#fuck karen traviss
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Saw your post saying you're not a Karen Travis fan, and I'm so glad someone is willing to call her out on her BS.
Ahahahhaahaha trying to read the last two RepComm books very nearly broke me mentally and spirtually. I found her soapboxing mostly annoying when reading the Kilo Five trilogy but holy shit the way she reduced every single female to a potential love interest for the clones and even at one point had Kal joke about kidnapping women and bringing them back home? OH HELL NO.
Finding out she's apparently a right-wing terf shithead afterwards wasn't shocking in the least. The thing that continues to stupify me is she writes Walon Vau as this awful, abuser who then gets semi-forgiven by the kids he abuses cause fucking stockholm syndrome or something IDEK she's all over the place character-wise towards the end of the Rep Comm books.
Yet she turns around and demonizes the shit out of Catherine Halsey in the Halo novels like five years later. I don't know if that's just 343 pushing some narrative since they have DEFINITELY taken a turn on how they paint her. The early books she's this saintly mother figure all the SPARTANS adore and now she has a 0% approval rating from most of the galaxy. So I'm not sure if it's Traviss soapboxing or something else. Prolly a combo of the two. she does love her punching bags. And I dunno I dislike seeing someone demonize a character just to justify their bullshit narrative. She she is infamous for that.
I generally try and find the good in most things and don't partcular LIKE indulging in draging people in fandom. The world is hard enough to make my way through without dwelling on negativity and I certainly have to battle my own inherent pessimism on a near daily basis but some people are just....nope. I have zero interest in trying to excuse or defend and Karen Traviss has certainly become one of those people.
Which stinks because I love so many of the Rep Comm characters. And just wish they'd gotten handed to a writer who would have done more than legit reduce all the women to props for the male characters and actually given us some realistical consequences for both Kal and Walon's shitty behavior.
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Arrogant Kenobists like you drove Karen Travis out of Lucasfilm because you couldn’t stand hearing the truth about your precious Mary Suetopia, the Jedi Order. You don’t deserve to call yourself people, much less Star Wars fans!
….
I should block her. I really should block her.
….fuck it.
One: It’s Karen Traviss, with two S’s at the end. If you’re going to put a writer up on a (imho completely undeserved) pedestal, you might as well spell her damn name right.
Two: Karen Traviss was not driven out of Lucasfilm. She quit, because George Lucas decided to take Mandalorian culture and clone culture in a different direction that what she’d written in her novels and she was throwing a tantrum to try and change his mind.
Three: Mary Suetopia is such an antiquated term that TvTropes merged its page under plain Utopia years ago.
Four: AllTheTropes still has a Mary Suetopia page, and notably, the Jedi Order is not on it, but Traviss’s Mandalorian society is. This is because the Jedi Order does have a few flaws that make it feel like a natural, interesting society in Lucas’s films, while Traviss makes her Mandalorian culture so perfect, upstanding, and idealistic that it becomes uninteresting. And aren’t you the one who’s always blathering about perfect, heroic characters being uninteresting, Domina?
Five: And on that note, aren’t you the one calling yourself a Lucas purist on your Ao3 account? That would be as utterly nonsensical as if I were to say, “oh, I’m a Tolkien purist and I think Rings of Power is the most faithful adaptation I’ve ever seen of the Silmarillion, which I have totally read and understood.” Karen Traviss is not George Lucas; saying that her stories supersede George’s canonical vision necessarily makes you not a Star Wars purist.
And lastly: I meant it when I said to find something else to do with your time, Domina. If you can’t find work or a boyfriend, try a physical hobby! I like knitting and cross stitch, myself; maybe you could try crochet? Or macrame?
#“anon” asks#tragicfantasy-girl#good. fucking. grief.#Karen Traviss#PLEASE do no get into discourse about her books on this post#I didn’t care for them when I read them#They were fairly boring#Kal Skirata named one of his sons “soulless” and Domina likely thinks he was a perfect father#while she lambasts Obi-Wan Kenobi as abusive for trying to verbally discipline Anakin for sexually harassing a Senator#“Mary Suetopia”#y’know for someone who hates “Mary Sues” as much as tragicfantasy-girl claims#most of her approved characters seem to fit that description#You keep using that term Domina!#I do not think it means what you think it means!#Also no insult meant to Rings of Power fans#unlike some people I understand the transformative nature of adaptation
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THE PAIN HAS ARRIVED! WHOOOOO!
If you thought I went on about Gears of War before just you wait - It's time for GoW: Time to Cry edition!
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(click for better quality)
this is Etain Tur-Mukan from the first Republic Commando book : Hard Contact by Karen Traviss, how she looks in my head specifically
Yes, i've read the first repcomm book, WHAT ABOUT IT?! (yeah, no, it's not like i've had some existential crises along the way WHAT SO EVER) everything is c h i l l
#huge potential for this character but is was poorly written#very very very well done 'cone perspective'#and when you think that YEAH I KINDA UNDERSTAND WHAT THEY GO THROUGH AND ALL (the clones i mean) that's the moment some deeply traumatic#shit happens or they have a flashback from T R A I N I N G where some of them D I E D amd then what can you do?#emphatise the fuck out of it cause you can't do anything else#cry your heart out for the copy pasted men like everyone else#not the best book but really good none the less#ig i'm starting to have standards lol#republic commando#republic commando hard contact#karen traviss#etain tur mukan#omega squad#star wars#clone wars#star wars fanart#clone wars fanart#repcomm fanart#repcomm#digital painting#myart
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Margaret Parangosky. As ugly as she is an asshole.
#halo#halo meme#office of naval intelligence#a contradiction in terms#fuck oni#margaret thatcher ass bitch#you just know Karen Traviss WORSHIPS Thatcher
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Glasslands, Pt 3, Final
I suppose it was inevitable that at some point, I would have to talk about my opinion on Halo’s political/moral implications. Everyone congratulate my past self for this prank I played on my present self by deciding to discuss Halo at length to people.
I’ll keep it brief:
Halo is one of those stories that gives us permission to imagine a justified war in which the entire human species faces extinction at the hands of an implacable, nonhuman enemy. Halo also tells the story of an empire being challenged by rebellion in its colonies, these rebels are Bad Enough Dudes to be punished with violence, and these are colonies which did not require the subjugation of pre-existing native peoples in order to form.
None of these things is unique to Halo. It borrows a pile of classic science fiction tropes in order to create a world in which it can tell stories about cool space gun shoot times and Hard Decisions (TM) without it being too unpalatable for its intended audience. It does this by avoiding the real problems inherent in real war, empire, and colonialism.
I do my best to be an anti-war, anti-colonialist person, and it is my hope that some of the problems in these tropes are self-evident enough that I can get on with this post without having to belabor them. Is it weird that I’m into Halo like this? I don’t know, probably. The brain chemicals move in mysterious ways.
I don’t generally take being a fan of Halo, or even being a writer for Halo, as a red flag about a person’s beliefs. I think most people engaging with Halo also find something compelling in it (possibly just a paycheck) and I think it’s irresponsible to try to judge the inner lives of others based solely on the fiction they consume or produce. I mean, if Halo has problems and liking Halo is a red flag in and of itself, where does that leave me?
But that’s not to say one can learn nothing about what someone might be like from their fiction.
This brings me back around to our subject today.
Sometimes, in the course of reading someone’s work, something gives you such powerful bad vibes that you can’t help but start having suspicions. Glasslands is, for me, one of those books.
(It gets long here, folks.)
After reading Karen Traviss’s attempt to convince me that somehow ONI’s pile of war crimes were the cool and good war crimes, as opposed to Dr. Halsey’s bad and evil war crimes, I began to question whether or not the author... how shall we say, has a distinct taste for rubber soles and boot leather. This gave me pause, as all I know about her is one book and one short story. However, I have always heard rumors of her being a terror in another fandom.
So, I conferred with some Star Wars nerds. What did Karen Traviss do in Star Wars, and (importantly) was it more than just bros being nerdmad that a woman wrote a story they didn’t like?
Given that this is not my particular nerd lit poison, I can only tell you about it secondhand. Based upon my research, these are the things Traviss is most notorious for:
Passionately hating the Jedi (and talking about how Order 66 was deserved) while lionizing the Mandalorians (who had just as many problems, but they were her special favorites)
Giving people “ah, she’s a military fetishist with a bit of the fash” vibes
Ignoring canon details and especially bending pre-existing lore to make people she likes look good and people she hates look bad
Showing no respect for characters/lore other writers had created (including killing off a major character from another author such that he only found out about it after the book was published)
Bragging about not reading the work of other people working on the same canon
Flouncing from Star Wars when she felt like her contributions were being disrespected
Calling fans who didn’t like her the “Talifans” (as in the Taliban), meanwhile fans who liked her were the “Fandalorians”
Some of these antics absolutely form a pattern when one looks at what she has done in Halo as of Glasslands. To whit:
Passionately hating Dr. Halsey while lionizing Admiral Parangosky and ONI
Ignoring prior canon in order to make Halsey look bad and ONI look good (to her, anyway)
Importing her pet drama from Star Wars to Halo and ignoring prior canon to make it fit
What was her pet Star Wars drama? From what I can tell, two things: Believing the Jedi are evil elitist eugenicists, and that they are vicious slavemaster monsters because of the clone army. She had an FAQ page about hating the Jedi on her website for years where she claimed not to hate the Jedi, but drew parallels between fans defending the Jedi and actual Nazis. In an interview, she once said that Order 66 was deserved and that the only Jedi characters she didn’t want to “shoot on sight” were her own OCs.
It’s very weird compartmentalized thinking, honestly. In the same interview as the legendary Order 66 quote she talks about how she doesn’t believe in writing characters to be “villains” and how it’s important to her to make all her characters make sense internally to her, and to hear everyone’s side, but several paragraphs later she just goes off on a specific class of character that is totally okay to just violently hate. Her Jedi FAQ page had her talking about how it would be ridiculous to hate fictional things because they’re not real, and good grief was that rich of her based on the other evidence.
I don’t know enough EU lore to really talk about the contents of her work, given that Jaws was never my scene and I don’t like Star Wars. However, “the person I hate is an evil eugenicist because the Spartan program had genetic compatibility requirements, I am going to focus really heavily on the fact there was a kind of cloning, and I am going to make up a ton of shit and ignore details to make fetch happen” is absolutely her MO in Halo.
Let’s not pretend that Halsey is an innocent baby angel and the Spartan program was anything less than awful, but here’s the thing: Traviss wants us to sympathize with ONI (which has done even more and even worse bad things than Dr. Halsey) for being cool and necessary while hating Dr. Halsey for the Spartan program. She wants us to sympathize with a guy fantasizing about murdering her (when she is by this point completely repentant and cooperative) and comparing her to Dr. Mengele (an actual literal IRL Nazi whose crimes were nothing like this stupid shootmans game fictional character’s crimes.) Traviss pays lip service to more sympathetic points and has things like Admiral Parangosky talking about how she herself is going to burn in hell, but there is so much venom in this book. The framing of these scenes is so clear. We are supposed to like Parangosky and Vaz, we are supposed to hate Dr. Halsey, Traviss wants us to feel that so badly.
Halo has always had serious problems when you think about the ethics of what’s going on inside it, but for the most part? Halo doesn’t usually ask the audience to wrangle with them like this. A lot of the Halo experience is Halo going “Hey kid, you wanna hear about a fucked up situation? It’ll be fun for a couple hours,” and you go “Yeah, sure.” It’s not deep. Sometimes someone can get into real feelings when they engage with Halo sincerely, but for the most part I feel like Halo knows that Halo is on thin fucking ice when dealing with the origins of the Spartans and it behooves it to keep moving quickly.
The problem Traviss has is that Traviss wants you to take her seriously in Glasslands. Traviss wants to give you a real indictment of the bad shit in the heart of Halo, she means it.
The problem I have is that when I take Traviss up on her dare and hit it as hard as I can, it just flies apart for me. She does have some ideas that are enjoyable and some scenes that are fun. There are much weaker writers in Halo canon, lots of them. But what it comes down to is: they don’t ask me to actually think about important human things that matter for real when I’m reading them.
She tells me to look into Halo for the darkness inside of Halo, but it sure as hell feels like this author showing me the darkness inside of her instead.
When Halsey asks Parangosky what makes her so much worse, Parangosky tells her: Halsey lied to her about the clones. Let’s ignore that Halsey somehow successfully lying about the cloning to ONI is stupid and doesn’t make sense, and entertain this for a moment. Traviss throws up a smokescreen of going on about how bad and evil the cloning is, but it’s the lying. The lying is how she couches the final knife Parangosky is driving in, the particulars of the evil don’t actually matter that much compared to the lie.
ONI does evil every day of the week and twice on Tuesdays, but Halsey lied to the organization. Halsey was disloyal to ONI. When Halsey finally abandons ONI because she can no longer stand it, this is treated by Traviss as a despicable, self-deluding bitch martyring her conscience. She can’t actually mean it, she’s a self-serving disloyal monster that can convince herself of anything. Otherwise, she would have remained loyal to ONI: the sanctioned authority of doing horrible shit for “the greater good.”
The authority. The organization. It’s not ONI’s fault one of its actors did something beyond the pale (such as the pale apparently is for Traviss’s ONI), it’s one bad apple. Her manhandling of canon details is all about setting up this conclusion for us, and that’s because the institutional authority of ONI and the UNSC matters to Traviss.
And this is adjacent enough to some real world things to leave one with some very serious questions about who the person writing this stuff is. Laying aside anything else that’s gross in Glasslands (describing shooting an Engineer as feeling like shooting an autistic child absolutely comes to mind), this is the shit that eats me.
What kind of person’s work am I reading?
Well.
When I was talking to friends and working through my feelings about Glasslands and its author, one of my friends casually mentioned to me that Traviss’s twitter behavior (before she mostly quit using it in 2021) had demonstrated her to be a Brexit-supporting, transphobic asshole with bad opinions about covid. So, I went looking to see what her current Twitter likes are.
Here are some examples.
(Did I mention that she apparently has a ship named after Thatcher in one of her books? Yes? Sorry, gotta do it again.)
Much like I don’t think this about Halo as a whole, I don’t think that enjoying the Kilo Five trilogy is a sign that someone is a bad person. I don’t think it’s enough information to have to know anything of significance about somebody.
I also don’t think I could appropriately say I know, with certainty, who this author is on the inside just based on all the internet bullshit I could dig up.
But I certainly feel confident that I know enough about her writing and her behavior in social internet spaces that I think I would prefer not to have anything to do with her.
I’m updating my Halo author shitlist, Traviss absolutely takes the cake at the top now. Denning’s merely irritating to me by comparison, Traviss is actively gross.
Links:
The SWEU subreddit talks about Traviss
The legendary "Order 66 was long overdue" interview
The Jedi Hating FAQ Page
A Hobby Drama post in which Traviss features
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George Lucas & Karen Traviss' visions of Star Wars are NOT the same...
So whenever I come across this image:
I keep in mind that it's from a book written by Karen Traviss, who is a brilliant author (I adored Legacy of the Force: Bloodlines and Sacrifice) but whose stance on Anakin, Yoda & the Jedi and Star Wars morality is this:
As opposed to George Lucas' stance on Anakin, Yoda & the Jedi and Star Wars' morality, which is this:
In a children's story about Light and Dark, good and evil, selflessness vs selfishness, George Lucas marks the Empire as absolutely evil and the Rebels as absolutely good, in the Original Trilogy.
In the Prequels, the situation is more complex (the Jedi are drafted into a war and forced to do things they know they shouldn't be doing, but have to for the greater good; the Sith bring about order to a corrupt government) but the morality stays the same... the selfish, greedy Sith are absolutely evil and the selfless, compassionate Jedi are absolutely good.
That's George's thesis.
And, as a character, Yoda's function is to deliver that thesis. It's no wonder why Lucas treats Yoda's words as absolutely correct:
Yoda is Lucas' mouthpiece in the Prequels, his self-insert.
George Lucas' narrative frames Yoda as objectively right.
So when Karen Traviss questions the Jedi, particularly Yoda's character and wisdom, she's disagreeing with George Lucas' thesis.
Which is fair. Traviss, is a different person than Lucas, she's an ex-journalist with a more "grey" view of the world and a different philosophy re: fiction aimed at children. "Death of the author" and all that. Again, fair enough.
And if you like Travis' interpretation and philosophy more than George's, if her read resonates with you more... also fair enough.
But the EU is not a reliable source on Lucas' vision.
I've talked about this in MUCH more detail here, but if you do care about George Lucas' vision, then maybe don't draw from the Expanded Universe, which includes content written by authors who expressly disagree with him, like Traviss.
Sounds logical, but for some reason people will read the above-posted Dooku quote and treat it as reflective of Lucas' vision, when it's not the case.
George Lucas' Dooku doesn't have an issue with Yoda or the Jedi (at least not openly, as Darth Tyranus, the Sith Lord he wants them all dead). Dooku's issue is with the Senate and the Republic.
George Lucas specifically added that most Jedi share Dooku's concerns. Before he's revealed to be a mass-murdering, Sith who enslaves neutral systems, the Jedi think he makes a good point and are even reluctant to consider him a murder suspect.
But let's not start saying that Lucas' Prequels are meant to be about "the Jedi's failure" and "Dooku being right that the Jedi are corrupt.
Because that's not the case.
If that's how you see them, great. It's certainly how Traviss saw them. To each their own, authorial intent be damned.
But it's not what they were about, to Lucas. Stating the contrary is... I dunno, lying? Rewriting history?
It's as if I got hired to write a Lord of the Rings prequel seen from Gandalf's POV. And y'know what, maybe I don't like Gandalf.
So I write him as a scheming asshole going “myahahahah, fuck hobbits! I’m gonna let them keep the One Ring so a bunch Nazgûl will swoop through the Shire and murder them!” and suddenly, everyone starts writing posts about the notion that “Growing up is realizing that Tolkien always intended for Gandalf to be the secret villain of LOTR!” as if that had always been the case and I didn't just reframe him that way retroactively.
Finally, I'd also encourage you to read @rendar-writes' well-made point here about the fact that, while claiming she "doesn't give the answers", Traviss nonetheless shows a clear anti-Jedi bias.
#There’s a difference between interpreting the story the way you want to#and saying that your interpretation’s is what the author originally intended to convey#star wars#george lucas#karen traviss#anakin skywalker#jedi order#dooku#meta#collection of quotes#lucas quotes#expanded universe
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Hi, hey there, did you know that the whole "Jedi can deflect blasters so Mandalorians used solid-shot weapons to kill them because blocking a bullet with a lightsaber just results in molten metal spraying the Jedi" meme is actually bullshit?
Like, first thing you have to know about that lore is that it was written by Karen Traviss. Traviss is fairly infamous for writing a shitton of military wank and really hating the Jedi, portraying them as cruel, cold, fascist idiots, who are much, much lamer than the cool Mandalorians, who are badass military types and definitely haven't carried out multiple genocides in the past (they have). She was also known for not exactly playing ball with other writers, and ultimately ragequit the franchise when TCW started to include Mandalorians and portrayed them differently. This was not a detail that basically any other writer in anything Star Wars ever actually backs up.
And like, here's the thing... this exists.
That's a Jedi using the Force to deflect bullets with her bare hand.
This is Tutaminis. And/or Force Deflection, it's not really clear whether they're the same thing or not. It's a pretty standard Force ability that a bunch of characters have demonstrated. Obi-Wan blocks both bullets and a flamethrower with it in the 03 Clone Wars microseries. It's how Yoda catches and redirects Force Lightning during his duels with Dooku in Attack of the Clones and Palpatine in Revenge of the Sith. It's how Vader absorbs Han's shots with his hand in The Empire Strikes Back.
It's also evident from the amount of times that the Mandalorians fight the Jedi with normal blasters instead of breaking out their "anti-Jedi" weapons for their ancient enemies. And the fact that the Mandalorians lost their wars against the Jedi.
If solid-shot guns/slugthrowers were the amazing anti-Jedi weapons that totally always worked against Jedi, then we'd see a lot more slugthrowers and a lot fewer Jedi. We see the CIS' Droid armies fight against the Jedi for three years, we see the Clones being designed from the get-go to kill the Jedi at the end of the war and being highly successful at it, we see the Empire hunting Jedi for the next 19 years and the rest of the Galactic Civil War after that, and y'know what they have in common? None of them use slugthrowers. They all just keep using blasters.
The answer to "How to kill a Jedi" equation has traditionally been depicted as "Use more blasters than they can actually physically deflect."
There's also the detail that Jedi are precognitive space wizards who can move with superhuman speed. If you're actually in range to shoot one with a gun, they'll sense you, evade or block with the Force, close the gap before you can chamber the next round, and revoke your Hand Privileges.
Even the "You'll kill them with a spray of molten metal from the melted bullet!" thing doesn't actually track with what we see on-screen. At the climax of Revenge of the Sith, we see Obi-Wan and Vader fight in the middle of an active volcano. They get splashed with showers of lava a couple of times, and at the end of the fight, both of their clothes are scorched and burned from the embers. Obi-Wan continues to wear his charred robes throughout the rest of the movie. And he's fine. No lava burns. Neither of them actually gets hurt by the lava until Obi-Wan cuts Vader's limbs off and he can no longer move or protect himself, and even then, Vader survives getting burned to a crisp by being really fucking mad about it.
So yeah, it's nonsense. A dumb "Hurr, Jedi are so lame and my unproblematic genocidal warrior race could totally kill them super-easy" take written by Star Wars' own version of Ken Penders.
#Star Wars#Jedi#Meta#Yeah sorry the Legends Mandos were pretty much straight-up villains most of the time
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So I've been on a Gears of War kick lately (obvs).
I played the games when they first started coming out in 2005 (I heard someone refer to them as "old school" and holy fuck, shut up), played through 1-3, and tried to play Judgement, but couldn't get into it. I haven't touched 4-5 at all.
I also read a couple of the books written about the universe by Karen Traviss, because that was really what drew me into the franchise. I'm not really a FPS shooter girl (although these are technically over-the-shoulder shooters), and I failed miserably at multi-player, but the campaign and gameplay were actually fun and engaging, and the world-building was absolutely brilliant. Just a super well-constructed universe, especially if you have any love for urban decay. It's funny how bad the graphics are in the first and second game, re-watching playthroughs.
Anyhow, GoW is probably a very "dude bro" type game on the surface, and that's definitely who got into it the most, but on a rewatch of the games I am absolutely jarred by how completely fucked up the protagonist, Marcus Fenix, must actually be. Like, all of the soldiers in the universe have seen and done some shit, but this goes well beyond "soldier tough guy".
His mother dies. He watches his father die after deserting duty to save him (and goes to prison for abandoning his post.) He watches his best childhood friend die, and becomes the unofficial guardian and protector of his dead-best-friend's little brother. He lives through the death of said little brother's children (of whom he was probably Godfather.) He sees one of his good friends commit suicide directly in front of him, with the weapon he literally just handed him. He helps the little brother euthanize his wife after finding her in a vegetative state. He also lives through the little brother dying in a suicide mission to save him. He realizes his father is alive, and watches him die A SECOND TIME.
And that's not covering decades of blowing up other living creatures and watching various other soldiers and friends die horribly.
The games cover most of these events, but they sort of gloss over them a bit. (Although Dom saying goodbye to his wife before he kills her was A LOT to rewatch.) Karen Traviss was a hell of a writer, even if I fucking hated her Mary Sue self-insert character SO FUCKING MUCH, and she took the whole story and ran with it, writing in a LOT of back story.
But holy shit. This dude was SO FUCKED UP. Like, although I haven't played them, I know he eventually marries Anya and has a son with her... AND THEN SHE FUCKING DIES, and he becomes estranged from his son.
How does nothing good ever happen to him? He's had like 15 minutes of happiness stretched across his entire lifetime, in little drips and drabs, and the rest has just been one horrifying atrocity after another.
Which is why, on the surface, it's so interesting to see Marcus Fenix presented to the average 20-something male gamer as "Oh yeah, such a badass," when -- after you dig into it -- it's like. My dude. No. He needs therapy and a hug. This is the most broken human being you've ever met. Don't glorify that.
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I'm sorry, Respawn's Star Wars title being cancelled is a topic I'm gonna be talking about for awhile.
I just need y'all to know how much we were promised and how little we've gotten when it comes to Star Wars games in the past decade. So many titles have been cancelled. So, so many... and mostly because of dumb corporate bullshit like this. I'm beyond angry that this stuff just keeps happening. These publishers are destroying some amazing development teams and studios.
Jedi: Fallen Order and Jedi: Survivor have been the only real Star Wars games lately; games that went in with a goal of telling a new story from start to finish. Not mobile games like Hunters or Galaxy of Heroes, not side content for multiplayer games like the half baked campaign for Battlefront II, not parody retellings like a LEGO game - just full on Star Wars game. Granted, I've yet to play Star Wars: Squadrons' campaign but I haven't heard a single thing about it since it came out and that doesn't' leave me very hopeful.
When it comes to Star Wars single player FPS too we haven't gotten a new title in over a decade (again, not counting Battlefront II) If you want to be technical, the last one we got was in 2007 with Renegade Squadron for the PSP. The last big Star Wars FPS, though, was Republic Commando in 2005. That's it. That was the last one. To add insult to injury, RepComm left on a cliffhanger. Then they cancelled its sequel, cut ties with Karen Traviss for the books based around it because Clone Wars was picking up steam and that was going to go in a completely different direction than what Traviss had for the Clone Wars... It's upsetting.
Do you guys remember how fucking fantastic the Jedi Knight games were and still are. Do you remember just the absolute golden era for Star Wars games from 1996 to 2010. What the actual fuck happened. As soon as the seventh console generation came around, everything fell apart. Most cancelled Star Wars games are from this era. 1313, the Darth Maul game, Battlefront 3, Battlefront 4, Imperial Commando, First Assault... The list, unfortunately, goes on and doesn't seem to be ending anytime soon.
I want to hold out hope, I really do. I want to be excited for new Star Wars games but this just keeps happening again, and again, and again, and again... Out of the six(?) Star Wars games that were announced several years ago, it seems like only Ubisoft's title is going to make it through. I'm excited, of course. A story in-between Empire and Jedi is going to be interesting regardless. But after watching this absolute slaughter over the years, I keep asking myself:
What happened?
#star wars#respawn entertainment#jedi fallen order#jedi survivor#republic commando#long post#star wars 1313#star wars battlefront
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tell me more about this mereel fellow. where does he come from. what’s his story.
No art for this one, I'm afraid.
Mereel Skirata and his brothers are from the Star Wars Legends book Series Republic Commando by Karen Traviss. I simply play with them like Barbie dolls, and them being book-only characters, there aren't many illustrations of the boys to work off of.
You can find a fairly succinct introduction to Mereel on his Wookieepedia entry, but essentially he and his five brothers were the Proof of Concept batch of clones that the Kaminoans developed before the Alpha-Class. There were 12 total, but only 6 of them ended up being viable thanks to the "extreme" gene tweaking the Kaminoan Geneticists did to the embryos.
They were slated for "reconditioning" which at the time meant termination, but were saved by a Mandalorian training sergeant named Kal Skirata. The boys were then raised to be "instant death on legs" (I love that term lol) and eventually into stellar Black Ops CLONINT units.
There is a lot more to it, and I do recommend reading the book series. KT did a good job of delivering some interesting characters, even with the limited POVs and some other stuff that didn't age well.
What Mereel's role is in the whole Null-Class unit is a bit vague in my opinion, but it sounds like he mostly rolls around as a subterfuge specialist and a bit (understatement) of a Genetic Engineering Nerd. He likes fast cars, attractive women, and candy—just like any other virile young man set loose on the world, lol.
His favourite place to meet contacts and hang out are in seedy cantinas, where I reckon he's a hell of a sabacc player, though we never got to see much of his adventures in the novels. Most of our experiences of Mereel are on the side, and from the lens of an outsider. He's like some massive, looming leviathan underneath the surface of a still lake. I want so badly to explore how fucked up he is inside, because we catch glimpses of it but it's never quite enough.
I NEED to know!!
Long post. I can write for days about Mereel.
#mereel skirata#possum answers#null arcs#repcomm#i have repcomm brainrot#seriously i can talk forever about Mereel#and the other Null ARCs#i've been on a Prudii kick lately too#so stay tuned for that lmfao!
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“I feel like Tor Vizsla, and I would disagree on many of the finer points of Mandalorian culture, including the abuse of those under his power.”
I JUST, WITHOUT A SHRED OF IRONY IN MY SOUL, WROTE THIS DIALOGUE LINE FOR WALON-FUCKING-VAU.
Where's my clown shoes and wig. I have legitimately completely thrown myself out of writing heasdspace because I am screaming with laughter every time I read this line.
For thus unfamiliar with the context here, I have a LEGENDARY sized hateboner for Walon Vau because he was one of the most abusive trainers for the clones in old Legends canon. Like outright abuse of those under his power. Traviss tried to put a spin on it in a more positive light in later books but nu-uh. Fuck that shit.
But this fic is set in the past before Vau theoretically turns into a child-terrorizing monster but still. The irony of him saying this... I can't even.
#el writes#it's amazing I can see the screen beyond the clown nose I'm wearing here#in case it's not been made abundantly clear I am not a Walon Vau fan#Same for Kal Skirata...or honestly 3/4's of the Cuy'val Dar#Or at the very least I am very critical of them#okay I'm gonna top spamming my poor TL but I just had to share the absolute bullshit shenanigans I'm up to tonight.#I might need to scrap that line just for my own sanity's sake#also here's your daily reminder#fuck karen traviss
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Once you read as much Star Wars books as I do (nothing compared to the hardcore fans who read all of legends and disney canon tho), Legends or Disney canon, you get to weed out all the authors you don’t like and you realise hey, they’re anti-Jedi! Or just don’t like Jedi because of [checks list] things they obviously don’t want to agree with. They either villainise the characters or make them downright ‘bad’ for the readers because, get this, they think these characters are a bunch of jackasses when in reality, that’s not what it is. Or they’d outright say, hey these Jedi mfs are a bunch of fucking baby snatchers! And murderers! Yes, I’m pointing at you Karen Traviss, the bane of all Star Wars books.
#brotherhood was. insane because someone clearly doenst understand mace windu#karen traviss wrote republic commando without even wanting to#understand what sw is#justina ireland writes the non force sensitive all hating the jedi but is more than happy to use them#like okay this could be just the character but if it crops up with almost every non force sensitive and that it inself is a reaccuring theme#and then the jedi themselves are always doubtful of their faith in the force?#oprahyousee.gif#very telling innit#star wars#star wars legends#star wars wank#star wars discourse#fandom discourse#rant#vent
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okay. is Emilian a Child of the Watch (I know u like those guys), or are his hearing aids built into his helmet, or is there another reason you have his helmet on? How did he and Ahmed meet? What is their primary household language (signed? spoken? is there a specific dialect you have in mind? don't answer that one. that ones just me going nuts about language. leave me alone im tired.)
I have so many questions and also I dont want u to answer this ask bc I do want u to write the 50k bc I'm desperate for good Mandalorian reads that aren't associated with Filoni (gag) or Karen Traviss (gag part two).
Anyway. they're cool. or whatever. I'm normal. or whatever.
FJSHFJJF YOU ARE SO SMART YOU GUESSED IT ‼️‼️ emilian is a child of the watch! ahmed isn't (i'll explain how they met in a moment), but emilian keeps the helmet on bc of his creed. there are hearing aids in his helmet, but he's very deaf, so the hearing aids only help with loud noises like large thumps and vibrations, or blasterfire/gunshots, yk. he can't hear for shit, but that's fine with him, his helmet and visor help him stay super visual.
the way they met is honestly a VERY long story (50k...) but short story is that ahmed's ship got shot down, crashed onto the planet that the cotw were on. nablus was fine during the crash, but ahmed got fucked UP. like broken leg, punctured chest, arm fucked up so bad it had to be amputated later, you get it. a cotw team found the ship and pulled nablus and ahmed out the rubble (ahmed was wearing his helmet at the time so no one freaked out that much. nablus was like 3-4 years old). the leader of the team was emilian, which was how they met. they went back to the covert's place, where ahmed and nablus were to stay until ahmed could heal. emilian was mostly fine with ahmed and nablus at first, but once they put ahmed in a private room while waiting for a medic to arrive, ahmed took off his helmet (not knowing that they were cotw) and man. did emilian freak the fuck OUT
they use galactic sign language in the household. ahmed doesn't know tusken, only galactic, so they use that. if ahmed is talking to nablus alone, they use their voices (they don't use basic or mando'a. they are heavily arab inspired so in my head they speak arabic with each other but this is star wars unfortunately so idk. they speak a diff language only with each other). ahmed uses basic/mando'a with everyone else, but in the household they mostly use galactic sign language when communicating.
thank you for asking 🫶🫶 idk how i'll have time to write the 50k but maybe one day
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I hope this link works. @rain-on-kamino-deactivated20231 posted a Fi fic and it’s fucking amazing. I fell in love with it. She captures Fi exactly how I see him in the books. ❤️❤️❤️
GO SHOW HER SOME LOVE!!!
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Okay, so now people are going from "The jedi never did anything wrong ever and are perfect and flawless and made zero mistakes and literally everything was Palpatine's fault even when there were moments he was clearly speed-chess-ing to account for the unexpected," a kinda dumb but not unreasonable take, to "Everything is Anakin's fault and he never had the potential to be better and we're just gonna ignore his slave upbringing and Palpatine's influence and just decide he was always the worst person alive and his redemption at the end-" (which I will admit was kinda small in comparison to his crimes, but also was still the centerpiece of the movies that are the centerpiece of the franchise) "-does not matter at all, fuck that guy, and also the Jedi are still 100% perfect btw". And I do not like that.
Like
I really don't wanna get into the weeds here, but there's something about this that really doesn't sit right with me. I will happily call Kylo Ren a neo-nazi school shooter all day, because his awfulness was established and reinforced as his own choice, (no matter what RoS may retroactively claim) and while I could understand the argument for Palpatine being to blame for literally everything in the Prequels, (he is the big bad for a reason, after all) and I won't deny that Darth-youngling-slayer-Vader isn't even remotely close to innocent either; idunno, it still feels off.
There's just, this weird undercurrent of pushing the blame, or the idea the Jedi may have been even the teensiest tiniest bit less than perfect, or provided any ammunition for Palpatine to use against them, off to anyone and everyone else. And not only does it feel divorced from the actual subtext or even text of the Prequel Trilogy, the context of all the different factors that led to Anakin becoming Vader, (some of which he was responsible for, some of which he was not) or the ending of RotJ; but it also just feels increasingly bizarre outside of that. Like y'all are projecting onto the Jedi so hard that anything said against them feels like a personal attack, and the response is to refuse all responsibility on their behalf. And pardon the pun, but that feels very irresponsible when taking into account the political aspect of some of what the prequels were trying to say about complacence in the face of rising fascism.
I can sorta get why people would be like this, I have heard horror stories about Karen Traviss's Jedi-bashing nonsense, but this is going too far in the other direction at this point. I can also understand how RoS dropping the ball with TLJ's setup could aid in this, since I think TLJ's overall point that the Jedi are still good, but do severely need to evolve and change, was undercut by JJ's own blind worship. But that doesn't make the point any less valid at the end of the day, you're just missing it completely.
#not a reblog#star wars#star wars discourse#jedi discourse#maybe there's some vital context I'm missing#in the clone wars or whatever#since I am a movie-only gal#but this really reads to me like people#who took the OT's stilted and biased account#of them at face value#but instead of getting mad at the prequels#just decided to completely misread them#to align with that prior perception#for the record I do not think the jedi suck#I think they were trying to do the right thing#but made a fuckton of mistakes#that Palpatine was more than happy to exploit#thus this trend of completely denying those mistakes#is really really fucking stupid#and honestly a little uncomfortable#and I just hope that y'all don't approach#important irl issues the same way#really. every time I see stuff like this#it reminds me that at the end of the day#while TLJ made me appreciate#and even love the movies again#I will always hate 99% of star wars fans
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