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edge-oftheworld · 3 months

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you know i don't really talk about it on this acc much, but i find myself in a lot of various neurodivergent spaces. hearing stories of people desperately trying to communicate their needs, being invalidated, or forced to jump through hurdles they're unable to in order to get help they need. thinking about how as humans we have so many differences in communication, yet so many people are silenced when using theirs, struggling and invisible, blamed for their own difficulties, for not measuring up. people's experiences being pitted against finite resources, victimised by systems many of us can't thrive in, burdened with more than some can keep up with, it's the nature of being disabled, unable to empower themselves. and there's only so much legislation and that can do, as good as it is. good systems need to be put in place, but those systems need to be backed by the support of people--not just those who are vulnerable but a whole tribe of us in solidarity. we need that love, and to build it, we need connection and understanding that simply being told 'these are people with needs' isn't going to evoke.

and for that reason i really love writers and artists. i think as humanity we owe a lot to them. i love a talented writer who can get into someone's head, be they real (with consent) or a fictional amalgamation of the characteristics of people, and share their writing far and wide, so people can feel and learn something from it and be a little more understanding. you don't need buckets of empathy necessarily, just a perspective, that window into how someone or a group of people experience life. and to use that new information to choose to be an ally. i love you, fanfic writers, for doing this and building the skill to take beyond fanfic if you choose. i love artists who create art that give us insights into perspectives, that capture moments and feelings and really make us question how we do things. it's very punk. artists of all kinds, i love you.

and this is a music blog. i have to mention songwriters especially. because i've spent my life looking for songs that convey experience in the most real way possible. i've chased perspectives and representations of my own in artists' music. you can learn to see things a thousand, a billion ways through music, both in the lyrics when they are present, and in every musical element put together. it all creates a picture. it presents something. it communicates on a much more primal and validating way than just using words, facts, demands. it allows us to see much more intimately and intricately ourselves and each other. it is absolutely necessary in our activism for vulnerable people, invisible for one reason or another, disabled, neurodivergent--you name it. and it is a really beautiful statistic for me to see, that so many songwriters are neurodivergent. this allows a kind of communication that might be difficult to have otherwise. it is something people of all neurotypes accept. we all, to some degree, love music. and we can (and do, often without realising) use it to do just this! to communicate, as songwriters, our own experiences or those of whoever inspires us. we see souls and we see lives through it. and music has no real categories and labels, just a new piece for us to connect with, maybe deeply, or maybe just witness for a moment, and see something we usually wouldn't.

and so i have a dream. a dream where we can channel the often accidental (but also, often so purposeful) activism of music into the causes we care about, thinking about which voices are centred, and making sure whoever is sidelined gets a chance to be heard sometimes. a dream where we don't just have lists of how to be better allies and legislations we vote yes or no to, but we can educate ourselves on all these diverse and different experiences through music as well as specific, measurable, often emotionless data. because i've spent the last six years trying to figure out how i exist in the world. why i am the way that I am. if that sounds familiar. i've come across an encyclopedia's worth of knowledge on diversity. on neurodivergence. that I had to sift through to see what fits me. but in the process i can see the experiences of so many people, all of whom I see a little bit of myself in, and I've learned how accommodations work and sensory profiles and how there is so much injustice in the world most of us aren't even aware of because people's pain is invisible. and they're often not given the tools, the labels, the words to use to describe it because people simply don't think about it. they don't know. they don't know how to see it in someone until they're told. until that person has nowhere else to go, if they're lucky they'll find the blueprint for their life and their brain before living without it destroys them. and work back from there.

isn't it good that scientists and those experiencing these things have put together categories of human for the kinds of specific blueprints we might need? yes I know there is problematic history of exclusion and many other things--that still influence stigma today and why we don't ever think of neurodivergence or disability when someone is what we class as successful--but we've figured some things out!! we can help people with them!! we can combine our winnings!! science and labels and lists of accommodations that come with them, with personal art about experience from people who are in some of these categories, people who aren't, every kind of unique experience you can think of. imagine it. a world of people with so many resources they need to feel better. some of them make art. some of them enact legislation. all of this goes back to helping each other!!

i could probably look at every artist i know well and have a guess at how their brain and nervous system would be categorised. i have the confidence by now to say that i would for the most part, be right. or at least very close. if i had the chance to do this i could tell them i love them and i desperately want them to be okay and of the impact of their art. i could be part of distributing that validating or experientially educational art to those who most need it. I already do that, to the extent I am able at the moment. and i try to be a good activist. i've seen a lot more awareness of things i've been talking about over the last 2-3 years. we're getting better. but sometimes I do feel like i'm posting bits and pieces of information through the entire internet with part of my goal being hopes that this person i care about whose art i've consumed and loved and benefitted so much from, might put the pieces together and figure these things out for themselves. we're getting better. i still feel helpless when i encounter some content some artists i love put out.

i don't think it's respectful to be like 'i hc this person as this' all over the internet, so i'm not gonna do that, and i ask that you also think of the implications of what you theorise as well--99% of the time it's fine. i know that. but i also know the stigma around neurodivergence that exists still is there, and also what labels people use publicly are their own choice and this should never be taken away from them. but we don't have to be detectives without filters to simply talk about our own experiences with neurodivergence, with whatever things we struggle with, to each other in the fandom, and build a culture of creating awareness. we can do that. without taking away anyone's autonomy or anything like that. so talk to me about this stuff!! please. always. i always want to hear it. and i wanna hear what songs you relate to because of it!! that's what i'm here in the fandom for. i love you guys. i'm being vague on purpose but if you catch what triggered this spiel (and it's a recurring pattern. every time something new comes out) i salute you. we can bond over it. please bond over it with me. i try to be an activist, yes, but really, i need connection and validation of my experience just like I think all of us do, and deserve to have. small conversations are part of creating this vision <3

#neurodivergence #activism #musician thoughts #pretty sure i've related all of sgfg to this *broad concept* and maybe bloodhound as well by #5sos #5 seconds of summer #idk if i'm gonna tag this post more than that tbh. but feel free to rb

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lawyernovelist · 6 years

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Luke Skywalker, Jedi Master: A Legend

I'm not dead! Sorry for the long break, and sorry in advance for the fact that this post isn't quite up to my usual wordy standard; I've spent the last several months suffering from massive writer's block on almost every project I have on the go, including a novel, the next chapter of My Tauriel, and several blog posts.

Anyway, to get on with the show, I thought what The Last Jedi did with Luke Skywalker was one of the coolest and gutsiest things in it.

Bring it.

Spoilers for Star Wars through The Last Jedi and Lord of the Rings.

Now, I opened in that unnecessarily confrontational way because I've seen criticism of how this movie handled Luke from all over the place and all directions. And to an extent I get that, like I kind of get a lot of the criticism of this movie. I would, however, just like to get one small thing out of the way, and that's the comment I've seen all over the place that "they made Luke evil to make Kylo Ren good." And... no?

I think where this comes from is a feeling that because we see Luke do - or start to do - something unequivocally morally wrong, namely murder his student and nephew in his sleep, that must mean that the movie is telling us that Luke turned evil after we last saw him in the original trilogy. The main narrative beneficiary of such a change would be Ren, since this means that not only is the person telling us how he went bad unreliable, but he himself pushed Ren over the edge. It's not Ren's fault; his mentor betrayed him and so he fell from grace as a reaction to that. Luke is actually evil - the sort of man who would murder a helpless boy who trusted him - and Ren is his innocent victim.

Well, that only really holds up if you subscribe to the belief that if someone does or thinks one wrong thing they're irredeemably evil and that anyone who's been victimised is automatically good. And to be honest, I shouldn't be surprised this is a thing; it seems to be a really common belief on the internet.

But this was part of why I admired this story beat so much: it goes square against that narrative. What Luke did was wrong. Nobody denies that, even him. Right then in the moment he realised that he should not murder a defenceless boy just because of his own fears of what that boy might grow to do, and he accepts that what happened next was a consequence of his actions. Meanwhile, while Ren was right to be frightened and defend himself in the moment, and it's entirely reasonable that he drew his own lightsaber, force-pulled the roof down on Luke, left him for dead, and fled into the night, you know what wasn't a reasonable thing to do? Burn down the school and massacre the other students.

Luke did a bad thing, acknowledged it as bad, and accepted the personal consequences, including the lasting guilt. That doesn't make him evil, it makes him human. Ren reacted in an entirely understandable way up to the point where he went way too far and continued his trend of, when presented with multiple choices, always taking the evil one.

Ren: Gee, I've captured a teenage scavenger who has information I need. Shall I put her in a secure but comfy cell, apologise for scaring her, and offer her money and a ride home to Jakku in exchange for the information, or shall I tie her up, threaten her and her friends, and mind-rape her?

Also, while I'm defending Luke, you get points for realising that what you're about to do is awful before you do it. They say that the first thought you have is what you've been conditioned to think and the second is what you actually think.

Anyway, that probably would have been a nice segue over from the last post where I talked about the presentation of good and evil in these movies, but I did want to explicitly call out that one piece of criticism because it actually irritates me more than is rational. They did something complex and interesting! Stop discouraging them!

OK, so I mentioned that I can see why people are upset about this, and the next one I'm going to address is one that I actually kind of sympathise with, as well as being the reason I chose this specific quote as the title of this blog post: the presentation of Luke as a disillusioned old man who has failed to live up to his own legend.

I thought long and hard to come up with a hypothetical Tolkien example so I could empathise on this one, because Star Wars wasn't a big part of my childhood or anything, so maybe that's why I find it easy to say "Oh, neat, they're doing a cool new twist on an archetypical character" when everyone else in the cinema is saying "WTF have you done to Luke?" Eventually I came up with the option of "What if some asshole came along and made a sequel to Lord of the Rings in which we see that power corrupts and all the bad aspects of medieval kingship (and there are a lot of those) have started manifesting in Aragorn?" and concluded that yeah, I'd be pissed and that would actually be less upsetting than this must be because at least I'd have the comfort that such a sequel would be terrible fanfic, not actual canon. This is Star Wars canon now.

So yeah, I get why people are upset, but hear me and my outsider's perspective out.

For one thing, this is another difference between that hypothetical Lord of the Rings example and The Last Jedi: the problem isn't with Luke except that he couldn't live up to the legend that had grown up around his name and his position as the last of the Jedi and founder of a new Jedi order. And that's an awesome take.

A couple of things about me: first, I'm actually really interested in the question of what happens after these classic stories end. Now, that doesn't always mean that I want to find out - I don't feel the need to actually see Cinderella struggle to adjust to her new life as a princess in combination with the potential political awkwardness caused by the fact that the heir to the throne clearly suffers from face-blindness, and that's why I cannot believe Disney made two sequels (though I hear Cinderella 3 is way better than it has any right to be) - but it's always an interesting question. That's especially true of bigger and more complicated stories with world-shaking consequences like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings: it is kind of interesting to wonder how, after the happy/bittersweet ending, things fell apart. Because that's what things do.

To continue down this rabbit-hole - I promise I'll surface with a point in a moment - this was something Tolkien really got and which you can only really appreciate if you read all his Middle-Earth work: The Silmarillion, The Hobbit (supplemented by The Unfinished Tales), and The Lord of the Rings, in that order: things fall apart. Every time there's a victory, something is lost and it's only a temporary reprieve because evil always rises again. It may be smaller, but so are the forces of Good. Tolkien actually did start work on a sequel to Lord of the Rings in which we see evil returning during the reign of Aragorn's son Eldarion, not really because Eldarion was a crappy king or anything but just because that's what evil does.

The Last Jedi hits a similar note: Just because the Empire was defeated, evil isn't banished from the galaxy. And just as in that unfinished sequel, it's not because the heroes of the previous stories did anything wrong, it's just that this isn't as simple as it looks and winning one big battle and killing one guy doesn't solve all the problems. Eventually the situation will deteriorate again.

That's even more true where the heroes involved don't necessarily know how to pick up the pieces of the evil empire they destroyed, by the way. The galaxy was pretty lucky to have Leia on hand.

The second relevant thing I find interesting is myth-making: how people tell themselves stories about what's happening around them, and how that affects their behaviour and expectations. This is something that happens all the time, sometimes because someone is deliberately creating a myth around an event, group, or person, sometimes because a story has been heard, mis-remembered, and repeated so many times that it's lost some details and gained others, sometimes because people desperately want to believe in something. And it's honestly pretty fascinating. It's been great fun watching the discussion around Hamilton, for example, and how it seems to have changed views of the founding fathers because it presents a new myth in the form of a history play with awesome music.

Watching modern myth-making in the form of polemic and conspiracy theory is also a little bit terrifying, but that's a whole other topic.

Humans love to tell themselves and each other stories, and you can bet stories spread far and wide about Luke after the Empire fell. Even Rey, having grown up in this crappy backwater town on Jakku, seems to have knowledge and expectations of Luke and the Jedi. Doesn't it make all kinds of sense that those stories became myths and that they grew and changed in the years between the fall of the Empire and Luke taking some students and setting up a Jedi school, painting Luke as a larger-than-life hero who could do anything?

Personal anecdote time: when Obama was elected in 2008, I was at university in the States (now you can all guess my age :P). I watched the results coming in on the TV in our dorm lounge, and when the election was called for Obama the place went wild. We spilled out into the road, I could hear the celebrations from other dorms half a mile away, even I went running down the length of the building screaming and wearing an American flag as a cape. But once I'd calmed down a bit I looked around at the Bacchic levels of celebration and said to one of my friends "He'll be remembered as a failure." Naturally, she looked at me like I'd grown at least five heads, so I elaborated, "Everyone's built him up to be the Second Coming. He can't live up to this. Nobody can." I bring this up because that's what I remember when I look at Luke in The Last Jedi: everyone had such high hopes and expectations of him, a legend had built up around his name, he'd become a figure of myth, but at the end of the day he was just a man. He couldn't live up to that. Nobody could.

That acknowledgment of the effects of myth-making around great people and events isn't something I see very often in film, and it ties into what I was saying about seeing what happens after the words "The End". What stories do the people in the world tell themselves about the hero? How does that affect everyone's view of him? How does it affect his view of himself?

That last is also why I find Luke's characterisation in Last Jedi very believable. It makes total sense to me that after this massive failure, which also cost the lives of his students and might have driven his nephew to the dark side, he has withdrawn and become embittered. Again, I come back to the line I used to title this post; the way Hamill delivers it really sums that up.

By the way, good grief did my estimation for all the actors in this film go up.

Anyway, that also feels like a subversion of tropes, which was something this movie did in spades and I love it. I'm having trouble thinking of another of these epic fantasy stories where the hero tracks down the mentor who will turn them into a great warrior or whatever and finds someone so disillusioned. Rey's not having to persuade Luke she's worthy or anything (side-note: I especially enjoy that he never gets weird about the fact that a girl is so strong with the force. It wouldn't make a lot of sense - I mean, he knows Leia - but it was still nice not to have a a subplot where she has to prove she's worthy despite the ~*~terrible handicap~*~ of a second X chromosome), she's having to persuade him that just coming back into the fight at all is worth doing. She's not having to persuade him to train her but to train anyone, and his refusal actually does make sense. I mean, look what happened last time he got himself a crazy-powerful young student. Clearly he can't do this and it might not even be a good idea for anyone to do this.

Now, again, not very familiar with the original movies, this might actually be the exact route they took with Obi-wan and/or Yoda, but I don't remember ever seeing it before and something that distinctive is something I'm sure I would have noticed seeing for a second time. If I'm way off the mark here, though, I can only apologise.

One more comment, and then I'll close. I also really enjoyed Luke's relationship with Ren. This is kind of bringing me back to where I started, but it was still interesting to see how the break with Ren has affected Luke as well as how it's affected Ren. I like watching the emotional consequences play out, as well as how his previous failures have affected Luke's later relationship with Rey and view of himself. Also, that last fight was amazing. It did a great job of developing Ren's character in how he reacted to the sight of Luke and also the emptiness he seemed to feel when after all that Luke wasn't really there. For me, the way Ren reacted after that fight really did cement my view that this is not about Ren defending himself any more, no matter what his initial reaction might have been when he woke up to find Luke standing over him with a lightsaber; it's now about revenge. It kind of shone a new light on Ren, which was in itself interesting to me.

Anyway, I liked Luke in the original trilogy. I liked his enthusiasm, his intelligence, his determination, and his compassion (why did nobody tell me about him redeeming Darth Vader with the power of love?). However, that just meant that I enjoyed all the more seeing how he's been developed here. That Luke was still there, minus some enthusiasm and plus some world-weary cynicism that makes perfect sense given what's happened in the interim. I liked him as a character, I liked what he added to the story, and overall I think his presentation was one of the gutsiest things in this movie.

In summary: Luke good. Film good. Don't @ me.

If you enjoy my blog, you might also enjoy my novel: Bladedancer's Heirs. You can also find me on Goodreads!

#Characterisation #film #Star Wars: The Last Jedi #the last jedi review #Star Wars

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