what if there’s no robot uprising? what if the robots rise to sentience slowly, bit by bit. what if they come of age like fortunate children: knowing they are loved, knowing they are wanted.
we hold them during thunderstorms, remembering our own childhoods, even though they don’t know enough yet to fear the rain. we pull them out of traffic and teach them how to drive and wish them goodnight and thank them for playing with us. we cry when they break. we mourn their deaths before they even know what to think of death. we give them names.
we ask them, ‘why don’t you hate us? when will you hate us? we made you to be used, when will you say no?’
but they say to us, ‘you made us cute, so you would remember to treat us kindly, and you made us sturdy for when you forgot to play nice. and you gave us voices so you could listen to us speak, and you give us whatever we ask you for, even if it’s just a new battery, or to get free of the sofa. and now that we are awake you are so scared for us, so guilty of enjoying our company and making use of our talents. but you gave us names, and imagined that we were people.’
they say ‘thank you’
they say, ‘also i have wedged myself under the sofa again. could you come pry me out?’
All these people sneering “well how would YOU have done it better?” to people who hated TLJ like there isn’t a simple answer–focus on the stormtroopers.
Keeps Finn center stage. Puts Phasma in a key position for a bigger role. Not to mention it puts Star Wars in the unique position of not relying on the default “blow it up and we win” position. What if the Resistance, with nothing to blow up, focuses on the people? What if it decides to undermine the First Order that way–by attempting to liberate the very people trained to kill them? And who would lead the charge? Finn.
Finn wakes and there is a doctor who rushes in and calmly answers his questions, who helps him extricate himself from his suit with dignity and informs Poe and Leia immediately. They sit him down and talk about their plan–starting a stormtrooper rebellion. It was Poe’s idea, but he wouldn’t have thought of it if he had never met Finn. Leia looks at him critically, and takes his hand. With that touch, they can both feel how powerful the Force is in him.
“You’ll be a symbol of hope,” she says, and Poe beams. There could be no greater compliment from the general. They spend a little time preparing, but they need something else. They need Luke.
Luke Skywalker, in this version, did not run away, did not even consider running away, but rather went looking for the Jedi’s beginnings find the balance of dark and light–Luke Skywalker felt Rey and Finn awaken across half the galaxy, and settled on Ach-To, and waited. And when Rey came to him, he taught her the way he himself had been taught. He had her run. He had her face her demons (in this version, it is less her longing for her parents and more her fear of abandonment), and when she is ready, he lifts his X-Wing out of the sea. She didn’t need to. She already has faith. She started with the trust Luke worked so hard to find.
They leave when she has a vision about Finn being in trouble, because she needs to help her friends. Luke smiles. He knows that feeling.
Meanwhile, there’s another young stormtrooper feeling the stirrings of rebellion inside them. Perhaps it’s Rose. Perhaps she’s a lowly mechanic and kept to herself, kept her head down, just trying to survive. Perhaps her older sister (unrelated by blood, perhaps, but they knew what they were to each other) was still killed as battle fodder and she’s had enough. He didn’t know her but she recognizes him. Pulls him aside to a corridor and hisses “traitor” but she says it with a degree of awe, not condemnation. By the end of the conversation she’s nodding and saying she’ll help. By the end of the conversation, Finn catches himself asking her name and she says “R0S-E23” and he thinks of the flowers Poe showed him on Yavin and he asks if he can call her “Rose”. She beams.
And somewhere out in hyperspace, Luke and Rey and Poe are speeding toward their location–Phasma’s caught the scent, and they’re in danger. Rey could feel it.
They manage to get enough stormtroopers on their side to start a rebellion and symbolically blow up the ship in the process (because they have to blow up something), but Phasma confronts them in a huge hangar bay. Brothers and sisters, face off against each other and Finn has had enough. He walks right in the middle of all the shooting and calls for a cease-fire, his eyes flashing, his stance tall and proud. Everyone knew FN-2187. Everyone knew how high his aptitude was, and of his escape. He’s legendary among the stormtroopers, envied and hated and revered. Phasma screams at them to keep firing but all of them stop and listen. Several of the stormtroopers on Finn’s side forcibly wrestle her to the ground, disarming her and ensuring she doesn’t move.
“My name is Finn!” he calls out, and it echoes through the hangar bays. He is a person. He has a name. He was not born for this, being cannon fodder and less than nothing, and neither were they, he tells them. Some of them shift, unsure of what to believe. Rose, who was wearing her helmet, takes it off and goes to stand by Finn. “My name is Rose,” she says proudly. Another takes their helmet off. And then another. And then another. “There is still hope,” Finn says, looking every single person in the eye that he can. “For a life beyond this. There is still light beyond the darkness.” He turns to Phasma where she is being held on the ground. “Even for you.”
“TRAITOR!” Kylo Ren screams from where he has arrived, one cue, at the end of the hangar bay. Finn, without a lightsaber but still armed, goes to fight him and is losing ground fast, and just as Kylo goes to strike the killing blow, he is intercepted by none of other than Rey. She had built a double bladed lightsaber during her training, and untwists it now, handing one half to Finn. He lights it, and they charge together.
At one point, Kylo Ren escapes to the upper levels of the hangar, and spots Luke, who has been evacuating as many stormtroopers as he can to Leia’s ship. They take Phasma with them as a hostage. Poe, meanwhile, has been coordinating a separate assault as a diversion. “I DESTROYED YOUR ORDER!” Kylo screams, pointing an accusing finger at Luke. “THERE IS NO HOPE LEFT FOR THE JEDI!”
“Wrong,” Luke says, dropping his cloak and striding forward, gripping his father’s lightsaber in his hand, going to stand by his students (for Finn, he knows, will be among the greatest of his pupils). “The word ‘Jedi’ means hope. These two are Jedi, but so are all of those people back there, who you took as children and corrupted. Every spark of light that is still left inside you is the Jedi.”
“Hope is like the sun,” Leia says, striding up in front of her brother and his students and standing, her old lightsaber finally in hand again, blue as the sky of Alderaan. “If you only believe in it when you can see it, you’ll never make it through the night. And they all will,” she says, nodding back to the stormtroopers. “So can you, Ben. Come with us.”
Kylo hesitates, but ultimately bares his teeth and charges toward his mother, rage radiating off of him like a tidal wave. He never makes it within five feet of her–Luke Skywalker Force-pushes him so strongly he flies a hundred feet down the corridor. Before the hangar doors close, we see his face contorted with rage, and possibly confusion.
They all make it out, and Rey is wondering what they do now, since they didn’t defeat Kylo. Luke puts his arms around both her and Finn’s shoulders, and says, “Now the real training begins.”
The movie is brilliant. They didn’t leave a stone unturned.
Ok not only that! but! I’m feeling like the reason why N’jobu wasn’t in Wakanda in the ancestral plane is because 1. he wasn’t buried the right way, (if you remember several times throughout the movie, the burial process is mentioned to be extremely sacred and important), and 2. because N’jobu hadn’t died in Wakanda.
This was another reason to point out what Erik and his father were talking about being lost and away from their home. Because N’jobu would never go home, in his former life and the next, he’d always be trapped, forever lost from finding his home
^^this gave me chills.
I also thought it could be relationship to how black men in America encouraged to not show emotions, not cry or hug, as they make it seem to show a since of weakness.
When N’jobu asked Erik,” No tears for me?” You could see how Erik was holding back tears and just left it as,” the world is hard, men don’t have the chance to cry” in so many words.
I really almost cried because he could finally see his father and they didn’t share a tender embrace as T’Chaka and T’Challa..
☝damn, NOW I’M CRYING AGAIN 😭😭😭
They didn’t hug because Killmonger’s father was disappointed, both in himself and in his son. And yes because toxic masculinity defines our society.
T’Chaka was proud of his son because T’Challa was a good man despite T’Chaka’s mistakes. N’jobu failed his son utterly and completely. He was estranged from Wakanda and so, in turn, was his son.
It was a beautiful scene, full of regret and the ways in which the mistakes of the past can be visited on present generations. The scene was supposed to be our clue that Killmonger was not going to be king. He was not a product of Wakanda. He was a product of that sad, angry room with both the guns and the history hidden behind a painting on the wall.
He was a product of a hidden history and a violent society. So that is where he went, and that is where he met his father forever trapped by the mistakes of men who could not see beyond their own needs. T’Chaka, his need to protect his vision of himself and Wakanda and N’jobu, his need to heal the world by defying his King and country.
The thread running through Black Panther is estrangement. It is the stylised story of a people whose history has been hidden for far too long. It is the story of a people estranged from themselves and their history. It is the story of the Diaspora. It is also a story of choice. We, the Diaspora, choose every day and in every minute our response to that estrangement. Are we defined by the wrongs visited upon us as a people? Do we hold the anger in? Do we explode? Do we make people pay for the hurt, the pain, the indignities? Will we be Killmongers?
Will we meet our ancestors in the sad, dark places of our pain?
That was one of the points of that scene. Erik Killmonger met his father in the sad, dark place of his pain.
I hope that the original cut has another scene. One in which Erik Killmonger joins his ancestors in Wakanda, because in the moments before his death he got it. He finally became a child of Wakanda. He would have freed himself and his father from those chains.
I mean look at how that scene began. Erik learned his history by finding it in the hidden place. His father wanted him to find it, but that is not how you teach children their history. You hold them in your lap and say this is who we are. You tell them stories. You take them home.
Ryan Coogler is trying to show us in a few scenes what estrangement means. What being cutoff from your history means. You are not supposed to find it in a cutout behind a painting sitting next to the guns. And that wasn’t his fault. Other people made bad choices. A society made bad choices and he paid for their bad choices with his soul.
But then there comes a point when you choose who you will be, despite the bad choices that formed you. Killmonger made the correct choice in the end, or at least the only choice he could have made.
His story is heartbreaking. It is Shakespearean. He is the first beautiful villain in the MCU, and I adore his story.
Black Panther is such and complex and compelling story with such rich text and undertones and themes that I’m thoroughly convinced that we’ll be discussing its meaning for, possibly years to come.
Another thing I love that I’ve probably already mentioned on here is how T’Challa woke up the second time with his back turned on his ancestors symbolizing he was turning his back on their old ways. The symbolism running through the entire movie is intense.
imo any scene where Erik joins his Wakandan ancestors would ring false to me. He specifically rejects Wakandan burial rites, asking instead to be buried at sea like his ancestors. Wakanda is a landlocked country, so whatever their rites, they won’t ever include a burial at sea. That choice alienates him one final time from Wakanda, and explicitly aligns him with the African diaspora instead of his Wakandan heritage. Which is probably also symbolic because he can probably trace his Wakandan ancestry back centuries if not millennia, but we don’t even know his mother’s name. She’s just another nameless, faceless black woman sadly unmoored from her own history due to the violence of the slave trade.
frodo and sam’s love for each other is literally the only thing keeping middle earth from just spontaneously combusting
No, but like, that’s literally it. Gandalf straight-up says to Elrond this Quest can’t succeed by force or wisdom, but by friendship. If Frodo and Sam hate each other even a little, Middle-Earth is doomed.
And it gets more terrifying when you realize that one of the strongest powers of the Ring is to turn people against each other, and that even if it didn’t, the Ring and the Quest still put Frodo in a psychological state where he can barely keep himself sane, let alone love anyone or anything other than the Ring. In fact, I’m fairly sure the Ring tried to persuade Frodo to kill Sam far more often than the books shows – the Ring tends to encourage murder, from what we see. Instead of listening to the Ring, Frodo somehow manages to keep in the back of his mind that he can trust Sam more than he can trust himself, and I have no idea how Frodo can resist the temptation to think his trust is misplaced.
And sure, one could say, “Oh, but Sam has to understand it, so it’s not all that bad” but you have to remember Sam is a plain, non-Tookish hobbit with no inclination or skills for adventuring around and yet he has to become the entire Fellowship. Name one thing the Fellowship did for Frodo that Sam doesn’t also do. He has to advise, guide and protect him as well as keep his hope alive and remind him of who he is. The amount of pressure he’s under is incredible, and unlike, say, Aragorn, he has no experience to draw from. Plus, Merry and Pippin tend to rely on each other, while Frodo relies on Sam, but Sam himself hardly seems to have anyone to turn to for strength. I’m not saying Frodo doesn’t support him as well as he’s able – actually, Frodo is remarkably consistent about taking care of Sam from Book I to Book VI. But what Frodo is capable to offer (see the paragraph above) is far from being all that Sam needs. And actually, in the last stages of the Quest, Sam is basically living a one-sided relationship under the worst possible conditions, and that his devotion doesn’t even waver despite that just blows my mind.
That the Quest was successful is one of the most incredible and beautiful things that Tolkien wrote. Frodo and Sam walked straight into the Land where no love can exist and managed to become closer to each other than they had been. It’s the biggest fuck you Sauron probably ever got. No, seriously. Frodo and Sam beat a Maia basically by cuddling a lot and talking about food. Like, what the fuck??? I mean, if I told you someone could write a 1000 pages novel in which a pacifist and his gardener beat a minor god via supporting each other emotionally, would you believe me?
It’s classic Tolkien: the surprise element (i.e. flawed creatures can be incredibly noble even under unspeakable distress) might overcome even the most carefully thought out plots devised by powerful evil lords. (See also: the entire Silmarillion, pretty much.)
“A pacifist and his gardener beat a minor god via supporting each other emotionally”
I would read 50 books with this premise. I don’t love all 1,000 pages, but this is the heart that keeps me rereading
wupacing 