skygiants

Really truly horrible to realize that over the course of its third season I have become a person who genuinely thinks The Bad Batch -- a show that, when it was announced, filled me with nothing but a sense of wistful ennui for all the hours I was going to spend watching it against my own will and better judgment! -- is the best Star Wars television I have experienced barring Andor. Absolutely appalling to discover that I genuinely think the long arc is extremely well executed! that its characters have moral nuance and complexity! that it does a better job of any other Star Wars media properties of digging into systemic clone dehumanization! that it retroactively justifies ( spoiler )! and that it does all this without leading any of its characters towards their ultimate Jedi destiny or showing a single Skywalker on screen!

Is any of this actually true? Who can say. I don't know anymore and you probably shouldn't trust me. All through Season One I was like "this is a perfectly fine self-indulgent Star Wars show for children" and then throughout Season Two I started gradually tilting my head like "IS the tragic postcanon clone show about the horrors of the military-industrial complex that I've been wanting for years bursting its way out of the Hijinks-Filled Children's Show cocoon in which it's been lurking all this time?" and now Season Three has happened and it's ALL horrors of the military-industrial complex ALL the way down and all the stuff it turns out they have been building for three seasons genuinely landed for me??? how could this happen to me. Just When I Think I'm Out etc etc

Okay one thing I do feel confident in saying is the fact that Bad Batch has bar none my favorite heel face turn arc in all of Star Wars, the Heel Face Turn Galaxy Long Ago And Far Far Away, because it is NOT about the power of love and it IS about radicalization through solidarity. ( and I am going to talk about it more under a spoiler cut )

I also really love that the show counterbalances its long redemption arcs with a couple different iterations of allies who are fun and compelling characters to have onscreen and also end up eventually betraying our protagonists -- and not in silly "lol Hondo is up to his tricks again!" ways, nor by dramatically Falling to the Dark Side, but just by making selfish and petty decisions out of fear in the way that people sometimes will do. This is especially good because broadly speaking the show often is the kind of show in which our plucky youthful protagonist who wants to believe in people and make connections with them is proven right; it makes it genuinely surprising and impactful on the occasions that she's wrong. ( spoilers again )

And! Also! I love that the the show lets its characters have different priorities, and act on them, eventually to the point of permanently splitting the party in a way I did not think would be allowed -- ( yet a third round of spoilers )

Let's see, what else ... I do really love Omega, she's a Good-Hearted Protagonist Child but I love how visibly you can see her growing into adolescence over the course of the show and that she never forget that although she's a child among adults, she's also paradoxically the oldest among them. I also, God help me, love all the absurd cameos. ( ONE LAST SPOILER ) The Bad Batch is a good show!! Maybe. If you trust me. Which you shouldn't. I'm emotionally compromised by clones and that's just going to go on being true.

To no one's surprise I really dug Andor, the show that is theoretically about Cassian Andor from Rogue One but in practice about systems and abuses of imperialism, colonialism and the carceral state and the various shapes taken by resistance to those systems!

Not that it's not about Cassian, in that he's often either the focus of events or the conceptual pivot point that sets other things into motion -- and also he is in a lot of ways going through quite a traditional refusal of the call/acceptance of the call kind of journey -- but this really is much less I think a show about individuals as individuals and much more about the glimpses we get of individuals as part of very specific systems, contexts, groups, cultures, in a way that I thought was really interesting to see.

I was a little bit spoiled for it going in but fairly minimally, and all of the plot points I knew about or thought I knew about ended up playing out in ways that were a step or two sideways from what I expected. "Surprise! here's a twist you can't predict!" is for sure not the thing that I most value in storytelling, and that's not the thing the writing of Andor is generally doing either -- just as often the broad narrative beats are exactly what one would predict (or, occasionally, symbolism so aggressively on-point that I didn't actually call it and then ended up staring at it with my mouth open like the moment when the setup for someone else's pun pays off and slams into me like a train) -- but frequently a storyline that seems to be building in one way gets abruptly derailed by anticlimax, in a way that couldn't possibly have been predicted but feels inevitable within context.

( spoilers )

Anyway, the other thing I like is the show's commitment to showing various forms of resistance and the pros & cons & messiness thereof -- there are long-running cells like Saw Gerrera's, there's flash operations and ideological infighting and Le Carre-esque , and then there are popular movements that arise naturally from ordinary people within their own contexts fighting their own particular and personal battles, and these things all happen individually but also the ripples and runoffs of those things play into each other like. Hmm. Not just streams running into the same river but a complex tidal system? My metaphor may be running away with me here but either way it's a kind of storytelling I like.

In other news within a few weeks of starting to watch this show I was required to make a character for an RPG and I said "hey is anyone else planning on making a manifesto kid because I kind of want to make an annoying manifesto kid --" and then everyone laughed at me. I did love Nemik and this was very predictable of me.

I also loved getting to grab

genarti by the elbow and hiss in delight "IT'S THE PRIDE LESBIAN! THE LESBIAN FROM PRIDE! SHE'S HERE!" perfect typecasting no notes

I watched The Book of Boba Fett with

genarti and

jothra! I enjoyed the experience; I did not think it was a particularly successful narrative.

The good:

- one is a simple person who enjoys seeing Ming-Na Wen and Temuera Morrison hang out onscreen
- one also enjoys watching Temuera Morrison have a festive and supportive Tusken wedding! good for him
- less flippantly: the show does want to make very sure that one remembers that Tuskens are people with indigenous rights to Tatooine and one does appreciate this, broadly speaking, although to my mind a lot of that good is unfortunately mitigated by [Tusken spoilers, below]
- nice that the show lets Boba Fett be bad at things
- weird Star Wars subcultures are good, actually, I think
- one is a simple person who finds it very cute when a little puppet takes a nap against a big puppet

The bad:

- while I'm conceptually down with Boba Fett being bad at politics, Star Wars ... is also bad at politics .... which made this aspect of the show more frustrating to watch than I think was perhaps intended ....
- I did not hate Boba Fett's wacky gang of misfits -- personally I love the concept of Punk Tatooine Youths On Festively Colored Velocipedes; see, Weird Star Wars Subcultures Are Good, Actually -- but in order for this storyline to be narratively successful I feel we might have needed some actual time to get to know them and care about them as characters and as a unit ... Star Wars television is just consistently beset by the desire to create pale copies of The Seven Samurai but one's reach should exceed one's grasp, I suppose
- the watcher's collective of

genarti,

jothra and I -- representing between us a fairly broad range of thoughts and opinions about the Jedi as an institution and their portrayal across the various eras of Star Wars media -- were united in our feeling that the Jedi stuff was simply not good; ( spoilers )
- ( [Tusken spoilers, below] )

The obvious:

- the back half of this show is not in fact the Boba Fett show but S3 of The Mandalorian. Everyone and their long-lost twin has already made this observation and I'm not even annoyed about it on a personal level, it's just structurally baffling; it would have been very easy not to do this! you have unlimited budget to make as many different shows as you want!
- Not Enough Feelings About Clones*

* this is obvious because there were never going to be enough feelings about clones for me regardless of how many feelings about clones the actual show contained, which, of course, was zero; however I am making my argument that if the POINT of your show is going to be "we are tired of standing alone and avoiding attachment, it's about Family now," and your protagonist has a background of strongly differentiating himself from and avoiding identification with the millions of genetically identical humans that once pervaded the galaxy loudly calling each other 'brother' and are now all mostly dead, it seems to me this would be relevant to at least mention, at least once!

I will be honest: I knew I was going to watch Star Wars: The Bad Batch from the moment they aired a trailer featuring Rex, but in a glum sort of 'you-got-me' way where I expected to want to fight it most of the way. I didn't particularly care for the Bad Batch episodes in s7 and while I am, obviously, as you all know, wildly overinvested in The Star Wars Clone Experience overall, the Bad Batch initially gave me some "Not Like Other ~~Girls~~ Clones" vibes that I didn't love -- I'm much more interested in further explorations of the individuality of (and war crimes against) quote-unquote standard-issue clones and following a group of Only Special Clones felt to me like a distraction from the main tragedy of how Order 66 depersonalized the clone troops.

...and I still do kind of feel a little bit that way -- I would truly, truly love to have at least one perfectly regular-issue non-Bad-Batch clone included in the main cast and to actually explore and interrogate the tensions there -- and, like, it's not the postcanon clone show that I personally would have designed, but nonetheless I did actually end up having a great time over the course of the first season! In large part because I am easy for the following elements:

- Unlikely Adults Accidentally Adopt And Become Overinvested In A Child ... is this becoming the pattern of more or less every Disney-era Star Wars story? Absolutely. Unfortunately I Remain Here For It.
- Look, Here's A Character Or Location You Know From Another Star Wars Property! I feel especially confliced about my enjoyment of this tbh because I do actually think that "show you a reference that you are pleased to recognize and make that a building block of narrative delight" is a sort of lazy form of storytelling to which large franchises are increasingly prone, and yet Bad Batch gave me ( mild spoilers for some specific episodes and interactions )

So, like, I don't know if The Bad Batch is good per se in and of itself, but I do think it functions pretty well as a kind of early-Imperial-era anthology show with the Bad Batch themselves and the related Kaminoan metaplot serving as a thread of connective tissue between the situations that it wants to explore and develop. I'm enjoying it a lot and looking forward to the next season, and, also, if nobody in the show ever has an actual conversation about Fives, I will be personally furious.

Some top moments from Medstar II: Jedi Healer, the sequel to Medstar I: Battle Surgeons, the second Star Wars tie-in novel about overworked and stressed-out medical professionals on a backwater yet highly contested jungle planet during the Clone Wars:

- the ongoing subplot about doctors stealing doses of the miracle drug produced on-planet, which is not allowed to be used on-planet because of how valuable it is, to secretly use on dying clones and low-level personnel

- the loving description of Barriss Offee's lifetime-guarantee spun-plastic boots

- the Doogie Houser wonder kid prodigy who shows up at the beginning of the book to replace a beloved dead character and does nothing plot-relevant throughout the book except continue being annoyingly good at surgery

- "she couldn't talk to any of her colleagues -- what was she going to say? Hey, Jos, I just became one with the entire galaxy ... and how's that case of Ortolan rhinorrhea you've been dealing with?"

- the moment the book briefly tried to red herring the audience into thinking a different character was the enemy spy than the one who was obviously the enemy spy; as a red herring it was not particularly effective but it did make me look back and appreciate the surprising skill with which the authors avoided gendered pronouns in the spy's POV sections throughout both books in the duology

- I-Five the droid, staring with dramatic reverence after a new female-coded droid who's just been brought in to work the cantina: "She's beautiful!"
"I-Five ... are you saying you're attracted to Teedle?"
"No. Had you wondering for a second, though, did I not?"

- "From what I've studied of popular culture, I think this is the moment where I'm supposed to remind you of all the wonderful advantages you, as an organic, have over me, a mechanical. Unfortunately, I really can't think of any."

- ( spoilers )

- "somehow, during his sojourn here, [the hard-boiled three-foot-tall war reporter] had become infected with a germ more deadly than any bug to be found in Drongar's pestilential ecosystem: a conscience"

- ( more spoilers, these books really did understand the brief )

Apparently there are further tie-in novel adventures of the three-foot-tall war reporter and his best mean droid friend and, on the one hand, they will not be about overworked doctors, and on the other hand, I might read them anyway?? Unfortunately this now appears to be who I am.

I was going to wait to write up Star Wars: MedStar I: Battle Surgeons until I had read the second book in the duology (Star Wars: MedStar II: Jedi Healer, for the record) but in fact I enjoyed Battle Surgeons SO much that it seemed better to write it up in the full force of my enthusiasm before I discovered whether or not Jedi Healer could live up to it ...

I picked up Battle Surgeons after hearing the folks on the Clone Wars podcast I've been listening to read the blurb out loud, because it's extremely funny:

A surgeon who covers his despair with wisecracks; another who faces death and misery head-on, venting his emotions through beautiful music … A nurse with her heart in her work and her eye on a doctor … A Jedi Padawan on a healing mission without her Master … These are the core members of a tiny med unit serving the jungle world of Drongar, where battle is waged over the control of a priceless native plant, and an endless line of medlifters brings in the wounded and dying—mostly clone troopers, but also soldiers of all species.

Yes! I thought. I do want to read Star Wars: General Hospital! This is sure to be a very funny experience!

... obviously I got punched at least four times with feelings about clones, because I play myself in entirely predictable ways.

Otherwise, Star Wars: Medstar I: Battle Surgeons does exactly what I hoped it would do and does it enjoyably: leans into being a specific kind of genre story about more-or-less ordinary people in the Star Wars universe. The only character I recognized in these books is Barriss Offee, who's there on some kind of Padawan mission, but she's not any more protagonist-y than anyone else and most of her C-plot is about squinting disapprovingly at the local martial artist/weapons instructor who seems to be going homicidally Heart of Darkness --

-- sidenote, can one really sidestep the racism embedded in the history of this particular "sucks to be a noncombatant experiencing a jungle war in a climate that feels inherently inimitable to you, a white person" genre (Heart of Darkness, Year of Living Dangerously, etc.) by setting it on a fake science fictional extra-unpleasant jungle planet with no indigenous population? great question although not one I am going to deeply consider today because that would involve thinking about this book significantly harder than I really intend to --

anyway. Aside from Barriss' personal semi-homicidal nemesis, other plots include:

- local hotshot military surgeon is bored of operating on identical clones, then distressed to confront the notion that clones are people; finds true love in the arms of sexy and minimally-characterized nurse!
- Someone Is A Separatist Spy!
- Someone Else Is Secretly In Cahoots With Black Sun And Also, Unrelatedly, Enjoys Playing The Most Dangerous Game For Sport!
- a cynical three-foot-tall war correspondent is investigating the Hutt quartermaster in order to pursue a personal vendetta!
- a world-weary formerly-independent droid who used to be a smuggler is trying to recover missing memories to figure out how he ended up as a piece of Republic medical equipment!
- another local hotshot surgeon copes with the trauma of war by playing beautiful space classical music on his not!cello!

... this is not a full plot tbh I just really love the sweet Zabrak doctor whose burgeoning classical music career got cut short by the outbreak of galactic war and feel he deserves a shoutout. I do actually have a vested interest in Barriss and I also, predictably, love the cynical war correspondent and the independent droid. I have no particular interest in hotshot surgeon or the corrupt official who also likes to hunt people for sport, but a.) the hotshot surgeon is an avenue for clone feelings and b.) the corrupt official who also likes to hunt people for sport plot is so over-the-top and yet so absolutely irrelevant to any of the actual doctors doing their actual jobs that it does add, you know, a certain atmospheric element ...

Really the book is structured more like a season of a TV show than a novel; all the plots are happening alongside each other and there's at least one scene of everyone playing poker together or cracking wise at the bar in between any major forward momentum on any of them, but by and large everyone's just kind of pursuing their own personal storylines. Life in a jungle medical unit is a rich tapestry! I refuse to make any kind of assessment of the book's actual quality but I enjoyed it very much and will absolutely read the next one, hope with all my heart it remains exactly as episodic and unrelated to Major Star Wars Plot. In conclusion, please experience some sad clone fanart from this book from Twitter with me!

My clone feelings may be time delayed but absolutely cannot be stopped!

jothra,

innerbrat and I finally finished watching season seven yesterday morning and I spent much of the rest of the day telling poor

ep_birdsall how much I cared about Rex and Ahsoka whenever we were in the same room for an extended period of time. I'M SORRY THAT ENDING WAS JUST REALLY GOOD.

( Am we the last people to have not gotten around to S7 yet until now? Spoilers under the cut anyway! )

This extremely stupid tumblr post made me laugh incredibly hard, and also kicked off a ( long and very silly Schitt's Creek Star Wars AU conversation )

Believe it or not, I have actually seen a reasonable number of films in theaters recently besides Cats (2019).

( Knives Out (no spoilers) )

( Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker (major spoilers) )

( Jumanji: The Next Level (minor spoilers) )

( Little Women (structural spoil...ers?) )

( Daughter of Shanghai (spoilers for a film from 1937) )

We finished playing our Clone Wars campaign about a year ago, and I thought perhaps my clone feelings would fade. And then Debi and I finished watching the Clone Wars a few months ago, and I thought perhaps then my clone feelings would fade.

Nope! it turns out!

Anyway, I made a Clone Wars vid, it's about created humans and free will and the panopticon.

Title: Velodrome
Music: "Velodrome," by Dessa (lyrics)

"Velodrome" (Watch on Vimeo)

(on Tumblr) (on AO3)

E.K. Johnston's Padmé book Queen's Shadow was good enough that I have now followed up with her Ahsoka tie-in novel (titled, helpfully, Ahsoka) and a.) it is not as laser-targeted to my interests as the Padmé book but it is also quite good! b.) I have so much respect for E.K. Johnston's determination to edge every big-name Star Wars character she's handed as close to canon queer as she possibly can under the constraints of her contract; a deeply noble quest and one in which she absolutely must be supported.

The book takes Ahsoka on her journey from keeping her head down as a fugitive in the wake of the [as yet un-filmed] end of the Clone Wars to becoming an active participant in the nascent Rebellion, by way of a small farming planet, where she meets a girl --

JOHNSTON: Who will be her love interest!
DISNEY: You cannot make Ahsoka gay.
JOHNSTON: OK, but I can make my OC gay, right?
DISNEY: Sure --
JOHNSTON: And give her a crush on Ahsoka, right? Ahsoka's a protagonist, it makes sense that people would fall for her, yeah?
DISNEY: We guess --
JOHNSTON: And then, I mean, obviously she'll confess her feelings to Ahsoka when Ahsoka rescues her from an Imperial prison --
DISNEY: Wait a minute --
JOHNSTON: And then I'll end the scene before Ahsoka has a chance to say anything more than "Thanks and we're not going to die!"
DISNEY: You're on thin ice here, Johnston.
JOHNSTON: SCHRODINGER'S GAY 🏳️‍🌈

-- and accidentally ends up organizing the resistance to Imperial occupation! She also befriends a smuggler family and fights some Jedi hunters while figuring out how to protagonist in a different way than the military leadership role she played in the war.

I generally appreciate both Johnston's big-picture and small-picture takes on the Star Wars universe; I like the broad sweep of Ahsoka's journey, but also the text was full of small pleasing moments, such as "Ahsoka is startled to find that the universe is full of people who are just ordinary good at things and not world-altering protagonist prodigies" and "Bail Organa is concerned that his daughter will somehow teach herself to read secret dossiers and get involved in the Resistance at the age of three."

My biggest complaint: I am here for the brief glimpses of Ahsoka's clone feelings that we got, especially at this particular moment in Star Wars canon time right after Order 66, but I wanted more of them! However, I understand that I cannot expect every good professional Star Wars fanfic to be perfectly tailored to all my interests.

Now that everyone's excited about Star Wars it seems like a good time to say that we finished all the currently available Clone Wars! I've been emotionally compromised by the first arc of this last season for the past several months!

( Season Six, under the cut )

I've been feeling playlisty recently, so a few weeks ago I did a Twitter meme where I asked people for prompts for 5-song playlistlets about things we both liked, which I would make in the next week.

...it has now been almonst a month, but on the other hand almost every playlist on this list has more than 5 songs in it, so really it was an equal-opportunity lie!

clones (star wars) for

bluestalking - I uh for sure had this one ready to go already, mostly with songs siphoned off from the playlist for my clone amateur oral historian character from our last tabletop campaign

bash for

jothra - relatedly, the playlist for my clone amateur oral historian character from our last tabletop campaign

wild theatrical productions for

evewithanapple - I was not sure whether this prompt meant 'songs from wild theatrical productions' or 'the mood of creating/experiencing a wild theatrical production', so I attempted to do the second with the first? please note that 'wild' is not a condemnation, some of these are from productions I think are legitimately delightful and some from productions I sincerely believe are terrible

Kay for

aella_irene - this was surprisingly difficult, the only thing in my personal feelings about Sir Kay that for sure I feel like I captured was my strong belief that he spends his entire life annoyed and stressed

Russian Doll for

aberration - this is another one I definitely had cued up and ready to go already

the Iron Bull (Dragon Age) for

agonistes - the Land Down Under here represents Ferelden

bog bodies -

shati forbade me from using Zombie by The Cranberries in this playlist, which, technically, I did not

UNIONS! -

happydork is lucky this playlist was not composed entirely of Daniel Kahn songs

True Pretenses by Rose Lerner for

sophia_sol - this one was so much fun to do AND coincidentally also gave me an excuse to use another Daniel Kahn song >.>

Ernest Shackleton Loves Me for

pseudo_tsuga - an attempt at conveying the Mood of this great work without using any actual songs from the show

Princess Tutu - ok YOU guys all know that my personal playlist for this is LENGTHY, but the person who requested it is my roommate M and we've just finished watching S1, so I had to leave off more than half the things I would put on it until a later date when they will make sense >.>

Twelve Kingdoms for

izilen - another playlist I have had ready to go for years just waiting for someone to ask me about it

the specific emotion of yankumi pretending that shin rescued her from the scary gang member she just beat up for

esmenet - this is indeed a very specific delightful emotion which I did my best to capture!

trapped in an inn for

nextian - a mediocre playlist for a great prompt, I would LOVE more suggestions for songs that express the feeling of 'I'm been stuck for a week in this place with a bunch of people I don't like OH WAIT no nevermind I love them now'

Feel free to chime in with a.) song suggestions for any of these playlists or b.) more prompts, I am always looking to grow my music collection and I continue to find playlisting a pleasant and soothing activity.

I really dug E.K. Johnston's Queen's Shadow, the just-released book about Padmé and her handmaidens. The book begins when Padmé ends her queenship and covers Padmé's her first year or two as senator, and there's not a lot of plot, per se, but it does the thing that really good fanfiction does of digging deep into characterization and worldbuilding to make sense of things that don't necessarily make a ton of sense in canon.

I especially loved the exploration of Padmé's persona as Queen Amidala and the way she learns to alter that persona for her role as Senator, and the amount of strategic analysis she and all her team put into that -- and also the way that her actions in the Senate during the first movie have a very real and not necessarily positive impact on the way that both her putative enemies and allies regard her.

Also, handmaidens! So many handmaidens! Artsy handmaidens! Political handmaidens! Hacker handmaidens! GAY HANDMAIDENS!

(All the handmaidens are a little bit gay, but some are much gayer than others.)

In addition to the above, you will probably enjoy this book if you like:

- encouraging explorations of the way that sitting on a committee about concrete transportation can have a real impact on both Galactic policy and the every day lives of the people you represent
- loving descriptions of incredible space outfits with lots of Genevieve Valentine-style analysis about what kind of image they're meant to convey for political purposes
- affectionate shout-outs to Bail Organa's ever-present Clone Wars green turtleneck
- Getting The Band Together scenes with Padmé and her most important canon political allies
- a lot of fairly hilarious dunking on poor Rush Clovis, whom E.K. Johnston has absolutely no time for
- really intense loyalty dynamics between royalty and their sworn servants/bodyguards
- I mean TECHNICALLY there is nothing EXPLICITLY in the book stating Padmé/Sabé as a canon romantic relationship, but Padmé is constantly thinking things like "She missed Sabé like she would miss the sun," Sabé IS canon bi, and the conversation with her own one-book casual love interest goes "You love her" "of course I do; she will always pick Naboo, and I will always pick her"
- so, you know, if you're into that sort of thing, E.K. Johnston is definitely not telling you NOT to be into it, is all I'm saying

(Please note: I am currently playing an ex-Naboo handmaiden in a tabletop roleplaying campaign and Johnston's assumptions about how handmaidens work and how gay they probably are overlap pleasingly with my own; this ALSO may have had something to do with how much I enjoyed this book.)

WELL, WE FINISHED CLONE WARS SEASON 5.

( The last ten episodes of Season Five, under the cut )

genarti: The thing is the Clone Wars just sounds like it's really depressing all the time.
ME: It's not ALWAYS depressing! Sometimes the episodes standing alone are perfectly upbeat! It's just in broader CONTEXT they're depressing!

genarti: [deeply unconvinced expression]
ME: Okay, I'm going to prove it to you. We're going to sit down and watch this episode about ADORABLE BABY JEDI and I dare you to find it depressing.

genarti, 20 minutes later: That admittedly was very cute.
ME: Now just don't think about what's going to happen to have happened to all those cute baby Jedi by the end of Revenge of the Sith!

In other news, I want it on the record that the baby Jedi episodes comprise the show's best arc to date.

( The first ten episodes of Season 5, under the cut )

I told

tenillypo that, unfortunately, I had developed a lot of feelings about the Clone Wars, and she subsequently refused to let me leave her house without her favorite Clone Wars tie-in novels: Clone Wars Gambit: Stealth and its sequel Clone Wars Gambit: Siege.

....and I completely devoured them, because is the person that I am now.

The books revolve around Anakin and Obi-Wan's Top Secret Mission to try and stop a devastating bioweapon from being developed on a tiny backwater planet by a kidnapped scientist.

(VILLAIN: If you fail to comply, we will kill your mother!
SCIENTIST: oh no
VILLAIN: and also your sister and brother-in-law --
SCIENTIST: oh noooo
VILLAIN: AND your brother and sister-in-law --
SCIENTIST: yikes!!
VILLAIN: plus four or five close personal friends --
SCIENTIST: DAMMIT, WHY AM I SUCH A SOCIABLE PERSON?)

In the first book, as you may have guessed from the title, they are stealthy! In the second book, they are hiding out on the planet in a village under siege! At all times, they are constantly engaged in debates about the greater good, acceptable risk, and ethical Jedi conduct ~~under late capitalism~~ in a state of galactic war!

(ANAKIN: I cannot BELIEVE you, OBI-WAN, A JEDI, would argue in favor of LYING to this POOR COERCED SCIENTIST --
OBI-WAN: Just because we've only rescued FIFTEEN of her SIXTEEN potential hostages doesn't mean it's okay for her to create a devastating bio-weapon, Anakin!
ANAKIN: She has the right to make an informed choice and also! THE JEDI CODE! SAYS NO LYING! TO ANYONE! EV-
ANAKIN:
ANAKIN:
ANAKIN:
OBI-WAN: ....what halted your hissy fit, my friend?
ANAKIN: oh I just remembered I'm lying about my marriage to literally everybody including you is all, NEVERMIND WE'RE FINE LET'S GO LIE TO THE COERCED SCIENTIST
OBI-WAN: what
ANAKIN: what)

In the B-plot, Ahsoka befriends Obi-Wan's ex-girlfriend, a brilliant and heroic Jedi with shimmering blue hair and golden eyes who is suffering from a tragic fatal illness!

AHSOKA: Master, what happened to you?
TRAGIC JEDI MASTER TARIA DAMSIN: I ate some very bad shellfish once and now, unfortunately, I will never recover.
AHSOKA: ...
TRAGIC JEDI MASTER TARIA DAMSIN: Sometimes them's is just the breaks, kid.

(As a sidenote, the books have pretty minimal clone stuff -- though most of what there is is EVERYONE FEELING BAD ABOUT THEM, which is how it ought to be -- but there are a few comments that give me a impression that Karen Miller ships Ahsoka/Rex. I'm not sure how I feel about this; on the one hand, Ahsoka is a baby, but on the other hand, technically Rex is probably the exact same age!)

The second book is less fun and more depressing than the first, as our guys spend most of it trapped, exhausted, and slowly being poisoned by local hazardous materials, but there's some good Senate politics stuff and also I'm legitimately interested in the Jedi ethical debates....

Other notable moments from the duology:

- the loving description of Palpatine standing there gushing publicly over Anakin while Obi-Wan and Yoda silently judge and Anakin dies a million deaths of embarrassment
- Anakin learning that Obi-Wan's friend? is someone?? that he used to bang???? and immediately going into another fit of shocked pearl-clutching, WHAT A HYPOCRITE, HOW VERY DARE
- five million iterations of Anakin bouncing off to do something heroic and impetuous while Obi-Wan shouts "ANAKIN, NO!"
- Obi-Wan: "You must admit now I was right to insist upon training Anakin, he's a credit to the Jedi." Yoda: "......your best you did!"

We're done with Season 4 of the Clone Wars! I now understand all the jokes about Darth Maul's spider legs!

( The last 12 episodes of Season 4, under the cut )

On the topic of Star Wars, which is a topic I've been on a lot recently for aforementioned reasons, last week I read From a Certain Point of View - the fanfic anthology in which A Number Of Acclaimed Authors retell the events of Star Wars: A New Hope through the eyes of pretty much every side character encountered in the entire film.

I had pretty mixed feelings about this overall. Some of the stories were charming! Because I'm an easy sell, I enjoyed every parody piece that took the banality of Imperial bureaucracy as a central conceit (standout examples: Ken Liu's "The Sith of Datawork," in which a bureaucratic genius guides a hapless officer through filling out all the right forms to cover his ass when someone asks why he let two droids escape Princess Leia's ship, and "An Incident Report," in which the officer who was force-choked by Vader files an HR report about being force-choked by Vader.)

On the flip side, there were the stories that were quite clearly designed to Make Us Feel Sad, and sometimes that worked (Breha Organa) and sometimes that did not work at all (the little red droid who almost gets picked instead of R2-D2 and just! wanted! to be loved! by a family! sorry, my heartstrings were not tugged.) And, I mean, I certainly felt appropriately solemn when I hit the first short story from the POV of a doomed rebellion member who commits to dying for the cause, but then I subsequently hit a dozen more stories that followed the trajectory of "here is some backtory to make me lovable AND NOW WHOOPS THIS IS MY LAST MOMENT, GOODBYE FOREVER" and by the time I hit the halfway point I was sort of over this as a short story genre.

In general, I think there was perhaps just a little too much of everything in this. I liked the first short story from the point of view of a member of the cantina band, but then there were FIVE MILLION short stories about EVERY SINGLE PERSON in that damn cantina and by the end of it I was like "I DON'T CARE, PLEASE LET US MOVE ON."

Also, I was confused and mildly affronted by the Lando story where he's a random gambler who apparently hasn't yet become a responsible Cloud City administrator -- A New Hope doesn't take place that long before Empire Strikes Back, does it? Am I missing something?

But I do have a lot of respect for Nnedi Okorafor for choosing to write from the POV of the trash monster.

Because she is a sadist,

jothra offered to DM a Clone Wars RPG campaign in which all the player characters were clones. Because we are masochists, we agreed that this sounded like a great idea. Last weekend, we played the campaign's thrilling finale, in which we all got brainwashed by Order 66 and spent the entire last battle fighting our own Jedi and rooting desperately for her to destroy us before we could kill her. A good and not at all emotionally fraught time was had by all!

As a result, the past week has been pretty much all clone feelings all the time around here, and the announcement that there are suddenly going to be SURPRISE NEW CLONE WARS was pretty much just the cherry on the cake, so it's probably time for me to do some catch-up Clone Wars posting.

( The first ten episodes of Season 4, under the cut )

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