*slight Spoilers Follow For Witch From Mercury Episode 17 (or Season 2, Episode 5)*

*slight spoilers follow for Witch from Mercury episode 17 (or season 2, episode 5)*

I have now watched the episode, and my principal emotion is relief. From the way y’all were talking, I was worried Guel was gonna die.

Nice.

It feels like the edits are a lot closer to Ganondorf in Hyrule Warriors or Ocarina of Time (which I’m personally a huge fan of), while the canon ones are taking more after Twilight Princess.

The new design also reminds me a helluva lot of Demise from Skyward Sword (though since they basically are Ganon, in a sense, I suppose that’s to be expected).

edited the new artwork of totk ganondorf too so heres both :)

(remember, this is not saying 'fixing it' or 'i replace canon', just a fun lil edit)

here are the canon ones for comparison

i think the first one is purely and illustration, the second one feels like it was the actual model painted over due to the subtle difference in design and dynamic

Today is the day we acknowledge that “I heard the moon was damaged in the calamity war” is just an absolutely wild thing to say. In context and out of context.

First off, You Heard? As in, this is some rumour that you’re not actually sure about? I know they’re on Mars, and haven’t had much/any of an education, but I would think that the fate of Earth’s primary celestial body would be fairly well known. But this is just like “oh yeah, apparently the moon’s busted”.

Second, “Damaged in the Calamity War”. I don’t know why but damaged is the word I focus on here. Damage implies it’s still functioning. Damage implies that it took the hit but wasn’t destroyed. Damaged is such an odd way to talk about something like the moon.

Like, it really sells the Calamity War as this, well, Calamitous thing. You can really understand why it was such an upheaval that necessitated gjallarhorn’s formation, why the dating process is “post disaster”. And really, why a lot of the setting is how it is.

Why gjallarhorn’s mostly Earth based, why Mars is a backwater with poverty and pmc’s. Why Jupiter can essentially be run by Teiwaz (well, they at least have a lotta influence there). It’s just one example of what happened to this world.

I know we’re probably never gonna fully know what happened in the Calamity War, since that’d ruin the mystique, but…

Just imagine what it must’ve been like.

Gundams battling mobile armours for the fate of the moon.

And behind them, Earth.

There’s a scene in The Clone Wars that I find pertinent to this.

Count Dooku’s replaced Ventress as his apprentice, and is in the process of training Savage Opress as a replacement.

It’s very similar to Yoda and Luke’s training, just with added motivation (IE force Lightning). Dooku is trying to get Savage to lift the stone pillars, and Savage Tells him it cannot be done. Dooku replies:

“The task is only impossible because you have deemed it so”.

It’s essentially exactly what Yoda tells Luke in Empire Strikes Back, and reinforcers the fact that Dooku was once Yoda’s apprentice.

Not me being mad today about people over exaggerating the "do or do not there is no try" and hating on the Jedi for it as if it's not an idiom about always trying your best and giving it your all (and considering things when you do them) instead of literally saying don't try if you can't succeed. :/

I've always understood "do or do not, there is no try" as "ultimately, you will either have done or not done" - it seems like it's about focusing on the outcome instead of the process.

(As a recap of what exactly happens in ESB: Luke is doing a handstand trying to lift stones with Yoda perched on his leg when the ship suddenly sinks further into the water. It breaks Luke's concentration and his rocks fall, along with him, and Yoda. Luke laments they'll never get the ship back, Yoda laments that Luke always thinks things are too hard to be done, Luke says lifting stones is different, Yoda says it isn't, and Luke agrees to try, which is when Yoda has his iconic line.

And critically, after Luke does try and fail, Yoda gives him a great speech about the nature of the Force and how it binds everything together and Luke despondently says that it's just impossible. Upon which Yoda lifts the ship out of the water, of course, and Luke exclaims that he can't believe it, to which Yoda answers that that's why he's failing.)

Obviously you won't always get things right the first time, and that's precisely what Luke is frustrated about in the scene. And because he's disappointed that he's not getting things right, he doesn't even want to try anymore - his first instinct is to give up because he thinks the situation is beyond fixing.

So the critical point about the quote is that this Yoda shifting the focus: he tells Luke to stop thinking about what he's doing and concentrate on what he wants to do.

This is because of Luke's current state of mind, because Luke is currently associating his own efforts with failure, it's not just a random thing he's saying to make him feel bad.

Everything Star Wars tells us about the Force is that it's used through both intuition and confidence:

That's why the Jedi train so hard from such a young age - you can't doubt yourself or second-guess the Force, or you will get your ass kicked by both the universe and your potential opponents. You have to be able to trust your instincts because you have to rely on them - hence the need to either instill good Force-oriented instincts in kids, or in Luke's case relearn his own base sentient instincts. You can't learn to categorize the material world as 'too heavy,' 'too far,' 'not possible' - you have to focus on the Force, not the physical nature of the objects or your own limitations.

Luke thinks and feels the way a non Force-sensitive would: 'heavy things = can't be lifted.' He was doing okay lifting stones upside down, but he was using his muscles to stand upright, not the Force (hence why he was struggling to stay up and why he fell so easily). His concentration was clouded by material concerns (the loss of the ship and his own powerlessness) so he couldn't maintain it. He sees success as depending on his own conscious efforts but that's just not the way it works, he has to let go because his mind is just not wired right yet and so his efforts are necessarily counterproductive. It's that materialism that Yoda is responding to.

That's the point of Yoda's lesson imo - it's not so much about the technicalities of 'giving it everything you've got,' it's about something much deeper. He is trying to get Luke to radically change his mindset and entire worldview (the 'luminous beings, not this crude matter' quote is from this scene too), because Luke is never going to succeed if he thinks in terms of 'trying.'

If Luke could visualize the starship out of the bog and focus on that, the starship would be out of the bog. If he's focused on trying to lift it out of the bog, then he'll fail because everything in his mind tells him he can't.

Which is exactly what happens.

And the fact is, we know Yoda is 100% right with his advice and that everything he says and teaches in that moment is endorsed by the narrative - because he easily succeeds where Luke kept failing.

Story-wise, it couldn't be clearer that Yoda's advice is good, because it's immediately proven that not following it doesn't yield results, but that following it does.

Like most Jedi maxims, "Do, or do not. There is no try," is circumstantial advice and I'm pretty sure it doesn't show up again in Star Wars canon, be it the movies or TCW (until Rebels that is, when Kanan quotes it to Ezra like it's a rote thing that Yoda used to say all the time and it's kind of 'ah ah' moment because neither of them can figure out what it means). Which is why it kinda bugs me that it was elevated to a Yoda proverb like it's something he says constantly and not just something Luke needed to hear in that moment. It's a banger of a quote though.

Honestly, I always figured that the reason why the Clones are the way they are in Star Wars (IE, Why they exist, why they’re written as they are) is that, fundamentally, they were beholden to that line from way back in the original Star Wars (before it was A New Hope) back in 1977. “You fought in the Clone Wars?” So, Clones have to be involved somewhere, they’re stuck with that. They’d already established the Droid armies as being a thing in A Phantom Menace, and it sells the Trade Federation (and by extension, the rest of the separatists) as cowardly, since they’re relying on machines to do their fighting for them, and since they’re expensive, they’re rich as well.

It’s important to remember that around the time of the prequels coming out, there was the very real fear among people of mechanisation in the workplace, machines coming to take their jobs (I’m not saying that isn’t still a thing, just that it was less prevalent then than now), so with that as the backdrop it’s less likely that the viewing public’d get behind a robot army. So, we have to work clones in somewhere, and they can’t be the bad guys, and the Grand Army of the Republic has to come from somewhere…….

Eureka! Make the Grand Army of the Republic clones!

It solves the problem of the giving the republic an army for the conflict, without making them look like the aggressors, or implying that they would use a standing army to enforce rule on the galaxy. The Republic is still the good guys, remember, no matter how corrupt and inefficient certain parts of them are. It also enables them to sell this conflict as being a sith plan, since this army “just happens” to have been set aside for this very purpose.

It’s also worth noticing that, in the movies at least (near as I can tell, until The Clone Wars (The CG tv show) the clones have a far more varied depiction, from being varied characters with their own views on the war, to being essentially droids made of meat, with a lot of variation between those two binaries. The Clone Wars (as above) took the decision to follow the more humanist line. I’m focusing on the movies since, again, primary source) the clones don’t really have much personality. Mostly that’s because there’s only so much screen time, and it’s being taken up by Jedi, Senators and the like, but it really feels like the only reason they’re human is so we, the viewers can emphasise with them as the good guys and to provide foreshadowing as to where those suspiciously similar stormtrooper fellows come from.

“Are the Clones slaves?” Is, at least to me, a fairly thorny ethical question in its own right, both in and out of universe. I won’t go into the specifics of that now, but it is absolutely a fun and interesting question to ponder. But there’s a myriad of reasons as to why this decision was made, so making such a binary choice as throwing out everything else because the clones are apparently slaves is honestly just kinda doing the series an injustice.

People complain that the jedi don't act appropriately to being forced to use a slaver army, but they seem to forget that the jedi can't. Not just in universe (although yes, in universe there was nothing the jedi could do about this decision made by the senate) but narratively.

The jedi can't comment on the clone's slavery because the narrative won't let them! As a matter of fact, the narrative won't let anyone mention this! Literally no one calls the clones slaves seriously, even characters who by all accounts should feel that way because the narrative won't let them because they are fictional people created by a team of writers.

The clones aren't slaves in universe because the writers refuse to write them that way. Do I personally feel that this should have been a plot point? Yeah I think it would have been interesting! But they didn't!

Is it fun to explore this in fanfiction? Yeah it totally is! I know I would mention it in any fic I write in the future.

Does it make for good media criticism or analysis? No! This is just straight up not how you professionally analysis media. It is worth bring up in a discussion about the creators and exploring why they didn't bring these things up in the series. That would be good media analysis.

But as "proof" that some characters are bad this fails dramatically. Why? Because then you must apply this logic to every character, meaning not just the jedi are evil but actually every single character in the whole series, yes all of them, are evil. Once you do that you have successfully thrown away any meaning the original work had. It is all pointless now.

People confuse in-universe (watsonian) and out-of-universe (doylist) analysis. 'Why did no one do anything about the clone's situation?' is a shit watsonian analysis. But 'why the fuck did the writers write the clones like this?' is a GREAT doylist question.

Media analysis should add meaning, or explain meaning, or even describe why you feel the work lacks meaning, but it should never take all meaning away.

It is the same reason droids aren't called slaves. It would complicate the narrative and distract from whatever the writers were actually trying to say. The writers don't want to go there, so they don't.

Alright, considering I spent the last two points gushing about how much I like Mcgillis, I should probably do a post on the other great power in Gjallarhorn.

Rustal Elion, the Man Who Rules the Moon.

And I’m gonna pick apart that title before anything else. He is in charge of the Arianrhod fleet, in charge of directly safeguarding Earth, which obviously affords him a lot of power. Him being “the man who rules the moon” also puts him in the same league as Nobliss Gordon and McMurdo Barriston “the man who rules Jupiter”. It also shows his, at least at first, disconnection with the other events going on around him. Or rather the fact that he essentially just shows up, this massive power unrelated to much of the others going on around him, like he’s come down from another world. Which is fairly accurate.

His tactical excellence really goes without much saying, but the recent Iron-blooded orphans MSV has revealed a new detail I want to talk about.

ASW-G-48 Gundam Haagenti, the Gundam frame owned by the Elion family, currently stored at Vingolf with (presumably) the rest of the Seven Stars Gundam frames (which is a topic for another day).

Now we know that members of the families are able to take out and deploy Gundam frames, as Gaelio does with Kimaris, so why wasn’t the Haagenti deployed? It would have surely been a great boon to their forces, and even might have been able to match Barbatos.

Rustal even has a pilot for it in the form of Julieta Juris, so why was it just left in Vingolf?

Because Rustal chooses not to. The Gundam frames are legendary relics of a bygone age, and Rustal wishes to crush Tekkadan and Mcgillis without using them. He could even risk playing into Mcgillis’ hands by using the same “power” that Mcgillis does. So instead he uses the Reginlaze Julia.

He rejects the ancient power of the calamity war, instead choosing a machine based off the brand-new Reginlaze frame. He embraces the future, while Mcgillis and Tekkadan wield weapons of the past.

(Okay yes he also uses Dainsleif’s, but those don’t have as much of a mythic aspect in-universe as Gundam frames do).

It just adds to his character, with him possessing the power needed to enact change, but also the wisdom to recognise that some powers he probably shouldn’t use.

(And yes I know the out-of-universe explanation is “well it didn’t exist yet, so of course he couldn’t have used it”, don’t @ me.)

Also (less relevant to the above points but I just want to kinda gush about Haagenti (and Gamigin) for a bit) ever since we saw the hangar in Vingolf in episode 43, I’ve really been looking forward to seeing what the other Seven Stars Gundam’s are. Haagenti and Gamigin are utterly gorgeous, but I’m particularly interested in the Issue, Kujan and I suppose Fareed families (I always forget that the Fareed family exists as a separate entirety to Mcgillis, since he was adopted into it).

Huh, actually that does throw Mcgillis’ plan in a new light, since he (presuming it’s still around) essentially already had a Gundam as his birthright as head of the Fareed family, but still went for Bael. Maybe the colour didn’t match or something, I don’t know.

Anyway, I’m reasonably sure that the Kujan family Gundam’s no longer around, since you just know Iok would’ve deployed it, Rustal or no. But that still leaves the Issue, Fareed and Baklazan families still to go.