I couldn't figure out how to put it in to words last night when I was summarizing my thoughts on Visions S2, but I think "Screecher's Reach" does a really good job with the concept of the Sith/dark side as corruption, in how it takes familiar, positive elements we've seen in other Star Wars stories, and twists them. Everything is recognizable on the surface, but just...off. Unsettling in a way that isn't obvious at first.
For example, the repetition of a mantra. We've seen this before, but usually with something that invokes the Force. An appeal to strength and courage seems positive enough (and in another franchise might very well be), but it definitely seemed odd, not Star Wars-y...until it took a dark turn when the protagonist describes herself as "strong" in reference to her taking a life, and the appearance of a Sith. It made complete sense then.
Another example, the test in a dark side cave. We've seen this before, as a way for Jedi to face themselves and confront their fears. And the narrative seems to travel this route, until it's revealed that the test was not to face herself, but another being - and kill them. Luke fails a Jedi's test by bringing his weapon and fear and anger with him, and sees his own face when he kills the illusionary Vader. This short turns that on its head, with our protagonist passing a Sith's test by taking up a weapon already inside. She sees nothing (that's shown to us) when she kills the real, living Sith. She doesn't face her dark reflection, but it is her reflection since she goes with the Sith in the end.
And of course, the mentor and leaving your old life behind - usually positive in this franchise. But here, while it has all the same trappings of the more positive or bittersweet departures (even echoing Shmi's "don't look back"), the audience knows that the Sith doesn't have any good intentions here, and that nothing but misery waits for the protagonist, not the better life she's expecting.
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Hurry up and Wait
I love the trope that Obi Wan gets visions of the future (the CW, Order 66, and later) and through these visions he (accidentally or otherwise) saves the galaxy. Let's take a walk through a twist in that.
Obi Wan gets those visions of the future, but never consciously remembers them. Only a lingering sense that he needed to be a Jedi knight (so that he could be in a position to find the clones). Subconsciously, however, he falls in love (platonically) with the clones in general and falls in love (romantically) with Cody in particular, even though he has no memory of it.
As a consequence any Force user with even a hint of a connection to the unifying Force can tell upon meeting Obi Wan that the Force has a Plan with a capital P for him.
This changes nothing about his Padawanship (From which I cherry pick parts of anything I can get my hands on, assume that anything that is known that does not directly contradict what is in here is in play). Qui Gon Jinn’s connection is exclusively to the Living Force, as is Yoda’s.
You know where it starts changing things? When Obi Wan takes Anakin as a Padawan. Anakin, as a child of the Force, got an even clearer sense of the Force Plan. He could sense that Obi Wan would find something(someone) and leave the Jedi before Anakin’s padawanship was finished. He could sense that this would be important, changing the tides of the galaxy kind of important.
So before Anakin could ever become attached to Obi Wan, he is dissuaded. In this Obi Wan is not Master/Teacher/Father/Brother. He is viewed as a tutor, or favored babysitter, until it is time for Anakin to go to his actual Master. And Obi Wan never begrudges teaching Anakin, never lets Anakin think that there was somewhere else Obi Wan had to be, because there wasn’t. Not yet.
Perhaps in another universe Palpatine would have been able to step into the space Obi Wan never realized he made. Except the first time Palpatine pushed to meet with Anakin, Obi Wan had an unexplainable (to anyone who did not know the future he was seeing in his dreams) panic attack strong enough that he needed to go to the healing halls. This panic attack, and the subsequent smaller ones he has whenever he thinks too long about Palpatine being alone with Anakin have two major consequences for Anakin specifically and one for the Order overall.
The first is that Anakin never grows to trust Palpatine. He meets with him, because Palpatine made some fairly heavy-handed implied threats to the Jedi if they did not provide him with the company of a small boy, but he never really lets him in. This Anakin never forgets the lessons that he must have learned as a young slave, particularly ‘never trust a smiling, kindly man in power’. Anakin, at the insistence of the High Council, Obi Wan, and his own instincts is required to see a healer and a mind healer after every session with Palpatine (for fear that was grooming Anakin-which he was, just not the way the Jedi thought).
The second consequence is that the High Council as a whole, and Mace Windu specifically, keeps a closer eye on Anakin. It is to Mace that Anakin begins to turn as a Mentor, whom Anakin is sure will be his Master when it is time for Obi Wan to leave. So, much like with Ahsoka in Canon, Mace and Obi Wan end up co parenting Anakin. And it is understood, and has been exhaustively discussed by all three (to the extent that Anakin's age allows to reasonably be part of the discussion), that Mace is Anakin’s master, though Obi Wan may be considered so on paper (Mace, as head of the Order, cannot take on a too young Padawan. When Anakin is older, certainly, and if Obi Wan leaves early, sure, but for now the day to day is handled by Obi Wan).
The order as a whole, and the High Council in particular, had no actual idea that the Chancellor (and possibly other Senators or representatives) can effectively make the Jedi Order deliver a 9 year old boy to his office and leave. They immediately set a mixed group of Archivist and Shadows to go through all of the treaties, laws, and Senate rulings that can possibly refer to or affect the Jedi. Going through all the laws and rulings and things that should not have affected the Jedi but do(because of a confluence of three, or four, or six different laws that separately don’t do shit to trap the Jedi but together create something that is Ironclad and razor sharp) takes several months. The results are so horrifying that several shadows have to be talked down from the ledge of taking over the Republic entirely.
The High Council decides that they will begin to untangle themselves from the control of the Republic, but that they must do it quietly. There is concern that if they bring attention to the potential for abuse of the Jedi Order, there are beings that would take advantage. They do not realize that they are caught in a Sith Plot (one that in Canon would see them forced to be generals of a slave army). Instead they believe the laws that entrap them to be, not quite coincidence, but that their effect on the Jedi is secondary. So that is going on behind the scenes.
We come to the mission that would get the clones discovered, the one that was supposed to spark a war. Palpatine fully believes that everything is on track with Anakin, as he has not clocked onto the fact that Anakin is humoring him and does not trust him. So Palpatine enacts his plan to get Anakin alone with Padme, hoping that something Jedi code breaking will result (Palpatine does not exactly have control over Padme-Though he certainly thinks he has more than he does-however she is exactly the kind of reckless that he needs to get Anakin into com kind of trouble) while Obi Wan is sent on a chase for the assassin, Jango, which will lead him to Kamino.
Obi Wan arrives on Kamino and knows the instant that he is shown the clones that this is what he has been waiting for. He still does not consciously remember his lifelong visions, but he knows that he has found his people. He very calmly sends out a message to Anakin and Mace to the effect of ‘I have found my people. May the Force be with you. Peace Out’ then goes back and uses every ounce of his cunning and negotiating skill to take command of the clones, the ships, and all the supplies for what should have been the Republic's Army and fuck off to a planet in Wildspace (That Obi Wan owns. Until that very moment he did not know why the Force had encouraged him to acquire the planet).
Jango, who is very intrigued by the pretty red headed Jedi who had just politely browbeaten a bunch of Kaminoans (It is a very much one sided attraction, since Obi Wan is very much in love with Cody-even if he doesn’t know it yet), and Boba go with them.
No just picture this. Dooku is waiting on Geonosis for Jango Fett to lure a Jedi, specifically to lure his grand padawan to the planet so that war can get started. And Waiting. And Waiting. Meanwhile the Geonosian Queen is hovering in the background, starting to make noises that are the equivalent of ‘well, don’t let me keep you’ (and other such saying that were polite-as this was still a potential ally- for ‘Get fucken out of our house already’).
Another Meanwhile, due to a combination of the lack of needing to go to Geonosis to rescue Obi Wan, the lack of a need to go to Tatooine (By sheer happenstance Shimi was not captured by the Tuskens, thus no visions for Anakin), and the goodby message Obi Wan left (which indicated that the current assassin would not be bothering Padme for at least a few weeks), Anakin and Padme get back to the Senate in time for the Separatist Vote. While not unanimous, it is an overwhelming majority that voted to allow the Separatists to leave (Mainly because most of them wanted to be able to leave themselves if need be).
Everyone, Separatist and Republic alike, stares at each other awkwardly in the aftermath of the Vote. For some reason everyone feels as though there should have been a different outcome and no one(outside of Palpatine and his minions) can tell why. Eventually the Separatists turn and walk slowly from the room. Those who wanted the war were seething internally, but not able to show it externally.
Palpatine has to work hard to keep his screams of frustrations internal later, when he calls Kamino and finds that his shiny new army is not where he left it. Then there is the repeal of a seemingly insignificant law and it takes him nearly three weeks to place why (that one law neatly disassembles most of the legal trap that the Jedi were in, because it was the connecting law between that laws with the really harsh punishments and that laws that specifically mention the Jedi).
Back with Obi Wan and the Clones…Things are a bit strange. In the first place Obi Wan still does not consciously remember any of his visions, but subconsciously knows all of the clones and can tell them apart. So he calls the clones by name rather than designation. For some of the clones before they even choose a name. He also knows without knowing why hobbies and interests for most of the clones.
And for all that the Clones have been primed through propaganda to love the Jedi, they don’t actually fully trust anyone who is not a clone, not yet. This has the effect that Obi Wan is, without realizing it, acting very informally with clones who do not know what to make of him. This is compounded by the fact that Obi Wan sees Cody and is instantly smitten. Cody does not know what to do with this.
Hilariously this has the effect of making Jango jealous of Cody. Jango is attracted to Obi Wan, who only has eyes for Cody. So Jango is off to one side making passive aggressive comments about Obi Wan settling for a badly put together copy when he could have the original, muttered low enough that Obi Wan cannot hear. When Obi Wan does over hear one of the comments, the resulting rant on Jango failures as a person (this was before they discovered the chips, but after the realization that Jango had effectively sold his children into slavery) and how Cody is clearly superiors in every way, does help to endear the clones to him.
His visceral horror when they find out about the chips helps too.
I am not sure where it would go from here, though I imagine it does end with the Jedi, in clumps of two or three, just sort of arriving on the planet.
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I'm in love with how this season of Visions made the Force so wonderful and big in the way it can be accessed. It also rightly made the Dark Side utterly vile, terrifying and disgusting. But the way young Force-sensitive really discover the Force for the first time? (Or rediscover it, in Toul's case.) It's so magical.
It's light from your planet's plantlife and it's memories you couldn't reach before showing up as dancing paintings.
It's foggy visions on wet stones.
It's the clarity of facing yourself.
It's glowing statues, showing you that hope exists in equal measure to despair.
It's the light of a kyber choosing you reflected in your eyes.
And it's a thousand songs calling to you, so you can sing back and heal the corruption.
It's light and music and it's so personal and unique and multifaceted and nobody experiences it quite the same aaaaaah i love it so much!!!! This feels like Rebels!!!! It's like Lothal and the dancing paintings and the World Between Worlds and the wolves!!!!
HECK YEAH. That's why Star Wars needs animation, not just live-action. How do you communicate to an audience what the Force even is if you can't have moments like this? It actually felt like being there with the characters learning what the Force is, and seeing and feeling it! That's the kind of stuff I want to see the most.
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