• they/them

plural system in Seattle, WA (b. 1974)
lots of fictives from lots of media, some horses, some dragons, I dunno. the Pnictogen Wing is poorly mapped.

host: Mx. Kris Dreemurr (they/them)

chief messenger and usual front: Mx. Chara or Χαρά (they/them)

other members:
Mx. Frisk, historian (they/them)
Monophylos Fortikos, unicorn (he/him)
Kel the Purple, smol derg (xe/xem)
Pim the Dragon, Kel's sister (she/her)


I love the film The Last Jedi, even though I tell myself that perhaps I shouldn't. If there's a coherent overall trajectory in the new Star Wars trilogy, it's not in the on-screen narrative but in the off-screen politics and the betrayal of promise, not to mention the betrayal of any number of actors, especially John Boyega and Kelly Marie Tran, whom the Disney-Star Wars franchise left to twist in the wind, abandoned to the mob of entitled racıst Star Wars fans who feel they've purchased themselves the right to dictate creative terms over Star Wars media. The Last Jedi, even though it rises above the obnoxious milieu of modern Star Wars, is still marred by the general cowardice of the franchise. They pretended for a little while that we would get a striking new sort of hero—Finn, the ex-Storm Trooper, played by an up-and-coming young Black actor. But already, The Force Awakens was backing away from this idea. Finn was shunted to deuteragonist status to make way for Rey, and The Last Jedi cements his second-banana status. I'm not convinced that Rian Johnson did the best he could under the circumstances, either.

All the same, he made a very strong movie, one that I credit with reminding me why I ever cared about Star Wars in the first place. Johnson successfully restores a sense of true mythic weight to the Star Wars fable. I think that genuinely scared the crap out of the superfans, the way that an intensely Christian movie such as Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ put the fear of God into the reactionary Catholics who view their faith chiefly as a weapon against their neighbors. In a way, the extreme overreaction is a testament to the film's power. People don't record forty YouTube videos in a row, heaping fresh excoriations of The Last Jedi, about bad movies. Bad movies don't have enough substance to sustain heartfelt loathing on that scale.

I could say a lot about the movie but I had a particular scene in mind, one that strikes me as brilliantly managed. Johnson builds up to it with superb timing. The secondary narrative about Poe's slapdash commando raid is thin, but it works the best when it needs to work, reinforcing the struggle between Rey and the Dark Side through deft parallel editing.

And what's the moment?

Rey had become fixated on the idea that she would save Kylo Ren, just as Luke had saved his father—refusing to realize that the situation was not at all the same, and it wouldn't work a second time. Luke knew this, because he knew Kylo Ren far better than Rey. And surely Rian Johnson was also interjecting just a hint of subtext: the Star Wars superfans, who view Star Wars much as they'd view a successful fast-food chain, i.e. a source of reliable pablum, are obviously fixated on the notion of cheap redemption. They love The Return of the Jedi because it's like the equivalent of believing in deathbed conversion as a panacea for sins. "Oh I'll just do what I like until I'm about to die, then I'll repent. Problem solved!"

So Rey charges right into the jaws of danger to save Kylo Ren, believing she's seen a vision of his redemption, except it was actually a vision of something much different. Visions are tricky things, and Rey had wanted to believe she could simply duplicate Luke's feat, so she didn't think about the other possibility—the possibility that Kylo Ren would betray his master, not because he believed in goodness and repentance, but because he believed in power. And then he does that thing which so many cult leaders, so many abusive parents and partners, must revel and savor in doing: they tell someone, with the harsh finality of an executioner, that they are nothing.

"But not to me."

~Chara of Pnictogen


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