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~King of the Dragonfish: Chapter 7~
Obi-Wan uses a faint tendril of force to brush over his kyber, sending the animus of it his affection. It murmurs back at him, ill at ease to be handled by the energy signature it knows as Maul.
With a sigh, the jedi holds the hilt out. “Kneeling wasn't in the agreement.”
The other man sways closer, tense and watchful.
“It would please me to see you on your knees,” the sith says, reaching out and lifting the unlit saber from his palm.
Obi-Wan leans back on a hip, and crosses his arms. “I'm sure it would. Beat me up some more if you must, but I won't kneel to a sith lord willingly.”
Maul squints at him, calculating, and he has the uncomfortable realization that the other man may have simply taken that as a challenge.
“Hmmm…” The half dragonfish hums, twirling Obi-Wan's saber between his fingers, then igniting it.
He can feel the kyber song shudder. It does not want to be wielded in darkness.
Maul makes a swift strike, stopping a matter of inches from his hips. “Perhaps I should take your legs as you took mine… would that not be fair?” The man sneers, “Surely you jedi care about fairness.”
“No,” Obi-Wan counters, not giving an inch despite the sputtering heat of his own blade too close to his side, crackling as it resists this use. “The jedi code isn't concerned with being fair, only just.”
Maul grins. The defiance only seems to please him.
The dragonfish sith extinguishes the blade and sways backward on his tail, retreating to the water's edge. “I will return, and then I will take you to a different cave. Be prepared to go, jedi. I will drag you under either way.”
“Wonderful,” Obi-Wan drawls as Maul backflips into the water, hardly making a splash, “It's a date.”
Alone again, unarmed again, the jedi prisoner scowls and goes to lurk beside the magma ball. It's only mildly warm now, the cooled shell being too good of an insulator. The center of it is likely still fluid, but it's thermal radiance is diminished. Obi-Wan still leans back against it, plotting.
He had been too stressed on that first day to pay much attention to the pathway Maul had taken from open sea to this particular cave as he kidnapped Obi-Wan to it. An oversight on his part. They would be going to a new one though, and as much as he isn't looking forward to the blasted cold, it would provide an opportunity to learn some of the area.
He could pay attention to the path between here and there, and then, maybe in a day or two, find a way to make Maul consider the new cave to also be an unacceptable cell. The sith would move him again. Another opportunity.
It would take time, cunning, and no small amount of manipulation, but if he could map out enough of these caves, he may be able to learn a way out.
The next problem would be getting all the way to the surface, slowly enough to not die of drowning or diver’s sickness.
One problem at a time.
Obi-Wan flips where he's leaning on the magma rock, attempting to warm his front side in advance of this next trip. That's how Maul finds him, practically hugging the misshapen ball of it.
“Jjjedi,” the sith calls to him from the water. “Come.”
Rather than waste energy being difficult when he wants to be focused and aware for the trip to the next cave, Obi-Wan opts to approach the water himself, and -with a grimace- take a deep breath and hop in. He manages to not gasp from the immense chill by a small margin of success. The temperature is bitterly cold, shocking even when he'd prepared.
Regardless of the chill, it's beautiful and alive down here. The seaweed drifts like tall, ribbon grass. The moss glows white and blue. Little fingerling fish with translucent bodies school around pink coral and porous stone.
Amid the beauty, the sith swims over to him, black and red and incongruous with it all… yet a part of it. A monster from above with dual citizenship on the ocean floor.
Maul swishes up to him, fast and graceful, and grabs his tunics before taking off.
‘Well,’ Obi-Wan thinks as he relaxes into the hold, ‘at least he isn't coiling around me like a vice this time.’
Maul glides them through the water, into a small tunnel that opens up into a larger one after only a few feet. Obi-Wan can see it going off to the left and right, lit by the moss. The sith takes them left, around a curve in the tunnel. The path splits into a dark corridor. They go left again, then right.
He hopes they arrive quickly, he'd like to breathe soon.
They go up, across the open sands of a massive cave the size of the senate chamber. The space is brightly lit by orange crystals and purple fish that glow in neon stripes.
He's running out of breath.
Their path leads though a hole in the wall. Obi-Wan looks upward, hoping to see an air pocket…
There isn't one.
Alarmed, he wacks Maul in the chest and gestures at his mouth. Where in the blazes are they going? He needs air! Even with the lungs of a swordfighter and the aid of the force, he has to-
Maul presses their mouths together, and breathes into him.
‘What,’ he thinks dumbly. The jedi master feels six different things at once. His thoughts are mangled by the chaos.
Now his lungs are overful, but the edge is taken off from his need to inhale. Obi-Wan lets some of the air escape him, making a cascade of silvery bubbles erupt around their faces. Maul does it again. A second stale breath fills him.
Oh. Right, yes, okay, the sith has made himself into a rebreather.
Obi-Wan breathes out again…
…and the Dragonfish sith gives him air once more.
… and again.
… and again.
They breach a water surface and Obi-Wan opens his eyes, blinking owlishly.
When had he closed them??
'Drat,' he thinks, dismayed.
… he'd lost track of their path.
Maul lifts him onto shore, and he feels heat at his back. Obi-Wan rolls towards it before he's even got his bearings, shivering and disoriented.
Mmmmm. Warm.
“This shall serve. A gorogoro cannot pass the threshold to enter unless it is juvenile, the door is too small,” Maul declares, sounding pleased with himself.
“That's nice,” Obi-Wan tells him, trying to get as close to the fresh magma ball as possible without burning himself. He shrimps around it with a sigh.
“You will drink. There is fruit. I shall hunt, while the magma is still hot enough to cook on. Speak your preference, Kenobi, or I will simply bring you crab.”
“I love crab,” he tells the wonderful black stone before him, “but I've no seafood cracker.”
The sith snorts, “You are an idiot,” the man tells him.
With a small splash, he's gone.
Obi-Wan's desire to be warmer fights with his desperate need to hydrate, until finally he gets up and at least looks for the supposed fruit.
There, not five feet away, is a massive pile of coconuts and laundry. He squints at it, making sure he's seeing it right. Did the oxygen deprivation do something to him…?
No, indeed, it's a pile of coconuts and laundry. There's even a laundry line and clothespins mixed up in it.
“Why-” he starts, then shakes his head, “No, nevermind. Let's see if I can split a coconut with the force.”
He can, but it spills the majority of the milk everywhere. Obi-Wan screws up enough coconut crackings to get his clothes covered in it, but who cares? The swim here might've cleaned off most of the octopus viscera, but he is still wet anyway. What's a little more?
The trick, it turns out, is drilling a hole in the top with a sharp rock, and drinking from that.
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I keep feeling like I’m taking the mandalorian s3 way too seriously when I get mad about what’s happening… but I just can’t help how upset it’s making me 😭 I stopped watching after episode 2 but have kept up for the most part. Going through the mando tag here on tumblr is so surreal because there are people actually thinking the direction makes sense and that DinxBo is a natural next step?? Anyway, I really appreciate reading your thoughts on how it’s all going. Makes me feel like I’m not alone in this!
(I hope you don't mind me lumping my response/thoughts re: your ask in here too, @just-prime, since uh there are a lot of spoilers in it and I'm not sure it's a good idea to make it public)
You have every right to be upset. This is a show you invested in, a show that sold you a story of a lonely Mandalorian bounty hunter and his Force-sensitive child in a post-war galaxy. It gave you story beats and the promises of adventure, trials and tribulations, and self-discovery in the micro and the macro. There was a road map in all the ways Din discovered and challenged himself as he gave up basically everything he ever knew about himself, his covert, and the galaxy to keep the child safe and get him to his kind. There was a story to be told here in Din taking his helmet off in front of other living beings to save Grogu and in Din winning the Darksaber from Gideon despite Bo-Katan's best efforts to get it back.
I wonder how much of this was corporate meddling to keep raking in the money (KKKennedy, is that you and your white girlbossing ways again?), how much of it was success getting into Filoni and Favreau's heads that they think they can turn bullshit to fucking gold, and how much of it was the game plan to MCUfy Disney Wars. This is fascinating the way that the Sequel Trilogy was fascinating, in that somehow, both times, Disney fucked the fuck up.
People will take what they want from whatever they're consuming. It is what it is. I quit after the season premiere because i hated the short runtime, the cramming of three different potential subplots into thirty fucking minutes, the ridiculousness of all three subplots, and, most of all, the desecration of IG-11. I read elsewhere that the season premiere was a hit! People liked it! They were excited by it! Good for them! I'm glad they got something out of it. People got paid and put hours, blood, sweat, and tears into producing this show and I would want for them to know that their efforts were worth something.
But it is so hard to ignore how increasingly inconsistent, aimless, illogical, and bewildering the the entire season has been. We have now seen 7 of 8 episodes and even the 7th episode, supposedly the "best of the series", got a ton of complaints on a storytelling level. I read elsewhere, both on tumblr and twitter, that this season is now very plot-driven rather than character-driven when previously the show was extremely character-driven. Season 1 happened because Din couldn't leave Grogu behind in Imperial hands and thus uprooted himself and his covert with his decision to go back for the child. Season 2 happened because Din was now searching for Grogu's kind while we the viewers knew that Gideon was alive and well and likely still hunting for the child. Season 3 - and I'm saying this as someone who'd been reading reaction posts, summaries, meta, discourse, etc, instead of watching it because I love myself enough to Not Do That - doesn't seem to have that. It really felt like the story beats, wherever the fuck they were, felt more like "now move from Point A to Point B in order to get closer to Point C". They needed to check things off on a list in order to prepare for the MCUfication of the Disneyficaiton of the OG Thrawn Trilogy, something that I know a lot of people want... but at what cost?
I really hate how likely it is that the show is going to push DinxBo on us and I really hate how much people are expecting it and dreading it. I hate the compulsive heternormativity and the expectations and dread that come with it. I hate how it ruins characters and stories. If you like this ship, good for you. Don't talk to me, I don't care.
This really feels like watching The Last Jedi all over again. I was sold on Finn and Rey as co-leads only to be told to my fucking face that white neo-fashy Kylo was now co-leading because for some reason Rey got it into her head to save him? Meanwhile Finn got tazed and shoved to the side in a tone-deaf subplot with Rose, and Poe turned into a bizarre caricature who needed to be taught lessons by older white women. Like, sorry but I can't unsee this shit. I can't undo the betrayal I felt at the bait and switch of the ST.
And now it happened all over again with The Mandalorian. I'll give it one thing: When Din and Greef first encountered the pirates on Space Renn Faire Nevarro, I got those space western vibes again. And for those few seconds, I felt hope that the previous however many minutes were just a rough start and we're back to space westerning our way to Mandalore. That hope died real fast, didn't it? Fuck me, I guess.
I've started using Tumblr's tag tracking feature to keep tabs on the more critical Mandalorian tags. I'll add them to this post so that you can use them yourself. There are also a lot of interesting coversations happening elsewhere by various blogs. You might have to get creative with your tag searching. Just know that just as many people are out there happy with this show, there are just as many who are dissatisfied with it. That's usually how it goes, but man I can't remember the last time I saw a bunch of the fandom community turn on a show/movie/book series the way we've done with The Mandalorian. It's a damn shame because deep down, a part of me is desperate for it to find its feet and get good again. But honestly, with all the announcements that came out of SWC 2023, I think that ship has sailed and the best thing to do is take all the good you can find from it and mold it into your own sand castles.
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