Jurassic World Might Be Sexist, but Less So Than Almost Everything Else

“She’s a stiff, he’s a life-force – really?”

—Joss Whedon on Jurassic World

“He’s a pushy, smarmy sexist, and she’s an uptight bitch. What’s the problem?”

—Mike Stoklasa on Jurassic World

Is Jurassic World sexist? That’s the question that seems to be on everyone’s cyber-lips, for some reason. I don’t claim to know the answer, but I do claim that some of the arguments flying around to that effect are somewhat specious at best, if not entirely hyperbolic.

People can be offended by whatever they want, of course, and it’s been quite the season for it. We started the summer with Avengers: Age of Ultron, a big dumb action movie decried for the sexism of having its amoral super-assassin talk about her uterus and get captured by the bad guy for five minutes. Then came Mad Max: Fury Road, a big dumb action movie hailed as a triumph of feminism because Charlize Theron did more stuff in it than Mad Max. Now we’ve arrived at Jurassic World (known in foreign markets as Jurassic Park 4: Dumber Than a Box of Rocks), a big dumb action movie whose unabashed sexism includes having its female protagonist wear heels and learn to care about her family.

Why do we expect so much from big dumb action movies, again?

Let’s not forget that the first Jurassic Park is the only real movie in the franchise; all three sequels are just monster flicks populated with stock characters who exist only to carry the plot between scenes of people being eaten. Which is exactly where you expect to find the most nuanced representation of progressive gender politics. I just wanted to see people running from dinosaurs, not get sucked into an Internet vortex of amateur feminist film theory.

A common thread I’ve noticed in several articles is that apparently the Jurassic Park franchise is renowned for its strong female characters. I had never heard this before, and I suspect that it only recently became the case (when people reacted negatively to the lead female character in the latest movie). Multiple reviews, however, talk about how Jurassic World’s Claire Dearing (played by Bryce Dallas Howard) represents a step backward from the previous films’ iconic feminist characters.

Laura Dern’s Ellie Sattler from the original JP was a fine character, sure: strong, confident, reasonable, passionate about her work, and equally passionate about having kids with Dr. Grant. Her big scene in the movie comes when a man with a gun escorts her across the park so she can flip a circuit breaker then run screaming from dinosaurs. No disrespect to Ellie (the honest reactions of the first film’s characters to their situations is one of its many strengths), but let’s take off the feminism-tinted glasses.

Then there was Julianne Moore’s memorable character Jeff Goldblum’s Girlfriend from The Lost World. She inadvertently kick-starts the entire regrettable plot of the movie by going to Dinosaur Island, prompting Jeff Goldblum to fly to her rescue. The first thing she does when he arrives is tell him she doesn’t need a man to save her. The second thing she does is piss off a herd of stegosaurs and need Jeff Goldblum to save her.

Even Téa Leoni’s character from Jurassic Park III is given higher marks than Claire. You’re a better person than I am if you can remember anything about Téa Leoni’s character from Jurassic Park III, besides how she lied to Dr. Grant and tricked him into risking his life to help rescue her son from the dinosaurs. Endangering others to save your stupid kid is a more feminist character trait than coming to realize you can be more than an uptight business professional all the time.

It’s also Jurassic Park III in which we learn that Ellie Sattler, fearless kickass adventuress from the first movie, has settled down and become a stay-at-home mom. At least two reviewers leapt to defend this development, however, pointing out that this was perfectly okay because it was Ellie’s choice. Unlike Claire, whose character development was the result of a gun pointed at her head, or something. Oh no, her sister told her she should have kids someday; now she has to do it.

The most dishonest thing about this is that the third movie’s bungled handling of its returning characters didn’t even need to be taken into account. It was a cash-in sequel with no interest in respecting the character arcs of the first film (just look at poor Dr. Grant, who is still a lonely, childless grump in Jurassic Park III, despite the growth and change he underwent in the original). It’s not the viewer’s job to justify bad writing. But that isn’t allowed to be the case, because these arguments hinge on painting Jurassic World as the black sheep in a franchise of otherwise unimpeachable feminism.

Claire, in contrast to her predecessors, stealth-kills a Dimorphodon to save her boyfriend and uses herself as bait to lure a Tyrannosaurus into battle with the evil hybrid dinosaur to save everyone. Despite apparently being a horrible sexist stereotype, she’s kind of the most badass chick in these movies. Except for Jeff Goldblum’s adorable daughter Kelly, who uses gymnastics to kick a Velociraptor out a window (note: this is the most stupid thing that happens in any of these movies/in any movie).

All of her accomplishments and character development are undercut, however, by her wardrobe. More than one critic, male and female alike, derided Claire’s skirt suit and stiletto heels, specifically calling her out as a “damsel in distress” because of them, which makes me think they don’t know what that term means (one prominent review even included Claire’s bangs as part of that problematic ensemble, which . . . what? I mean, what?). None of them can understand why, when the park she runs breaks down in the middle of a business day and her nephews are lost in the dinosaur onslaught, Claire doesn’t go home and change out of her work clothes into more practical jungle gear.

Honestly, I don’t get it. Aren’t we pretty blatantly reaching for something—anything—to complain about now? I remember reading an article last year criticizing the female protagonists of popular young adult franchises (Divergent, The Hunger Games, etc.) for all having the same body type, but instead of advocating diversity of female empowerment, it just came off as body-shaming petite women. Have we come so far that we’ve somehow looped back around on ourselves and become the thing we hate? I don’t know what else would qualify us to judge this character based on the way she dresses. How disappointingly reductive.

So what if Claire wears heels for the whole movie? She kicks ass in her heels, without calling attention to that fact. She dresses like a professional corporate executive; there’s nothing objectifying or exploitative about her outfit at all. It suits her character and personality—she belongs in a boardroom, not roaming around out in the field. Despite being ill-suited to the action hero role, however, she doesn’t shy away from venturing out into the Mesozoic wilderness to rescue her dimwitted nephews.

But because Chris Pratt, a Navy veteran-turned-dinosaur wrangler hired by the park’s CEO specifically for that talent, is a badass from the start instead of learning how to become one, Claire’s journey is somehow negated. Her heroic actions are just “mirroring” Pratt’s (no examples given), and played for the novelty of a girl kicking ass (no examples given). In reality, she’s just an object of disrespect, a punchline for her male colleagues’ inappropriate humor (no examples given).

I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure the only park employee who offers Claire any insubordination is Chris Pratt, and it’s not because he’s a macho hunk and she’s a fragile little girl with the vapours, but because he’s a douche. “He should have been fired for sexual harassment!” Yeah, but . . . it’s a movie, that’s his character. The “charming rogue” would be an asshole in real life, but we’re still allowed to find him a fun archetype in fiction, right? In The Empire Strikes Back, Han Solo sexually harasses Princess Leia for the whole movie. These are exciting adventure films, not how-to guides for interacting with your female coworkers.

The last line of defense, of course, is hyperbole, also known as “bald-faced lying.” These professional film critics/gender commentators would have you believe that Chris Pratt is “shocked,” “horrified,” and “disgusted” that Claire doesn’t know her nephews’ ages, but I saw the movie too and he just looked momentarily confused, then immediately moved on to something else. The movie did not want us to hate Claire for this, but it seems that plenty of people wanted it to want us to.

How about that ending, though, where Claire willfully decides to throw away her career so she can get married and become a mother, because having children is the answer to literally all of a woman’s problems? Virtually every condemnatory diatribe against this movie that I read included this summary of its conclusion. Except that Claire doesn’t get married or have children, she just gets a boyfriend, and she doesn’t quit her job to become a housewife so much as the company she works for self-destructs when the dinosaurs it created start eating its patrons.

(Childrearing is hardly presented as a panacea in any case. Claire’s sister, Karen, only sends her kids to the island in the first place because she’s in the middle of an embittered divorce with David Wallace over the rights to Suck It®. Many were quick to jump on her suggestion that Claire settle down as the film asserting that marriage and children are key to a woman’s happiness. Except Karen’s marriage is a sham and her life is falling apart. So much for eternal wedded bliss.)

The final lines of the movie actually imply an open, unfettered future. Having shed her self-imposed restrictions, Claire is finally able to look ahead without the need for constant certainty and meticulous planning. “What do we do now?” she asks as the remnants of her old life burn down around her. “Probably stay together. For survival,” Chris Pratt answers, smarmy egotist that he is.

Maybe they’ll stay together and maybe they won’t. The point is that Claire is now capable of seeing all her options, not just the safe ones she can control. As Jurassic World CEO Simon Masrani says earlier in the film, “The key to a happy life is to accept you are never actually in control.” It’s like a theme or something.

So, then, is Jurassic World actually sexist, or just T-rexist? There is one central aspect of the film, buried beneath the circular arguments and unconvincing justifications, that the above clutter was invented to protest. Claire is a successful, career-driven woman, and her arc over the course of the movie involves her becoming receptive to a life beyond that career by forming a relationship with a man and two surrogate children. Through her ordeal she is “softened,” changed in a way that paints her earlier worldview as incorrect, or at least incomplete.

This is, if not sexist, not particularly deep or original either (but consider that this is the third sequel in a 22-year-old franchise about dinosaur clones and you can see how much the studio prioritizes depth and originality); Dr. Grant had almost the same arc back in the first film, after all. If it is sexist, however, it’s so mild and non-malicious I can’t see calling it out as anything harsher than “somewhat problematic.”

But what Hollywood movies aren’t “somewhat problematic”? What is it about Jurassic World specifically that has drawn so much ire? Many articles credited their initial awareness of the movie’s sexism to “well-respected voice” of feminism Joss Whedon’s now-infamous tweet. Good call, guys, but maybe we shouldn’t jump to appeal to the authority of the dude who just wrote a movie where a character talks about how her hysterectomy makes her feel like a monster. (That’s something that happened, right?)

“Like so, so many of you, I bought a ticket to see Jurassic World this past week,” wrote Kelly Lawler of USAToday.com. “I went to recapture that feeling I had when I saw the original as a child. Unfortunately, I walked out of the theater not with the sense of wonder and amazement Jurassic Park gave my 10-year-old self, but instead with a familiar mix of anger and depression.”

Of all the reactions I read, this one saddened me the most, because it was the most honest and most understandable, and also one of the most unfair. We can’t go home again, Kelly. If we watched the original Jurassic Park today for the first time, who among us would still feel that childish sense of wonder and amazement? Who would be bored by the middle-aged cast, the talkiness and debates about morality, the low body count and scant dinosaur screen time, and play Angry Birds on our phones until something loud happened? Who would be underwhelmed by no-longer-special special effects we’ve seen a thousand times before in a thousand other movies, a thousand times as big and fast and loud? Who would live-tweet their outraged scorn for how Ellie Sattler does nothing but talk about wanting babies, get fought over by two men, shriek while being chased by monsters, and break down crying at the end? We can never go home again, never look at something new with fresh eyes, never allow ourselves to be shaped by an experience rather than trying to reshape the experience to fit what we already know. Maybe Jurassic World is perfect; maybe it’s we who are broken.

Then Kelly started talking about how the movie was brainwashing little girls into believing they are morally bad people if they don’t become mothers (“Won’t somebody please think of the children!”) and she lost me.

It’s perfectly natural to lash out when we perceive a threat to something we care about, have fought over and struggled for. Sexism is all around us, its talons sunk deep into the fabric of our everyday lives, so we’ve conditioned ourselves to be on the lookout for it at all times. On the bus, on the subway, at work, at school, on the news, at the club, on the street, in advertisements, online, in the movies. We can’t escape from it, and we’ve gotten used to the idea that we never will. So when we see something, even something ultimately harmless and well-intentioned, that sets off the subtlest of alarm bells in the back of our minds, it’s easy to go off half-cocked with that tweet or Tumblr post or overly self-congratulatory web editorial.

If you felt offended or belittled by Jurassic World, that is of course your right. But let’s allow ourselves at least a little honesty: even if the movie is sexist, most of the ways people have gone about arguing it are crap. This is not a particularly feminist film franchise. There is no reason a strong female character can’t wear heels and a skirt and be more comfortable making an itinerary than going on an adventure. There may be some small irony in lambasting a movie for being written exclusively by four men when it was really written by three men and a woman.

Jurassic World has its problems, as every movie does. Some mild form of antiquated chauvinism may well be one of them, but it’s a problem you can encapsulate in a single sentence. If you find yourself writing a dissertation on how sexism is inextricably baked into this movie’s 65-million-year-old DNA, there’s a good chance you’re doing it wrong.

Movie still wasn’t that great though, better luck next time, Chris Fatt.

2 Classic Christmas Specials (You Probably Don’t Remember)

Raggedy Ann and Andy in: The Great Santa Claus Caper
Release Date: November 30, 1978
Distributor: CBS

Does anyone alive today even remember Raggedy Ann and Andy? Anyone who wasn’t haunted by them, I mean. A brother-and-sister pair of rag dolls, they started out as characters in a series of illustrated children’s books before becoming a successful line of toys and, occasionally, stars in the odd animated holiday special. Released in 1978, The Great Santa Claus Caper tells the story of how Raggedy Ann and Andy, along with their stuffed dog Raggedy Arthur, saved Christmas from Alexander Graham Wolf, the antagonist from Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Little Pigs, and The Wolf of Wall Street.

As chief inefficiency expert at the Gloopstik Corporation, a division of Acme Conglomerates, Inc., Wolf combats inefficiency wherever he finds it, and his next target is Santa Claus’s workshop. Unfortunately for him, as he monologues his evil scheme to the audience, he happens to drive past Santa’s reindeer Comet, who somehow overhears his entire plot as he speeds past. Instead of giving Santa a heads-up, Comet decides to go find someone else to save Christmas, someone light enough for her to carry on her back but who won’t die a horrible death of exposure at the North Pole. “Of course, how stupid of me!” she exclaims. “Raggedy Ann and Andy!” 

The logical choices.

Raggedy Ann awakes to find this looking in her window:

 

Comet explains the situation and they begin the long trip back north. “I didn’t know reindeers could fly!” says Raggedy Ann. “I didn’t know rag dolls could talk,” Comet shoots back.

Cut to Santa’s workshop, where the elves make toys by pulling a lever on a conveyor belt, dropping hundreds of mass-produced dolls, yo-yos, teddy bears, soccer balls, bicycles, and, for some reason, fully decorated Christmas trees into giant bins. 

Wolf arrives and his car unfolds into a fanciful contraption. A large robot claw drops Santa’s toys one at a time into a funnel on top of the device. When they come out the other side, they are coated in transparent gelatinous cubes or cones.

Comet and the Raggedys arrive at Santa’s workshop, which is at the bottom of a giant chasm for some reason. Comet remains on the surface to keep watch for no reason, while the rag dolls venture down to the North Pole. 

The Big Bad Wolf apparently knows of the dolls through their reputation and proudly shows off his machine, the Great Gloopsticizer. Wolf reveals that Gloopstik prevents Christmas presents from ever wearing out of breaking; he’s actually doing a great good. However, Raggedy Ann and Andy soon realize that toys are no good if you can’t touch them or play with them. Wolf admits that this is all a money-making scam; he holds all patents on Gloopstik, so with all of the toys Gloopsticized, the world’s children will have to buy their Christmas presents from him. 

Raggedy Arthur attacks the wolf but is dropped into the machine and encased in Gloopstik. Wolf thoughtfully leaves his head exposed so he can breathe, because of course rag dolls need to breathe. Raggedy Andy is able to turn the tables on the villain by dropping him into his own contraption. The Great Gloopsticizer apparently thinks the Big Bad Wolf is a Christmas tree because it spits him out in a cone of Gloopstik covered in ornaments and tinsel, with a star on his head.

Raggedy Ann and Andy tell Arthur that they love him even though he’s encased in a tomb of Jell-O for all of eternity, and much to their surprise they find that love is the only force powerful enough to destroy Gloopstik. Bursting into tears with the realization that no one loves him enough to free him from his self-made prison, the Big Bad Wolf poses that age-old moral quandary: “How can you be good when you’re stuck in Gloopstik?”

The dolls break the fourth wall by appealing to the audience à la Peter Pan, and by shouting at their TVs, viewers at home are able to destroy the Gloopstik with the power of love. All of the toys and the newly reformed Big Good Wolf are released, and Wolf presses the self-destruct button on his machine so Santa will never know what happened.

As he walks home from the North Pole on foot, Alexander Graham Wolf remarks to the Raggedys that he thinks he will enjoy being good much more than he enjoyed being bad, but no one can say for sure unless they’ve tried both.

I suppose that’s the best moral we can ask for.


The Wish That Changed Christmas
Release Date: December 20, 1991
Distributor: CBS

So I guess there used to be this occasional TV series called McDonald’s Family Theater, in which McDonald’s sponsored a half-hour program whose content was completely unrelated to their brand. This special Christmas episode opens with Ronald McDonald trimming his tree, when two McDonaldland characters known as “Fry Kids” walk in. The feature presentation then begins with no transition.

The Wish That Changed Christmas follows a little girl named Ivy, who lives at Miss Shepherd’s Home for Orphans. As the only inmate who hasn’t been taken in by a foster family for the holidays, she is shipped off by train to the Appleton Infants’ Home. However, as the train passes Mill Valley, the narrator, who is a character in the story describing the action as it takes place, decides to move the plot along by distracting Officer Jones, causing him to trip over a cord to the town Christmas tree. As a result, several lights on the tree go out, so instead of reading “Merry Christmas Welcome to Mill Valley” it now reads “Merry Christmas to Ivy.” 

Ivy sees this new spelling from the train. Being intensely stupid, she assumes the sign was put there by her grandma, who we were already told by Miss Shepherd doesn’t exist. After wandering around asking random strangers if they are her grandmother, Ivy realizes that she’s missed the train and is now stranded in a strange town on Christmas Eve.

Elsewhere in town, Mr. Blossom entrusts Peter, his preteen employee, with locking up his toy shop after he goes home. Neither of them know, however, that the toys all come to life when no one is around (naturally). The only toys of note are a Christmas doll named Holly and a sadistic owl named Abracadabra.

Meanwhile, Ronald comments on how amazing it is to get lost in a good book, only to discover that the Fry Kids have somehow entered the book he’s been reading to them and really have gotten lost inside it.

 

Will Ivy ever find her fictitious grandmother? Will Holly ever file a restraining order against the Tootsie Pop owl? What does the McDonald’s Corporation have to do with any of this? Only a miracle of Christmas can tell.

 

The Long, Tortured History of Calling Sith Lords "Darth"

We’re now entering the part of the Old Republic timeline where the Star Wars prequels begin to exert a clear influence on the setting. Say goodbye to Tales of the Jedi’s retro aesthetic and hello to bad guys with red lightsabers, Jedi Padawans, stubbornly ineffectual bureaucracies, and Sith Lords named Darth Negativeconnotation.

At one point in Knights of the Old Republic: Commencement (2006), Zayne Carrick, our new hero, sarcastically calls female lead Jarael “Darth Sunshine,” a one-off throwaway joke that ruined continuity forever.

Again.

“It’s morphin’ time!”

Darth, of course, used to be just an evil-sounding name that Luke Skywalker’s father took for himself when he turned to the dark side. While writing The Phantom Menace, George Lucas decided to make it some kind of religious tradition wherein every Sith Lord takes the name.

The EU, as we know, had already featured a plethora of Sith who weren’t named Darth, because even Kevin J. Anderson wasn’t that derivative. This was fine, however, as most of those Sith hailed from ancient times, and the Darth tradition seemed to originate with Darth Bane, the creator of the Sith “Rule of Two” seen in the movies. For all we knew at the time, “Darth Bane,” introduced in the Episode I novelization (1999), might have just been the dude’s birth name and all the Sith of his order, from Sidious to Maul to Tyranus to Vader, renamed themselves in his honor.

That convenient explanation wasn’t long for the canon, however. Wizards of the Coast’s Living Force Campaign Guide (2001) introduced Darth Rivan, a Sith Lord who predated Bane and, more importantly, had chlorophyll for blood. Then the two Knights of the Old Republic games (2003 and 2004) added Darths Revan, Malak, Bandon, Traya, Nihilus, and Sion, bumping the Darth title back thousands of years even further.

However, since all those characters could trace their supervillain origin stories to the Trayus Academy, an ancient Sith training center on the dark-side world of Malachor V, one could reasonably assume a connection between the academy and the Darth name. Maybe at some point there was a dude called Darth Trayus, and Revan and Malak, the villains of the first KotOR, took his name after getting their undergraduate degrees in evil. After KotOR III got canceled, there was no reason not to headcanon that idea.

That is, until John Jackson Miller ruined it by populating the interim period between Tales of the Jedi and Knights of the Old Republic with Darth Sunshine, Darth Hayze, and Darth Luzion, none of which were really the names of any actual characters.

“Heritage of the Sith,” an article in Star Wars Insider #88 (2006), traced the Darth name, like so much else in Star Wars, back to the Rakata, an ancient dark-side race of aliens who ruled the galaxy before the time of the Old Republic. It revealed that “Darth” likely comes from the words Daritha, which is Rakatan for “emperor,” and darr tah, meaning both “immortal” and “conquest through death.”

The Rakata connection would seem to link back to Revan and Malak, as they rediscovered the Rakata’s Star Forge and the remnants of their Infinite Empire after falling to the dark side during the Mandalorian Wars. This was even made explicit in Jedi vs. Sith: The Essential Guide to the Force (2007), which identified Revan and Malak as history’s earliest known Darths (it also said that “Darth” was often considered a contraction of Dark Lord of the Sith, because that’s a common method of abbreviation now, why not). The KotOR comics’ casual references to Darth names preclude this, however, so for the Rakata explanation to work it must refer to something in the even more distant past.

Fortunately, “Evil Never Dies: The Sith Dynasties,” an online reference article published as a supplement to Insider #88, established that the Rakata had tried to conquer the Sith species some 27,000 years before the time of the movies. The invention of this confrontation proved to be quite the continuity godsend, as Revan’s uniqueness was soon eroded the same as Bane’s and Vader’s had been. Star Wars: Republic #63 (2004) introduced Darth Andeddu as a long-dead Dark Lord entombed on Korriban, while “Behind the Threat: The Sith (Part 5): Antiheroes” (2008) named Darth Vitus as the gatekeeper of a holocron that was already ancient by the KotOR era.

The EU’s Old Republic and Legacy eras continued to dilute the Darth title by introducing unimpressive and ridiculously named new characters ad nauseum, but for the next few years Sith lore remained mostly unchanged. We still had no idea who the first Darth was, but given the ceaselessly shifting retcons we’d already endured, it was starting to matter less and less. Of course, as with all things, the worst was yet to come.

From the earliest drafts of The Star Wars, where Darth Vader was some random evil general and not anyone’s father, to the comical Darth Andrew from BioWare’s MMO The Old Republic, “Darth,” although occasionally referred to as a title in some sources, had always been functionally a first name (Obi-Wan even uses it as such in the original Star Wars). Discontent to leave well enough alone, however, Paul R. Urquhart, co-author of Star Wars: The Essential Guide to Warfare (2012), prefixed it to Naga Sadow’s name in the book’s section on the Great Hyperspace War.

The addition of “Darth Naga Sadow” to the (now defunct) canon did nothing but further confuse what exactly the Darth name is and further ruin the specialness and mystique that were once attached to it. No small feat, given how polluted the EU had already become with terrible Darth names (see also: Darth Enraj, Darth Vowrawn, Darth Ruyn, Darth Karnage).

Now anyone could be a Darth; you didn’t even have to rename yourself to show the depth of your devotion to evil. You could probably just pay a small fee and get ordained online.

Fucking Star Wars.

“lol wtf am I doing”

[Continuity Note: It bears mentioning that, although Darth Rivan was created first, his name’s similarity to Darth Revan’s was eventually explained in the best possible retcon, at the mere expense of undermining Rivan’s character in every way. Rivan, it turns out, was the galaxy’s biggest Revan fanboy, so much so that when he became a Sith he attempted to rename himself after his hero. Unfortunately, the ancient manuscript he was consulting contained a typo that misidentified Darth Revan as Darth Rivan. The Dark Lord of the Sith’s whole identity was based on a misprint. This was an actual thing that happened in Star Wars canon.

[Rivan then used an ancient Force artifact so ineptly that it somehow transported him hundreds of years into the future, where he was immediately murdered by some rando. It was a quiet Christmas back on the plant-people farm that year.]

My Kung Fu Anime Lesbian Daughter

Me: Finally finished your teen girl anime.

Me: 7/10 show but I give it an 11 because two girls held hands in the last second.

Paul: "Better concept than execution" sums it up.

Paul: Also great fight scenes.

Me: Having read the top comments on your article idk if I should even write a rebuttal now since it seems like everyone already shares my opinion.

Me: Not to dump on your lesbian anime daughter because she still had a better show than the one with the heavy black outlines and stylized character designs where everyone has sharp edges.

Me: Aka ALL OF THEM.

Paul: So avatar > anime?

Me:  Avatar > Korra > Yu-Gi-Oh season 1 > Death Note > Pokemon Indigo League > the rest of Yu-Gi-Oh > the ending of Death Note > Digimon > Samurai Shamu

Me: I think that's all the animes.

Me: Oh wait this one 

 

Me: Which is on a VHS tape in my parents' attic.

Paul: Denver le dernier dinosaur is better.

Me: That's not anime though.

Me: Also Barn Beagle and I tried watching it in college and it was terrible.

Paul: There is currently a social media campaign to recognize best freinds.

Paul: Thanks, Farcblog.

Paul: Well of course.

Paul: You watched it with Barn Beagle.

Paul: Beagles have never been able to appreciate anime.

Me: DENVER THE LAST DINOSAUR

Me: HE'S MY FRIEND AND A WHOLE LOT MORE

Paul: Yeah Korra is basically my kung-fu anime lesbian alter ego/daughter

Paul: so I can't help it.

Paul: Hey hey but what about that Toph, amirite?

Me: Season highlight.

Me: I did not dislike the show, it was good, but Avytar was better.

Me: Still wish they would do shows for the next earth and fire Avytars.

Me: While the setting continues to decay in post-industrial blight.

Me: Then in the last one they're in space.

Paul: Hahahaha

Paul: That would be great.

Paul: Avatar: The Legend of Rocky: Pennsylvania

Paul: Avatar: The Tale of Flamo: The Moon

The Legend of Sexism

Me: Goddamn, why does Korra suck so much?

Me: She gets her ass kicked so often it's like watching a Joss Whedon show.

Paul: But I love jizz whiner.

Me: whine abt dat jizzzzzzzz

7 Things I Learned from Watching 7 ‘Fast & Furious’ Movies in 7 Days

A week ago, I had never seen a single Fast and Furious movie, and I was content that things stay that way. After months of being told by suggested article titles in various sidebar links “This franchise isn’t really as bad as you’d think!,” however, my curiosity was finally piqued. What followed was a seven-day odyssey into a world of ten-stacks and drifting, pink slips and NOS, bromance and blatantly pornographic shots of cars. When I emerged at last on the other side, forever changed by what I had seen, I was certain of nothing, save for the unshakeable veracity of these absolute Truths.

Works cited:
 

• The Fast and the Furious (2001) – Paul Walker teams up with Vin Diesel to take down his criminal gang from the inside but his head is turned by Vin’s sister’s talent for sandwich-making.
  
• The Turbo-Charged Prelude for 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003) – Paul Walker teams up with a music video director to go on a cross-country road trip.
• 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003) – Paul Walker teams up with Tyrese Gibson to rescue Eva Mendes from a drug dealer by driving a car onto a boat.
• The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006) – Nobody from the first two movies teams up with an unlikable teenage expatriate living in Tokyo.
• Los Bandoleros (2009) – Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez vacation in the Dominican Republic on the studio’s dime.
• Fast & Furious (2009) – The first movie happens again.
• Fast Five (2011) – The gang is hunted by both special agent John “The Dwayne” Rockson and a crime lord whose MacGuffin they have accidentally stolen.
• Furious 6 (2013) – Vin Diesel brings his crew out of retirement to contend with an amnesia plot.
• Furious Seven (2015) – Jason Statham is out for revenge but proves even more inept at it than Emily Thorne.

1. Ignore the people who tell you to watch the movies in chronological order.

Google “fast and furious timeline” and you’ll find no shortage of helpful advice indicating that the fourth, fifth, and sixth films are in fact prequels to film number three, Tokyo Drift. That’s fine information to keep in mind, but as with the Star Wars prequels, if you opt for chronological order over release order you’re just screwing yourself over.

Ignore everyone who says that Tokyo Drift takes place between Fast & Furious 6 and Furious Seven. They’re wrong; it takes place concurrently with the end of part six and the beginning of part seven. The final minutes of Furious 6 actually spoil a key scene from the end of Tokyo Drift by reusing footage from that film. Not to mention that films four, five, and six all contain nods back to film three (“I thought you wanted to get to Tokyo?” someone asks Han Seoul-Oh, the best character from Tokyo Drift, to which he replies, “We’ll get there eventually”).

Just stick to the order the films came out; you’ll spend less time wondering why everyone in Japan was apparently still using flip phones in 2014.

 

2. Despite a consistent release schedule, it took almost 10 years for this franchise to get off the ground.

Even if you haven’t seen any of the Fast and Furious movies, as I hadn’t, you still have a basic idea of what to expect from them: Paul Walker, Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese, and Ludacris on a high-octane adventure, often involving some sort of heist. That’s what the previews for the past several films have shown us, anyway. But that only takes us back to Fast & Furious (the fourth film) in 2009. The first movie came out in 2001. What the hell were they doing for eight years?

Spinning their wheels, really, but now we can look back on this span of the franchise’s history and charitably call it “worldbuilding.” When Paul Walker, Vin Diesel, and the rest of the Super Friends reunited in 2009’s Fast & Furious to jumpstart the franchise as we know it today, a whole pool of supporting characters from which future films could draw had already been introduced. The Fast and Furious series is like the Marvel movies if they were made by someone with a little more restraint.

3. Most truckers would rather commit cold-blooded murder than take an insurance hit.

Look, bros, I know you’re pissed about constantly getting your cargo ripped off by Vin Diesel and his gang, but castle doctrine will only get you so far. Clearly these guys weren’t expecting you to be packing heat; you’ve already made two of them total their cars at 80 miles per hour, and now you’ve got the last dude dangling from the outside of your cab while his arm gets lacerated by wire. I think continuing to fire point-blank shotgun rounds at him is, at this point, a pretty clear-cut case of MURDER.

This is the situation that Paul Walker finds when he returns to save the day. Handing the wheel of his car over to his girlfriend, he climbs out the window as they race down the highway alongside the semi and attempts to disentangle his friend. And the trucker keeps shooting at them! Paul Walker is still a cop at this point, so the trucker would have been extra screwed if he’d been a better shot, but for all he knows he’s trying to blow away some good Samaritan attempting to rescue the guy hanging from the outside of his truck.

The same thing happens again in the opening heist sequence of Fast & Furious. Vin Diesel & Co. are in the process of hijacking a fuel tanker in the Dominican Republic. Suddenly the driver catches sight of Michelle Rodriguez walking along the roof of one of his tankers. I honestly don’t know what my first reaction would be in that situation, but I’m fairly confident it wouldn’t be to immediately speed up and start jerking the car around in an attempt to throw her to her death.

I can see trying to outrun them or fighting back in self-defense, but come on, guys, this isn’t even your own stuff you’re willing to kill over. Were you hired to transport some corporation’s product from one location to another or to protect it with your life? It hardly seems worth it, bros.

4. Vin Diesel can convert any by-the-book cop into an anarchic rogue just by talking to them.

He does it to Paul Walker (twice!), The Rock, and that fluminense lady cop whose name I don’t remember. The Fast and the Furious, as mentioned above, follows Paul Walker as he goes from being an undercover cop investigating truck robberies to an outlaw himself after falling under the sway of Vin Diesel’s magnetic personality.

Fast & Furious (aka the fourth one) almost feels like a reboot of sorts: Paul Walker is once again a cop, Vin Diesel and his crew are once again robbing trucks, everything is back where it started. We watch as Paul and Vin become friends all over again, Paul rekindles his romance with Vin’s sister, and in the end Paul Walker once more turns his back on his badge to save his friend.

The films teach us to expect Paul Walker’s alignment flip-flopping, however. He’s a former car thief and juvenile delinquent, he grew up on the streets and used to run with people like Vin Diesel’s crew. The Rock, on the other hand is introduced as a paragon of legality. He’s Inspector Javert, he’s Lieutenant Gerard. He doesn’t care about the good intentions that led you to break the law; if you broke it, your ass is his.

That is, unless his entire team is killed by drug traffickers and you help him satisfy his blood vendetta. Then he’ll draw down on a lawfully acting army captain when he refuses to set free a dangerous mercenary to save Paul Walker’s kidnapped wife. It’s cool that his character actually has an arc and all, but you’d think he would have at least gotten fired over that one.

Then there’s that fluminense lady cop who tried to arrest Vin Diesel then teamed up with him because she wanted to bone him. I mean who doesn’t though?

5. All the hottest skanks hang out at the drag racing circuit.

You wouldn’t think it, but apparently it’s true. No matter where or what time it is, any drag race will be spectated almost exclusively by impractically clad women (those who aren’t are sweaty bros in muscle shirts). Chief among its artistic achievements is how the Fast and Furious franchise broke new ground by aesthetically blending the illegal street-racing scene with an L.A. nightclub and/or red-light district.

If you look up the word “gratuitous” in the dictionary, you’ll find all the nude scenes from Game of Thrones. If they didn’t have that, though, they’d have a collage of all the ass shots in the Fast and Furious franchise. Even in the United Arab Emirates, where women are routinely stoned to death or flogged for being raped, you can’t have a rockin’ party without dancers in thong bikinis and gold body paint.

 

Sharia law has no power over Vin Diesel and Paul Walker driving one of the world’s fastest cars off one of the world’s tallest buildings . . . into another of the world’s tallest buildings. #america

It’s not really offensive in the way that Michael Bay draping Megan Fox over a motorcycle is, but for the most part it isn’t that sexy either. At a certain point the level of pandering just becomes comical and you say to yourself, “Oh, I’m watching a movie for 13-year-old boys.” Then you hang your head in shame for not figuring that out back when Vin Diesel drove a car really fast underneath an exploding fuel tanker.

6. Paul Walker wasn’t really that bad an actor.

Before his tragic death, I had never heard much talk about Paul Walker except as a punchline about bad acting. Having now seen the franchise that made him a household name, it’s hard to deny that his Hollywood career probably owed more to his being absurdly handsome than to his acting talent. That said, his performance was never a chore to sit through or a distraction that pulled me out of the movie. He always just seemed like a regular dude having a good time.

I mean, with a movie franchise that also stars Vin Diesel, Ludacris, Michelle Rodriguez, and The Rock, you’re not going to the theater expecting to see some Day-Lewis-style method acting. The performances are an afterthought in these movies; besides the action and car porn, the appeal is the interplay of the personalities on-screen.

In that regard, Walker is perfectly adequate as the relatable everyman whose point of view anchors the franchise and makes a believable part of this family of lighthearted, non-emotive outcasts. Let’s be honest, these movies are just dumb fun and everyone involved in making them knows it. Paul Walker just always seems like he’s having a blast doing ridiculous things in dumb movies with his friends. What more can you ask for a part like that?

I watched all seven of these stupid things over the course of a week and still found myself having a real emotional reaction to his sendoff at the end of Furious Seven. I neither knew nor cared anything about him seven days ago, but these goofy movies somehow made me care.

 

7. The Rock perpetually secretes baby oil from his pores.

Seriously, he is so goddamn shiny.

Like a statue of David carved out of Vaseline.

So, for the second time, [the Pharisees]
summoned the man who had been blind and said:
“Speak the truth before God.
We know this fellow is a sinner.”
“Whether or not he is a sinner, I do not know,”
the man replied.
“All I know is this:
once I was blind and now I can see.”
 

John IX, 24-26
the New English Bible

This Is This

Me: A MAN CHOOSES, A GAMER OBEYS

Paul: A MAN CHOOSES

Paul: A GAMER GATES

Me: Finally started Korra season 4 today.

Me: Forgot what happened at the end of last season that made her turn into Robert De Niro from The Deer Hunter.

Paul: She was scared by a bald.

Suddenly, the EU Gets Really Good

Tales of the Jedi: Redemption 

Author: Kevin J. Anderson

Artist: Chris Gossett

Medium: Comic

Publication Date: July – November 1998

Timeline Placement: 3,986 BBY

Series: Tales of the Jedi

Ten years have passed since the Sith War, and still Ulic Qel-Droma can find no rest or respite from his demons. He’s hired a pilot named Hoggon to fly him from planet to planet, looking for a place where he can escape from his memories and live out the rest of his days in solitude. Hoggon takes him to the moon Yavin 4, its jungle ecosystem now recovered from Exar Kun’s fiery end. “You can get a real sense of history here,” Hoggon explains. “It gives me shivers to be here . . . I can almost feel the echoes . . .” Ulic stands amid the crumbling ruins and sees them as they were: Massassi firing from atop unbroken walls, Republic soldiers rushing past, smoke rising from the burning temples, bodies littering the streets. The ghost of his brother, left arm missing below the elbow, staring back at him.

“No . . . this won’t do,” says Ulic, wringing his hands. “This won’t do at all.”

On Exis Station, Nomi Sunrider has called a Great Jedi Convocation, the first gathering of all the galaxy’s Jedi since the end of the Sith War. Nomi’s daughter, Vima, now probably around thirteen or fourteen years old, greets the Triceratops Jedi Master Thon and the felinoid Cathar Jedi Sylvar as they arrive on the repurposed mining station. Vima is eager to show her old master around, but the Jedi are called away as Nomi brings the gathering to order and begins laying out her plans to restore the Republic to its antebellum glory.

Feeling left out, Vima Sunrider looks at the two holographic images on her mother’s desk: “My father Andur . . . killed when I was just a baby. And Ulic, my mother’s second great love . . . I think she resents him more for leaving us than for what he did during the war.” She asks her mother if they can work on her Jedi training now, but Nomi is too harried and overwrought from all she still has to do for the convocation. Vima packs a bag and runs away from home, determined to find someone who can teach her to be a Jedi . . .

I’m going to try to keep this a little vaguer than usual because this one’s really special. They should have called it Kevin J. Anderson: Redemption.

I won’t lie and say that Anderson suddenly became a genuinely talented writer. The script is easily the weakest part of this book, with some characters’ dialogue coming off as unwieldy or unnatural. But it’s also markedly better than the four KJA stories we’ve read so far, and the approximately 500 we’ve yet to get through. His typical juvenile, overly enthusiastic tone is completely absent, as are the unnecessarily descriptive textboxes that have littered this entire series. Instead of being told what the characters are thinking and feeling, the art is finally allowed to convey it wordlessly.

KJA’s writing style couldn’t have picked a better time to spontaneously mature, either, as Redemption is easily the most beautifully illustrated comic ever produced for the Star Wars brand. Christian Gossett’s art has always been the highlight of Tales of the Jedi (except in The Golden Age of the Sith #0, for some reason), but the art, writing, and coloring in this volume are so different and so much improved that it’s hard to believe it’s part of the same series.

Even the framing bears mentioning, like a cool, auteur-directed movie. When Ulic and Vima first see one another, it’s through a broken pane of glass. Ulic’s image looms large and jagged, reflecting both the way Vima sees him and his own spiritual state, while the crack running through Vima’s youthful features conveys the broken lens of memory through which Ulic views her and mistakes her for her mother (“I didn’t come all this way just to be reminded of your mother’s face,” he snarls).

When Ulic is buried in an avalanche and wishes he would die, all we see of him is an extreme close-up of his eye inside a torn and irregular panel, representing his broken point of view. Similar little touches and attention to detail permeate the comic.

Among them is the thematic pervasiveness of the title. Redemption is a common theme in the EU, with many characters following in the footsteps left by Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi, but few other stories match the deftness with which it is portrayed in this book. Tales of the Jedi: Redemption is not just another simple black-and-white tale of a Jedi fallen to the dark side working his way back toward the light. It’s about something more human and less metaphysical D&D alignment than that.

The redemption sought and offered here is not overly concerned with making amends for accumulating an overabundance of dark side points; it’s redemption for a wasted life, for refusing to let go of an old pain, for blaming others so you don’t have to blame yourself. The dark side of the Force is not nearly so scary as the darkness we all carry within our own hearts. The title is about Nomi and Sylvar as much as it is about Ulic, and the common thread that leads them all down the path to redemption is a little girl who wants to be a Jedi.

The characters in this book sparkle with a life heretofore absent from the series. Sylvar was an unmemorably flat and uninteresting side character in the previous two volumes, but here she practically leaps off the page, wounded and dangerous and thankfully completely redesigned so instead of just being a creepy a lion in a bikini she’s actually pretty badass.

Vima says it all about Nomi in the line I quoted earlier: “I think she resents him more for leaving us than for what he did during the war.” Absolutely she does. It’s not very heroic, and probably not very politically correct, but it is very human. It doesn’t excuse what she did to Ulic at the end of The Sith War, but it’s good to see KJA eventually acknowledge Nomi’s actions for what they were, and see how that resentment has festered inside her for a decade, shaping her as a Jedi and as a mother.

Ulic himself, the only real protagonist we’ve followed for any length of time since Xesh, is finally a compelling character as well. Free of the burden of being a well-intentioned idiot for the sake of the plot, Ulic is allowed to just be Ulic, and we to see him for all that that entails. Stripped of the Force, his friends, all his hope, and his Damoclean destiny, Ulic reads like an entirely different character.

Just from the way he’s drawn, the cant of his head and cast of his eyes, you can feel the weight of the albatross around his neck. When he tells Vima, “I no longer enjoy my memories . . . I have wandered too far, seen too much . . . I have the blood of enough children on my hands,” it doesn’t ring at all false or melodramatic. Unlike the cocksure, hotheaded, angst-ridden, and ultimately hollow young man as whom he came across in the rest of the series, this is a characterization with some real weight to it.

There’s a beautiful moment near the end of the book where Nomi goes looking for Vima and ends up coming face to face with Ulic for the first time in 10 years. They’re drawn in profile, facing one another with mostly blank expressions, but between them are two panels with close-ups of their eyes, and they contain all the sadness in the world. Without a single word, this look tells us everything we need to know about how these characters feel, all the lost time and wasted chances they see in one another in this moment.

Wait, am I still talking about a Star Wars comic?

The fact that Redemption is so much incongruously better than all the preceding volumes of its series is just one of the things that make me think readers would be better served by not even bothering with the other Tales of the Jedi comics and just skipping right to this one. Dark Lords of the Sith and The Sith War aren’t bad but tonally they don’t match their follow-up at all; the rest of the series, I feel, might actually weigh this volume down.

Tales of the Jedi in a single image.

All the relevant information about these characters’ back stories and relationships is contained in the book’s opening crawl or conveyed through exposition. It’s set 10 years after the previous comics, making Redemption more of a coda to the main series than a direct continuation of an ongoing plot. It’s a pretty self-contained, standalone story, and I recommend it be experienced that way.

Regarding the passage of time, 10 years is a long time, but it’s not that long. Ulic and Nomi should probably still be in their early-to-mid-thirties, depending on how old they were supposed to be when we met them. The way that they’re drawn, however, they look at least 40, and Ulic could easily be in his fifties. Yeah, hard living and all that, but that was the excuse fans had to tell themselves when George Lucas compressed the gap between the original trilogy and the prequels, de-aging Old Ben Kenobi into a spry 57-year-old.

Details about the Great Sith War also don’t match up with what we saw previously. In The Sith War, no one from the Jedi or the Republic ever set foot on Yavin 4; they just stayed on their ships and cast Wall of Light from orbit. In Redemption, however, Ulic remembers ground combat taking place, with Republic soldiers fighting Massassi among the Sith temples. This scene also seems to imply that Ulic’s fatal duel with his brother took place on Yavin 4, when it actually happened on Ossus. Later lore would take its cue from this version, depicting a final battle between the Republic and Sith forces before Exar Kun killed himself.

A minor detail, but Ulic’s lightsaber blade is now yellow, when in Ulic Qel-Droma and the Beast Wars of Onderon and The Freedon Nadd Uprising it was green, before becoming blue in Dark Lords of the Sith and The Sith War. The yellow blade is way cooler, though, so the hell with it.

More curious is the pendant that Ulic wears around his neck throughout Redemption. He frequently looks at it when deep in thought or lost in his memories, and freaks out when he almost loses it at one point. Weirdly, it’s drawn inconsistently, switching between a ring and a medallion between panels, sometimes even subsequent panels, but whatever it’s supposed to be, its importance to Ulic is clear.

Yet despite this, Ulic never speaks of it directly and we never learn its significance. It could have been something of Nomi’s, of Cay’s, of Master Arca’s, or perhaps a token of someone or something else entirely. Something of his mother’s, perhaps, or his early life before he became a Jedi? Something he picked up during his decade of soul-searching?

Its origin and meaning are known only to Ulic, and that’s actually a pretty cool withholding of unnecessary information; all that matters is that we know how Ulic feels about it. If you’ve just read the entire series, however, it feels a little strange that this thing is depicted as being so important despite coming out of nowhere.

Then there’s the matter of Ulic and Nomi’s romantic relationship. I get the feeling that Tom Veitch and/or KJA wanted it to be this epic, tragic love story, with two young lovers torn apart by a galactic war and the misguided decisions that caused it. What really happened though is that they kissed like once and then Ulic got into drugs and Nomi started PMSing really bad and set Ulic’s Force on fire.

Here, though, there is a real sense of something lost between them, a history whose squandering feels like it should matter. Forgetting about the strict guidelines of canon and continuity for a moment, Redemption feels like it would work best if set in a universe similar to Tales of the Jedi, but one in which those events didn’t happen exactly as depicted in the comics. There always was a good story embedded in there, it was just obscured by lackluster writing and weak structure.

If you ignore the rest of the series, you lose the good along with the bad, but it leaves the backstory up to your own imagination, and that may make for a stronger story than slavish adherence to the comics. In 1977, Star Wars dropped us into the plot in medias res, and fans spent the following two decades theorizing about the Clone Wars and the rise of the Empire and Anakin Skywalker’s fall to the dark side. Then when we actually saw those things we couldn’t help but be let down. It’s true that Redemption was the end of Tales of the Jedi, not the beginning, but I think the same principles may apply. A good story always leaves you wanting more rather than knowing too much.

5/5 lightsabers. Legit art.

Next: Intrigue in the Old Republic

Shadows, Light, and Some Sith Spawn

Tales #23: Shadows and Light

Author: Joshua Ortega

Artist: Dustin Weaver

Medium: Comic

Publication Date: May 2005 in Star Wars Tales #23

Timeline Placement: 3,993 BBY

Three years after the Great Sith War, we return to Tatooine for the first time since Dawn of the Jedi. Of course, it’s now the same crummy desert it was in the movies, but don’t worry, we’re only here for a minute. We meet three Jedi in battle against a terentatek, a dark-side monster that feeds on the blood of Force-sensitives. They are Duron Qel-Droma, a cousin of Ulic and Cay; Shaela Nuur, his girlfriend; and the Twi’lek Jedi Guun Han Saresh. Over the past two years, this trio has ventured around the galaxy exterminating terentateks and other “Sithspawn,” monstrosities created through Sith alchemy, such as silans and Sith wyrms.

[Continuity Note: Terentateks were introduced in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (2003), where Jedi historian Deesra Luur Jada described them as a historically recurring threat to the Jedi whose numbers swelled whenever the dark side was ascendant. Star Wars: The New Essential Chronology (2005), however, claimed that the terentateks were a creation of Exar Kun, severely shortening their window of historical influence. This factoid was later ignored by Star Wars: The Old Republic (2011), which had Grand Moff Odile Vaiken slay a rabid terentatek on the planet Dromund Kaas almost 1,000 years before Kun’s time.]

Duron establishes a psychic link with the terentatek, rendering it dazed and confused, then Shaela and Guun Han stab it to death. It’s not the most complex strategy, but it’s served them well for the duration of the Great Hunt, the systematic purging of Sithspawn from the galaxy. So far they’ve cleansed Onderon, Yavin 4, and Tython, the location of which is apparently still common knowledge after 20,000-plus years but will be forgotten sometime within the next three centuries so it can be rediscovered in time for The Old Republic.

Victorious at last, the three Jedi companions return to Dantooine, once the informal training grounds of Vodo-Siosk Baas, now the site of an institutional Jedi Enclave. At this time, the Enclave is chaired by Qual, a Selkath; Bala Nisi, a black human woman; Vrook Lamar, a character from the KotOR games voiced by Ed Asner; and Aleco Stusea, who is some kind of elf woman? They congratulate the Great Hunters on a job well done, but reveal that there is still one planet left to cleanse: Korriban, homeworld of the Sith and most evil planet in the galaxy.

That night, as Shaela and Duron watch the Dantooine sunset, Shaela reflects on the time she spent on Ossus as a student of Master Ood Bnar, the Jedi who was also a tree. As a reward for constructing her first lightsaber, Ood gave her a very rare lightsaber crystal called the Solari. One of the most powerful focusing crystals in the order’s possession, the Solari can be used only by a Jedi who is firmly entrenched in the light side. If its user strays into the dark, the crystal will cease to function, but Ood had faith in his apprentice’s purity of heart.

The Jedi are apprehensive about the corrupting influence the Sith homeworld could have on them, with Guun Han concerned that Duron and Shaela will be unable to control their passion for one another. Nevertheless, they accept the mission and arrive on a planet strangely different than you might expect. Instead of the desolate graveyard world it was during Exar Kun’s visit four years earlier, Korriban now boasts a thriving spaceport called Dreshdae, populated by all sorts of scum and villainy with no apparent connection to the Sith.

Even more bizarre, right next-door is a fully staffed and operational Sith academy, tutoring Force-sensitive youths in the dark side. It’s not like a secret or anything, the Jedi are fully aware of what’s going on. But despite just fighting a devastating galactic war against the Sith, I guess they’re cool with it

[Continuity Note: The Korriban Sith academy also first appeared in Knights of the Old Republic, in which it is revealed that the previous headmaster, Jorak Uln, was a follower of Exar Kun. The game gave no founding date for the academy, however, so having it show up here, almost forty years too early, is rather incongruous. To explain its anachronistic appearance in Shadows and Light, The New Essential Chronology established that the academy was founded by Exar Kun to mass produce Sith acolytes to fight in the war. That doesn’t really seem to fit with his style of recruiting troops by tricking them into getting possessed by ghosts, but I’ll take it, I guess.]

The three Jedi ask around Dreshdae’s cantina, The Drunk Side (lol), but after a week they are unable to get any leads on the terentatek. Guun Han finally bites the bullet and seduces a coed from the Sith academy. He gets her drunk, steals a keycard from her while she’s passed out naked in bed, and sneaks out the door with a smug grin on his face, never to call her again. Man, how many of my relationships have ended like that?

Meanwhile, Duron is having a nervous breakdown. The lure of the dark side on Korriban is overwhelming and the Force bond among the trio is not protecting them from it as the Jedi Masters had hoped. Duron admits to Shaela that when he makes contact with the terentateks’ minds, he can sense their thoughts and intelligence, evil though it is, and he is sick of killing them. Because this issue of Star Wars Tales was marketed for its tie-in with Knights of the Old Republic, Duron abruptly has a vision of events from that game, including the destruction of Taris and the torture of Bastila Shan. And boy does that make me want to buy it!

He is knocked over by the force of this vision and Shaela rushes over to comfort him. They kiss just as Guun Han walks into the room. Outraged at this violation of the Jedi Code, Guun Han demands that they renounce their love for one another, which they refuse to do. With everyone’s tempers already running high from their time in this dark-side miasma, Guun Han gives his friends the stolen keycard and walks out, suggesting that they do the same.

Following rumors of another terentatek, Guun Han arrives on the Wookiee planet of Kashyyyk. He tracks the terentatek to the Shadowlands, the dark underbelly of Kashyyyk’s planet-wide forest, and sets a trap for it. When he attacks, however, the blade of vibrosword that he uses in place of a lightsaber snaps off in the beast’s hide. Defenseless, Guun Han is killed and eaten by the monster.

On Korriban, Duron and Shaela have used the keycard to access the fabled Valley of the Dark Lords. They sense their friend’s death in the Force and Shaela mournfully curses him for leaving. They venture into a cave and encounter the terentatek. As Shaela moves in to attack, Duron is horrified to realize that he is unable to make contact with the creature’s mind, presumably because the Force bond the three Jedi shared has been broken. He rushes in to help Shaela and the terentatek crushes him with its claw.

As Shaela cradles his broken body, Duron has a vision of the player character in Knights of the Old Republic looting his corpse to equip his +8 Dexterity robe and using it to defeat the final boss (although I think everyone knows that realistically a light side player would have equipped the Star Forge Robes by that point). Gratified to find the future full of light, Duron tells Shaela he loves her and dies in her arms. “. . . I love you, too . . .” she whispers.

With a heart full of bitterness and bent on revenge, Shaela tracks the terentatek to the tomb of Naga Sadow. Consumed with hatred over the death of her boyfriend, Shaela ventures deep into the crypt, the yellow blade of her lightsaber her only source of light. As she comes face to face with two terentateks, she recalls Master Ood’s words as he gave her the Solari crystal: “Your soul is as radiant and pure as any I have ever known. You will accomplish great things in your life, Shaela Nuur . . . Just remember to always stay in the light. Always.”

Her lightsaber flickers and goes out.

Meditations

I have a soft spot for this comic, as I do for all KotOR-related stories, so I may be kinder to it than it deserves. That said, the artwork is inarguably very good. Dustin Weaver will illustrate many issues of the KotOR comic series, and there is something about his style that feels like a perfect adaptation of the BioWare game’s character modeling.

Duron Qel-Droma, Shaela Nurr, and Guun Han Saresh originated in a series of audio journals the player discovers in Knights of the Old Republic. Shadows and Light lays out basically the same story as that described in the journals, but for such a brief comic, it’s amazing how many continuity gaffes it brings to the table.

Although Guun Han Saresh’s species is never explicitly identified in the game, he is described as “a proud and boastful young man,” and the descriptive text of the Circlet of Saresh, a wearable item, states that the Sareshes were a rich and powerful family from Taris known for their arrogance and cruelty. As shown in the game, however, Tarisian culture is highly xenophobic, with the wealthy upper class consisting solely of prejudiced humans while the alien races, including Twi’leks, are forced to live in slums.

When Guun Han attacks the Kashyyyk terentatek, his sword breaks off at the hilt, leaving the blade embedded in the beast’s flesh. In the game, however, the broken sword that the player finds in the terentatek is that of the legendary Wookiee warrior Bacca, having been lost by Chieftain Rothrrrawr. Maybe two people just broke two different swords fighting the same monster.

Guun Han also arrives on Kashyyyk in what appears to be a Sith fighter, although this model of starship should not exist yet, as it was created by the Star Forge using Rakatan technology during the Jedi Civil War, almost 40 years hence.

When the Jedi are greasing palms on Korriban, they come across a guy who claims to know a half-breed Massassi who can tell them where the terentatek is. First of all, Exar Kun just killed all the Massassi (save one) who remained in the known galaxy at the time. Secondly, that Massassi population was isolated on Yavin 4 until four years ago; they wouldn’t have had time to breed with some other species and grow their half-breed offspring to adulthood. It’s like the author just picked a seemingly appropriate species name out of a hat but didn’t finish doing his homework.

I’ve already covered the anachronism of the Sith academy and Dreshdae settlement, but these aren’t the only things in this comic that exist before they should. KotOR I and II are great games, but if there’s one thing about them I don’t care for (besides the obnoxious d20 combat system), it’s how they, for lack of a better term, “prequelized” an era for which Tales of the Jedi had already established a distinct look and feel.

I thought the point of the Jedi’s downfall in the prequel trilogy was that they had become too mired in political intrigue and governmental bureaucracy to function as intermediaries between the will of the Force and the galactic populace. As part of the Sith’s machinations, they had been led astray from the enlightened path they once followed: their fear of the dark had cost them their humanity.

But then in KotOR and TOR, thousands of years in the past, the Jedi already have a council, a centralized leadership enshrined in the Republic capital, and codified ordinances restricting romantic attachment and advocating emotional suppression. They use words like “Padawan” and they all wear the same drab monk robes. This really isn’t at all how they were portrayed in TotJ, just a few decades earlier, in which they were more like a loosely affiliated brotherhood of knights-errant. There was no formal Jedi Council in those stories, just the collective wisdom of the elder Jedi Masters, whose word was less law than generally considered to be very good advice.

Shadows and Light moves the Coruscant Jedi Council’s influence back even further, as they are the ones who give the order to send Duron, Shaela, and Guun Han to Korriban. Guun Han turns his back on his friends because they openly defy the Jedi rule prohibiting love, although no such rule should exist at this time. It was bad enough that these things came up in KotOR, but that was 30 years down the line from Tales of the Jedi: Redemption, and you could headcanon the Great Jedi Convocation in that comic into the beginning of the more formalized order from the prequels. In fact, that comic actually features Nomi Sunrider mentioning the Jedi forming a new council, but I guess the rest of the EU just forgot.

Starting with this comic, however, and later reinforced by background lore for The Old Republic, we’re told that there already was a Jedi Council at the time of the Great Sith War, and probably far earlier as well. Because that’s how it was in the prequels, so that’s how it has to be forever and always, until the end of time.

All that said, I still like this comic. It’s very attractively drawn and fills in a cool bit of backstory from a great videogame. The characters are not masterfully fleshed out or anything, but they’re developed well enough for the brief portrait this story paints of them. It’s not great at continuity, but it does have a cool little cameo appearance by Ood Bnar, and that has to count for something. Plus, dat nihilistic ending, yo.

3/5 Death Stars.

Next: Suddenly, the EU Gets Really Good

The “First Gay Star Wars Character” Is Neither First Nor That Big a Deal

Apparently there’s been a great deal of talk on the Internet this week about Delian Mors, a lesbian Imperial officer in Paul Kemp’s upcoming Star Wars spinoff novel Lords of the Sith. The story broke when Del Rey editor Shelly Shapiro allowed a reviewer with an advance reading copy to reveal Moff Mors’s sexuality online. “If there’s any message at all,” Shapiro was quoted as saying, “it’s simply that Star Wars is as diverse, or more so because they have alien species, as humanity is in real life and we don’t want to pretend it’s not.”

Thrilling as it is that Lucasfilm has bucked all convention and made the first widely publicized homosexual in Star Wars a villainous lesbian, every article I’ve read on the subject leads by stating that Moff Mors is the franchise’s first LGBTQ character. Which is patently untrue clickbait.

Just Google Mors’s name and you’ll find no shortage of editorials calling her the “the very first LGBT character to be made canon in the Star Wars universe” and “the first canon lesbian character in the franchise’s history.” “Writer Paul S. Kemp is changing Star Wars forever,” one site claims. Even CNN picked up the story. “If you feel a ripple in the Force today, it may be the news that the official Star Wars universe is getting its first gay character,” writes Michael Pearson, ill-informed journalist.

Many of these articles, after going on for several paragraphs about how Lucasfilm is breaking new ground by introducing the First Ever Gay Character In Star Wars™, slip in a mention at the very end alluding to how there have previously been gay characters in Star Wars. But you see, they point out, those characters don’t count; Moff Delian Mors is the first canon LGBT character, and that is a newsworthy distinction.

Two problems with that:

1) Those characters were 100% officially licensed canon when they were created, and only lost that status in April 2014.

2) Only nerds care about canon.

Canon is empty marketing jargon. Canon is a corporate buzzword. “Hey, guys, check out our new canon Star Wars books! Unlike those old, non-canon books (which we previously promoted as canon until it stopped being profitable to do so), this is the real, true, factual continuation of a fictional story!”

Canon is meaningless in this context; if it says Star Wars on the cover, it’s Star Wars. Or are we pretending the previous books and videogames with LGBTQQPIAA+ characters were published without the license holders’ permission and against their will?

Because that would be almost as stupid as discounting these characters just because their sexuality can’t be cynically exploited to promote a webpage or market a new product.

1. Juhani

A recruitable party member in Knights of the Old Republic (2003), Juhani is a female cat alien who will eventually profess her love to you if you are playing the game as a female character. “I care for you,” she admits. “I do not know why. I do not know if anything will be possible or if you even return what I feel, but I do know it is there. I am sorry if this upsets you. I am so sorry if I am wrong, but I cannot deny what it is that I feel.”

You can also encounter a female Jedi named Belaya, who describes Juhani as “a dear companion to me for many years” and recounts how they “spent many nights together alone under the stars.” Should you elect to kill Juhani instead of recruit her, Belaya will turn to the dark side and join the Sith. She returns later to attack the player for placing “this black bitterness” in her heart.

2. Goran Beviin and Medrit Vasur

The first married homosexual couple in Star Wars, Goran and Medrit were introduced in Karen Traviss’s 2006 novella Boba Fett: A Practical Man, although Medrit’s sex was not specified until his appearance the following year in the execrable Legacy of the Force series. A few articles about Moff Mors made reference to the “gay Mandalorians” from past books, but dismissed them for being too subtly homosexual.

It’s actually completely unambiguous in the text, but that presupposes the people who read those books actually cared enough to comprehend what they were reading. Regardless, the accusation of subtlety has no leg to stand on. After Medrit’s nonchalant introduction as Goran’s husband failed to incite a whirlwind of controversy across the Internet, Karen Traviss apparently felt the need to hammer the point home, just to be safe; later in the series, Medrit needlessly points out that he doesn’t know how to tell if women are attractive.

3. Luxa

 

An NPC from Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords (2004), Luxa is a female Zeltron, which means that she is basically just a human with pink skin. She will also hit on the player character regardless of which sex you’re playing as, and even has variable flirtation dialogue depending on your gender. Does this make her the first bisexual in Star Wars? Wookieepedia says there’s no way to know, but they also have a page about space tits, so who are you going to believe?

4. Sarn Shild

 

Possibly the first Star Wars character implied to be anything other than heterosexual, Sarn Shild, governor of the Baxel sector in the Outer Rim Territories, was created by the late A. C. Crispin way back in 1997 for her novel The Hutt Gambit. Shild, a thin man with oiled hair and a pearl stud in one earlobe, is described as having tastes that do not extend to human women, and hires one to pose as his mistress to avoid the suspicion of his Imperial colleagues.

This reads like coded language for gay to me, especially considering the Star Wars license-holders’ more conservative restrictions at the time (Daniel Keys Moran once recounted how he was forbidden to use the words “hell,” “damn,” and “whore” in his stories, despite the first two appearing in the films themselves). Of course, some fans will argue that Shild was just into alien women. Don’t ask them why the text couldn’t just say that instead of portraying him as a closeted gay man, though. I mean, Corran Horn banged an otter that one time and no one seemed to care.

5. Mr. Sulu

 

6. C-3PO and R2-D2

 

Come on now, who are we kidding?

7. The planet Makeb

Oh, we’ve forgotten about this already, have we? In 2013, BioWare released Rise of the Hutt Cartel, the first expansion pack to their Star Wars MMORPG The Old Republic. Among the features this expansion added to the game was the ability for the player to engage in same-sex romances, but only on the planet Makeb. Like Tatooine was a desert planet, Hoth an ice planet, and Mustafar a lava planet, Makeb is apparently a gay planet.

This seeming ghettoization of the galaxy’s homosexual population was unpopular, to say the least, and game’s implementation of same-gender relationships probably should have been handled a bit more deftly. But despite the controversy, only a scant few NPCs on the planet are actually romanceable. In terms of press coverage, apparently Delian Mors is just lucky her name rolls off the tongue a little more easily than Lord Cytharat’s.

Ultimately, that widespread press coverage is what’s so baffling about this non-story. Of course we should celebrate and encourage increased diversity in Star Wars, but Moff Mors is just the most recent step in that direction, not the first or the most notable (except in terms of the publicity she’s gotten). The fact that she’s currently the only “canon” LGBT character doesn’t make her any more special or important than the characters who broke that ground before her.

Not to bad-mouth Lords of the Sith, since only the handful of people with advance copies have read it, but it’s just one in a long line of media tie-in Star Wars spinoff fiction. I’m pretty sure that a lot more people played the Knights of the Old Republic games than will read Lords of the Sith, and a lot more people than that will be lining up to see The Force Awakens. Wake me up when J. J. Abrams has two dudes make out on-screen; that’ll be a story worth tweeting about.