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antianakin · 17 days

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Pong Krell. It’s universally agreed that he deserved worse than what he got and I get that. I just wished we got to see what he was like before he Fell. Did he always hate clones, was it gradual? Did he suspect something off and went over paranoid?

I’ll say this one and I’ll say this probably a thousand more times but I wished the creators focused on more details with characters. It’s absolutely fascinating that they created a Jedi that Fell but did nothing with it besides outright evil.

How other Jedi reacted to learning that a fellow Jedi betrayed everyone? How did the Republic?

I just wished they did more with him than just, yeah that dude was a dick and killed clones.

Yeah, it's one of the things I don't like as much about TCW, the extremely episodic nature of it means that there really is never any build-up to anything or lasting impact from anything. Unless it's happening within one of the 2-4 episode arcs, we RARELY get to see any kind of build-up or fallout. It's one of the major issues with Barriss, too, we see her ONCE in season 2 and she's calm, kind, methodical, and selfless. And then three seasons later in season 5 she's suddenly ruthless, selfish, doubting everything and everyone, merciless, etc. There is NO BUILD UP to that radical 180 to her character and there's no real exploration of how Ahsoka really feels about that particular betrayal afterwards, the focus in later episodes after the Wrong Jedi focuses only on Ahsoka feeling betrayed by the COUNCIL and her feelings about that. Nothing since TCW has ever touched it either (Rebels, Mandalorian, the Ahsoka show). Satine's death never really comes up again after it happens aside from Bo-Katan being an asshole. Obi-Wan goes from being totally fucked up about Maul coming back to being chill enough to take on Maul and Savage alone and winning without us getting to see him actually deal with those emotions.

Pong Krell and the Umbara arc IN GENERAL falls into this category easily (so do the Zyggeria and the Deception arc tbh). Krell is such a basic evil character, there's so little nuance to him and we never get to see the Jedi react to the revelation that one of their own turned at all. Dooku turned after he had already left the Order as far as any of them really know, but Krell was still IN the Order when he decided to betray them and it would've been really interesting to see the impact of that on them. It would've been ESPECIALLY interesting to explore that more during the Wrong Jedi arc in particular in how the Jedi feel like they can't trust their own people not to betray them anymore after Dooku and Krell.

Krell is presented with like. Zero nuance. He is just unequivocally evil and despite Anakin greeting him in a friendly way at the beginning, the visuals tell you this dude's no good right from his first appearance. There isn't really any chance that he's going to be a good guy at all. So all we are left with are headcanons.

And I remember discussing my Krell headcanons somewhere, but I think it might've been on a Discord server I've since left, so I unfortunately cannot find them again. So I'll try to remember them and immortalize them here, I guess.

Here's the thing about Krell. NO ONE suspects him. So he cannot be overtly acting like a bigoted asshole from the jump at any point, he HAS to be acting in such a way that it's not trickling out to the other clones and to the Jedi themselves that Krell is an absolute monster. Even Fives takes a moment to decide that Krell is suspicious and only brings up Krell's casualty numbers after he sees Krell's behavior for a minute and combines that knowledge with what he's now personally experiencing and is starting to come to conclusions based on that. He doesn't go into the relationship thinking Krell is worse than any other Jedi already.

And based on what we know of EVERY OTHER FALLEN JEDI (Dooku, Anakin, Barriss), they didn't start out as monsters. Dooku was a highly respected Jedi Master who seems to have had a really positive relationship with Yoda and Qui-Gon and simply became disillusioned with the Senate and his care for the people of the galaxy got twisted into something darker over time. Barriss was kind, selfless, compassionate, brave, and resourceful, and it was the war that caused her to start letting her fears and pain consume her into turning on the Jedi. Anakin was kind and spent years having his fears and doubts twisted into selfishness and greed and darkness that allowed him to justify murder and genocide for power. So it wouldn't make sense to me that Pong Krell wouldn't fall into the same pattern where he was once kind and good and selfless and brave, but that the circumstances surrounding the war caused him to lose faith and fall.

My headcanon is that he lost an entire battalion early in the war, much like we see happen to Plo Koon during the Malevolence arc and that that loss and failure just BROKE him. Krell DID care about the clones, he cared about his men, and he FAILED them all. And I think that he saw all of these clones dying by the dozens in all of the other battalions and instead of choosing to let go of his pain and fear and lean into his compassion, he chose to distance himself from them entirely to make it hurt less. If he didn't care about the clones, if he just saw them as the cannon fodder that the Senate treated them all as, then it would hurt less when they died. Maybe the Senate itself even dragged him over the coals for that initial loss. Or perhaps it was the opposite, maybe most of his battalion was killed, but it ultimately ended in a victory anyway because they were forced to just keep going despite the consequences. And so Krell decides to enter this mindset where he is disillusioned with the Senate and just CANNOT allow himself to care about the clones, because it won't change what the Senate is going to do to them anyway, so he may as well just treat them the same way.

And this wouldn't have happened overnight. It wouldn't have been a sudden 180 where he decided he was just going to treat them like shit. But he maybe decided to put some more professional distance between himself and his new battalion, not get close to them, not use their names (although he still knows them, still remembers them all). Maybe one day they're in a tricky situation and all of his options are bad, he HAS to sacrifice some of his men in order to salvage the situation at all, and it's a choice between a full retreat that he KNOWS the Senate won't take well, or sacrificing the men to achieve the victory. So he sacrifices the men. It's not an entire battalion, it's not even a whole company, but it's more than it would've been if he'd retreated. Maybe next time, there's a choice between going back to save some of the men even if it poses a risk to his own life or the mission or something, and he chooses not to go back for them because the mission is more important, or he rationalizes that his life is more important as the Jedi General. And it's just more and more little decisions like that that add up over time to being able to see the clones as nothing more than tools.

The disillusionment with the Senate leads to him sort-of agreeing with things Dooku and the Separatists have said and he can look at the war and realize that it's entirely possible that the Republic is going to LOSE, and he CANNOT be the one who loses again, so maybe he starts bouncing around the concept of maybe switching sides. And of course initially he rejects the idea. He's a Jedi, he won't just abandon the Republic, he can't be a traitor, who in the Separatist side would ever trust him anyway. But once that seed is planted, it doesn't go away and it keeps coming back up and he keeps finding ways to rationalize why it might be a good idea and then deciding not to do it over and over again. Until one day, he can't convince himself that it's a bad idea or that it wouldn't work. He tells himself it's the ONLY option, if he doesn't change sides then he's dead. But Dooku WON'T trust him unless he can prove that he's not on the Republic's side, so he has to come up with a plan to gain their trust. And what better way to earn that trust than to ensure a Separatist victory in an important campaign by double-crossing the Republic.

And once he's chosen to go down that path, it's even EASIER to stop caring about the clones because, well, they're all dead anyway. The Republic is going to lose, the clones are all dead men walking no matter what, so why bother caring about them or trying to keep them alive? He can't lose so often that the Jedi or the Senate become suspicious of him, of course, but it's REALLY easy then to get to Umbara and treat the clones like crap and turn them against each other and intentionally try to get them all killed. They're dead anyway, he's not the one killing them really, is he, the Senate is, the Jedi are, the war is. They were dead from the moment they were created in that test tube because they were created for this specific purpose. It's not his fault.

And much like Barriss turns against the Jedi in part because she did LOVE the Jedi and was devastated by what she saw happening to them and the pain of seeing her people forced to become something they were never supposed to be, as much as her actions were intended as some kind of message to try to sort-of save the Jedi from a course of action she saw as their downfall, I think that Krell turns on the clones because at some point he DID care about them. A lot. And that care became his downfall, the pain at what was being done to them just absolutely gutted him and it threw him down a path that ultimately led him to turn against the very people whose deaths had hurt him so badly just a few short years ago.

Krell might not have been the most effusive or emotional person prior to the war or anything, he might've been a more reserved person similar to Mace or Dooku or Luminara, but I think he probably was a perfectly good Jedi who was kind and selfless and compassionate once upon a time.

And none of the headcanons above have even touched what his relationships with other JEDI must have been like. It's just as possible that he did have friends and people he considered family among the Jedi. Maybe he had a padawan once at some point. And maybe all of those people had died by the time we get to Umbara. Maybe he had to watch a lot of the people he was closest to just fall like flies, and so it starts feeling like nothing matters. Maybe one of the Jedi who died on Geonosis was a former padawan of his, but Krell himself obviously wasn't there and the pain of THAT loss and the guilt he feels at not having been there (even though this padawan had been knighted for a while and there was a good reason Krell wasn't there that day) just sticks with him, too, and he never quite manages to let that go, either.

I think a lot of people choose to just headcanon Krell as having just always been kind-of an asshole even when he was a Jedi, but that doesn't work for me. If Krell was always an asshole, I feel like the Jedi would've stepped in at some point before the war even HAPPENED and tried to manage that situation. And it doesn't match up with the way pretty much every other fallen Jedi has ever been written, where they were GOOD PEOPLE once upon a time who saw awful things happen that they couldn't stop or had an awful thing happen TO them that they couldn't stop and the pain of that experience consumes them to the point that they spiral into darkness as a result. Krell should be the same way, which means he likely was a perfectly good normal Jedi before the war. He would've been kind, he might've been good with younglings (he's tall, maybe he was the one the younglings went to all the time for piggy back rides, maybe he often taught dual wielding to padawans who asked because of how clearly proficient he is at it), he might've taught a student of his own successfully, he would've been wise and selfless and compassionate, he would've loved the Jedi and the people of the galaxy.

Like, to be frank, if Tales of the Jedi HAD to explore a fallen Jedi story, they should've explored Krell instead of Dooku. Dooku has been explored before, we know quite a lot about him and his motivations and his backstory, but Krell, as you noted, is left a mystery and is stuck in the realm of being just purely evil for the sake of the story they were telling in this one arc. Krell needed more nuance in a way Dooku just did not.

#star wars #pong krell #tcw #the clone wars #umbara #umbara arc #krell

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liontalon1 · 4 days

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I purposefully didn’t include fan hated characters like Rey or Jar Jar because this is about actual evilness not being annoying.

#Star Wars #star wars polls #character polls #swtcw #the bad batch #star wars original trilogy #star wars prequels #star wars sequel trilogy #the mandalorian

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talesfrommedinastation · 7 months

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My redneck neighbor Doug tries to cheer me up with 'The Clone Wars'

CW: Doug-isms. Y'all know it.

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(text message exchange today)

Doug: Hey Dr. MM! Can I borrow your rake today?

Me: Sure, ask my husband. I'm busy.

Doug: Everything ok kid?

Me: No, my uncle passed yesterday. I'm sad.

Doug: Aw I am so sorry. He's with Jesus now. Or other types of Jesus. Did he believe in Jesus?

Me: Thanks Doug.

Doug: Oh since I got you here, I need a refresher. What was the name of that guy everyone hated in Star Wars?

Me:....there's a few of those.

Doug: Naw, this one, everyone hated!

Me: Doesn't narrow it down. What did he look like?

Doug: He was on 'The Clone Wars'. He was a Jedi like that robot with all the arms that coughed all the time.

Me: General Grevious? Not a Jedi.

Doug: Okay, but this guy, what was his name? He was a giant frog with a lot of arms with a ball sack hanging from his face. He got fragged by his men after being a dick.

Me: Pong Krell?!

Doug: Yeah! That's it! Pong Krell!

Me: Can we just call him 'Frog with Ball Sack On Face'?

(unsee it. You can't.)

Doug: Works for me kid! Can I borrow that rake?

Doug's a national treasure. He made me smile after a very sad day.

#doug talks star wars #doug the neighbor #pong krell #the clone wars #star wars #star wars thoughts #star wars clone wars #redneck doug #umbara arc

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bedlemboy · 2 months

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More Incorrect Star Wars quotes, again!

Anakin to the Council: Where is all this hate coming from? You guys tell me I’m the best all the time!

<cut> Rex: You’re the best, General!

<cut> Rex: General Skywalker, you’re the best!

Anakin: . . . Y’know, that might just be Rex.

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Anakin: The doctor said all my bleeding was internal. That’s where blood is SUPPOSED to be!

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Anakin: Master, we just caught a serial killer! I’ve wanted to do that since I was four years old!

Kenobi: That’s troubling.

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Rex: Welcome to the 501st, General. I'm Captain Rex.

Pong Krell: And I'm not interested. I have no use for clones. I find clones weird and confusing. I live my life by numbers. You see this watch? It tells me how many calories I burn at any time. Question- how many calories do you think I burned walking from there to there? You, clone closest to me.

Dogma: Oh! Uh, three?

Pong Krell: Three?! Haaaa ha-ha-ha! Try 0.8, numbnuts! I made promises to my superiors that I most certainly cannot keep. That's why I need you idiots to work twice as hard- no, no! Strike that! Four times as hard! No, no no! Strike that! I NEED YOU MORONS TO WORK EIGHT TIMES HARDER THAN YOU'VE EVER WORKED, IN YOUR ENTIRE LIVES! I'm having a heart attack. Yep, I'm having a heart attack. . . Get back to work.

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Ahsoka: Name one thing Rex can do that I can’t!

Anakin: Roller skate like an angel?

Ahsoka: Whore! I’m great at skating! Or have you forgotten Barris Offee’s fourth grade birthday party?

Anakin: I have definitely forgotten that. Can you look exactly like this Rex decoy I hired?

Cut-up: Sup?

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Ahsoka to Cut-up: If you’re going to pose as me, you need a little more Beyonce swagger. . . Alright, working with what you got, I guess.

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Ahsoka: On the bright side, you got Masters Kenobi and Skywalker off their hunger strike.

Mace Windu: I just threw a bunch of popcorn on the floor. It wasn’t that hard.

Ahsoka: Yeah, they’re animals.

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Kenobi: Normally, it’d be our word against theirs, but luckily the Clones were all wearing body cams!

Anakin: You see, Master, the thing about cameras is that they don’t really tell the whole objective truth. Images can be distorted. People can appear naked.

Kenobi: What are you talking about?

Rex: General Skywalker is completely nude in the footage, sir.

Kenobi: WHY?!

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Anakin: Baba-booie! Cornholio! . . . And that’s it for my prepared remarks. Any questions?

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Kenobi: I want to show you a picture from last night that really upset me.

Anakin: In my defense, Ahsoka bet me 5 credits that I couldn’t drink all that shampoo.

Kenobi: That’s not what. . . You drank shampoo?

Anakin: . . . No. You’re the one farting bubbles.

#star wars #incorrect quotes #kenobi #brooklyn 99 #ahsoka #anakin skywalker #the clone wars

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heart-of-a-rebel16 · 4 months

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Excuse me- Shackled SEQUEL?! GIVE MEEE

🫡

shackled sequel my beloved!!! There’s definitely going to be a lot more whump and angst, and maybe just a bit of comfort :)

I cast opening snippet upon ye!

The old clone was staring up at him. CT-7567, colloquially known as Rex to his peers and superiors. He had fought under Anakin Skywalker, then later Ahsoka Tano, and for a brief while, fell under the command of one Pong Krell, a corrupt Jedi that had infiltrated the religious order’s ranks in the heat of war. The reports given from the campaign upon Umbara were fascinating, if he did say so himself.

One quick search into the Holonet’s backlogs had told Thrawn all this information, and practical experience told him more. He knew that the clones were fiercely individualistic, he knew that at one point in history, they had been almost rabidly loyal to their Jedi. He also knew that upon the execution of Order 66, the clones had been told that their beloved Jedi had betrayed their republic, and that they were to be killed on sight. It had happened in the sands of Utapau, among the exotic flora of Felucia, in the snow on Kaller, and it had happened in the skies of the Bracca system, on a ship called the Albedo Brave. All of this, just from a quick search, and a keen mind.

Chaos reigned around Rex, CT-7567. Voices layered one on top of the other, a green lightsaber flashed in the small cell, and yet still, the clone looked upwards at the camera, eyes wide and layered with shock and anger. By all accounts, Cal Kestis should be terrified of the clones, and conversely, CT-7567 should hate him for his actions while he was still aligned with the Empire. Yet, a stony type of rage glinted in the old clone’s brown eyes like flint against steel. Thrawn found the whole dichotomy utterly captivating.

The purple blur streaking past Rex was surely Garazeb Orrelios, and the Lasat was just one more piece of the puzzle that made up Cal Kestis. The way the former guardsman scooped up his trembling friend could hardly be read as platonic, nor the Lasat resting his forehead on Cal Kestis’ furrowed brow, murmuring soft words that were lost amongst Sabine Wren calling for a frantic pickup.

Captivating indeed.

Thrawn broke his gaze from the monitor for a moment to study the gloves folded in his hands. Warmth still leached from the old, weathered leather. Chiss naturally ran colder than other humanoids, their bodies instead pulling heat from the objects around them. If Thrawn concentrated, he could feel the ghostly warmth left from Cal Kestis’ freckled hands seep deeply into his.

With a satisfied nod, Thrawn clicked the monitor off, closing the curtains on the vignette, pocketing the gloves to savor what warmth was still left on them. He had not been in possession of neither the time nor the resources to monitor Cal Kestis’ heart rate or brainwaves; thus, his experiment could not be considered a complete success. Nevertheless, he was certain that this would not be his last opportunity to test the limits of his traitorous Jedi’s abilities.

#TOXIC YAOI ME LADS #I’m so excited for this one y’all can’t believe :]#star wars rebels #swr #sw rebels #star wars #zeb orrelios #agent kallus #alexsandr kallus #garazeb orrelios #kalluzeb #sheep in wolfs clothing au

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ahsoka-its-all-of-us · 1 year

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Possibly unpopular opinion: I think The Clone Wars missed a great opportunity by making Pong Krell evil.

Don’t get me wrong; I hate the man with an absolute, burning passion. He was a bastard, an asshole, the worst Jedi ever. But then in the end it’s revealed that’s because he isn’t, not anymore, he has willingly and openly fallen to the Dark Side and has committed his war crimes in hopes of getting Dooku’s attention. Which is a valid and interesting storyline, I guess.

But what if he hadn’t? What if he had remained a devoted Jedi?

One thing TCW tries to show occasionally is that even on the bad side not all people are actually bad — e.g. Mina Bonteri —, and similarly they try to show that on the good side not all people are good — e.g. Slick or Barriss. But they always stop shy of actually making that point; in the end, Mina’s son Lux decides to join the Republic, Slick was not just a defector but a traitor, and Barriss loses all humanity (Mirilianity?) betraying her own friend. In the end, the show keeps being about good and evil, and the Republic is good while the Separatists are evil. This becomes painfully obvious with systems that wish to remain neutral; in multiple instances they are eventually persuaded to aid or join the Republic, which is then framed as a good and honourable thing to do. As if choosing to stay out of a conflict they have no stakes in wasn’t.

Of course I have to make the comparison with Avatar: The Last Airbender, which very similarly has a good and a bad side of a conflict. But there we do get to see the opposite in both sides: the good side has people like Jet and the Earth Kingdom thugs, people who lose all humanity in their quest for vengeance or who abuse the situation for their own gain, while the bad side has people like the Fire Nation kids and Zuko and Iroh: people who have been drilled into supporting the system and don’t know any better, or who figured out that their side was in the wrong and decided to work against it for their own people as much as for the other side.

And I think Pong Krell could have been a great example of that. A great example of a Jedi who has lost sight of all things a Jedi should be; whose arrogance and racism (sort of; I don’t have a better word for it rip) actively undermines all we as an audience believe the Republic should stand for. By having him change sides, that conflict is reduced to a good/bad one, when it could be so much more.

Because imagine the consequences if he hadn’t done what he did because he wanted to join the Sith. Rex and the others had not just moral but legal backing in arresting him because he betrayed the Republic, and same with Dogma shooting him. But what if they hadn’t? What if Rex would have to choose between loyalty to the cause he was bred for and the General that stands for it, or loyalty to his men and therefore against the General? Would he have been able to make the arrest? Clones are meant to be expendable, after all, and while Krell’s actions are nothing but cruel disregard of his pawns, they weren’t necessarily illegal. It was more the contrast with the other Jedi generals who had developed a bond with their clones that made Krell’s behaviour jarring.

The Umbara arc is one of my favourite arcs because of the spotlight on the clones and their morality, and I think this would have made it even better (or worse, in terms of how my heart could have taken it)

#star wars #the clone wars #pong Krell #Captain rex #barriss offee #slick #atla #avatar: the last airbender #dogma #Mina bonteri #lux bonteri #dooku #star wars gifs

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