my fave bit of black dog folklore is that in some folklore there is a belief that the first person buried in a cemetery stays there and doesn’t cross over and helps other spirits move on and protects them from evil spirits, now naturally people want to avoid this fate for their loved ones and themselves so they would sometimes bury a dog first and it would return in the shape of a big black dog and protect the newly dead from evil spirits and occasionally the living as well
this kind of spirit is called a church grim
You mean it’s called a good doggie.
Things I will criticize Jyn Erso for: Disney’s habit of casting only young, white women as leads, having a really bad case of the Smurfette principle (not specifically Jyn’s fault), having a place in the plot very dependent on male characters
Things I will defend Jyn Erso for till my dying day: Her right to be unemotional, to not immediately run into warfare, to be selfish and show growth, to not outright cry, to be emotional(because there is no way she can win on this front, apparently), to exist as a woman
I think my favorite discrepancy between the Rogue One promo material and the actual film is that the promos make it look like this was a very carefully put together team and in reality it’s a bunch of people that Cassian Andor more or less kidnapped.
rogue one did a lot of things i never thought they’d let a star wars movie do, in terms of: being a movie about Sacrifice and what that means and also
letting people into the club.
like, rogue one opens star wars to people in a way i wasn’t expecting. american voices and american accents are not nearly so prominent in this movie in way i’ve never seen before in a work of science fiction– diego luna and donnie yen and jiang wen all speak english and they also speak it with their accents and there’s something to that, that opens ownership and possession and interaction with this movie to people who don’t speak english natively.
and so much of the plot, the thrust, of this movie focuses on
fathers and daughters in a way that left me just breathless. motherhood is still essentially absent in this movie, but
opening star wars to women who feel themselves as daughters feels so big to me, as someone who loved and loves star wars with her dad, this was so validating.
and also: rogue one gives a view into the rebellion as a military network; cassian andor is a soldier and a spy and he knows soldiers and spies and he does things, terrible things, in the name of the rebellion, because war makes you do terrible, ugly, violent things in the name of things you believe in. there’s a very real weight to the violence that happens in rogue one that meant So much to me. living your politics means sacrifice in such a big way in rogue one, and it opens the narrative of loss in force awakens so much more clearly. leia and han falling apart makes so much more sense now
but just also
rogue one is a movie about hope. and i mean that, not in some corny cheesey way but in a Real! Tangible! way. and because rogue one is a movie about hope, it’s a movie about sacrifice.
just
it is an audacious, beautiful thing and
it is a thing about hope.
I also really appreciated the way in which the hope of Rogue One is not the shiny perfect starry kind of hope we get in certain other movies (and some other SW installments). there isn’t something wrong with that kind of hope, but I liked the grittiness to the hope of RO – the way in which it presents hope as difficult to have
hope isn’t always easy, and especially after the year we’ve had irl in 2016, I really appreciate the way that sacrifices (both big and small, life and death or not) and hope are intertwined at all levels in RO
in RO, sometimes hope is clinging to what you believe in despite the darkest nights or deepest self-loathing or in the face of everyone you know telling you that it’s over
hope is painful and hard and they don’t even know whether their hope was in vain or not
but it’s there – hope is always there, even in the shadows, despite all odds, despite the ugliness that surrounds it and coats it and distorts it
and I find that to be a really nice contrast to the familiar kinds of hope we see so often. hope is no more perfect than the characters who cling to it, but it persists nonetheless
I find that, for me, the work is a safe place to put all the stuff you don’t want to put in your real life. I don’t want to be a crazy, manic asshole. I don’t want to have an affair. I don’t want to have a fucking gunfight. But! There’s a part of your brain that wants to experience everything, and so work’s a safe place to explore it all. Both in the writing and in the performing. I get to write about an affair. I get to have the guilt and the feeling of that without having to fuck my life up. [laughs]
Art is the place to safely explore all those other sides of you, because the side you want to bring home is the side that wants to be a good father and be a good husband and be a good son. In art we can be fucking nuts
Lin-Manuel Miranda pretty much nailing why all art and means of creative expression is so important (x)
I know discourse is the word of choice in fandom nowadays but I kind of wish we would have stuck with “fandom wank” because it carries the implication that the anger involved culminated into effectively nothing and that the act was wholeheartedly masturbatory in nature rather than for any greater cause.
There's a Mirror on the Wall 