Fiction is both an escape and a reflection.

AU where Maul doesn’t get sent to a trash planet and recovers his sanity much faster so by the time Anakin is twelve he and Obi-Wan have Maul periodically popping up while they’re on missions and trying to kill them.

at one point he actually manages to sneak into the temple, but because it’s a centuries old structure that’s been continuously added to for almost as long as it’s been around, it’s completely impossible to navigate without a map, so he ends up lost inside the temple for weeks. by the time he finds Obi-Wan some poor master has mistaken him for a lost shadow who just got home after years and years and has fed him and bathed him and clothed him in jedi tunics

It turns out that Obi-Wan isn’t even IN the temple, so Maul decides to continue his cover as a jedi until he gets back. By the time Obi-Wan does return, Maul has actually started enjoying his new life and doesn’t want to leave it, so when he runs into Obi-Wan in the hallway, he ignores him. Obi-Wan, who can’t believe that the man walking around in beige and bowing respectfully whenever someone greets him is Maul, decides that it must be a weird coincidence and decides to be perfectly polite and normal about it and then go cry in his room alone.

#“master windu i haven’t moved on from qui-gon’s death - I keep seeing maul everywhere” #*cuts to maul glowering in a corner mulling over the ways he can kill kenobi but keep the clothes food and sweet accommodations* (via @smhalltheurlsaretaken)

saw a take so fucking rancid on twitter i almost deleted the entire app from my phone jesus fucking christ

first of all ao3 is an archive site. this is like going to the library and saying "oh i dont like this" on every piece of media you find that you dislike and thinking they should be stamped with some sort of a marker just cause you didnt like it

you can always click back and leave. fic writers owe you nothing to explain themselves and their creations. if they have mistagged or miscategorized fics, then i understand, however there are report tools for that instead of yelling at the artist tbh

im not saying free works arent necessarily above criticism. but this is just. fucking wild. its common courtesy to just enjoy stuff (or fucking leave if you dont, the back button is free) and if the artist specifically asks for critiques, then give one - constructive that is, shitting all over someones work is not proper criticism, mind you

i just find it fucking wild people are treating art and archive sites as social media these days like this and everything needs to be policed and ~catered to the algorithm~ like. no. ao3 doesnt have an algorithm. you should be able to fucking tell what you like and what you dont like and steer away from that kind of content and let people fucking be with their art. they dont owe you anything (except trigger warnings i'd argue, but i know some people disagree with that as well for some reason), and imagine how much more energy you'd have if you only engaged with things you liked and spent time looking at instead of going to places where you dont enjoy yourself. let alone spending time telling other people you dont enjoy what they enjoy. what a fucking life

You know how fanfic authors will over-describe their main?

Well we know Menelaus has reddish blond hair, Achilles is the most beautiful and has long, blond hair, Ajax the greater is huge and Diomedes has a foot.

Odysseus is shorter than Agamemnon, has curly blondish hair, a beard, wide shoulders, thick juicy thighs, a scar on his leg, and he seems a simpleton when he's not speaking.

I'm just saying, Homer was completely normal about Odysseus

waltuh, you can't kill the moon spirit waltuh

the whole world depends on that balance waltuh

anything you do to that spirit, waltuh, ill unleahsh on you tenfold

"The Jedi were wrong about the Force" has to be one of the stupidest arguments in Star Wars fandom. The Jedi teachings are literally what George Lucas (guy who invented how the Force works) said about the Force.

Are you really going to try and tell me that the creator of the fake space energy was wrong about how the fake space energy works?

Like there's no grey area here, the Jedi are objectively correct about the Force.

amok time

Au where mace windu and anakin skywalker accidentally bond over mutual dislike for this one specific holodrama that everyone seems to love and it saved the galaxy

Perfect interaction with your kiddo

We don’t talk about Leia killing Jabba enough. Her grandmother and father were born into slavery. Her blood was that of the desert sand and the shackles of bondage. Leia was never more a Skywalker than the day she strangled her slave master with the very chains he used to bind her. The daughter of Anakin Skywalker was the one who killed Tatooine’s most notorious slaver, and I find that really beautiful.

This isn’t commonly known but one of the rings of hell is actually being in a fandom wherein the popular bloggers have the worst opinions known to man that everyone else parrots

I should add: the worst opinions known to man that go unchallenged bc if you challenge them you’re practically blacklisted or otherwise scorned

Fan: Why does Dean call Jack half-angel in the last episode but anti-christ and other bad names before?

Jensen: In the beginning, he could only see Lucifer in Jack, now he sees Cas.

I am gonna be sick 😭😭

You know, if we DO make contact with aliens within the next hundred years-ish, enough people are going to give the Vulcan salute to the first alien they see in real life (whether out of quivering excitement, lol memeitude, or sheer awkward, panicked grasping for the one prominent alien greeting nested in the social conscious) that there's a solid chance that it becomes a thing we're known for as humans.

Live Long and Prosper, my friends.

Leonard Nimoy would openly, unironically weep with joy if that happened.

He helped develop the Vulcan salute based on what he saw certain people doing during services at his temple. The splayed fingers represent the Hebrew letter shin  ש‎, and the men (I don’t know if they are rabbis) do it with both hands. It represents a blessing.

In an interview, Nimoy mentioned how delighted he was that people the world over greeted each other with “the Vulcan salute,” because it meant “they were going out and blessing each other.” 

I’ve always been an atheist, but I still think it’s a lovely sentiment to greet someone with “May you have a long and bountiful life, and I wish for good things to happen to you.” 

It's an excellent greeting.

It's non-threatening. You not only can't hold a weapon in that hand, the position itself is awkward enough to be useless for combat. It's not something that easily switches to a punch or strike.

It doesn't involve touch contact - avoids both cultural barriers to touch and problems of disease or incompatible skin types. (Don't have to shake the hand of the volcano aliens.)

It's clearly deliberate, unlike some kinds of bowing. And it can be mirrored by a wide range of body types, even if they don't have "hands" or "fingers" - an octopus-being that holds up a tentacle in response would be recognized.

And the sentiment it conveys (the Vulcan version; I have no idea about the original Jewish meaning) is likewise pretty universally acceptable.

It’s the Priestly Blessing (although in some Reform synagogues the rabbi will do it rather than calling up all congregants of priestly lineage to do it--i.e. everyone whose last name is Cohen or Katz or Kaplan or whatever is supposed to go up and collectively bless the community together).

The words match the oldest excerpt of the Bible found by archeologists, on amulets in grave goods dating from before the big redaction project that actually produced the Bible in its written forms. (NB: Jewish amulets usually take the form of written text; this is even more true in the modern era.) There is a real sense in which this blessing predates Jewish religion as we usually understand it.

The translation is “May HaShem bless and keep you, may HaShem’s face shine on you and show you favor, may HaShem lift his face to you and give you peace.”

In the Jewish religious context, “may HaShem bless and keep you” means, like, may God decide that you’re going to keep living a while longer. So the benediction literally means Live Long and Prosper in Peace.

This blessing is often referred to as the parents' blessing or blessing of children; at my Reform shul back in PA, we used to bring all the families up to the bimah on Friday nights and the parents put their hands on their kids' heads and recite it in Hebrew and then in English. Reciting this blessing at Shabbat dinner by parents (or grandparents) is very common as well.

One time we had 5 generations of one family at shul because people were visiting for a baby naming, so you had this chain of parents to kids, the great-great-grands with their hands on the great-grandparents' heads and then their children and so on down to the infant in arms. It was one of the most lovely things I've ever seen.

one of the important cornerstones of fandom is understanding that your headcanon is not everyone else's headcanon, and i'm not sure when people stopped understanding this

I was thinking "nah, why would they? not the right vibe" and was going to just assume the answer was no, but...

...I was very surprised to learn that in fact, they did. (close by, that is)