and bomb (bomba) are related.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN
also note that the sword the mandalorian has looks like a scythe w/ the cloud. nice
also i think it's interesting that the mandalorian is haloed. "but it doesn't make sense to use christian iconography in star wars" you may be thinking, but the character in the bottom left is "mother with dead child" and is widely thought to be an example of pietà, or the virgin mary mourning christ's body after he's been taken off the cross. what does THAT mean in the context of star wars
if we switch over the the character on the right, THAT is clearly supposed to be "woman with lamp" (it looks like a candle). this woman is thought by many to be the spanish republic, bearing witness & casting light on the atrocities of war. this the SW version she has a blaster instead of a lamp. is this.... the galactic republic......? the mandalorian is blocking her bullets. she's also very much more like GRR than the original
???
EDIT: okay actually that could be "kneeling woman," based on positioning. however kneeling woman is clearly injured and in pain and probably a representation of seneless cruelty, and blaster woman is..... uh. well anyway this might be interesting in how the SW artist switched up the symbolism. idk i like "SHE IS THE GALACTIC REPUBLIC" but also i have no idea what that means in the context of whatever the is happening in TCW
the character at the bottom of the SW painting is obviously supposed to be a jedi. it's less obviously something directly from the original gernika, but i'm assuming based on the positioning and the lightsaber, this is meant to be SW-version "dead soldier." the symbolism of this dude is less clear to me, but i think it's interesting to note that in the original his sword is broken with a little flower growing out of it, while this jedi just.... dropped theirs lol. their hand DOES look like it has the squiggles from dead soldier's hand, which may or may not be representative of the stigmata of christ. hooray
the background on the left side, i think, is probably just meant to cue where this is all going down (city skyline/double moon/there's a space ship).... i don't THINK the space ship is meant to be a star wars version of the bull. but what if it was. this is going to keep me up at night
there's a little something something under the republic's gun in the SW mural that looks like part of a squid to me. what does this mean.
i think it's also interesting that in some other example of mandalorian art, non-mandalorians are given a picasso-y cubist style whiel the mandalorians are drawn in more more rigid lines.
i was asked by @phoenixyfriend to reblog it with my tag commentary, I'll clean it up but it's the same format
To clarify, this shot wasn't just in the clone wars (2008) (I looked this up as well) it was also in Rebels, 2014, where I noticed it in Thrawn's office, where he was analyzing the Mandalorian people. I was wrong, it was in Pre Vizsla's home as well.
With that said, I think it represents the sacking of the Jedi Temple on Coruscant and the taking of the darksaber from the Jedi Archives, and I have a few reasons for that.
The skyline resembles that of that of Coruscant from the Jedi temple
The woman in the front has a lightsaber that has fallen from her hands at the mandalorians feet.
Coruscant has the amount of moons required for this sort of depiction, Mandalore only has two. (Coruscant has four total, and I can see three in the piece, the two in the front, and then one more further back, next to the tip of what I presume is the darksaber.
The woman with the blaster isn't depicted as another mandalorian, she's unarmored, and given the period this was made at it could very well be that she's meant to represent the republic, in-universe, working in tandem with the Jedi.
The piece is depicted quite clearly as a moment of triumph for the Mandalorian at the center of the piece, he's domineering and above the fray, with that halo around him. On a meta level of the piece (Guernica) He'd also be the fire consuming the buildings and the women in the painting, as well as the tangle of bodies in the middle, the bull and the horse and the sword and the fire, consuming Coruscant in victory. It also could be framed as the combining of an army into one man, a representation of how Mandalorians consider themselves as a people, a one man army.
The attack on Coruscant happened during the fall of the Old Republic, the Mandalorians were at war with the planet, and as Pre Vizsla explains it, this war allowed a few members of House Vizsla to steal the darksaber from the jedi archives. It was in Thrawn's office because the man studies his subjects through the lens of art, what does the art say about the people, etc.
If we take it as the sacking of coruscant and specifically the jedi temple perhaps there's a level of awareness by the artist (in universe) that they (the mandalorians) attacked Tarre's people— more than likely archivists, padawans, and temple employees, while there was a war going on. It's a less than honorable battle for a supposed holy goal that destroyed many, many people — the jedi and mandos ultimately among them.
And ofc using the real context of the painting— we know it was not an honorable battle, it was bombing and using the guns in the aircrafts to terrorize a city full of mostly women children on a market day, during a civil war when there wouldn't be soldiers around to do anything or help anyone there. And they specifically targeted that city, as it was a cultural heritage site to basque country, important to that resistance to Spanish nationalism/fascism.
And, referring back to Thrawn, knowing the empires ultimate plans for mandalore at that time in the story (rebels taking place shortly before the events of ANH).... “total warfare” is commonly comes up and is depicted in irl through events like depicted in Guernica; so from a meta perspective it may have been chosen to be brought back up not only to discuss the Darksaber, but also to symbolize what was about to be depicted in the mandalorian s1 which was to my knowledge being developed around the same time as rebels Mandalore episodes in real life. (Rebels, Trials of the darksaber came out in 2017, Mandalorian S1 in 2019.)
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
