Gah. The whole clone thing in The Clone Wars is SO FUCKED UP. These are supposed to be the good guys and what they’ve done is the same thing that the First Order is doing to stormtroopers, essentially.
In the episode I’m watching now, Rex says they took an oath, but like, how did they possibly have a choice to take any oath?
Am I missing something, or is the Republic just that fucked up?
The Republic is sort of that fucked up, but I don’t think they got there by themselves. Look who’s in charge! Really, keep an eye on Palpatine, especially the speeches he gives. Every time he gives a speech, your stomach should curdle because something really bad is about to happen, and it’s going to happen because he’s about to emotionally engage people to be terrible sentient beings. A significant portion of how bad the Republic gets–not all of it, but a meaningful chunk–is ol’ Darth Sidious basically fucking with everybody’s minds. Not in a Dark Side way, but in a worse way. He wedged the Republic into this rock and a hard place with this war he created, and then he says to them, “Isn’t making clone soldiers better than sending our own people out to die?”
“And you know what,” he then says to them, “let’s put the Jedi in charge! Because they’re MERCIFUL. Because they’re HONORABLE. Because THEY, you can be sure, will not abuse people or engage in violence beyond what’s necessary or throw lives away needlessly or commit all those horrors you inevitably see in war.”
And everybody up to and including the Jedi nod, because doesn’t that seem wise and compassionate?
And then he points to devastated colonies as horror stories about what happens each time they fail, and lets them scare themselves into justifying everything. He lets the war itself convince them that they HAVE to win, by any means necessary. He just sits back and lets the Republic, even the Jedi, learn how to dehumanize–depersonify–their enemies (when it’s robots and clones you see doing most of the shooing, it’s so easy to forget that actual people are dying, isn’t it? Even for the audience). All he has to do is stand up and give an occasional speech, and let them all get swept away in the “us versus them” and “whatever it takes.”
And so they all convince themselves that the right thing to do is have the Kaminoans breed clones for them to train up and send off to die in a war the poor guys never asked for. As the series goes on, the clones and everyones’ reactions to them are really kind of the living breadcrumb trail of how far the Republic is falling as things go on. Palpatine effectively turns the entire galaxy to the Dark Side. And he doesn’t even have to actually use the Dark Side to do it. Dude earns his Sith name.
DAAAAAMN.
And everybody up to and including the Jedi nod, because doesn’t that seem wise and compassionate?
Dude, the Jedi couldn’t even SAY NO to Palpatine or the Senate. The Jedi were there to protect and defend the Republic and the Republic WAS the Senate since the Senate was the voice of all the planets in the Republic.
I mean, look at Sheev, talking to Mace in Anakin and Obi-Wan #1
“Well, I’m the Chancellor, so you guys have to do what I say!!!!”
Now, let’s say the Jedi did say no to the Clone Wars. A lot of people say the Jedi went back on their teachings and should have declined to fight, but they couldn’t. If they did, then most likely they would be branded as traitors to the Republic. “The Jedi will not fight for the Republic they claim to defend and love! The Jedi would rather see Coruscant in ashes than fight!” And the Jedi Order gets shunned out of the Republic, leaving Palpatine free to take over. His whole goal for the Clone Wars was to destroy the Jedi so he can take over the Galaxy, right? If the Jedi are banished, they won’t be able to touch him. What are 10,000 Jedi going to do against my Clone Army and all these people in the Republic who love me? Or maybe he’d just let the CIS win and rule through a puppet leader like Dooku.
So, no matter what the Jedi do, Palpatine is going to fucking win.
Putting the Jedi in charge was a great idea because it made people start associating the Jedi with war. Despite the fact that for AT LEAST a thousand years, the Jedi were known as peacekeepers who most likely just did diplomatic missions and helped out people, all that seems to fall away when they are shown on the HoloNet News leading armies.
Palpatine drags that war out so long that people are now thinking the Jedi are in charge of it all. They are the ones leading it all. So the public opinion of the Jedi becomes tainted.
So when Palpatine claims the Jedi are traitors and tried to kill him, people actually believe him. He was able to make a religious group of space wizards who were known for at least a thousand years as ‘the good good GOOD guys’ into the bad guys. He was able to corrupt the Jedi Order in the minds of the galaxy without the Jedi Order being corrupt.
Annnnnnd don’t forget the whole amorality of the existence of the clones themselves.
They are manufactured and perceived by many (not all) to just be wetware battle droids, expendable and replaceable, to spend their whole brief lifespan fighting for the safety and freedom of Republic citizens, while never knowing safety or freedom for themselves or their brothers.
And you can see them start to doubt their purpose - Cut deserting, Slick’s betrayal, Fives desperately trying to reveal the truth to someone who can help - and it hurts. A lot.
“So, no matter what the Jedi do, Palpatine is going to fucking win.”
Literally most important note ever. For all the terrible things the Jedi were accomplices to, it’s all because Palpatine rigged the game from the start. If they had refused to fight under the moral ground that using the clones is unethical, Palpatine would have just labeled them traitors a decade earlier, fabricated some evidence that they were scheming with the Separatists all long, and the clones would have just marched right into the Temple.
Another note on how the Jedi had to fight or be labeled as traitors: in the kotor series that was exactly what happened. When the mandelorians were attacking outer rim planets in an attempt to convince the Jedi to fight them (because mandelorians are like that) the Jedi council said no. Simple as that. They said “we will not fight because it’ll just lead to more fighting”
What did this cause? This caused the outer rim planets who were dying to hate the council. It caused the Jedi who so desperately wanted to help but couldn’t because the council said no to hate the council. It caused the republic who was sending relief efforts that we’re eventually attacked and destroyed by mandelorians to hate the council.
And you know what happened next? Revan. Revan happened next. Revan went against the council and convinced hundreds of Jedi to do the same and they went and fought the mandelorians. They won, but at a great cost, and from there Revan and Malak fell to the dark side and in time crippled the Republic further and led to the destruction of the Jedi.
In short the Jedi HAD to fight in the clone wars because last time they tried being pacifists they all died and nearly went extinct and Palpatine knew this, and he used this.
“So, no matter what the Jedi do, Palpatine is going to fucking win.”
Still the most salient point. Darth Sidious engineered the war from the beginning, he and his master were the ones who created the clone army to begin with and locked them into the involuntary drafted soldier status…at the point where the Jedi even had the knowledge and ability to begin to make choices, it was already too late. The clone troopers were going to be sent out to fight and die and given no choice in the matter REGARDLESS of any decision the Jedi could have made. The troopers were soldiers of the Republic, not the Jedi’s personal army, which means it was the Senate and the Chancellor deciding their ultimate fate. The only choices the individual Jedi or the Order leadership could have made at that point would be to stay and fight alongside them as ordered by the Chancellor or to walk away from the Republic entirely and leave the troopers to die without them on the battlefield. Double jeopardy of course, because if they just walk away they are also betraying their oath to defend the citizens of the galaxy, leaving the helpless bystanders to die in the atrocities and war crimes the CIS forces were perpetuating.
Darth Sidious deliberately and meticulously built up the perfect catch-22 for the Jedi, and it would be naive to not acknowledge it.
There was no path available to them which would have allowed them to free the clone troopers from Republic control, they had no control over the course of the war, they only had the option to choose between two evils, and I understand why they chose to agree to stand and fight when the Chancellor ordered it. Even if it can be seen as implicitly supporting a great injustice. In my opinion, abandoning the clone troopers to die in even greater numbers without them, and abandoning their duty to defend the helpless in the face of the CIS atrocities
(see: carpet bombing/use of human shields in Ryloth, etc), would have been the greater evil.
There was no path the Jedi could see to get out of the war or save themselves.
That does not mean there was no path. I think I heard somewhere ‘only sith deal in absolutes’.
The Jedi could not escape without help and they had gone a thousand years without needing to ask for help or ‘involve themselves in politics’.
Darth Sidious sowed discord and discouraged trust and the Jedi fell for it.
We know that there were senators (lots of them!) worried about Darth Sidious and the war but the Jedi saw ‘playing politics’ as beneath their mandate and tried to go it alone.
Looking back at my history classes in school they mentioned important individuals but never the importance of building coalitions. None of the successful social movements were by a single person or group. These battles are won when you find other people to stand with you.
THIS!!!!!!!!!!!! The Jedi were not helpless, they did have options. From their point of view shitty options, but options. But then again, taking control of what was basically slave army, because you were “ordered” too, is also a pretty shitty option. Personally, I think getting involved in politics to correct that is the lesser sin, but what the hell do I know?
Also, because my brain is incapable of looking at anything purely as good or bad, just because they were a flawed organization, in no way does that mean that they deserved what happened to them! They needed reform, not a slaughter.
The Jedi were only caught in this position because they set themselves up. They got themselves into a position where they were effectively a branch of the justice department, but were subject to zero public oversight and zero transparency. There were no hard-and-fast rules or policies about the exact jurisdiction and role of the Jedi, and certainly nothing enforced by a third party. The Jedi did whatever the Jedi decided the Jedi should do. A police officer can’t enter your home without a warrant signed by a judge. A jedi doesn’t need a warrant, and they might also decapitate you if you get in the way, and there is zero legal recourse for that. Are they allowed to do that? well, nothing says they’re NOT allowed to do that.
A police officer isn’t going to be deployed to fight a war on foreign soil. That’s not what police do, that’s what the department of defense is for. Remember when Bush started sending the National Guard overseas to fight the “war on terror”? people were pissed because that’s not what the fucking national guard is for. But there is no such division of roles when it comes to the Jedi. What is the Jedi’s role in the galaxy? Negotiators? sure! Peacekeepers? sure! Can they arrest criminals? sure! Use violence to arrest criminals if they have to? Sure! Use violence to defend innocent civilians from dangerous criminals? Yes! would we say that a Jedi failed in their role as a Jedi if they refused to do these things? Probably! Can a Jedi lead an army to war on behalf of the republic? Why not? Can we say they failed in their role as a jedi if they don’t? Well, Palpatine sure can. And since there’s nothing that says Jedi SHOULDN’T be leading armies, he’s not entirely wrong?
The Jedi tried to pretend they were above politics when they were really right in the center of it. You can’t act as a branch of the government and NOT be involved in politics. They had no formalized role, just a long tradition of doing “peacekeeping stuff”. The Jedi have to decide whom to help, which side to take in disputes, who is the aggressor and who is the victim, who is “innocent”. These choices are ALL political. Plenty of times, the Jedi choose to allow an injustice to take place because correcting it would cause huge problems for the Republic. Because it would be politically inexpedient to do so. And yet they somehow pretend that they’re not involved in politics!
Again, let’s look at real-world organizations, say, the Red Cross. The Red Cross is dedicated to helping people with immediate concerns, i.e. the injured in war zones, housing and feeding refugees, helping people in natural disasters. Helping people sounds pretty Jedi, right? But the Red Cross is international, it is not attached to any one government. And they do not make choices about whom to help. They caught a lot of flak for providing medical aid to the Taliban. But they helped them anyway because it is not their job to make choices about who deserves help. In this way, the red cross specifically tries to separate itself from politics, by having rules that prevent them from making political choices. This means that they are less able to waltz around and do stuff than the Jedi- if a country says “no you can’t come in and do your thing” they’re stuck. They have to rely on international pressure- other countries going “wtf is wrong with you let the red cross help”- in order to have the power to execute their mission. The Jedi have decided that they’re not subject to that kind of governmental oversight, and in doing so, have automatically positioned themselves as a political body. They have entered the game of politics whether they want to admit it or not. And then while everyone else is playing the political game, they plug their ears and go LALALA WE DON’T GET INVOLVED IN POLITICS. of course they were outmaneuvered and caught in a catch-22.
The Jedi defined their job as “defend and protect the Republic”. i mean fuck’s sake, “the Republic” is a political entity. By all rights, the Jedi should still be serving under Emperor Palpatine, because hey, the Republic turned into the Empire, and that’s what you’re supposed to defend. By the Jedi’s own rules, Anakin Skywalker is the only Jedi still doing a Jedi’s job.
What if the Jedi had instead spent the last thousand years defining their role as, idk, ending slavery wherever it is found? First of all, they’d probably have been made enemies of the republic a long time ago. There probably would have been a huge-ass clusterfuck of a war on the outer rim centuries past over the Hutt’s slave empire. That might have resulted in decades of chaos and violence, but that’s opposed to centuries of slavery, which is just as, if not more so, violent, it’s just… less chaotic. You could even call it a peaceful violence. Sure, there’s slaves, but at lease the Republic isn’t having to spend resources and lives on a war, right? (so just by attaching themselves to the Republic, the Jedi compromised themselves). When the Clone Army rolled up, these hypothetical anti-slavery Jedi would have stepped up and gone “hold the fuck up, you can’t do that, and we’re going to stop you”. And no matter how pissed people were about it, it would have been a lot harder to blame them for not defending the republic, because that isn’t their job.
I understand why the Jedi aligned themselves to the Republic government in the first place- it gave them official permission to go wherever they wanted and so just about whatever they wanted to complete their mission. But, only if their mission is aligned with the Republic’s goals. They compromised their moral core in exchange for expediency and power. They might have been less effective had they not aligned with the government, but what they ended up being very effective at doing was not at all what they should have been doing.
So the Jedi entered the political game, with all the responsibility for making political, moral choices that comes with that, the moment they aligned themselves with the Republic. And they set themselves up for corruption and failure by refusing to acknowledge that they were playing at all. The fall of the Jedi was inevitable, either literally, because someone like Palpatine did something like Palpatine did, or figuratively, because situations like the one palpatine engineered would have arisen naturally in the course of time, with the order slowly devolving into nothing but an elite police/paramilitary force, directed by the chancellor or senate, with absolutely no oversight, enforcing the corrupt, political will of a corrupt, political body, and thinking they were right the whole time. Palpatine didn’t even need Order 66, he could have had the entire Jedi Order serving as his Inquisitors if he’d been patient enough to take a few more years easing the Jedi into it, and had been a little less blatant with his Evil Empire branding.
Overall, I’m kind of confused what the argument is here. Most of it seems to be an attempt to dispute the validity of the Jedi’s choice to align themselves under the Republic government in the first place, and how choosing to place themselves under that constraint, control, and oversight of the people’s representative government led to their moral decline. But that choice was made over a thousand years ago in-universe. The post this is responding to was almost exclusively focused on the wicked problem of the Catch 22 that the Jedi face in the immediate timeline of the prequel movie era. By that point, just about everything under discussion here is already set and decided and immutable. Obviously it’s all fiction, but within that fictional universe, it isn’t an option for the Jedi to go back in time before the Republic began to decline and just…opt out of aligning with it. What was under discussion on the post this was responding to was how the Jedi’s choices are constrained in the era the story is actually set in.
The Jedi didn’t have control over and had no power to stop whether the clones would be created or whether the clones would be implanted with control chips. They didn’t even know this was happening.
They didn’t have control over and had no power to stop whether the clones would be forced to serve in the GAR. Even if they had chosen to walk away on moral grounds when the Jedi were directed by Palpatine to serve in the GAR, the clones would have still been forced to fight and die; it would just have been without the Jedi dying beside them.
Order 66 was already in place. Palpatine and Dooku engineered and controlled the governments and the war from both ends. What choices could the Jedi characters we see in the movies have realistically made that would have averted that?
To address some of the specific points brought up though:
“They got themselves into a position where they were effectively a branch of the justice department, but were subject to zero public oversight and zero transparency. There were no hard-and-fast rules or policies about the exact jurisdiction and role of the Jedi, and certainly nothing enforced by a third party. The Jedi did whatever the Jedi decided the Jedi should do.”
I don’t think we’re actually given enough detailed background information in canon to make such a sweeping statement with certainty. We don’t know exactly what external rules governed the conduct of the Jedi, how they were enforced, or how they might have been restricted. We know the Jedi are funded by Republic tax dollars, and we know the Senate controlled the Republic’s budget…this absolutely implies that some level of budget oversight/control of the Jedi by the Republic’s Senate exists…which absolutely amounts to at least some degree of public oversight on the Jedi, as the Senate is the voice of the people. (I’ve written another post going into a longer rant about how if the citizens of the Republic didn’t like what their own representatives in the Senate were doing on their behalf, it was up to those ordinary citizens to STAND UP and do something about it to fix that corruption in their Senate. It’s not only or even MOSTLY the Jedi’s job to fix that, so I’ll just move right on past that for now.) To what degree that budgetary control rolled over into practical Senate oversight of specific Jedi missions, mandates, priorities, etc, is an unknown. We know the people’s government in the form of the Chancellor directly assigned missions to Jedi, we see him doing it, so that absolutely existed. Also, once they were pressured into accepting roles as members of the Republic’s military, they absolutely fell under the oversight, control, and DIRECT CHAIN OF COMMAND of the Republic’s Chancellor in his role as Commander in Chief of the GAR, elected to his position by the people’s representatives of the Senate. So yeah, they fell under a fair amount of oversight and control, we just don’t know the internal details of exactly how that shook out.
“You can’t act as a branch of the government and NOT be involved in politics.”
You absolutely can and often should strive to do exactly that. Many, many entities that exist within governments are non-partisan, as they absolutely should be, and actively prohibit members from involving themselves in statements or activities that could be viewed as attempting to influence the direction of political decisions. This is healthy! The U.S. Army shouldn’t take the side of the Republican party, either directly or indirectly, just because the Army decides the Democrats are too soft on the war against country X, or whatever. The Attorney General’s office shouldn’t support one politician over another because he or she happens to agree with/align with their views. It is far more common for government entities to TRY TO DO THEIR UTMOST to remain impartial where political alignment/support comes in…they are there to support the institution, the government as a whole, to work to better life overall for the citizens they serve no matter whether they agree with the individual(s) holding power at that moment or not.
Somewhat a repeated theme in the post above, I have no idea what is meant by the alternating criticism that the Jedi were more political than they should’ve been and somehow at the same time, since they were inherently political already, they should have taken far MORE direct political action…but it’s never made clear HOW exactly the Jedi should have been more ‘political’ or how that would have actually solved their problems. They don’t have a direct voice in the Senate where many of these decisions are being made, including all of the votes to funnel more and more power directly into the Chancellor’s hands. Sure, they have access to and can talk to Senators and try to cajole, persuade, influence, etc, but that’s a slippery slope and would probably come pretty fast with accusations of partisan bias and potentially even increased fears of mind control/influence against their organization. They interact with the Chancellor’s/Executive office fairly often, but again, they don’t have any control over his decisions or directives. Even if they had known about and tried to support the political coalition that was beginning to form and plot towards the end of RotS between Padme, Bail, Mon, etc to oppose Palpatine, that didn’t even begin to stir until it would have been far too late to prevent Order 66 from being called into effect. Again, they didn’t even know about the clones until after they had already been created, and once they were in place with the control chips, it was pretty much game over. How exactly could the Jedi being more politically active and outspoken have prevented the clone troopers from fighting in the war, averted Order 66, and/or prevented the fall of the Republic? What exactly were all these ‘political’ options the Jedi Order had but failed to exercise?
“The Red Cross is dedicated to helping people with immediate concerns, i.e. the injured in war zones, housing and feeding refugees, helping people in natural disasters. Helping people sounds pretty Jedi, right? But the Red Cross is international, it is not attached to any one government.”
The Red Cross is not at all a good parallel for the Jedi Order, though. Yes, the Red Cross seeks to help people and the Jedi seek to help people, but that’s pretty much where the similarities end. The Jedi Order has always been an order of warriors, as well as diplomats, healers, etc, who had DEFENSE of the helpless in their mandate from the beginning, not just offering medical assistance. If the Red Cross was an organization where all of the volunteers were warriors as well as medical personnel, who were heavily armed, powerful, and would fight in defense of those who needed defending (as in they actually looked more like the Jedi) would this comparison you’re trying to make still hold up? Would the Red Cross be able to operate in the real world if they were all armed and ready to fight to defend themselves and others? Would ANY country allow an NGO like that to operate within their borders?
And: “[The Red Cross] caught a lot of flak for providing medical aid to the Taliban. But they helped them anyway because it is not their job to make choices about who deserves help.” But if the Red Cross were actually more like the Jedi, and had taken a stand and forcibly stopped members of the Taliban who deliberately conducted mass attacks against civilians in crowded marketplaces, would they have still been welcomed and able to help the Taliban? The whole point of why the Red Cross is able to assist all parties and operate across most borders is because they are completely pacifist in their approach, completely neutral to all parties, and their only mandate is to offer medical aid. It’s a very good mandate and I support them in it, but it is not what the Jedi are, and doesn’t even seem to be what you think the Jedi should be. If the Jedi were fighting only to end slavery as you seem to think they should, clearly this would sometimes include violence against those who refused to comply; not at all even remotely like the Red Cross. Can anyone cite a better example of a real-world independent non-government organization that can effectively operate across most global borders, while actually being an effective parallel to what the Jedi are (warriors as well as peacekeepers)? I mean, I know you can’t. It doesn’t exist. Governments will always maintain a monopoly on legitimate use of force within their borders. An organization like that couldn’t function unaligned in the real world. And neither would the Jedi in the galaxy they live in.
“In this way, the red cross specifically tries to separate itself from politics, by having rules that prevent them from making political choices. This means that they are less able to waltz around and do stuff than the Jedi- if a country says “no you can’t come in and do your thing” they’re stuck. They have to rely on international pressure- other countries going “wtf is wrong with you let the red cross help”- in order to have the power to execute their mission. The Jedi have decided that they’re not subject to that kind of governmental oversight, and in doing so, have automatically positioned themselves as a political body.” But…the Jedi HAVE decided they are subject to that kind of government oversight. Remember, half of your post was saying they are in the wrong for choosing to subject themselves to the Republic government (that became corrupt) which they serve under? From what I can gather at this point the argument has morphed into that the Jedi are wrong because they operating all over the galaxy willy-nilly, without any control or oversight, and have failed to subject themselves to the will of local governments like the Red Cross does, to include not entering or interfering with a country/world if it doesn’t invite their intercession. But…that’s actually exactly what the Jedi ARE doing that you are saying is wrong in other parts of the post. The Jedi DO follow the limitations placed on them by the government (ie: the Republic, to include the member worlds involved), they DON’T go around ending slavery in areas/worlds outside of their jurisdiction or on worlds that haven’t invited their presence…which now seems to be a point of objection. On the one hand, they should be more like the Red Cross and have more respect for the will of governments which might deny them entry and would restrict their ability to operate, and on the other hand an optimal mandate for them would be breaking off from any government control at all and conducting a galaxy-wide campaign to end slavery which…would definitely have to involve crossing borders without the consent of those in power there in order to be effective. You see the contradiction, right?
“What if the Jedi had instead spent the last thousand years defining their role as, idk, ending slavery wherever it is found?”
But how would they have remained themselves and still done anything like this without operating under the mandate of the primary large central government that exists in the galaxy, in the form of the Republic? They certainly wouldn’t be able to operate anywhere within Republic space as armed intercessors to stop slave traders/human traffickers without either being some kind of government unit, or pooooooossibly serving under some kind of government sanctioned warrant (ie: legitimate bounty hunters). For that matter, ANY region in the galaxy even outside Republic space with any kind of organized central government would not allow them to exist/operate within their borders while being completely outside their span of control. If you’re just talking about them operating exclusively on the far more sparsely populated worlds outside the Republic’s borders, and outside the borders of any other organized coalition of worlds in order to end slavery there, I mean, maaayyyyyybe. But really, I don’t see this working either. If the ~10,000 member Jedi Order split off from the Republic and turned itself into a conquering aggressive army that overthrew regimes it disagreed with (ie: ones that allowed slavery to thrive), the rest of the galaxy, including the Republic, would band together to destroy that threat right real quick. A roaming army of unaligned, conquering, misunderstood and feared Space-Wizards? Even with a righteous cause, there’s no way that would be allowed to stand.
And in this scenario, where are they getting funding for the continued living expenses of the ~10,000 Jedi, let alone this really expensive mobile campaign to end slavery across the galaxy, if it’s not through a system of taxes? Are they selling their services to generate revenue? Wouldn’t this just exacerbate any concerns that already exist about how they prioritize their efforts? Would they be stealing from the rich, corrupt governments/crime lords they are overthrowing? I’m not sure how this would be sustainable long term.
“By all rights, the Jedi should still be serving under Emperor Palpatine, because hey, the Republic turned into the Empire, and that’s what you’re supposed to defend.”
and
“Palpatine didn’t even need Order 66, he could have had the entire Jedi Order serving as his Inquisitors if he’d been patient enough to take a few more years easing the Jedi into it, and had been a little less blatant with his Evil Empire branding.”
I totally disagree. And that’s really clearly shown in the prequel movies and a big part of the whole point of them. Palpatine had all of the Jedi massacred in large part because he knew that there would come a point where the Jedi would no longer allow him to continue to tear down and worsen the corruption in the Republic, where they would take a stand against him because he had twisted the government too far away from what few remaining principles it had left. He knew it and would not allow that. So he built in a plan that would ensure they were all slaughtered from the beginning. What escape from Order 66 was there? Really, what choice could the Jedi have made in the prequels-era that would have averted that? That would have saved the clone troopers from the war?
The thing is, we know for a fact that the Jedi would have taken a stand against Palpatine’s tyranny because they…did. We…saw them? Remember? Mace Windu brought a group of Jedi to place him under arrest if he illegally refused to give up the emergency powers upon the conclusion of the war that he had manipulated the Senate into giving him. And he murdered them all, followed by a total genocide of their people and culture, since he knew that the vast, vast majority of the Jedi would never have assisted with the evils his Empire perpetuated on the galaxy.
In conclusion……..
Man, if people spent even HALF as much time and energy focusing on, tearing apart, and analyzing the workings and real-world implications and dangers that can be found within Palpatine’s evil fascist empire, Kylo Ren/Snoke’s evil fascist empire, and even the public’s/Senate’s failings as causes in the decline and fall of the Republic, as they do hating on the far, far, far, far, FAR, FAAAAARRRRRR less morally corrupt Jedi, bending over backwards to blame the Jedi’s genocide on themselves, I’d be so much less concerned about the prospects for Trump being re-elected….it’s not a perfect parallel, but it all seems to go hand-in-hand with a scary purity culture mindset, where people can justify thinking that ‘Hillary is just as bad as Trump’, because any deviation from your values is equivalent and just as evil as total deviation from your values.
Bilbo was declared dead while he was away in the Hobbit (and had to do a bunch of paperwork to get declared alive again) but there’s no indication he was formally declared dead after leaving the Shire, even though most people assumed he had died.
Therefore I posit: having a missing person declared dead in the Shire requires the consent of their next of kin. Whoever Bilbo’s next of kin was at the time of the Hobbit (possibly Otho? I’m not sure) had him declared dead at the first opportunity but Frodo refused to ever do it.
Frodo had anxious hobbit bureaucrats knocking on his door every couple of years like ‘Mr Baggins… blease… it’s been 10 years… he was eleventy-one… can we fill out his death certificate yet’ and Frodo was like ‘absolutely not’.
Early on he genuinely couldn’t bring himself too but after a while it was more that he enjoyed irritating the local magistrate’s office than anything else.
I raise you: the hobbitish bureaucracy has no means to re-declare someone dead. They had no precedent to declare someone who was once-dead dead again. They would need the Thain, the Mayor, and the Master of Buckland to agree to changing the statute, and since the Thain and the Master are too amused by the whole henclucking that they haven’t gotten round to it just yet.
I’m upping the stakes with: last time Bilbo was declared dead when he was, in fact, not dead, they removed the law stating that you can have someone declared dead without a body, so when Bilbo left (happily aware of this legal loophole and snickering) he could never become legally dead again.
I am loving the implication here that Bilbo can literally never die in the eyes of the law. He’d love that.
a hobbit parent telling their kids the story of Mad Baggins and being like “thanks to a loophole in hobbit law he’s technically still alive today”
a hobbit child misinterprets this and lies awake at night worrying that Mad Baggins is still out there and will appear in their room without warning
In highschool I wrote a story about a middle-generation of stellar travelers. Their parents were born on earth and left as children, and the middle generation will not live long enough to see their destination. They live their entire lives on the ship and I wrote about them trying to find their place in everything. They will never know blue skies and warm beaches and open fields with warm breezes. They’ll never know birdsong or crickets or frogs. They’ll never hear the rain on the roof of a dreary day. I never could find the right way to end the story. I wanted it to be a happy ending, but I didn’t know how to do it.
I realize now that it was a book about me dealing with depression before I even knew it. Looking back at how blatant the projecting was, it’s obvious now. It wasn’t then.
In the story, the middle-generation people are lost. They’re apathetic. They’re just a placeholder. The only job they have is to keep the ship running, have kids, and die. As the middle generation of people began becoming adults, suicide rates were skyrocketing. Crime and drug rates were jumping. This generation was completely apathetic because they felt that they had no use.
In the story, a small group of people in the middle-generation create the Weather Project. They turn the ship into a terrarium. They make magnificent gardens and take the DNA of animals they took with them and recreate them and they make this cold, metal spaceship that they have to live their entire lives on into a home. They take what little they have and they break it and rearrange it into something beautiful. They take this radical idea and turn the ship into a wonderful jungle of trees and birds and sunshine.
And I realize now how much it reflects my state of mind as I transitioned from a child into an adult while dealing with depression. You always hear “it gets better” and “when you’re older things will be easier” and I was so sick of waiting for it to get better. I was in the middle-generation stage. And I was sick of it. I was so sick of waiting.
When I was in highschool I didn’t know how to end the story. I didn’t know how to have a happy ending. I didn’t have the life experience then to finish the story in a meaningful way. I didn’t know how to make it better for these middle-generation characters.
But now that I’m older, I’m learning. That if you sit and wait for things to get better, it never will. You have to take your life and break it apart and rearrange it into something beautiful. You have to make the cold metal ship into the garden that you deserve. You have to make your own meaning. You have to plant your own garden.
You have to teach yourself that being happy is not a radical idea.
i cant believe zeldas out here knowing everything about the wildlife and flora of hyrule and constantly talks about experiments and science and even asks link to eat a live fucking frog and y’all are like “ahh… shes such an elegant, graceful and proper princess :)”
zelda eats DIRT. shes a scholar and scientist and shes dedicated to knowing everything about hyrule and you bet your ASS that involves geography and she LICKS ROCKS. she keeps lizards and frogs in her POCKETS.
In four days, federal employees will suffer their first missed paycheck
since Trump’s border wall shutdown; it’s hard to say who will be worst
hit: the employees who are furloughed will never see that money (but who
may have been able to pick up some other work while they were off the
job to cover their bills); or the “essential” federal employees who’ve
had to show up for work every day without pay, but who will, someday,
get a paycheck to cover their forced labor.
In the latter group are 51,739 TSA “officers” (TSA screeners aren’t
cops, but they’ve adopted the “officer” honorific in a bid to secure
flyers’ obedience while they confiscate their apple-pie filling). Since
the shut-down began, TSA officials have insisted that screeners were not
staging “sick outs” (for example, to avoid daycare expenses by staying
home with their kids) and that the extra waiting time that passengers
were suffering through (53 minutes in Laguardia!) was the result of
heavier than usual travel.
But after Friday, TSA screeners will have to decide whether they want to
stay on the job without pay, and it’s a sure bet that lots of them will
stay home, and there’s not much the TSA can do about it. A TSA walkout
would cripple the nation’s businesses and strike directly at
higher-income Americans (that is, the people who supported Trump as he
used racist wall promises to secure the votes needed for a
two-trillion-dollar tax giveaway to the wealthy).
What happens next is anyone’s guess. Trump’s probably right that giving
in on the wall will lose him any chance of re-election as discouraged
racists stay home from the polls (as they had done historically, until
Trump gave them something to vote for), and deliver victory to Democrats
who have a small but meaningful chance of taxing the shit out of
looters and oligarchs. But the patience of looters and oligarchs – with
the exception of a few long-term thinkers like Charles Koch – is in
notoriously short supply. If Trump loses the racists, he won’t be able
to help the billionaires. But if he loses the billionaires, he won’t be
able to afford to court the racists.
TSA employees cannot continue to work without pay. Nobody can. That’s not politics, that’s simple fact. Even the most die-hard TSA enforcer has to eat and pay their bills.
Which means at some point in the near future the TSA will be unable to perform airport screenings and will declare a shutdown. After that, things can only go two ways:
1. Airports simply stop TSA screenings and waive passengers onto flights as if it was pre-9/11 America.
OR
2. Airports are totally shut down, citing security concerns.
#1 would demonstrate how airport screenings are security theater and utterly worthless, designed to keep us afraid. Airports operated perfectly for 50 years without forcing passengers to take off their shoes or surrender pocket knives & shampoo. Bypassing the scary body scanners & invasive blue gloves because we can’t pay the TSA would remind Americans this is all bullshit.
#2 would be an economic disaster. Average citizens would riot. Americans who commute via air would be forced into unemployment, and the airline industry itself would teeter on the edge of ruin. The brief airport shutdown of 2001 literally drove some regional airlines out of business. The ripple effect would impact hundreds of service industries including catering, hotels, car rental companies… the economic impact would be apocalyptic.
So which will it be?
Prepare for increasing weirdness if this shutdown isn’t resolved very soon.
Oh boy, I can’t decide which outcome is more desirable: economic disaster ensuring drumpf is overthrown but likely harming millions of low wage workers, or that doesn’t happen but everyone realizes how stupid and ineffective intense airport screening is.
I hate shipwrecks in Minecraft bc they imply that there is/was some form of intelligent life in Minecraft before the player…… It’s clearly not villagers bc they can’t even build a village properly…… Who are these mysterious ship builders and where did they go…..
actually the more i think ab it the more beautiful and lonely the world gets. i developed this interpretation after mineshafts where added but even before that, the temples buried by sand? trapped caverns in jungles? even in other worlds, fortresses in hell itself now only guarded by skeletons? houses in the end only accessible by portal after defeating the dragon? all relics of a past race thats been mysteriously wiped. the villagers dont know perhaps, they see you and assume your one of them. different perhaps, your nose is much to short and face much to squished, your language garbled complexities they have yet to decode, but thats fine to them. you have things they want and they have things you want. perhaps they will one day, long after you get tired of this world, uncover those past relics as well. perhaps they will recognize the stories passed down, perhaps they will lament not trying to understand you, to find the missing pieces of the race before them now entirely gone.
or something like that. im v tired
In the deserts under the sand you can find bone blocks making up massive skeletons of unknown creatures
there was something before us, giant and unknown wandering the world.
There’s a special class of “science weapons” that will have special, ridiculous effects, like a shrink ray
There’s a full character creator even though it’s first-person only (you’ll see your character in the inventory, and if you leave the game idling long)
Your companions don’t have separate inventories. Taking companions with you just gives you more inventory space to work with yourself
If companions really dislike the decisions you make, they’ll leave and go back to the ship. You can persuade them to see things your way
No romancing companions. They considered it, but decided against it.
Companions each have a special attack (one named Felix does a double drop kick) but you can also equip them with whatever weapons you want
Hacking and lockpicking don’t have minigames, and are simply based on your attributes
There are six skills (strength, intelligence etc.) and for every 20 points you put into one (up until 100) you’ll gain a new perk
As in the creators’ past games, you can play as a “dumb” character with stupid dialogue options. Your companions react appropriately.
They’re still not sure if it will be possible to play through the game completely pacifist (but you’ll almost definitely have to at least kill some robots)
Robots aren’t sentient, but your ship’s AI seems to have a strange degree of personality
Tim Cain wants you to know there are a lot of drugs, but he’s not going to pressure you to take them
The first time you see how cashew nuts grow, you’re gonna think somebody’s posting a joke picture or a weird art installation.
ok but you say this….then don’t give us pictures
LOOK AT THESE RIDICULOUS THINGS
And it gets even weirder!
The shell of the nut itself:
contains a resin that’s so toxic just touching it causes burns to the skin, similar to poison ivy. Which is why cashews are never sold unshelled, because processing them requires safety measures like this:
How humanity ever figured out to eat this nut is beyond me.
In case you ever wondered why cashews are so expensive. Now you can wonder why they aren’t more expensive.
what i’m wondering now is how anybody ever found out that you could eat cashews
OK but you seem to underestimate how scarce food could get for people, and how desperate they become to try anything. If eating it raw kills you? try cooking it because we’re gonna starve to death anyway. Cooking it kills you? Try cooking it a different way. Touching it is painful? Try washing it, or extracting the inner bit and washing that.
There’s this plant that’s eaten by aboriginal people of australia around where I live. Only certain parts of this plant can be eaten, and even then only if those parts are cooked exactly right, kept at a certain temperature for a certain amount of time. And it has to be exactly that amount of time as both undercooking it AND overcooking it are deadly.
The history of food is a history fraught with countless, terrible deaths because we are so stubborn that when faced with starvation, we will fucking eat poison again and again until it’s not poison anymore.
Some Paleolithic chef “I know like five people died already, but I think I got it this time.”
Some different, starving, Paleolithic person “fuck it bro. Gimme the nut.”
Ok but cashews are not just the nut. The fruit is edible (and delicious). I know because i’m from a region that it’s rich in cashew trees. They smell amazing. But here in Brazil we have a few plants that are poisonous until cooked, like mandioca (the root used to make tapioca) and tucupi, an Amazon plant that has to be cooked for seven days(!) to be edible.
STAHP THIS MADNESS HOW DID THIS HAPPEN
There’s an old saying – “Hunger is the best sauce” – and human history is a succession of “try eating X or die from not eating”. The various ways of making X safe to eat must be a saga in themselves.
Haggis is nothing, that’s just a big sausage using the less-usual parts of a sheep. I vaguely remember (probably from a Discworld book) a line that goes something like: “There’s nothing that a man with a big enough mincer can’t put in a sausage…”
Black pudding (blood-sausage) is nothing, that’s just refusing to waste protein; Masai and Mongols did the same, with the advantage that their approach didn’t even kill the animals or indeed cause more upset or damage than a really enthusiastic vampire bat.
Scrapple is nothing, that’s just another refusal to waste food - meat scraps and off-cuts - in a way which doesn’t even involve a great big mincer.
(Scapple, BTW, isn’t food; it’s writing software from the Scrivener people.)
What makes me pause is stuff that’s clearly and obviously gone off. I suppose that applied to everyone who first smelt fermented fruit (wine, eventually) or milk on the turn (cheese or yogurt, eventually), but those are now acceptable to many cultures though still a no-no to others.
It’s the extreme versions that make me wonder “who was brave / hungry enough to eat THAT?” THAT includes stuff like casu marzu and
Milbenkäse, which are insane versions of blue cheese, or fishy horrors like surströmming and hákarl.
(Here’s a report from someone who tried the last two in order to compare them. TL;DR = Don’t.)
All these and many more are now “regional delicacies” but almost certainly originated from a choice of eating them or eating nothing.
If hunger was indeed the best sauce, there must have been a lot of sauce involved…
Mom crow HAS to transport TWO PEANUTS AT ONCE. There is absolutely no other way at all
Glad ya’ll liked this vid! For the people who think she’s a good mom and tries to get all the snacks for the kids i gotta tell you that her kids are larger than her by now and that she pushed them off the bench to get to the nuts. I’m not judging tho because i would do the same
there is absolutely no reason hogwarts couldn’t’ve been founded as a monastic school for the education of the clergy, with two houses for women and two for men, except that the hp fandom is full of bitter atheists and people who don’t know shit about paganism & religious history
@ofloveandmedea said: please talk about this headcanon it sounds Fascinating and you always have such good sources
here’s two things that i don’t think fanfic writers understand about pre-enlightenment europe:
first, there is zero evidence that paganism continued to exist as a practiced faith in western europe after about 900 CE. there is more evidence for demons. (reading on this, among other things) if you want to make the case that with the statute of secrecy, wizards erased all evidence of their existence as your justification for pagan wizards, that’s fine, but you’re then left with the question of where the stories about witches came from.
second, there was no way for a non-christian organization to function. period. it didn’t happen. jewish groups, especially pre-1492, were very small and very quiet; islamic groups kept out of christian europe; there were no other options. if you were a guild, if you were a school, if you were a group of any form, if you were a government–you were christian. it was explicit. there wasn’t even a conception of how to organize without invoking christianity.
so when, in or about 950, hogwarts was founded, it had to be founded in a christian framework. there’s a big, huge, gigantic problem though: in 950, education happened one-on-one, through tutors or apprenticeships. the only, only institution educating in a group format was the church.
why? because clergy came from all classes, because clergy were required to be (at least partially) literate, and because the majority of the population (in some places and eras, from any demographic) was not literate. religious institutions were the only places collecting significant numbers of children and giving them an education.
there were two forms of this: cathedral schools, which produced priests, and monastic schools, which produced monks and nuns. (some reading)
couple of reasons why hogwarts would be monastic and not a cathedral:
the boring, the reasonable, hogwarts isn’t anywhere near anything that would be a cathedral, but monasteries were all over the place and the more remote, the better
priests were all male, which makes two of the founders difficult to explain
scotland was more connected to the irish monastic form of christianity than the mainland european bishop focused christianity
so. if you’re going to create a school in 950 in scotland that accepts students from all backgrounds with the goal of educating them, the most reasonable framework for this is the monastic school.
(monastic schools were also notoriously apolitical, which would go a long way to explaining some things in the books…)
but wait! you say. what about christianity and magic?
i’m so glad you asked. medieval catholicism didn’t actually have a problem with harry potter magic, as long as it was dressed up in the appropriate forms.
quote from holy feast and holy fast by caroline walker bynum:
By 1500, indeed, the model of the female saint, expressed both in popular veneration and in official canonizations, was in many ways the mirror image of society’s notion of the witch. Each was thought to be possessed, whether by God or by Satan; each seemed able to read the minds and hearts of others with uncanny shrewdness; each was suspected of flying through the air, whether in saintly levitation or biolocation, or in a witches’ Sabbath.
in other words, it’s not the things that people do that make them witches: it’s their relationship (or not) to God and the Church. things that we today would call magic–healing people by touching them, or saying incantations; turning one bread into many; transporting from place to place–all of these turn up in hagiographies of saints as miracles that they performed.
(complicating matters is that they did have a conception between good and bad witches, it’s just that all were damned. so you have good witches, who are doing good things, and bad witches, who are doing bad things, and saints, who are doing good things, and the quality of the thing…well it does matter, but it matters less than the position of the person doing it)
additionally, throughout the middle ages, you see records of people definitely doing magic which is contemporaneously acknowledged as magic who are…not getting burned as witches. the big easy example here is court alchemists & astrologers, who were all over the place telling the future and/or making things blow up and only really getting into trouble when their patrons did. (some reading)
there were also tumblr’s favorite women, the herbalist or local midwife (or, equally common, the wealthy widow). the line between “medicine” and “magic” was not all that well formed: if you knew that certain herbs with certain prayers would keep someone alive, who was to say that it was the herbs vs the prayers that did the heavy lifting? later there was a clear(er) distinction, but even then, the association of midwifery with witchcraft is not new and it is not unfounded. (more reading)
so there’s a deep, deep split here. because on the one hand, yes, people were (irregularly, but routinely) tortured and (less commonly) executed for witchcraft (under a variety of names). but on the other hand, people were socially rewarded for practicing magic within accepted forms, and while sometimes this was because the source of the magic was seen as different, sometimes it was not.
in this context, then, in this understanding that some people could (and did) work magic without being evil, in this society where education was the province of a very, very select group of people who were also (what a coincidence!) more likely to be workers of magic, in this situation that j.k. rowling seems to have absolutely no idea of–
hogwarts was a monastic school to produce good catholic magical monks and nuns.
(some more readings i didn’t have an excuse to share earlier: link (on merlin), link (on anglo-saxons), link (on things witches did), link (on what the witch hunters thought they were hunting and why))
and because i know you’re all wondering: hogwarts founder headcanons
helga hufflepuff is first and easiest, because helga is a midwife. you want an abortion? she can help with that. curse an ex-boyfriend? great! heal your child? she’s got that too. lost a cow? totally something she can help with. helga is a good christian, yes, and goes to church regularly, but it doesn’t occur to her for a while that some form of organized education might be helpful. she has her apprentices, and she grew up with tales about those who wanted too much, too badly, who didn’t think of the cost, and who did a deal with the devil as a result. but she thinks of this as the consequence of what she gets to do, which is putter around in her garden and make sure the crops come in on time. when they start talking about a monastic school, about a place to educate nuns in a little different way, a way that’s a little closer to god, she starts thinking about how to putter a little bigger and what that might mean.
salazar slytherin is the court alchemist. he came running north after an experiment went wrong (did it blow up? a little. was anyone hurt? not badly), looking for somewhere to go and someone to protect him–and this isn’t unusual, everyone has patrons and, and wizards don’t survive long without someone to explain to the church why these wizards are fine, thanks–and he finds that the local monasteries have more young children, young magical children than he’s used to, and he goes–oh. he is also 115% the reason why divination is a subject, because he is very good at explaining to people why their zodiac means they should leave their entire fortune to this brand new monastery, and he never, ever forgets that he has to rely on others, that his safety depends on people who secretly, deeply think he is a heretic, that he’s taking and educating and perverting their children, and that if they wanted to he and all his would die.
rowena ravenclaw is a nun. it’s not a profession she came to young; she came after her husband, after her daughter, after she was widowed and everyone looked at her a little differently, and a little sadly. after she started having visions, after her angry words started to hurt. so she went to a cloister, and discovered she was touched by god, and also that there were children here, like her daughter, who needed education and that she was very, very good at this. it’s rowena who reaches out to those she knows, here and there, saying, do you want to make this real? do you want to make this official? rowena has had a lot, and lost a lot, and found something else entirely, and is determined to take everyone along with her.
godric is a monk. he is not a very good monk. he is not big on the seclusion or the copying. he is very big on living in the community and helping them (he would make a decent fransciscan if he was born 500 years later). he’s an absolute stickler for penance, for himself or for anyone else, and also for justice. he became a monk because he got in an argument with a neighbor, and the next day the neighbor’s cow died, and there was an accusation made, so he decided that the appropriate solution was to vanish and made his way to ireland to become a monk. he sees people every day who don’t know what they can do, who do know what they can do but not how, who are hurting others and helping others and want only to know why, whether this was from god or from the devil, and he does his best to help them. but he can’t help but think that there must be some better way to do this, that if there was a monastery just for monks like him, they might be able to do something.
and they do.
This is a really interesting thought process.
However, there is one small problem with this: The druids and bards did have schools. They had schools way before they converted. The Celtic church was pulled into the Catholic church, of course, long before the founding of Hogwarts. But…especially in Scotland…there would still have been memories of those earlier schools, which could well have influenced the development of Hogwarts alongside monastic traditions (for example, literacy, which the pre-Christian Celts were not big on).
In 950, England and Scotland were still separate countries. They still have separate churches. The Scottish church was still very much, although officially Catholic, a Celtic church.
The highly verbal tradition of British magic also speaks to an origin that is probably pre-Christian. That does not mean that the school wasn’t founded in a Christian milieu…of course it was, and the pseudo-Latin of formalized spells also leads to a monastic interpretation.
But I think that there was a memory of the great bardic schools of a few centuries earlier involved too.
The need to placate The Church might explain the faux latin used for spells. culturally, they should be using something else if magic dates back to before the Christianizing of the region. some form of Celtic most likely. Switching to Latin (even bad/non-standard Latin) would have been a way to make the whole magical subculture more acceptable to the Roman Catholic Church, since the Church largely viewed the Celtic languages (especially the older forms) poorly, as lay language at best in the regions where it dominated (scotland, wales, etc) and use of it with magic would have been viewed as ‘paganism’ and heavily cracked down on. but Latin was the language of prayer and religion in most of Europe, and using latin for spells could easily be taken as prayer followed by divine miracles. especially if the wizard was careful to mix the actual spell’s words into sentences that are suitably prayer like. this would have added a degree of protection to the magical community across europe, in the days when their ability to hide themselves wouldn’t be as organized or refined. it probably helped that for most of the middle ages the Church took the view that witches and magic did not exist, as such power was God’s domain alone, and would actually accused anyone who brought charges of witchcraft up to be a heretic. by playing along with this view the magical community in the HP world could easily have lived alongside Muggles without the sort of extreme separations we see in the books. (just some common sense precautions)
Can we please have a realistic forensic anthropology show? One where the anthropologist works out of a dingy basement lab and has a regular day job when there’s no cases? One where all lot of the remains turn out to be animals? Where half the human remains are so old they have to be passed off to the archaeologists? Where solving a case can take a season or longer, and a bunch of cases are in the works at any given time?
Seriously, there are ways to make stories interesting without also making them wildly innacurate. Just ask us, we’ll give you enough drama, humor, and what-the-fuck moments to make this work. I dare you.
my brother is getting married and i’m so excited to fulfill my destiny as the embarrassing drunk gay sister who flirts with the bride for the entire ceremony
i’m gonna yell “RUN AWAY WITH ME” to her during the vows
there are people out there genuinely worried that I’m gonna steal my brother’s bride away the day of their wedding… i’m laughing. I’ve known her since I was born, we just love annoying the shit out of my brother and this “you picked the wrong sibling” joke has been going on for as long as I can remember. The whole family is in on it. The three of us are super close, she’s always been family. Also we are really bad at romantic weddings (my Mom wore jeans at my Dad’s and hers, signed a bunch of papers and then got blackout drunk), and my brother and his girlfriend probably won’t even have a “real” ceremony, just a celebration between friends and family. I love my brother and he already knows I’m gonna pull some stupid stunt, it’s what we do. His girlfriend is usually the one to initiate these shitty jokes, I wouldn’t be surprised if she was the one to stop the “ceremony” to say some shit like “WAIT THIS IS THE WRONG SIBLING”. please don’t take any of this seriously lmao
that said, i’m definitely showing up half naked to her bachelorette party as the “surprise stripper” with a sash that says “the sibling your should be marrying” and a shitty plastic tiara
UPDATE:
1) for people confused about the “I’ve known her since I was born (…) she’s always been family”: She’s the granddaughter of our parents’ neighbors, we all grew up together and my brother and her have been in love since they were babies. He held her hand as she made her first steps, they even have a picture on their wall of the moment before she first tried to get up
2) IT’S OFFICIAL, I’M GONNA BE MY BROTHER’S BEST MAN. AND YOU KNOW WHAT THE BEST MAN DO? A SPEECH. Everything is going according to plan.
I forgot to update this post. Probably because THESE TWO SNAKES GOT MARRIED BEHIND EVERYONE’S BACK, JUST THE TWO OF THEM, AND DIDN’T TELL ANYONE. Aka, there was no ceremony. They just went and signed a piece of paper on their own. Like I said, we aren’t big on Flashy And Romantic Weddings in this family. BUT STILL, I WAS ROBBED OF MY BIG MOMENT.
That said, they still hosted a gigantic party with friends and both families with like 100 people and a good 100 bottles of champagne & 100 more of wine (we’re French, don’t judge us). A lot of food, too. And a lot of food means a lot of napkins. And a lot of napkins means I could spend the entire night writing down my phone number on them and keep obnoxiously slipping them into the bride’s hands, pockets, plate, glass, collar etc while mouthing “call me” and doing the phone hand-motion. Which she obnoxiously answered with a fake-fanning hand motion and a wink every time, btw. My own Mother slipped her a napkin on my behalf at one point, too. My brother ripped every single napkins in half. After roughly 18 times of what was probably the most annoying running gag of all time, my brother finally decided to put me in a headlock.
Anyway, these two are still disgustingly, infuriatingly, madly in love, everyone was piss drunk and we all lived happily ever after,
