I’ve been meaning to start a serie of fake vintage ad’s for monster for a while because is there anything better than good old monsters and stylish advertisement
I cannot stop thinking about Ireena Kolyana, So here’s my take on her! I got super inspired after seeing @luckyblackcatxiii ‘s COS art, so you should maybe go look at it too, like right now
The party I'm DM-ing have just met her and Ismark and oh boy am I excited to see how this goes.
can't remember if you've answered this before, but who do you think proposed between anakin and padme? personally i am immovable from padme, because of vibes and i think it's funnier
padme, for similar reasons, but also because i think it's an integral narrative beat that at the end of AOTC, she leans in to kiss anakin because she thinks they're about to die, and then anakin comes shockingly (pun intended) close to doing so. padme losing people to violence is a really important underpinning of her state of mind in AOTC; she opens the movie with corde dying in her arms in an assassination attempt directed towards padme, and for the whole film, anakin is her bodyguard and is very genuinely assigned to die for her if necessary. i think that guilt is something she deals with inherently badly, especially because throughout the film, anakin's past - much more less privileged than her own - is repeatedly shoved in her face. shmi helped save her life and then shmi is killed in a horrific fashion and padme, set aside by the fact that she's lived in a seat of power where people were trained to die for her, has to have the enormity of that unfairness smashed over her head repeatedly.
while she's going through all of that she's wrestling with feelings for anakin, and her refusal to act on them is undoubtedly shaken by the reality that he's going to war and all the bets are on him dying soon, or being horribly maimed (again) and padme reaches a point throughout AOTC where she's tired of losing and of losing her personal life to her career. both of them are actually acting out of the same place; they want to stop losing. the issue is that both anakin and padme are heading into a galactic war at a precipice where loss is the thing that will break both of them, and that's exactly the thing that happens in war the most, and it does exactly that. but it's important to me that it's padme who proposes, because anakin desperately and embarrassingly makes the case In Favor Of Feelings for the whole film and when he's shot down he backs off, but he says in AOTC that he can sense padme's feelings for him. we have no reason to disbelieve him, especially since "i can psychically sense your deep feels" is the plot lever lucas pulls with luke and vader in ROTJ. in this universe and with the skywalkers that's not a come on, that's a legitimate observation. it's important that the dynamic is anakin jumping into this relationship, getting shot down, and then padme realizing how much she actually just doesn't want to do that, and then under pressure she goes for it; the feelings are both mutual and still stupid. then the most important gestures become padme leaning in for the kiss as they go into the ring on geonosis and padme running towards anakin after the failed duel with dooku, and following the trend of those, i find it imperative to emphasize just how onboard padme is with this (immeasurably stupid, they're in their 20s) decision. they essentially had a fling for two weeks, got drive thru married in vegas baby, and then proceeded to be married and not tell their parents for like 3, 4 years.
HAYDEN CHRISTENSEN
photographed by Norman Wong for the digital-only Empire Focus cover edition, as part of Empire Magazine's 25 Years of the Star Wars Prequels (February 2024)