phoenixyfriend - Tumblr blog

phoenixyfriend · 6 hours

Text

#jango having to deal with satine and Obi-Wan pregnant amd theyre still doing satine and Obi-Wan things #jango: kenobi you are carrying the heir of my heir can you not jump in the way of a blaster meant for me for five minutes? #i have armour #satine if you make a come at me bro speech to deathwatch one more time istm #obi-wan: you look tired old man you should take a seat #satine: yes didnt you hurt your knee? #jango: do not change the subject (yes my knee does hurt)(via @threebea)

Okay I have yet ANOTHER AU idea and it's vaguely historical fantasy setting where, due to their respective fathers' deaths and alliance, Jango is king of Mandalore with Satine as his heir (despite being less than a decade younger than him).

Jango arranges for Satine to marry the grandson of the Jedi count Dooku, which is fine, they find out they get along well enough, but they have trouble conceiving. Since this is a Dualsex Obi-Wan setting, the solution to this incredibly uncomfortable situation is for Jango to get Obi-Wan pregnant in hopes that Satine's the one with low fertility, because that's basically his stepsister and Jango does NOT want to fuck her.

Obi-Wan does get pregnant, but then they find out that so did Satine, and Jango's house is just full of his pregnant heir, her pregnant husband, and two under-tens with anger issues (because Obi-Wan brought his illegitimate half-brother with him, and the kid has some ongoing conflict with Bo-Katan).

I think that while Satine has zero interest in going through another birth, Obi-Wan... really wants more kids and Misses Being Pregnant so it's time for an awkward conversation with Jango about helping out again.

Satine's pregnancy was Korkie, and Obi-Wan's was Boba... plus maybe more. Not sure if the first two Obi-Wan pregnancies should be Boba+Cal, then Omega, Boba+Omega, then Cal, or Boba, then Cal+Omega, or if I should scrap Boba being the oldest Jangobi baby, and have his first be Alpha-17 or something. There's room for a bunch of kids, I think Obi-Wan wants a whole lot of pregnancies in this AU.

Satine's a bit uncomfortable about the sperm donor being Jango of all people, but whatever, that's what being royalty is like, and honestly when it comes to pregnancy, she's very 'better you than me' about it because ow.

#how did I miss this the first time?#star wars #obitine #jangobi #obi wan kenobi #satine kryze #jango fett #phoenix talks #pregnancy mention #breeding kink mention #by implication

120 notes · View notes

phoenixyfriend · 6 hours

Text

Saw a post. Got to thinking. Am now wondering how my interpretation of characters differs from the canon, and how much of that is:

Deliberate and reasonable: in a 'fighting against canon-authorial biases' way (e.g. taking queer-coded characters to actually queer, addressing the religious stereotypes and racism baked into certain characters, expanding a female characters motivations in ways that don't match up to canon but do match up to Logical Thinking Human Behavior, updating language and slang to not include slurs, etc.)

Reasonable: in a 'yeah, I guess if you stretch your extrapolation of the canon, or focus on this part of the narrative, you can get there without contradicting the rest too much' kind of way

Deliberate: started nearly canon, and then 'ooc' but as an understandable result of the fic's events

Semi-Deliberate: kind of an art style thing, where it's definitely That Character, but through the author's specific style of dialogue and prose; author-tinted glasses, if you will

Semi-Deliberate: the author was trying, but kind of juggled too many things and you can tell that they slipped too far away from canon, and realized it, but didn't have the time/energy to fix it

Deliberate: different from canon, but within an acceptable standard deviation from the canon/mean

Deliberate: different from canon, in a sort of an AU-where-character-is-X, rather than just a different lens or the result of the fic events

Deliberate: ...but you should have honestly just made an OC, this is basically a different, new character

Probably not deliberate: different, but in a way that's kind of just. off-putting, and not particularly self-aware on the part of the author.

Feel free to reblog and have fun, and use this to talk about your own writing but DO NOT use this to vague and talk smack about other authors in your fandoms. Be Nice.

#self reblog

234 notes · View notes

phoenixyfriend · 6 hours

Text

So many possibilities with this one.

Ko-fi

Socials

#fandom stuff #star wars #videos #animatics

191 notes · View notes

phoenixyfriend · 6 hours

Text

As always

#current events #iran #israel #united kingdom #david cameron #syria #death mention

12K notes · View notes

phoenixyfriend · 7 hours

Text

Entry of the Gladiators

Remember my Fake Sith AU? Yeah, so I got around to writing it.

I started writing this around a year ago, planning to finish and post for an event. I never finished. So. Here's what I have so far, and let's hope I can get around to finishing it at some point lmao.

The year is 7939 CRC, and Obi-Wan is one-hundred percent not moonlighting as a Sith Lord with a drawling accent and a linen suit. And Anakin surely isn't pretending to be his unhinged Sith second. And Ahsoka definitely isn't actually a vigilante. And Cody absolutely isn't enjoying the chance to manage an entire set of organized crime rings. And Rex certainly isn't seducing the half-mad head priestess of an evil cult. Totally.

Chapter 1: Wake Me Up (Before You Go-Go)

Fun fact: I went to upload the first chapter of this fic, which I started writing a year ago, and I forgot I had a title for the chapter, so I just slapped something together to put into the chapter title slot.

Then I went back to my planning document and it's the same damn chapter title.

I am very predictable.

----------

Anakin wakes up with a pounding headache. This is, against all wishes, a very familiar feeling for him. Unfortunately, it has almost never been a result of something fun, like alcohol. He’s much more likely to wake up drugged and chained by his enemies or recovering from grievous injuries than, say, boozing up.

Hondo incident notwithstanding, of course.

(Besides, Obi-Wan got drunk too. That makes it his fault.)

As he catalogues his remaining fingers and extremities past the pain in his skull, he hears others shuffling nearby. The Force isn’t warning him at all, so they’re probably friendlies.

There’s a quiet groan a few feet away, high-pitched, that is almost definitely Ahsoka.

When he sits up, it’s to more pain and the ugly little realization that Ahsoka must also be in pain.

Obi-Wan’s voice cuts in. “What did you do, Anakin?”

“Nothing!” Anakin protests, his own voice loud enough to set his headache off. He runs through his most recent memories in hopes of uncovering actual wrongdoing. He doesn’t seem to actually have any memories past entering the possibly-Sith-in-origin temple, though. That’s… a bad sign, in part because they are now outdoors and looking at a completely different sky. “You went into the sketchy temple, too. I don’t remember doing anything that could have knocked us all out, especially not knocked us out and transported us to what’s probably a different planet.”

“Sky’s orange,” Ahsoka notes, getting unsteadily to her feet. There’s a moment where it looks like she’s about to fall, but Rex is closer than Anakin, and reacts fast enough to steady her.

Anakin finally gets a full look around. His master, his padawan, his captain, and Commander Cody, who isn’t Anakin’s in any way, except as a friend, but that’s not an exclusive group, because ‘his friend’ could mean a lot of—

He’s getting distracted.

“If we’re lucky…” Obi-Wan says, stretching his back with an awful cracking noise. He eyes the sky with distaste. “If we’re lucky, the cloud cover will dissipate and let us see the constellations when night falls. We can figure out where we are then.”

“Anticipating hostility from locals, sir?” Cody prompts

Obi-Wan shrugs. “Don’t want to hedge our bets on there being locals. We aren’t where we were, and we aren’t in another temple, either. Most planets in the galaxy aren’t actually inhabited by sapient species…”

“But that’s mostly because most of them don’t have breathable air, isn’t it?” Ahsoka asks. Anakin pats her between the montrals, almost like Obi-Wan used to ruffle his hair when he was this small. Well, smaller. Ahsoka at fifteen tolerates this much better than Anakin at the same age.

Ahsoka at fifteen is, however, the same height as Anakin at thirteen, when Obi-Wan was still ruffling his hair.

“You’re right, Ahsoka. Since this planet does have breathable air and some vegetation, the chances of sapient habitation are relatively high,” Obi-Wan agrees. “So, we’ll see how it goes. If we can find civilization that isn’t hostile to us, we might get off by nightfall.”

Anakin has a feeling that’s a bit too optimistic.

(Continue on AO3)

#phoenix files #star wars #the clone wars #time travel #anakin skywalker #ahsoka tano #obi wan kenobi #captain rex #commander cody #asajj ventress #ky narec

9 notes · View notes

phoenixyfriend · 7 hours

Text

One of my favourite bits of media history trivia is that back in the Elizabethan period, people used to publish unauthorised copies of plays by sending someone who was good with shorthand to discretely write down all of the play's dialogue while they watched it, then reconstructing the play by combining those notes with audience interviews to recover the stage directions; in some cases, these unauthorised copies are the only record of a given play that survives to the present day. It's one of my favourites for two reasons:

It demonstrates that piracy has always lay at the heart of media preservation; and

Imagine being the 1603 equivalent of the guy with the cell phone camera in the movie theatre, furtively scribbling down notes in a little book and hoping Shakespeare himself doesn't catch you.

#piracy #history #elizabethan era #shakespeare #shorthand

136K notes · View notes

phoenixyfriend · 7 hours

Text

#polls #early internet #aughts #what a set of choices. definitely charlie though

32K notes · View notes

phoenixyfriend · 7 hours

Note

Can you explain the Iran-Israel situation please?

Alright, let's get to it. Please note that I'm writing this on mobile during my lunch break, so I can't include reference/source links as much as I'd like. Thankfully, most of what I'm going to be telling you should be easily located by searching for an article on one of the following: APNews, Reuters, BBC Global News Podcast, Democracy Now!, NPR, or The New York Times. Long-term background is probably best found in videos by the YouTube channels Real Life Lore or tldr global news, or on wikipedia if you prefer text.

The short version: Israel attacked Iran's consulate in Syria to get at some of the military commanders that were there, which is legally equivalent to attacking Iran itself. Iran responded by sending about 300 bombs at Israel, most of which were shot down in transit. Given that they still called it a success, even though it seems only one person was even hurt, my understanding is that it's very likely that they only intended the rockets to be a show of force, rather than an actual escalation, because Iran can't afford a war right now.

To support my blogging so I can move out of my parents’ house, I do have a ko-fi. Alternately, you can donate to one of the charities I list in this post OR this post.

The long version:

Okay, let's start with some background on Israel, then Iran. This is... a lot, so if you already know the broad strokes skip down to 2023.

Israel was established following WWII by the English and French, following borders the two countries had secretly drawn up decades earlier in the Sykes-Picot agreement. The intent was to give the Jewish people a place to go... or, depending on who you ask, a place to send them. Their ancestral homeland was viewed as the best choice, sort of like a deportation millennia after a diaspora. Given that WWII had just ended by the time Sykes-Picot was actually put into effect, 'getting out of Europe' was something a lot of Jews were given to agree with.

The Arab world was not happy, as that land had belonged to the Ottomans for centuries, and had long since 'naturalized' to being Arab. I'm not going to pretend to know the nuances to when people do or do not consider Palestine to have been its own nation; it was an Ottoman state until WWI, at which point it came under British control for just under three decades, and that period is known as the British Mandate of Palestine; it ended after WWII, with the creation of Israel. Palestine's land and peoplie have sort of just been punted around from one colonizer to another for centuries.

Iran is the current form of what was once Persia. They were an empire for a very long time, and were a unitary monarchy up until the early 20th century; in 1925, Iran ellected a Prime Minister who was then declared the monarch. The following several decades had Iran's monarchy slowly weakened, and occasionally beset by foreign interventions, including a covert coup by the US and UK in 1953. The country also became more corrupt throughout the 1970s due to economic policy failing to control inflation in the face of rising oil prices.

In 1979, there was a revolution that overthrew the monarchy and the elected government, replacing the system with a theocracy and declaring Iran to be an Islamic Republic, with the head of state being a religious authority, rather than an elected one. This was not popular with... most countries. 1980 saw the closure of all universities (reopened in 1983 with governmen-tapproved curriculums), as well as the taking of over fifty American hostages from the US Embassy in Iran. You may have heard about that in the context of Ronald Reagan encouraging Iran to keep the hostages until the end of Carter's term in order to force the election.

So, the West didn't like having an Islamic state because it claims to like democracy, and also because the Islamic state was explicitly anti-American and this has some Bad Effects on oil prices. The Soviets didn't like having an Islamic State because a theocracy goes directly against a lot of communist values (or at least the values they claim to have), and weakened any influence their supposedly secular union could have on Iran and the wider middle east. The other countries in the Arab world, many of them still monarchies, didn't like the Islamic republic because if the revolution spread, then it was possible their monarchies would be overthrown as well.

(Except Oman, which is not worried, but that's the exception, not the rule.)

This is not a baseless worry, because Iran has stated that this is its goal for the Arab world. Overthrow the monarchies, overthrow the elected governments, Islamic Rule for everyone. That is the purpose of its proxies, like Hezbollah (Lebanon), the Houthis (Yemen), and Hamas (Palestine), along with less well-known groups like the Salafi Jihadists in Mali, who are formally under the umbrella of al-Quaeda, which Iran denies having any relation to but is suspected of funding. In areas where these proxy groups have gained power, they are liable to enact hard Shari'a law such as has happened in Northern Mali and other parts of the Sahel region.

While other conflicts have occurred in these countries, I think the above is most relevant.

Israel has repeatedly attacked or been attacked by other nations in the middle east, viewed as having taken over land that is not theirs, and being a puppet of the US government. The biggest conflicts have been 1947-1948, 1968/1973, and 2014.

And then, of course, 2023.

Now, Iran, more than any other nation in the Middle East, hates Israel. They have for a very long time, viewing them as an afront to the goal of spreading Islam across the whole of the middle east, and as being a front and a staging ground for the United States and other Western powers. Two common refrains in the slogans of Iran and its proxies are "Death to America" and "Death to Israel."

Due to Iran's military power and virulence towards Israel, the United States has been funneling money to Israel for decades. It has more generally been to defend itself against the Arab world at large, but it has narrowed over the decades to being about Iran and its proxies as relations have normalized with other nations like Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Cue October 7th, 2023. Hamas invades Israeli towns, kills some people, and takes others as hostage. Israel retaliates, and the conflict ramps up into what is by now tens of thousands of dead, some half of which are children.

In this time, Hamas's allies are, by definition, Iran and the other proxy forces. Hezbollah, being in Lebanon, share a border with Israel's north. They have been trading rocket fire across the border in waves for most of the past six months. The Houthis, down in Yemen, claim to be attacking the passing cargo ships in order to support Palestine. Given that the attacks often seem indiscriminate, and that the Houthi's control over their portion of Yemen is waning in the face of their poor governance, this is... debatable. It's their official reason, but given that "let's attack passing ships, claiming that we only attack Israeli or American ships and that it is to support Palestine" is rallying support domestically for their regime, it does seem to be more of a political move to garner support at home than about supporting Palestine.

Iran, however, has not attacked Israel. They've spoken out about it, yes, but they haven't done anything because nobody wants a regional war. Nobody can afford it right now. Iran is dealing with a domestic crisis due to oil subsidies bleeding the states' coffers dry, and the aging Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the leader of Iran, refusing to pick a successor. They are looking at both an economic crisis and succession crisis, and a regional war would fuck up both situations further. Iran funds most of its proxies, and they can't do that, and fight a war on top of it, while their economy is in its current state. Pure self preservation says they don't want a war, especially with the ongoing unrest that's been going on for... well, basically since the revolution, but especially since the death of Mahsa Amini.

Meanwhile, in Israel, Netanyahu has been looking at corruption charges and legal issues since before the Hamas attack. It's generally agreed that if Israel were to hold new elections right now, he would lose and be replaced, and also immediately taken to court. Netanyahu wants to stay in power, and as long as the war on Hamas lasts, he is unlikely to get voted out. A change in leadership in the middle of a war is rarely a good idea for any country, and he's banking on that.

However, the war on Hamas rests on the shoulders of American money and supplies. Without that military support, Israel cannot fight this war, and America... is losing patience.

Officially, America and most of the western world have been telling Israel to not fucking escalate for the majority of the war.

There have been implied threats, more or less since Schumer's big speech about how Israel needs a new election, of American legislators putting conditions on any future aid. There have even been rumblings of aid being retracted entirely if Israel follows through on invading Raffah.

So...

American aid to Israel has, for a very long time, been given in the name of defending Israel against Iran and its proxies.

Israel has been fighting this war against Hamas for six months, killing what is by now innumerable civilians, on the power of US military aid.

Netanyahu benefits from the continued war due to domestic troubles.

Iran does not want a regional war, or really any big war, due to its own domestic troubles.

The US is, in theory, losing patience with Israel and threatening to pull the plug on unconditional support. It's very "we gave you this to fight Iran. Stop attacking civilians. If you keep attacking civilians, then you're going to have to rely on what we already gave you to fight off Iran so that you won't keep wasting it on civilians."

Israel... attacks Iran, prompting a response, and is now talking about escalating with Iran.

I am not explicitly saying that it looks to me like Israel, which is already fighting a war on two physical fronts and even more political/economic ones, has picked a fight with Iran so that America feels less like it is able to withdraw support.

I just... am finding it hard to understand why Israel, which is in fact fighting both Hamas and Hezbollah, would attack the Iranian consulate in Syria otherwise. They can't actually afford to fight this war, escalating to a full regional conflict, on a third front.

Not without pressuring American into keeping the faucet of military funding open at full blast.

To support my blogging so I can move out of my parents’ house, I do have a ko-fi. Alternately, you can donate to one of the charities I list in this post OR this post.

#self reblog

54 notes · View notes

phoenixyfriend · 7 hours

Text

I've been thinking about how it might be useful, if not necessarily entirely fulfilling for whatever it is that I need out of them, to ask politicians how they would define a healthy economy, as opposed to just asking them how they would try to ensure a healthy economy.

President Joe Biden took to the White House lectern Friday to tout the healthy economy – strong job creation, lowering inflation and increased workforce participation and job satisfaction. - US News, Sep. 1, 2023

And

"I think we will see a big pickup in growth. We may not see it in the winter quarter...but I’m hopeful that we’ll see it in the spring,” Larry Kudlow, head of the National Economic Council, said on Fox Business. “It’s a fundamentally healthy economy,” he said, touting the 3.5 percent unemployment rate and “tremendous wage gains.” - The Washington Post, Jan. 30, 2020

In both cases they are offering a few signs of a healthy economy, the things that are quantified and measured as indicators, like unemployment, inflation, and wages.

But... wouldn't 'the ability to buy or rent a living space, and food security, for as many people as possible' make more sense?

Yeah, low inflation is the sign of a good economy, but what is the healthy economy actually doing? The jobs being created, are they actually full time and paying a living wage?

Fuck knows how many times a person at the podium has referenced the stock market as a signifier of the economy's health, and we all know that's barely relevant to the lives of us normal people.

I guess the question I'd want to ask politicians is "if the economy's health were measured in percentage of people who are able to afford housing, food, and other essentials on a full-time job with no government assistance, is the economy actually healthy?"

Low inflation means jackshit if the minimum wage is still no inflation. Job creation means something, but not if it's so far from your home that you spend most of your paycheck commuting. 'Tremendous wage gains' don't mean much if you're looking at an average that includes the CEOs and allows their paychecks to skew the data upwards.

How many of your citizens can afford housing, groceries, and medical care on a full-time wage, without government assistance?

#self reblog

44 notes · View notes