I’m gonna repost this one bit so it doesn’t get hidden behind the spoiler warning, because if there’s one thought I hope you’ll mull over from this, its this:
“We want to view Star Wars as a cycle— to quote another sci-fi property, “This has happened before and it will happen again”— but the truth is that the course of causality runs backwards. The present never echoes the events of the past; instead the past is shaped by the future it has to lead into. There is no talking about Star Wars without talking about all of Star Wars, because all of Star Wars has to have happened, past and future, before we could arrive at whatever moment we are in the present.”
i'm never going to watch ahsoka or the rise of skywalker or likely any piece of star wars television that isn't Star Wars Galaxy of Sounds - Episode 5: Beeps, but I want to share this just for this emboldened idea that gets at what we talk about all the time: the past is shaped by the future it has to lead into. that's precisely what we mean when we say teleological etiology; that the things that you are facing today exist, in the shape they do, for the purpose of a particular prescribed future. This distinctly isn't reality (or at least, as we know reality so far), but it's a necessary part of a great deal of fiction, especially science fiction; and it's a thing that has fascinated me since the first time I really understood the twilight mirage
