Self indulgent drawing of Murderbot <3 It and ART are cruising through space, just the two of them, and Murderbot is relaxed and comfortable. ART has more than a few feelings about this and saves an image to its archive -- unfortunately Murderbot is aware of ART watching it and it flips off one of the drones.
(it doesn't dislike the attention ART is giving it... it just makes it a bit flustered!)
See some bonus images (including ones without text) below the cut, along with an explanation of some of the design choices!
I am 100% in the camp of Murderbot having a much more expressive face than it realizes, especially when it's alone and/or comfortable.
All text in the images with a color block behind it is essentially metadata that ART has attached to any tag it makes for Murderbot.
The blue inorganics are purely because @hazelek found a post with early 2000s vibrant, semi-transparent tech and we were joking around about MB getting aesthetic upgrades lmao.
About half the tags in the last image are courtesy of @scificrows alkdjfl;kj thank you dearly for those additions!
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I think it's interesting that - in order to make his "free-thinking Jedi" characters hold any semblance of rationality in their arguments - Dave Filoni needs to resort to artificially dehumanizing the other Jedi and painting them all with the same "we dogmatically worship protocol" brush.
He does this with Huyang in the recent Ahsoka episode.
"Lolz he's so narrow-minded, preachy and by-the-book, unable to think outside the box, just like the Jedi in the Prequels."
My first reaction was being amused at the fact that Filoni had to resort to making the Jedi Order's ideals and rules be embodied by a literal machine for his anti-Jedi headcanon to start making sense.
But then I remembered: Huyang isn't just any droid.
In The Clone Wars, he had a sassy personality, he had a pep in his step, he had a sense of humor...
This character was human in his behavior, he was fun and whimsical.
But now he's been reduced to, I dunno, "Jedi C-3PO"? Basically?
"Ha! He's blunt and unsympathetic because he's a droid, but it's funny because the Jedi were the same, they were training themselves to be tactless, emotionless droids."
And Filoni does this with Mace Windu too, in Tales of the Jedi.
Mace, who brought a lightsaber to the throat of a planetary leader to defend the endangered Zillo Beast...
... and who went waaay past his mandate by mischievously sneaking around Bardottan authorities and breaking into the Queen's quarters because he felt something bad was afoot...
... was reduced to being an almost droid-like, rule-parotting, protocol purist who sticks to his instructions (and is implied to be willing to let a murder go unsolved so he can get a promotion).
I mentioned this at the end of my first post on Luke in The Last Jedi... while changes in personality do happen overtime and can be explained in-universe... if you don't show us that progression and evolution and just leave us without that context, that'll break the suspension of disbelief, for your audience.
Here, we have two characters with a different (almost caricatural) personality than the one they were originally shown to have.
Now... we could resort to headcanons, to make it all fit together.
We could justify Huyang's tone shift 'cause "Order 66 changed him". And we could make explanations about TotJ's Mace:
Being younger and thus more ambitious and a stickler for the rules, and only really becoming more flexible after getting his seat on the Council and gaining more maturity.
Being such a teacher's pet in the episode because we're seeing him through the eyes of a notorious unreliable narrator, Dooku.
There'd be nothing wrong with opting to go with either of those headcanons to cope with this. After all, Star Wars is meant to help you get creative.
But the problem I encounter is that:
Filoni has an anti-Jedi bias, so the above headcanons clearly wouldn't really track with his intended narrative.
We'd be jumping through hoops to extrapolate and fill in what is, essentially, inconsistent characterization, manufactured to make Ahsoka and Dooku shine under a better light.
And that sours whatever headcanon I come up with.
Edit:
Also, yeah, as folks have been saying in the tags... wtf is "Jedi protocol"? The term isn't ever mentioned in the movies, I skimmed through dialog transcripts of TCW, never saw it there.
So it's almost as if - if Filoni wasn't draining characters like Mace and Huyang of all humanity and nuance - his point about "the Jedi were too detached and lost their way, but not free-thinkers like Qui-Gon, Dooku and Ahsoka" wouldn't really hold much water.
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Thinking about how popular Mai would've been if she were a boy. Like, can you imagine?people would've swooned over her like they swoon over, idk, Jet—it just occured to me that I like her because she's so unconventional for a female character.
Girls like Mai exist in real world—but women are rarely allowed to be complex and three dimensional and grey in fiction.
I would argue that Mai is a grey character; she did start out as Azula's lackey. And well, that's a fictional girl; I found her apathy stan-worthy.
I love that she constantly has a bitch face. She cracks dry/dark jokes. Wears black. Is mysterious and stoic. Does everything she can to disregard authority/even though she's not confrontational about it. (There's one difference. Bad boys are usually very confrontational).
All these characteristics exist in popular male characters. (Except for one thing that I've noticed: most of these “bad boy” characters are volatile and yet, are described as broody/stoic, like, dude. That ain't stoic, that's so emotional.)
So yeah. Coming back to Mai. Imagine if she were a boy.
A boy who's apathetic and has no passion for anything. A boy who's constantly bored/a thrill-seeker/has nothing he cares about. A boy who has a shutter for a face and rarely expresses himself, is amazing with knives and hand-to-hand combat and is gloomy.
There's nothing he cares about because caring gets people hurt and everyone wants something and is two-faced so it's safe to be a mask of indifference. Until—hold on—until he meets a passionate, hot-headed girl who's ✨ different ✨and if not anything, wears her heart on her sleeve/is an open book...
Yes, I'm talking about Zuko.
...and oh, oh, would you look at that? Now he has something to fight for!
I mean, for Mai, Zuko (after Ty Lee) is the only other person in front of whom she can be herself.
Reminds me of “he's only nice to her” trope. Sorry.
“You're so beautiful when you hate the world.”
“I don't hate you.”
Just imagine Mai as a boy. People would eat it up. They don't like her 'cause she's a girl.
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