There’s an old interview where Lucas talked through the differences between the Unifying and Living Force, basically defining them in a classic giri/ninjo dichotomy. And since we know he’s a liiiittle influenced by samurai flicks (jidaigeki), it seems fully relevant. So the conflict is between giri/Unifying (social obligation) and ninjo/Living (human feeling). To forestall arguments on this point, I know that some sources define them differently, but I swear he absolutely did define them in these terms in that original interview and his BTS interviews always follow up on this point of obligation versus love.
Qui-Gon is the only character who vocalizes anything about these ideas within the movies when he urges Obi-Wan to be mindful of the Living Force. Obi-Wan quickly ripostes that Yoda has told him to think of the bigger picture, and then we get the reminder that it cannot be at the cost of the moment. Which basically summarizes everything for the rest of the trilogy in terms of what the Jedi are doing wrong, both for the war and for their individual members.
The Jedi are themselves unbalanced, having sacrificed nearly everything for obligation to the Republic. And I will say I think that sacrifice was well meant and rooted in very legitimate concerns. The Dark Side is corrupting and intoxicating. Turning throws a switch for a Jedi that makes them instantly into the worst possible version of themselves. Of the canon Dark Siders we have, I think Barriss has the lowest body count at only, what, half a dozen? The risk is substantial and it is understandable that the Jedi would cut off all the paths to the Dark Side as well as they can. Unfortunately, the primary path to the Dark Side, as they see it, is attachment, which is essentially saying that the Living Force itself is a path to evil. And yes, they obviously do not see it that way themselves in canon for Qui-Gon to openly speak of the Living Force in positive terms. They do not think they have turned from the Living Force and clearly think the Sith are what is unbalancing the Force, rather than being a symptom of what their influence on the Force has wrought.
And then you throw Anakin into the mix. His core flaw, as presented by the Jedi Council itself, is that he is overly concerned for his mother. He is consumed by attachment. Is he in balance? Hell no. Not even as a nine year old. But the point is that they do not cite his anger or trauma as being the problem. His attachment could lead to anger, hate, and suffering. The answer is to dig the problem out at the root and eliminate pre-existing attachments and avoid future ones. The course of the movies prove that this doesn’t work for Anakin, leading him to have even unhealthier obsessions about those he secretly loves. By contrast, Luke and Leia grow up in healthy families, are allowed to love openly, and Luke is able to balance his greater responsibilities to the Force and Rebellion (Unifying) with his love for his family (Living). At the same time, he is able to lead Anakin into making that choice. He finally does the right thing, which is simultaneous an act to save the galaxy from Palpatine and to save his son.
I get kind of mad when people claim that balance is Light versus Dark. SW consistently characterizes the Dark Side and the Sith themselves as unnatural blights on the Force. You don’t balance with evil. You may never truly eliminate it, but evil is not part of the cycle of life (and of course, death isn’t evil, which is an important thing to remember). It also makes no sense because Sith versus Jedi would still leave the Force unbalanced at the end of RotJ, what with the only two Sith in the galaxy dead and one Jedi still alive.
Was Luke necessary to balance the Force? Could it have happened without genocide and twenty years of tyranny? Absolutely. I really think it could have. And I think again that Anakin would have been the catalyst, but that his own actions would have been less relevant. In a lot of ways, he was designed by the Force to get the Jedi to change in specific ways. Catering to his needs and figuring out what he needs to be a good Jedi, serve the Force’s dual aspects, and help others would have changed the Jedi on a deep level and I think it would have itself brought balance.
I mean, I keep coming back to how overwhelmingly in VLD’s universe, planets appear to have only one or two distinct biomes? No obvious snowy polar regions on otherwise warm planets for example.
This is a pretty big deal if you consider Earth can go from Antarctica to the Sahara Desert to dense rainforest to mountainous steppes.
So my thinking here is humanity’s “gimmick” roughly measuring up to other species is adaptability to multiple climates. Everyone else “seems” at first glance more specialized in one direction or another but humans as excellent generalists who can more or less live comfortably just about anywhere.
Like Altea looks like a mountainous climate so Alteans make sense as small, but incredibly powerful and sturdy beings and probably have very efficient oxygenation in their blood to cope with a lot of climbing, thin atmosphere and lots of radiation, but that’s not gonna work in their favor if they’re on a planet like how I headcanon Daibazaal- a flat, featureless near-wasteland with incredibly dense atmosphere.
Conversely the galra are all long-limbed and probably built to run for miles because before they had technology to carry them place to place they needed that, and great big lungs and heart- but… well, I made a post a while ago of Altea probably being a planet basically covered in steep stairs and the idea of Zarkon visiting back during their allegiance only to be laid low halfway up the steps wheezing for breath while a couple of nine-year-old Alteans merrily traipse all the way to the top without pause, one of them carrying half their own body weight in school supplies, versus Alfor visiting Daibazaal and in constant danger of getting lost because the visibility’s awful and your atmosphere is like soup Zarkon how do you live like this.
So humans, I feel like humans are basically the Blue Paladins of the universe, which works out thematically considering that Lance is the one who places the most personal emphasis on Earth and his connection to it.
And I mean in terms of fantastical creature lore something often overlooked is like… most other creatures have specific exploitable weaknesses- they’re hurt by iron or silver, running water, holy water, salt, certain woods, garlic, mirrors reveal their true selves… and overwhelmingly this is presented as a way to tell humans from the supernatural because humans don’t care.
And sure, vampires et al. have their immunity but humans have a lot more of them. So bringing them together if I had to mark humans as “special” in VLD’s universe I’d imagine they have a statistically low level of allergies and are really good at acclimatizing to different environments since they’re one of the only species that pre-space travel would have been already exposed to multiple wildly different climates.
listen nothing in sound design will ever come close to the sheer power of the sound of a lightsaber turning on
I truly 1000% believe that Star Wars would never have gotten as popular as it has without everything about the lightsaber being absolutely perfect.
And I also believe the lightsaber is the perfect weapon in any form of media ever.
It draws upon a traditional and iconic weapon: a sword. Swords have gravitas, an ethos, that I don’t think anything else has. People love swords. They’re dramatic, they allow posing, tense back and forth battles, tests of skill and chances to flourish and show off.
But it’s better than a sword, because it sounds fucking awesome. You know what’s even better for your sword fight? If they make a cool ass noise when they hit eachother. Like everything about a lightsaber sounds amazing. It turning on, when they clash, when they deflect something, hell even when they just sit there and HUM it sounds cool.
There’s also the different colors, and this is important because it allows there to be differentiation. Vader has red, Obi-Wan has blue, Luke gets green. They’re instantly recognizable and you can understand what side someone is on based on the color of their weapon. It also allows there to be a certain amount of personalization and customization, which is VERY IMPORTANT because you know what really gets people into your story? When they start imagining themselves in it. When people start thinking about themselves in Star Wars I guarantee one of the first three questions that will come up (if not the first) is what color lightsaber would you have.
Finally, this is a small thing but, lightsabers are just easy to carry around. You just turn the damn thing off the and blade goes away. It’s a very manageable prop to carry around, and then you get sweet noises and posing when it turns on.
So both Hunk and Lance are “supports”- they’re people who are driven by caring about the team. Both are literally and figuratively, stabilizers and there’s some overlap in what they’ll do as compassionate people who care about their friends.
Part of this is that Lance and Hunk have a fantastic synergy between them. They’ve been friends for a long time and this frankly shows, obviously, in how their thinking and attitudes can near-effortlessly slot into each other. They’re something our other team of heroes, the arm pilots (Keith and Pidge) can frankly stand to learn a lot from.
The Yellow and Blue Lion both care, but they care in very
different ways. Where Blue is arms spread wide open for a warm
hug- “it’s gonna be okay! I’m here and I love you!” Yellow cares in the
way of someone who steps in front of the people they care about, stares
hazards down and goes “Not on my watch.” One is a warm blanket to keep
out the cold- soft and reassuring- and one is a wall to stave off wind
and fire, comforting in its own way for its unyielding, unbreakable
strength.
GodDAMN what a great summation of these two’s personalities and roles on the team.
Honestly, though, I think the Blue Paladin being a looked-down-upon position and the impetus to try and cast Lance as another- mainly Black, but some people are eager to see him stay with Red or interpret him as a sort of secondary Right Hand figure rather than a Heart figure– boils down to a couple of things:
Heroism that puts supporting others above personal glory is seen as unheroic. Dull, uninteresting, this isn’t the sort of thing we tell stories about- we want to see heroes who take the front lines and take charge and have specific victories that were all them. An example of this is s4e6, where Lance personally inspired and empowered Allura in a very big dramatic manner, impossible to miss- and people don’t consider that a heroic moment for Lance. Only Allura- because Allura’s making the magic happen.
If you’re a character that supports others, there’s a common assumption that only the characters you’re supporting are important here- that you are accepting a subordinate or less important position because of prioritizing your connection over personal glory.
Because oh, sure, nobody actually wants to be without the Heart,
but nobody wants to give them the time of day or actually admit that any
of their rough tough cool guy heroes need something as wimpy as, y’know, emotional labor or anything.
In addition to loving their battle morphs, I really love what K.A. Applegate does with each of the kids’ first morphs. As with the tiger and the gorilla and the wolf, what’s important is not the generally agreed-upon symbolism of the animals themselves, it’s the details she chooses to convey or focus upon.
Tobias becomes the first one to morph, and he does it alone. Because that’s who Tobias is, at that point in the series: eager for adventure almost to the point of recklessness, hungry to prove himself without fully grasping what an adventure will entail. He’s a house cat bouncing from bed to dresser to windowsill, not exactly looking where he leaps. Rachel morphs a house cat one book later, and the description of that house cat is all about Rachel’s character. Fluffer McKitty is a gorgeous fluffy murder machine who can fight a human five times his size to a standstill, with enough reckless courage to impress Visser Three, all in a package that is deceptively pretty-looking. By contrast, Tobias in cat morph is cheerfully impulsive, eager to impress Jake and not particularly grounded—Tobias hasn’t yet learned the hard way to embrace his inner hunter.
It’s not totally clear whether Cassie beats Jake to the punch, but Jake is the next person we actually see morph. Again, it’s all about the way that Applegate chooses to describe the golden retriever. Marco in dog morph delights in being an agent of chaos (#10, #35), but Jake in dog morph is bouncy, cheerful, over-eager, and quick to defend his own—even though he is of course defending Homer’s house from Homer himself (#1). At the Sharing meeting he takes advantage of the fact that everyone overlooks a dog on the beach because even dogs without humans are so very ordinary. And that’s Jake himself in the first book: quick to respond to unexpected events, fiercely protective of his family and friends… and also a thoroughly mediocre person. He’s a dumb jock who can’t make his school’s basketball team, a gamer geek who routinely loses to Marco at the arcade, an average kid trying to escape the long shadow cast by his more-competent older brother. The empire-toppling siberian tiger is yet to come.
Whether Cassie is the second person or the third one to morph, my headcanon will forever be that she chose the horse morph because of the whole “I hadn’t played that game where I pretended I was a horse since I was about five. Okay maybe six” bit, where we know that was definitely a childhood dream (#29). Anyway, that aside, the horse morph has the same implication the wolf morph does: it’s all about endurance. It’s about Cassie being able to go and keep going toward her ideals, her goals, and who she wants to be. Cassie has the horselike ability to run through any amount of fatigue for days on end until her body won’t carry her anymore. She’s also in many ways the one most concerned with protecting this planet and living up to Elfangor’s legacy, which is why she controls the morph to be andalite-like just for a second on her way out.
Then Rachel becomes an elephant, a freaking juggernaut of destruction who can nevertheless display a surprising amount of delicacy and finesse with that long, clever trunk. Marco gets the only battle morph who can unlock doors and also pull iron bars apart with brute strength, the most human-like battle morph when he is the most reluctant and least skilled morpher. Neither one of those needs any additional commentary.
Ax’s first morph is the tiger shark, the “blue blade”—note the name—who is not only an ancient killing machine, but also definitely not a dolphin (MM4). Ax, quite accidentally, starts out with a morph that is the “natural enemy” of the dolphin that the four humans have morphed (#4). He’s an outsider, an alien, a “living weapon” who has been trained into the idea of being a warrior since early childhood (MM4). He’s also mysterious, inscrutable, someone the Animorphs aren’t sure they can trust until four books later, and with good reason. He himself withdraws from them, makes pains to separate himself from humanity, and doesn’t share important information with them for fear of compounding Elfangor’s violation of Seerow’s Kindness (#8). Although Ax eventually gets a dolphin morph, and by the end of the war he’s more Animorph than aristh, as of his first appearance he’s a weaponized, somewhat fear-inducing outsider (#46).
It’s pretty obvious (and incredibly awesome) that all of the kids’ morphs reflect strongly on their personalities. The bald eagle and the elephant are both big, loud, rough, and able to do a lot of damage but without much room for finesse. The gorilla contains both the sweet gentle kid who Eva thinks will never make it in the world and the ruthless force of destruction capable of murdering his own mother to get what he wants. The red-tailed hawk reflects not only Tobias’s desire for freedom so extreme it gets in the way of his responsibilities but also the beautiful dangerous far-sight he inherited from Elfangor. The wolf and the horse are both about endurance, about sticking by one’s guns and refusing to tire no matter how long the bitter march goes on. Ax rarely morphs both because his conservatism is simultaneously his greatest strength and his greatest weakness, and because he is simultaneously delicate and dangerous, simultaneously beautiful and inhuman.
It’s not just the use of the animals themselves that makes this motif of analogies so clever; it’s the very specific way that the animals are described. The characters make the meanings of the animal shapes; it’s not a one-to-one comparison. One could easily imagine that if it was Marco who used the wolf as a battle morph the narration would focus on a wolf’s fierce loyalty and unwillingness to fight alone instead of its untiring endurance. If Jake used the gorilla morph the series would probably mention the silverback’s concern with protecting his own rather than emphasizing the gorilla’s slow-burning fuse connected to a nuclear bomb. David morphing a lion is a sign of his tendency to be more concerned with style than substance; James morphing a lion is a sign of his instinctive comprehension of patient leadership.
This massive metaphor/framing device/commentary/character motif not only forms a huge part of the backbone of the series, it also continues to evolve as the characters themselves evolve. Jake first uses the blindly destructive rhino the first time he uses the total war tactics (“getting out of checkmate by throwing the whole chessboard across the room,” as Rachel describes it in #22) that will later get him branded “Napoleon junior” and “Yeerk-Killer” (#53). Marco starts using David’s cobra as a battle morph as the sweet kid falls away and the cold-blooded tactical mind comes to the fore. Rachel’s grizzly morph harkens back to the original meaning of the word “berserker” to refer to a warrior who fights with blind ferocity while wearing the skin of the bear. Tobias uses hork-bajir shape more than any of the others and also becomes the only one who morphs a taxxon, an andalite, or a Nartec, paralleling the story of how he (as he puts it) gets in touch with his alien heritage—and, in the process, becomes ever more cut off from ordinary life on earth.
This principle even applies to the series’s villains. Visser Three always, always chooses the loudest flashiest alien shape he can find because he genuinely doesn’t understand how to use morphing as a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer. Tom’s yeerk morphs a king cobra because they are the only snakes that kill and eat other snakes—just as the yeerk sells out his entire species for a shot at revenge and power. Efflit 1318 (the controller who kills Rachel) morphs a polar bear as a ghostly shadow-self of Rachel’s own grizzly bear, emphasized in the way those hairs Ax finds are described as “colorless” and “hollow” (#54).
But all that goes even one step further with Jake.
Jake’s favorite morphs—the tiger and the peregrine falcon—aren’t just character commentary; they’re foreshadowing. The connection between a small, fast bird and everyone’s favorite “dumb jock playing General Patton” isn’t immediately obvious the way it is with Rachel’s wildly destructive nature being embodied in the grizzly bear (#35). It only becomes evident any time Jake has been flying around in falcon morph for a while… and starts to wear out. He moves the fastest of any of the Animorphs in bird morph—and has the least ability to maintain that speed. When traveling over short distances he kicks the butts of the rest of the team at 200+ miles an hour, and when he needs to get clear across town as fast as possible Marco rapidly outstrips him and he’s left flapping himself half to death when he runs out of steam (#31).
The tiger is the same way; the narration emphasizes again and again that it is lightning-fast but a sprinter, not a marathon runner. Jake almost gets killed by the veleek because he can only keep dodging it at crazy speeds for a few minutes before he tires (MM1). He doesn’t succeed in stopping Tom’s yeerk from taking the morphing cube before Cassie gets there because, after fighting Visser Three for just a few minutes, he barely has enough energy left to keep up with a human moving on foot (#50). Like Jake, the tiger is big and loud and flashy—the others use all that orange fur as a beacon when stuck in the Arctic, and the “pants-wetting” roar as their battle cry (#25). And, like Jake, the tiger responds to threats quickly but wears out just as fast.
Jake’s entire character arc, from his first battle to his final collapse, is spelled out right from the first and second books with the peregrine falcon and the tiger. He figures out within minutes of meeting his first alien how he needs to protect his friends (drawing the hork-bajir-controllers toward him and Rachel because they’re the fastest runners, creating a diversion to let the others get away, making snap judgments about whether he can trust Tobias as the only unknown element in the group), and his ability to make rapid decisive moves continues to be his greatest strength throughout the series. No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy, which is why the team needs Jake there to change and discard and reinvent plans with nanosecond timing. He’s there to notice everything, run through rapid-fire possibilities, and make the snap judgments that will get them all home alive. And Jake does it.
For a while, that is.
Jake burns his candle at both ends, even more so than Tobias or Rachel. He stops doing his homework. Stops socializing with friends. Stops sleeping regularly. Stops eating regular meals. His brain becomes a dark disturbing landscape of chewing on his guilt over the last battle even as he worries his way through the next one. He never, ever turns off the warrior the way that even Rachel sometimes does. It’s not like he has much of a choice in the matter—out of the six of them he is the only one who has the enemy living inside his home, who has to stagger home from a battle at the end of the day only to be greeted by a yeerk asking why he was out so late and whether that’s blood on his leg, who can’t even have nightmares in peace without wondering if his PTSD is going to be the thing that gives them all away (#41). Of course he burns out. Of course it’s spectacularly awful when he does.
Maybe Jake more-or-less keeps it together through the end of the final battle, at least enough that he succeeds in winning the war. But the truth is that he falls apart after they lose his parents, and he never really puts himself back together again. He’s done. Used up. Worn out. He spent the last two and a half years moving at 200 miles an hour, and he doesn’t have anything else left in him. And he never really recovers. The only thing that ever succeeds in making him happy again is the chance to go kill himself (and half his friends) in some heroic fashion so that he can finally have some peace. His epic battle plan during the last three books is ultimately effective—they do win the war—but it’s a hell of a lot messier than anything he ever came up with before, and results in literally tens of thousands of casualties. Including a lot of innocent humans caught in the crossfire. Including his own cousin and his own brother. He gets out of checkmate, but he has to smash the entire chessboard in order to do it.
The tiger form is incredibly powerful, both strong enough to take on a hork-bajir and fast enough to dodge an andalite. It’s adaptive, able to climb and swim as well as running. Its fearlessness as a predator is encoded into its brilliant orange color scheme and voice that can paralyze prey with fear. And it cannot run for a long time, cannot survive the level of damage that an elephant or a gorilla can, and it will lose any fight it does not win in the first 60 seconds. In other words: Jake Berenson in a nutshell. We just don’t know how apropos that comparison is until the final book in the series.
Considering the allegory there, treating losing faith as some sort of empowering thing is just UGH this some fake fan bullshit lol
You wanna talk “fake fan”, how bout the fact that in losing her friendship with Narnia, she traded in her bow and arrows and practical armor that most everyone loves for flowing dresses and a focus on makeup. Some people cry till their blue in the face about wanting a variety of representation and practicality in woman warriors but seem to be fine with that getting thrown out the window if it means promoting strict materialism.
Plus, Susan’s story was never finished! C.S. Lewis encouraged his fans to finish Susan’s story because whether she was “lost” or not, she was not on the train when it crashed and therefore would not have been able to join her siblings anyway in The Last Battle.
She’s not “happier” this way, she is lost and now she is alone. Her conclusion would have been to find Narnia and herself again. She did not “find herself” in vapid materialism, that is not Susan the Gentle. That is not the strong, caring archer who ruled Narnia’s Golden Age, friendo.
can we just talk about the time that Lupin was recovering from a full moon and Snape taught the DADA class and made all the students write essays on how to kill werewolves for Lupin to read when he got back I hate Snape so much it’s not funny
Lupin gets back and he feels like crap and suddenly his best friend’s son is writing an essay about how to kill him like that is so fucked up
Bear in mind that an ex-Death Eater does this tosomeone who was in the Order, risked his life fighting against said Death Eaters and lost his best friends to the Death Eater’s genocidal leader, for the sole purpose of screwing him over, and as far as we know he experiences no consequences whatsoever for doing so.
And if that wasn’t enough, he made them write those essays hoping some of them would realize Lupin’s a werewolf. And one did, but Hermione is a fucking DECENT HUMAN BEING and said nothing. Apparently the ‘insufferable know-it-all’ can keep her mouth closed, when it’s for something important. Just like Snape didn’t do at the end of the book.
I’m getting mad, so here’s something I’ve realized while reading The Order of the Phoenix again. (Please keep in mind that my books are in Italian and some concepts might be hard to explain, I apologize for my English mistakes)
In chapter 14, when The Trio talked with Sirius, he said that two years before Dolores Umbridge had written a law against werewolves that made it almost impossible for Lupin to find a job.
Now ask yourself this question. Why two years?
What had happened two years before? During Harry’s third year? Oh, right. The Magical World had discovered that one of Hogwarts’ teachers (someone who was in constant conctat with their children) was a werewolf. Does that ring any bell?
But that’s not all! If we take a look at chapter 15, in the Daily Prophet article we can see a familiar name: Remus Lupin.
In a newspaper. Where everyone can read it. “The werewolf Remus Lupin”. No wonder he couldn’t find a job! And it’s not the first time the Daily Prophet has written about him, as it’s stated in the article itself. There must have been a huge scandal when it had all come out.
So basically, when Snape decided he couldn’t bear not having what he wanted (for example, SIRIUS BLACK GETTING KISSED BY A DEMENTOR) and spilled the secret, he didn’t only tell the whole school. He didn’t only tell the kids’ parents. The told the whole Magical World.
He told the whole Magical World that a man who had kept his condition secret all his life was a werewolf.
And the Magical World responded with a law against werewolves.
So, basically, Snape didn’t only ruin Remus Lupin’s life. He ruined the life of every single werewolf in the UK.
I would love to see more AUs reflecting just how limited a lot of Lotor’s resources are shown to be, that until pushed incredibly far in s4e3 he doesn’t want to risk anything, the riskiest he’s been is with a single swarm of fighters or burning resources that aren’t his (letting Voltron attack the fleets in s3e3) and with the exception of large construction projects pretty much his entire operation relied on five people doing everything.
It feels like people assume because he’s a prince that he’s covered in extravagant luxury but as best as we can tell he lives in his armor and seems to sink the majority of his resources and effort into scientific pursuits- getting things he can immediately turn around and use strategically.
Like he’s a prince, but he’s an exiled prince from an incredibly spartan empire, whose parents are completely disinterested in his comfort even if he were remotely inclined to ask for their help when he legitimately needed it. Losing the cruiser left him functionally homeless because he actually doesn’t have any bases.
Give me like, a superhero AU where the team is having an incredibly difficult time tracking down Lotor’s secret base and he’s just living out of an RV parked behind a Denny’s and mostly resorts to burglary because his minimum-wage internship day job can’t actually cover the costs of the things he needs for his plan. Watching TV where they’re talking about this mysterious criminal mastermind and “how are they staying undetected?” and there’s Lotor eating microwaved spaghetti-os out of the can, “I have my ways.”
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