just a reminder that that is daniel craig rey just used the force on james bond
Fun fact: While filming Spectre, Craig would go over to TFA lots and just hang out. Until one day JJ asked if he wanted to be a stormtrooper in one of the scenes. This is the result.
And I like pointing out that he’s a REALLY reckless fighter. Maybe it was just this moment because he was falling all to pieces, but I think it’s more than likely a common thing with him considering his tantrums. It’s ridiculous to turn your back on an opponent in a sword fight, yet even wounded he’s doing it here. And on a side note even wounded he decides to use a double hand strike with the momentum of the spin for extra power. In other words, that move is going to HURT. He’s already been gut shot and is visibly bleeding everywhere and he decides to use moves that are really going to linger.
I’m going to back up this already excellent post with some lore for anyone who might be interested.
Yes, lightsaber blades are weightless, but resistant to changes in motion, so the 90-degree angle of Ren’s two beams actively make them work against each other, as opposed to the only other known crossguard user Roblio Darte, whose secondary blade emitter was 45 degrees from the first, enabling him to wield it perfectly.
Double-handed strikes are the most common movement among lightsaber users because of the inertia needed to counteract the blade’s initial repelling force. Ren uses a two-handed slash despite being heavily wounded because that will make the blade cut faster and easier than a one-handed grip. That’s why Jar’Kai users (dual-wielders) have to rely on speed and agility to compensate for the lack of power in their strikes.
The combat form that Ren is using here could be Ataru, which is noted for its acrobatic twirls, but it could also be Djem So, due to the switch in grips while spinning and the finishing uppercut slash (theoretically, this move conceals your strikes and does not leave you open to attack, even though your back is turned for a moment). I favor the Djem So headcanon, because this was Anakin Skywalker’s preferred form (and we all know how much Ren idolizes his grandpa).
Alternatively, this scene (and the whole fight in general) could also reinforce my personal headcanon that Ren is a Niman user. He uses Niman stance on Takodana, and it is entirely feasible that he could be adopting it in this scene too, as Niman is a combination of the other forms, and it is also perceived by a lot of lightsaber users to be very undisciplined, since it relies heavily on improvisation. Count Dooku once criticized a Niman adherent for his sloppy form and nonexistent footwork. I believe this ties in very well with how reckless Ren is in combat.
These lightsaber fights were EXTREMELY well choreographed, and well shot. A few other things I geeked out about:
* Lightsabers aren’t actually frozen beams of light–they’re LOOPS of plasma, that come out of the handle, turn around, and flow back into the handle. They resist motion because they’re actually already IN motion. It’s less like hitting someone with a sword, and more like hitting them with a chainsaw. This explains a lot of things that happen in the duels–any time a lightsaber hits the ground or an obstacle, it skips and kicks away from the absorbed momentum.
* Because lightsabers bend in a loop, they actually have an “edge” and a “flat,” even though it’s not clearly visible–your cutting technique actually matters, A clean cut will pass right through a human body, but a sloppy cut (like the wild swings that Kylo, Finn and Rey are throwing around) is going to contact human flesh and then actually kick away. This is why when Kylo cuts Finn’s back, he leaves a long gouge rather than just cleaving him in half–it’s a sloppy cut, and he has poor control.
* This also explains why the shape of the side emitters on Kylo Ren’s lightsaber aren’t a problem–when two lightsabers connect, they lock together and stick (imagine two chainsaws locked together!). This is why Ren doesn’t have to worry about another blade sliding down his and severing the plasma vent on the side. You can see this in the way Ren manipulates Rey’s sword when they’re in the bind in the end of their duel–he knows that if he’s physically stronger he can actually yank Rey’s saber around in her hand.
* You can tell here that while all of the combatants have at least some close quarters combat training, none of them REALLY know how to use a lightsaber. You can see this especially in when Rey first attacks Kylo Ren–note that she keeps trying to stab him. It’s very rare that we see other lightsaber users attempt a stab in the heat of combat–nearly every other blow attempted is a wide, sweeping slice. Stabbing strokes like that are *quarterstaff* techniques–designed to take advantage of the extra range that comes from having an extra 2 feet of stick to put between you and your opponent. It’s obvious when she attempts these attacks that she overbalances herself (because the lightsaber is shorter than the quarterstaff she’s used to) and that Ren has never been attacked by a lightsaber this way before.
* Also, look at how janky Ren’s lightsaber blade is! The thing is so obviously a Pinto compared to the Ferrari that is Anakin’s old lightsaber, and it’s all beautifully rendered without a word just in the design of the prop and the effects.
I loved pretty much everything about these movies, but the lightsaber choreography may be my favorite part.
I’ve seen Ataru and Djem Sho listed as possible forms, but I’d have said Juyo - all about the power and the heavy blows, nothing about the defense, and a form that more or less encourages you to channel your rage into it.
if you’re going to do a Star Wars academia!AU, here are some thoughts:
leia organa has been department chair for about a decade because every time she tries to step down, the department is unable to find anyone else willing to take the job. it was supposed to rotate after two years. she hates it.
han solo goes an leave every other year or so, ostensibly to investigate “new archives” in some sunny, tropical locale
luke skywalker also goes on leave every other year or so, but is actually going to very unpleasant archives and actually is allergic to dust
obi-wan kenobi used to be department chair but now when leia comes by to yell at him that it should be someone else’s turn, he pretends he doesn’t know who this “obi-wan” fella is, he’s totally an RA named Ben
padme is now dean. of everything. they thought you couldn’t be dean of everything, but she totally is. she’s about to retire and there will be one hell of a power vacuum when she goes
her ancient husband anakin has been emeritus for like half of his career. he still teaches grad seminars but usually scares off all the students on the first day. he has one grad he’s mentoring but he’s never letting her leave. she is on her 15th year of grad school.
C3PO is the photocopy code of the department secretary. everyone knows his code, no one knows his name. he complains about the copy machine in every single faculty meeting, but actually deeply loves the thing. he cried when they tried to replace it.
finn is a grad student who did his MA at [real university name redacted to protect the innocent] and was super burned by the competitive atmosphere. it came down to whether he was willing to take funding that had been allocated for foreign languages (and thus end their department) and he couldn’t do it. he had to switch. he has to start from scratch in the new program because they don’t allow terminal MAs here.
rey has been in one of the hard sciences for, like, EVER and has accidentally forgotten to leave her lab for the past month. don’t EVER try to “tidy” her lab. maintenance staff tell horror stories about her.
poe dameron is leia’s favorite postdoc. he lectures for her frequently. he always assigns her book when he does. they spend the first hour just agreeing how great her book is. this happens every time.
i love all the ‘poe has a wonderful singing voice’ headcanons for the obvious reason, but you know who else has a wonderful singing voice? rey. except where poe is a connoisseur of mellow space folk and lugs his space guitar from base to base and sings to his fellow pilots, rey has always made up her own songs and her own lyrics and her own stories to sing to herself about.
i’m saying: rey sitting at finn’s bedside, singing to him about the tiny desert critters burrowing in their tiny burrows with their tiny families for the night. it’s a strange combination, part lullaby, part counting song, something she made up when she must’ve been 7 or 8, and she’s never sung it to anyone else. but she’s singing it to finn, who’s unconscious, and it’s soft and sweet and poe walks by med bay one time and catches a glimpse and a couple of verses and he’s like
So this whole Rey Mary Sue thing just keeps twigging me (and not just because the whole bullshit, sexist concept of the Mary Sue knots my knickers like nothing else)
Because while this fuckboy opinion is probably motivated from dudes being, well, fuckboys, it may also be mired in them being MEN.
Because like, I and every single female friend I have walked out of Star Wars with absolutely zero doubts that Rey had earned every inch of her scrappy, badass survivor mantle. It wasn’t until dudes online started whinging about the “believability” of it that I even contemplated the issue.
So now, three viewings in, the second two spent ACTIVELY SEARCHING for signs that Rey may have suffered New Powers as the Plot Demands I have this to say:
The moment the film opened on Rey - a young woman living and operating ALONE on a world in which literal survival depends on who can scavenge AND EXCHANGE the most goods for food rations, I’d wager every single woman in the audience went, “Holy shit, this girl is capable as fuck.”
We didn’t even need to see her owning the thugs trying to steal BB-8 to know she could handle herself physically. We looked at her environment, her position in that environment, and we knew that to be where she was - just to have lived as long as she had - she had to know how to fight like whoa.
Because here’s the thing: woman don’t walk through life the way men do. Just living in our world is dangerous enough for a woman - to grow up young, alone and female on a world that would brawl over scraps and sell anything that wasn’t pinned down? That’s fucking terrifying.
Women look at Rey at the beginning of TFA and see every single hard-won year of survival. Every year of losing to fellow scavengers stealing her take before she could trade it. Every year she had to not become the very thing they were trading. Every year she was an easy target. And we see every year she had to fight to make sure she wasn’t one anymore.
That had to take guts, not to mention a healthy aptitude for combat and weapons training. The ability to pick up languages and social niceties on the fly would have been essential because my enemies enemy and all that.
Every single “unrealistic” ability these dudes are wanking on about was obvious as fuck to me within the first fifteen minutes of the movie.
So welcome to the party, boys - this is what it feels like to have to identify with someone outside of your own experience. And hey, who knows, if you take the time to ask why Rey was so capable instead of whining about it, you may just learn something.
I don’t doubt she could fight, speak droid, speak cookie, shoot, or use the force but how the hell does she know how to fix a fucking hyperdrive? I don’t think it makes her a Mary sue or whatever but it is bad writing. when characters have unexplainable abilities for the sake of making the film run more smoothly, it’s bad. I think it’s easy to go in the defensive when men criticise Rey because I do think a lot of it comes from a place of fear and sexism, but taking an unbiased, logical look at her abilities and realizing they may be slightly overblown isn’t sexist. It’s analytical. still, i’d rather see a female character whose overqualified as opposed to a weakling who needs a man to save her every 5 minutes.
How the hell does she know how to fix a fucking hyperdrive?
She… lives on a planet littered with the remains of the galactic war? Remains that include (as shown in the movie) Imperial Star Destroyers and other ships capable of hyperdrive? Remains that she has to scavenge for survival? Remains filled with parts that she’d have to know the function of in order to evaluate their trade worth?? And you don’t think she’s picked up any working knowledge of complex starship engineering in the years she’s done nothing but crawl around inside literal complex starship engineering???
?????????
Even my idiot brother picked up on the fact that Rey could fix ships because she dismantles them for a living. It’s… kind of obvious.
The only thing that gave me pause was how seemingly easy it was for Rey to use the force, having had no prior experience. Especially given that apparently it’s impossible for individuals to uncover latent abilities without training, going by the fact that if there are no active Jedi, everybody thinks the force is some kind of myth.
However, there are two points that can explain this. First, Rey was under extreme duress. Think of it like how mothers get super strength and are able to lift cars if their children are trapped underneath. The rush of adrenaline and self-preservation instincts allowed her to tap into this hidden ability.
Now maybe that alone isn’t enough. Surely Rey has been under extreme duress before, given her back story, and surely other individuals who are force sensitive have been in difficult situations without their powers manifesting. But my second, and most important, point is the fact that Rey had the force being used on her. She was on the receiving end and knew how it felt. From there, she just took what was being used on her, flipped it around and pushed it back.
So, in short, Rey’s prodigy-like manipulation of the force is not some Mary Sue special snowflake situation, it’s merely a demonstration of how humankind’s ability to dig deep and use everything available to them when their life is in danger is how they managed to survive this long in the first place.
Rey’s jacket at the end of the movie makes me happy because it’s probably the first time someone has ever given her something as a gift…. and in my mind it’ll always be how Space Mum Leia unknowingly gets Rey’s undying loyalty.
No offense but if Star Wars Episode VIII was nothing more than 3 hours of Poe flying around to different planets and showing Rey and Finn all the wonders of the universe, all the food and drink and fun they missed out on, with BB-8 and Chewie makig noises in the background, and an occasional cut to a shot of Captain Phasma with her helmet off lifting weights, I would be perfectly happy
As with any organization, the Resistance found it necessary to produce training holovids on a variety of topics, from basic demonstrations of the use of important equipment to more nuanced vids on cultural or personnel issues. They were a small force, but tended to be somewhat geographically scattered by necessity, and it saved a lot of time to have a small collection of introductory holovids to show new recruits to get them quickly up to speed.
The most entertaining holovid, however, was widely held to be this one.
DEALING WITH YOUR INEVITABLE CRUSH ON POE DAMERON
The title music swells, epic and orchestral, over a black screen. Fade in: a photo, taken outdoors, head and shoulders, of Poe Dameron, squinting slightly into the sun, jaw set in determination. His hair is tousled and he is in a flight suit and leather jacket, ruggedly attractive.
Another flourish of music, and the title pops bright white text over a black screen:
DEALING WITH YOUR INEVITABLE CRUSH ON POE DAMERON
Fade to footage of Poe Dameron, in a sleeveless tight undershirt smudged with grease and worn-thin trousers that fit very flatteringly behind, bending over to demonstrate how to use a new system of tie-downs to secure equipment such as small spacecraft in inclement weather. His hair is a little too long and falls across his forehead; he habitually shakes his head a little to keep it away from his eyes, in a charming gesture, and he frequently looks to the camera for guidance, which gives him an appealing, almost supplicant aspect, especially since he frequently smiles at the cameraman.
Voiceover (male, smooth, cultured, the same one who narrates most of the rest of the instructional holovids the Resistance produces): “It’s not a question of if, but when. It’s a natural part of joining the Resistance. Everyone says, oh, it won’t happen to me, I’m immune to that sort of thing. But everyone in the Resistance eventually ends up with a crush on Poe Dameron.”
Cut to head-and-shoulders shot of a middle-aged mechanic, female, in work attire, clearly in a spacecraft hangar, holding a wrench in one hand. There’s a label at the bottom of the screen: Yana, Mechanic. Below that it says, He Remembers Her Name. “You may think you’re immune to his looks,” she says, “but then he remembers your name after only having met you once, and claps you on the shoulder, and calls you ‘buddy’ and smiles at you.” She sighed. “And it only gets worse from there.”
Quick cut to a shot, zoomed in from a distance, of Poe Dameron standing on the ladder to the cockpit of his X-Wing. It is a video; he is watching someone offscreen do something, the wind gently ruffling his tousled hair and his helmet under one arm. His mouth is slightly open; after a moment he licks his lower lip, then grins, like he’s about to speak.
Meanwhile, voiceover:
“Don’t be alarmed. These are natural feelings. Take comfort in the fact that you aren’t alone. And you can console yourself in the knowledge that he has this effect on everyone.”
Cut to head and shoulders shot of a young pilot, female, dark-haired; she is attractively dressed and made-up, but wearing her flight suit. The label at the bottom of the screen says Jessika Pava, Pilot, and is subtitled, He Has Saved Her Life About 100 Times. “It’s not his fault,” she says. “That’s the thing you have to keep in mind. He’s really like that. He’s really actually nice to people. He’s completely sincere.”
A still shot fills the screen: Poe Dameron, very young, aged perhaps sixteen or seventeen. He is standing on a table, possibly dancing, shirtless, wearing New Republic Academy uniform trousers and suspenders. The suspenders are slipping down his shoulders, and he has his head tipped back and is provocatively mock-fellating a bottle clearly labeled “Corellian Death Rum” while staring seductively into the camera. He is clearly intoxicated.
Meanwhile, voiceover:
“Methods of coping with this affliction vary by individual. Some people pretend they don’t feel it. Others give themselves over to it. A few daring individuals have tried to actually go for it. But it seems that despite a wild youth, Poe has settled into a reasonably responsible adulthood. It is not recommended that you pursue him aggressively.”
Cut, footage of a very attractive blonde woman in her early thirties, in a New Republican Starfleet uniform. She is labeled Garella Unaeron, and subtitled Shared Single, Memorable Wild Night Of Passion. “I just broke into his quarters and got naked and lay in his bed until he showed up,” she says, looking smug. “It went well for me, but I mean, we were also like eighteen. So. I don’t imagine that’d go as well now he’s defected to the Resistance.” She tosses her hair, clearly taking a moment to remember. “But I mean, if you go for it,” she went on, “much as I loathe his politics, I gotta say, he’s really great in the sack. I don’t imagine he’s lost the knack, it’s not the kind of thing you get worse at with practice.” Suddenly her expression changes, twisting into suspicion. “Wait, who did you say you were again?” The camera jerks and the footage ends abruptly.
The next shot is a craggily-handsome man in his late thirties, with a scar down one cheekbone that speaks of a life of action. He is labeled Naeher Adamant, and subtitled Had Actual Grown-Up Sexual Relationship. “A gentleman never kisses and tells,” he says, unsmiling, but he looks pleased nonetheless, or perhaps fond. “I can tell you, though, that Dameron is never other than entirely genuine. There’s no need to play games.”
Another cut, another interview subject, head and shoulders of a shiny-polished droid. Titled CR-31T, Mechanic, and subtitled He Is Really That Nice All The Time. “I’ve never worked with any other human who went so out of his way to make sure I understood that he considered me a person, on par with a biological organism,” the droid said, a little shyly. “It’s not— I don’t mind, you know, I know what I am, but he’s just— he’s so nice.”
Cut to footage of Poe Dameron, dressed in his flight suit, clearly training footage of some kind as he is watching someone offscreen and gesturing a little hesitantly to parts of his gear, as if in demonstration. He is apparently a little bored with making training videos, however, and is making amusing faces at the offscreen person, exaggerated expressions of wide-eyed wonder and grimacing trepidation.
Meanwhile, voiceover:
“So when you find yourself suffused with inappropriate feelings for this particular individual, just remember, you’re not alone. Speak to your counselor about what coping method is best for you. And above all, don’t make it weird: we’re relying on him, and his possibly-unholy combination of dashing charm and uncanny good luck. Try to use your misplaced erotic energy wisely.”
The music swells again, and the scene cuts to another video of Poe, zoomed in on him from quite a distance; he is outdoors, watching something at a distance with a vacant half-smile. The wind, again, ruffles his hair slightly, attractively, and he laughs silently, eyes crinkling up fetchingly. The title rolls up the screen again:
DEALING WITH YOUR INEVITABLE CRUSH ON POE DAMERON
As the scene fades to black, the title is the last thing visible, then winks out as well.
____
This is part of a longer thing that’s not really coming together yet but I promise it will. @artgroves and I are working together on it and I am more excited than I can even express.
I am crying. Try to use your misplaced erotic energy wisely.
