BB-8

I’ve heard you complain about the Mortis Arc of Clone Wars. I’ve heard everything you’ve ever said about it. I’ve heard your analysis, ate it, processed it, and spat it out. It was nothing. Sorry, my friend. You were wrong this time. 



And I know what George Lucas said. I know what Sam Witwer said, in all those vertical format videos Youtube endlessly suggests to me because I like seening the man that looks like Jamie Tartt but talks like Galen Marek talk haughtily about how much Star Wars he know. I have heard the prophecy from David Filoni as he inhaled the strange vapors of Lucas Ranch and, like the augurs of ancient Greece, just spoke shit on Youtube.

I know.

*
I know. *

I know.

But you’re all fucking wrong, and it’s time somebody told you.

Because I keep hearing you talking about them as beings, Gods, force weilders— extant things, in other words. That Mortis is a place, that these characters control the Force, how awful it makes it that the Force now has Gods, etc etc etc christ almighty is this how you want to spend your time? 


Is this good for you?

The Force is a field of energy¹, the Force is tiny organisms in your blood², the force is the Whills influencing your actions through the little organisms in your blood³, the Force is three melodramatic Gods in a family feud⁴, the Force is a series of tubes⁵—

The first thing you need to correct is that the stranger the Force is, the better. The less definition it has, the better. If you ever see Star Wars define the Force one way, run, because they’ve lost the ball. Love the Mortis Gods not because they’re the truth but because they’re one of of a number of truths, a set of persons in an expanding polynity, world without end, amen⁶. Mortis isn’t bad because it adds a definition, it’s good because it fucks all the other definitions up. And if we’re lucky, people will keep on fucking up the definition of the Force for years to come, until nobody can ever write a rule about it. 


You’re not one of those people that wants the Force to be, to be modelable within the mechanics of a dice-rolling tabletop game are you?⁷ I reject you, get out of here, repent and come back because this wasn’t even the good part.

Because here’s what Mortis really is. Here’s what that Arc is, here’s what those Characters Are, here’s what The Thing Exists To Be, and again, I don’t care if Ahsoka Season 2 takes us to The Father’s Childhood home in Dixon, IL, lovingly kept up by the local historical society⁸, this is what the fucking thing actually is, and why its good, and why it matters, and why you’re all wrong and I’m right.

See Star Wars, its whole existence, has been defined by The Hero’s Journey. It’s intertwined with Campbellian analysis of Myth. There’s no Star Wars without the Hero with 1,000 Faces, there just isn’t, there’s a goddamn PBS special where Bill Moyers talks about Darth Vader for an hour because of it. Star Wars is defined by myth, by THAT myth, by the cycle of hero receiving call, rejecting call, crossing threshold, road of trials, belly of the beast, atonement with the father, magical flight, master of two worlds. Its almost pure that, maybe the purest anybody ever did it until Moana showed up.

And all of it is like that too. 


Your precious Andor? Your precious, sweet, cultural revolutionary Andor? HERO’S JOURNEY BABY, that fucker Cassian is even more Luke Skywalker than Luke Skywalker.

And I’m being agressive for rhetoric, it’s fun to write in a belligerent cadence, but let’s be clear here, basically anything can fall into the Hero’s Journey, because its a lens, not a blueprint. Its a way of seeing stories, of analyzing them, of pulling them apart into their functional parts for diagnosis.

And Mortis? Mortis is George making his own myth. Mortis is George saying “What if I had my own Hero’s Journey, my own lens for my own work”. Mortis isn’t the lore, it’s the framework for understanding the lore. Mortis is George saying, and I think this is subconscious because look at that title, I think he’s fundamentally wrong about the Star Wars he made, I think most people are fundamentally wrong about the Star Wars they make, I think subconciously saying “You all saw the Red Letter Media video where the drunks from Wisconsin played that video of me saying ‘It’s like poetry’ between sexual assault jokes?⁹ Well this is what’s like poetry. This is the rhyme to find.” 


A repeating triad of Father, Son and Daughter; Balance, Dark and Light; Past, Present and Future. Of course Ahsoka’s little owl is called Moirai, you jackasses, none of this is subtle. If they shared an eye, wove a thread, and said “Bubble Bubble Toil And Trouble” would it have helped?¹⁰

The father is the state of the force, the mentor and organizer, and the emblem of the past— his mistakes define the world we live in now.. The son is the dark side, and the conflicted present. The daughter is the hope of the future and light side manifest; the return of balance to the system.

Father, Son, Daughter 

Obi-Wan, Anakin, Ahsoka 

Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan, Anakin 

Palpatine, Anakin, Padmé 

Anakin, Luke, Leia 

Palpatine, Vader, Luke 

Han, Ben, Rey

Luke, Ben, Rey 

Palpatine, Ben, Rey

Are you seeing it now? Do you see how it goes? Star Wars is like an endless waltz, the three beats of Father, Son and Daughter continue on forever.¹¹:

Does it line up perfectly each time? No, of course not, neither does Marxist analysis but that never stopped you from running every goddamned piece of media through that filter and you live a happier life for it, so shut up and try out this lens for a time. Enjoy it. Roll around with it in your mind, that’s the point of a lens, to look and ponder at things, to see things from a different view.

You want to know why I love The Rise of Skywalker? Because in the Mortisian structure it inverts the whole thing. Instead of a system in balance falling to darkness, it starts with a triad almost completely out of balance— the Father is Dark, the Son is Dark, even the Daughter is turning Dark. The implications for the galaxy are palpable; we aren’t just out of whack here, our embodiments of the Force are almost wholly given over to chaos, and there’s no return from that.

But then, in a beautiful act of subversion, in a wonderful echo and twist to the Mortis arc, the Daughter sacrifices her own life to kill the father and save the son. The Dark doesn’t take the life of the Light in accident; the Light gives its life for the Dark. And the Dark in turn gives its life back to the life. A mutual sacrifice, a dual sanctification— if the original Mortis arc is a tragedy of vengeance and mistakes and hopeless bloodshed, a cataclysm that can only resolve with annihilation, this new Mortis, enacted in the dismal pit of the universe, a place as liminal as Mortis ever was, this new Mortis says the salvation of the Force is the Dark and the Light embracing each other, giving to each other, restoring each other.

But no, like, they’re the gods of the force now i guess. i guess they’re like the gods and if you pray to them they might grant your wishes or something. stupid mortis, wrecks the whole thing. ugh.

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1. Star Wars: A New Hope

2. Star Wars: The Phantom Menace

3. One of George Lucas's notebooks from 1976 where he also thought it was going to star Mace Windy and had seven prequels instead of three

4. Star Wars: The Clone Wars Season 3 Episode 15

5. Star Wars: Rebels Season 4 Episode 13

6. world between worlds, amen

7. Roll 2d6. If both results are 4, the "Fours are with you", and you gain 1 Force Point.

8. But do get some of the old-timey rock candy in the gift shop

9. This Cohost post is more disappointing than that hooker I keep trapped in my basement!

10. Where my Mothers, Maidens and Crones at!! Holla!!

11. That's why Star Wars will only end when we send it into the sun.