anundine: flowers (Default)
short version: Thanks! I hate it.

Long version under the cut for spoilers:


anundine: flowers (Default)

Since I’m not done going on Star Wars rants, it’s time to discuss one of the more criticized narrative, uh, choices made in ROTS: the death of Padme Amidala.

I would like to preface this by saying that the woman dying in childbirth trope is both overdone and kind of misogynistic, and the idea of Padme Amidala of all people dying of a broken heart is dumb as shit.

BUT

THAT SAID

Padme's death as a concept is not, fundamentally, as dumb and nonsensical as it feels. It was poorly executed, but it’s not, at its core, a bad idea.

(I feel kind of dirty)

 

My arguments are as follows:

  • Touched on in my last rant, but Sith using the Force to drain the life out of people is a thing that they can do. Palpatine draining Padme to save Anakin’s life while also removing a stabilizing force from both him and the galaxy as a whole is very Sheev.
  • Pregnancy and birth is actually pretty dangerous and puts a lot of stress on the body. Women die less in the modern era in childbirth, but it still does happen, even with proper care.
  • They were on the run from the Empire when Padme went into labor. Any medical facility they stopped at would have to have been illicit or at the very least small and out of the way, to avoid capture.
  • Humans are only one of millions of species. The droids at this (small, questionably competent) medical facility may or may not have had data packages on human care.
  • Any medical facility Obi-wan or Padme would have been familiar with would most likely have been one either associated with the war effort or smuggling. As such, even if the droids did have data on how to treat humans, it would have been geared towards traumatic injury rather then obstetrics. Just as Obi-wan have been more likely to know battlefield medicine, so too would the droids.
  • That weird cone thing is clearly terrible for human birth, but it's possible that it works perfectly fine for the birthing of whatever local species most commonly used this facility, if the facility is less of a back alley doctor and more of a poorly staffed small town hospital.
  • “Death by broken heart” could be a mistranslation of “death by heart attack”.
  • Meta point number one: if we’re already going to be killing off a woman to complete a man’s narrative arc, Padme needed to die at the dawn of the Empire to symbolically have Anakin’s ties to the Republic die and close out his story.
    • Counterpoint: Padme dying not in childbirth, but in the course of establishing the Rebellion would actually be more poetically appropriate: she died trying to undo the mistakes her husband made trying to save her. Also it would be more in character. And just less awful in general.
  • Meta point number two: Padme’s death was written into the script of the original trilogy. She has to die at some point, and killing her off-screen would have been bad in a totally different way.
    • Counterpoint: Leia describes Padme as “beautiful, but sad,” implying that she had some level of first-hand knowledge of her, so Padme didn’t have to die right away. This also supports my idea of Padme the Rebellion agent.

In conclusion: Padme’s death, as shown on screen, sucks shit. However, it could have been justified with the addition of some context and narrative groundwork. That said, Padme dying later on in the course of rebelling against the Empire would have made more sense with less effort, as well as being less misogynistic overall.

 

anundine: flowers (Default)

Recently, I was part of an argument discussion regarding Obi-wan’s role in Padme’s death by childbirth in ROTS. In it, the question was raised of, “Why didn’t Obi-wan heal Padme? Surely he could have had enough Force healing to do the equivalence of chest compressions until a real doctor could get there.”

Short answer: no, he couldn’t have.

Long answer, Watsonian:

-        Obi-wan doesn’t have Force healing. It’s just not a talent he possesses, just like psychometry is also not a talent he possesses but other Jedi do.

o      There was an argument made that he should have been able to “brute force it”. I think this is horseshit, for the reasons outlined below.

-        While there are many uses of the Force that are unconscious—increased reflexes, mild precognition, “I have a bad feeling about this”—using the Force on things outside of oneself has been shown to require a certain amount of training and mental discipline. It takes sustained mental effort to affect minds, lift objects, and, indeed, heal.

o      This is right after Order 66 and the fight on Mustafar. That’s a lot of trauma for a regular, non-psychic person. The thing about trauma is that it makes it hard to think. Everything’s a panic response. Think about the last time you were stressed, and how hard it was to remember to do things, let alone get up the wherewithal to do them. Now add the death of everything you know and everyone you love, which you got to feel on the inside of your head. Obi-wan was mentally bleeding out; even if healing occurred to him, it’s unlikely he could have been able to affect any real change.

-        Obi-wan is a diplomat-soldier, not a doctor.

o      Bodies are intensely complicated things, and learning how to properly treat them takes years. Years Obi-wan spent learning galactic law and politics, because that was more directly relevant to his job.

§       While taking care of Anakin Skywalker, known trouble magnet.

o      Even if Obi-wan did learn some medicine, it would have likely been battlefield medicine, not obstetrics. Learning how to avoid bleeding out while things are exploding is a set of skills different from learning how to give birth.

-        Draining life from one person and giving it to another is an established Sith skill; it is not unreasonable to assume that Palpatine drained Padme to stabilize Anakin. Whatever Force powers Obi-wan had left at that point would have been insufficient to overcome that, assuming Obi-wan even realized what exactly was going on.

 

Long answer, Doylist:

-        While Force healing is a thing that exists in later installments of Star Wars, it is unknown if it existed during ROTS.

o      Lucas has gone on record as conceiving of the Star Wars that he puts on screen and the Star Wars that fans put in books to be two different universes, and Force healing did not appear on screen until the sequel trilogy.

o      Lucas made shit up as he was going along. There’s a reason plot threads in ANH don’t link up quite right to the rest of the series. So if Lucas didn’t think of Force healing when ROTS was being written, it functionally didn’t exist.

-        George Lucas was more interested in the fairy-tale element of the hero’s mother dying in childbirth more than he was interested in that scene actually making sense. Relatedly, he is welcome to Catch These Hands.

 

Long answer, miscellaneous:

-        Can’t say I’m thrilled with an argument that boils down to “Obi-wan Kenobi could have fixed everything had he just tried harder and been better”

o      It relates to a train of thought I see cropping up in fandom sometimes, and that other people have also pointed out and discussed, where the way people talk about Order 66 drifts awfully close to “the Jedi were out of touch and unpopular, so they had their genocide coming.”

o      As a bit of in-universe propaganda, I live for this thought process, I really do. The idea of people in the gffa thinking “well the Jedi were corrupt and fell due to their own hubris” and then never examining what they’re actually justifying? Sublime. Phenomenal. Love it. Real life people buying into this thought process? Not thrilled. A group of people bringing about the violent, bloody end of their culture and people—including children and elderly—because they weren’t nice enough or didn’t solve other people’s problems enough….isn’t a take I’m thrilled about.

o      Also, Obi-wan is one dude. One very competent dude, but one dude. One human, mortal dude. He can’t do everything, fix everyone, always be on top of everything, always have the exact right answer. He’s going to fumble, and fall, and make mistakes, and say exactly the wrong thing, and miss obvious solutions to problems because he just didn’t see them. He already hates himself enough; we don’t need to go finding more blame to pile on.

-        During the argument, and in thinking about it afterward, I think the main point of contention was around perceptions of the Force and a Jedi’s relationship with it.

o      To put it in D&D terms, I see all Jedi as magic users, but not all as the same class.

§       Wizards, clerics, druids, etc., might all be magic users, but they are all fundamentally different. There is a certain degree of overlap, but they also just flat-out have different spell lists. At the end of the day, a wizard will not be able to fill a paladin-shaped hole.

·       In this conception, the question that was asked is, “Why didn’t the wizard cast healing word?”

o      Wizards don’t get healing spells. At no point would the wizard have had access to healing word. He can’t cast healing word, because that’s not something the class can do.

o      Wizards can only cast spells they have spent the time, in-game, to copy down into their spell book. He never copied down healing word, or any other healing spell.

o      Healing word is a 1st-level spell, and all this wizard had left was cantrips. Even if he did have healing word because of in-game justification and a permissive DM, he couldn’t have cast it.

·       Related question: “Why didn’t the wizard ever take a level in paladin? Even one level of a multiclass would give him lay on hands, you’d think he’d want that.”

o      Because when you can spend your action with lay on hands and save one person, or you can spend it on meteor swarm and save a bunch of people, meteor swarm wins every time.

o      However, others see all Jedi as all the same class, but of differing domains.

§       In this conception, all Jedi are working from the same base spell list, but differ in what spells they have to prepare vs which ones they get automatically. The question then is not, “Why didn’t the wizard cast healing word?” but rather, “Why didn’t the knowledge domain cleric prepare healing word?”

·       The point of being out of spell slots still stands, but this is a much more reasonable question to be asking.
 

 

In summation: let the tired man rest and stop trying to blame him for everything that goes wrong in Star Wars.

anundine: flowers (Default)
that one episode, in season two, with the werewolves? the one with the lady werewolf who didn't realize she was one? where she didn't turn for a whole night and then the next night she did and they had to kill her? yeah that was super gratuitous and actually i'm mad about it. there was no goddamned reason to kill her off other than for sam's manpain. in fact, pulling a PSYCH YOU THOUGHT THERE'D BE A HAPPY ENDING HERE?? SUCKER right at the end like that is bad storytelling and is an early example of the kind of nonsensical, needlessly cruel writing in the name of "gritty" and "shocking" that is endemic to current media.
anundine: flowers (Default)
rewatching supernatural really, really hammers home how young sam and dean are, really. they're just....they are so young, and it explains so much about why they make the stupid, stupid decisions they do. first time i watched this show, the were older than me. they were Adults, and Adults act reasonably and wisely, right? and now i'm watching this, and they're younger than i am, and of course they spiral like they do. of course they make dumb, reckless decisions.

also dean's just really pretty, and it explains his weird, self-conscious, hyper-masculine facade he projects at all times, because if i was a teenager with big eyes and a rosebud mouth growing up in biker bars and around john "toxic masculinity" winchester, i'd have a complex, too.

Hot Take

Apr. 15th, 2019 09:51 pm
anundine: flowers (Default)
sheev being back to take primacy as the big bad of the star wars universe once again is a commentary on the specter of institutional injustice and the forces that made bush-era politics possible. kylo ren is a clear parallel to the self-entitled incel/alt-right crowd, those who are demonstrably evil in their own right yet are nevertheless the result of wider, older systems of injustice. these systems are perpetuated, but not originated, by pale imitators who don the trappings of shitlords of yore for their own opportunistic gain, such as trump and snoke. in this essay, i will…
anundine: flowers (Default)
Listen. Listen. I've never liked Han Solo. (And before you go blasting off to leave a comment and berate me because he's So Iconic or So Awesome or So Charismatic or Harrison Ford Is So Dreamy, know this: you, specifically, are part of the problem. Let me dislike him in peace.)

So it really should come as no surprise that it has taken me this long to finally watch Solo, nor that I didn't like the movie.

Well, okay, that's a bit harsh. Isn't not that I didn't like the movie as a whole. I have no strong feelings about the movie as a whole. It's a very bland, forgettable movie. There are some good visuals, and Lando is a treat. The plot is one of the more solid ones, and the world building itself wasn't bad. The rest of my issues are as follows, in moderately chronological order:
Spoiler-ridden complaining under the cut )
Anyway the moral of this story is that I don't give a shit about Han Solo and I extra don't give a shit about his painfully mediocre "origin story movie" and I want to scream, loudly and at length, at the inclusion of so very many distasteful tropes and otherwise sub-par storytelling.

Fuck.
anundine: flowers (Default)
As I've mentioned, I'm rewatching Doctor Who. And while I stand by my opinion on Moffat, I'm having some mixed feelings about ten.

I really liked ten, the first time I saw him. He's fun! He's funny! He's got great one-liners! Tennant has a great deal of personal charisma and he killed it as the doctor. But going back and watching him...oof, is there Some Stuff To Unpack. Don't get me wrong, I still like him a lot, but I think that says more about me and my tastes than it does about the quality of that doctor. The thing is, ten's missing a lot of the compassion that supposedly drives the character, and while that's interesting to explore on a meta and micro level, it also makes him...fundamentally un-doctorish. Nine (and thirteen) are defined by the fact that they love people, and helping. They see people hurting and they want to fix it. Ten...just sees a puzzle to be solved. You remember that bit, when nine has that choice against the dalek-- killer or coward, and he chooses coward? I'm pretty sure ten would choose killer, and I'm not sure how I feel about that.
anundine: flowers (Default)
I'm rewatching Doctor Who for the first time since high school and honestly? I would like to extend a personal fuck you to Moffat for ruining this show for me, I'm having a great time. (Relatedly: superwholock can also eat my ass for being Like That, causing me to cringe away from the show long before it really ground itself into the ground) I'd forgotten how much fun this show is. There's a sweetness here, a light cheesiness and a pure joy that I had forgotten about. It's kinder, too, than I remember it being. It definitely hearkens back to an older style of scifi, an era before the grimdark revolution in storytelling.

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