it's okay to be afraid

Continuing my Legends posting with some Dooku duel analysis... The titular Dark Rendezvous show down between Yoda and Dooku is one of my favorite pieces of writing in old or new canon. Yoda almost has Dooku convinced to truly give it up and come home, and then Dooku sees on his security cams that Anakin and Obi-Wan have shown up (Palpatine, rightly suspecting Dooku could be swayed, sent them without Yoda knowing) and assumes he's been set up and betrayed. And then Dooku proceeds to have the messiest emotional breakdown of a duel....

Here, we have a classic "Dooku failing to make a kill" where he's so surprised (distressed?!) that he actually managed to hit Yoda that he totally botches an otherwise perfect chance to finish him off. His little horrified/fascinated/shocked "I've hurt you!" is tremendous. He almost seems scared.

This next part is so fucking sad. He can't help telling on himself in front of Yoda. What a miserable fool. I truly believe no one hates Dooku as much as Dooku hates Dooku:

Then he gets complimented and can't help returning it like the good teacher's pet/favorite son he still is:

So then, Yoda tells him he still loves him and...

This whole scene is in Dooku's (unreliable) POV btw. Since when does sweat run down in streams down (bearded) cheeks? This motherfucker is crying.

So just to summarize: he starts crying, whines about not being called apprentice like he clearly liked earlier in their talk, DROPS A MISSLE ON HIS OWN HEAD, and jumps out a 5th story window to leave the conversation.

10/10 cringefail Dooku. No notes. This is the most pathetic fucking fight of your life and I'm counting that time Sidious and Mother Talzin kicked you back and forth like a football.

My absolute favorite Dooku headcanon that doesn’t appear in the books or shit but is so real to me is that he genuinely has a strong, involuntary emotional response to Yoda’s notoriously-disgusting swamp cookery. 

Like, teenage Dooku doesn’t just have Daddy Issues, he has the full subscription, and that growth spurt had to be insane on him. An extra-hungry awkward too-tall boy who is a bottomless pit of need with a bunch of family-flavored trauma?? And a parent-shaped creature is offering him filling home-cooked food along with validation?! Bring on the swamp soup. I bet he imprints on that shit so hard like a baby vulture. 

In the Master and Apprentice book, Dooku’s “thing” with his Padawans is having meals together. Did he get that tradition from Yoda? And Yoda sometimes needed to stay on Coruscant during Dooku’s training, so he was often off banging around the galaxy with Lene Kostana and Sifo-Dyas. You can almost imagine how getting back to the Temple and reconnecting with his Master over a meal would be a thing. 

It also kind of vibes delightfully with Yoda in ESB taking one look at gangly-ass Luke and immediately trying to cook for him/feed him. And seeming genuinely confused when he doesn’t like it. Oh, a needy, lost, half-grown human with more Force ability than sense? He has just the recipe!

Sooo - what's the plan for Tumblr today, o Satan?! Ahh, post that scene in Yoda: Dark Rendezvous where pre-RotS Dooku comes so, so, so so so fucking close to getting it, is literally holding hands with Yoda, and, if you read between the weird sweat descriptions (later the "sweat" is running down his cheeks) seems to be crying? Yes, yes, my lord!

"I tricked you into coming here," Dooku said. "This is a trap."

Yoda said, "A trap? Oh yes, it is."

His old touch was warm and firm. If you fall, catch you I will.

No. Not if, but when. Yoda had said, When you fall, catch you I will. Had he known even then, seventy years ago, that this day would come? Surely even Yoda could not guess that his star pupil would fall so very, very far.

"To the dark side I do not think I shall go," Yoda said conversationally. "Not today. Feel the pull, do I? Of course! But a secret let me tell you, apprentice."

"I am not your apprentice," Dooku said. Yoda ignored him.

"Yoda a darkness carries with him," the Master said, "….and Dooku bears a light. After all these years! Across all these oceans of space! All these bodies you have tried to heap between us: and yet call to me still, this little Dooku does! Flies toward the true Force like iron pulled to a magnet." Yoda cackled. "Even the blind seed grows to the light: should the mighty Dooku be unable to achieve what even the rose can do?"

The Count said, "I have gone too far down the dark path ever to return."

"Pfeh." Yoda snapped his fingers. "The empty universe, where it is now? Alone you are, Count, and no one your master. Each instant the universe annihilates itself, and starts again." He poked Dooku in the chest with his stick, hard. "Choose, and start again!"

"Blowing up, your house is." Yoda remarked, peering at the various holomonitor displays with interest. A light blinked on the comm console. A special, red light. Dooku stared at it, then tore his eyes away.

"Message" Yoda said helpfully. "Answer it, should you?"

Sweat was freely running down the Count's face.

"Or maybe someone it is you do not want me to see. Your new Master calls, Dooku, ask yourself: which of us loves you better?"

"I only serve Darth Sidious." Dooku said.

"Not my question, apprentice."

The red light blinked. There was another explosion from downstairs. A siren went off, and several more holomonitors began to flash.

"Come," Yoda said urgently. "Catch you, I said I would. Believe you must: more forgiveness will you find from your old Master than from the new one."

-Yoda: Dark Rendezvous by Sean Stewart

something that lives rent-free in my head is the casual reference in Master and Apprentice that Dooku chose his Padawans on the younger side of the usual age range, because that's what Yoda also did. Which is sweet linage bullshit, but also hilariously means that he almost certainly had to be the one to give both Rael and Qui-Gon The Talk.

What's even funnier, it means YODA probably had to be the one to give DOOKU The Talk.

Never going to forgive the Yoda comic (and Tales of the Jedi) for drawing Dooku with fully-operational Christopher Lee melty brown puppy eyes they are too powerful

I love how sometimes it skips a generation. Dooku to Qui-Gon: (fondly) You’re a much wiser man than I am, Qui-Gon Jinn. Qui-Gon to Obi-Wan: (fondly) …and you’re a much wiser man than I am.

Obi-Wan to Anakin: (fondly) …uhhhm Yoda to Dooku: (fondly) ….uhhhm

AU where Dooku still meets the Tirra' taka on Serenno as a kid, but it's a baby one that imprints on him, and he takes it back to the Temple and raises it like a fucking pokemon?

And... Yoda is Yoda, so he just... goes with it? Like if your super Force sensitive kid with a ton of homeworld trauma connects with a mystical dragon that holds the world together and has lightning instead of blood and dreams earthquakes you just let that be and call it the Will of the Force?

AND IT JUST FOLLOWS TEEN DOOKU AROUND LIKE AN EMOTIONAL SUPPORT DOG EXCEPT IT'S A BIG DRAGON??? AND ITS GETTING BIGGER??

Dooku: It's a metaphor

Dooku: for me :)

If there’s a legit good reason why Qui-Gon chose to specialize in form IV, Ataru, the Hawkbat lightsaber form, aside from the simple, likely fact that he did it to troll his old Master Dooku (who outright calls the acrobatics of the form “ridiculous,”) I’d like to hear it. By which I mean I’ll write you a post about it.

Ataru is fast, aggressive, and inclined to treat the battlefield as a 3D space where the air is just as comfortable a place to be as on your own two feet. A direct response to Soresu, the “defense is my attack” form, Ataru flips that into “attack is my defense.” (We won’t talk about Makashi’s contribution to the conversation: “no defense whatsoever, but think fast, I just threw a dinner fork at you so hard it stuck in your metal arm!”) 

Of course, the most recognizable and classic application of Ataru is Yoda’s; we see him whizzing around people’s heads like a little green hummingbird in his AotC and RotS duels. Qui-Gon’s version looks nothing like that. If we weren’t told, I think it would be hard to guess that those characters are using the same form. In Duel of the Fates, Qui-Gon has to move down or over those infamous walkways repeatedly. He just jumps them: no flips, no aerial maneuvers, no bouncing off the walls. And this isn’t simply a practical choice for his age and build: Jocasta Nu is running up walls and leaping out of skyscrapers at easily aged 40 years older than Qui-Gon, and for all Dooku’s bitching over Ataru acrobatics, he does more flips to simply avoid walking down a few stairs than Qui-Gon, Master of the flip form, does in his entire time on screen. 

And yet, on some level, all of that makes perfect sense for Qui-Gon. Who better to completely subvert a form? This is a character who is contrary as fuck, full of wonderful contradiction, who blends lightsaber theory centered on attack and aggression with literal meditation. While the most notable scene, actually kneeling in the pose and everything, is in TPM, he does battle meditation repeatedly on a mental level in the Master and Apprentice and Padawan novels. (And it rightfully freaks out Obi-Wan.) Qui-Gon takes Ataru’s “your whole body is a weapon” and doesn’t apply that to somersaults, but rather, to moves like punching Darth Maul off a balcony as we see him do in Duel of the Fates. He fights in a way that throws himself bodily up against obstacles. You can see the same physicality of his relationship with his weapon in the scene where he is simply burning through the blast doors in TPM. We’ve seen Jedi cut through things on screen other times, but that scene is remarkable and memorable for Qui-Gon’s level of intensity. He is the battering ram. 

And we could loop back into lineage, couldn’t we? Qui-Gon stands in a line of Jedi with unconventional relationships to their lightsaber forms; their choices are formed in context of and in conversation with each other. Those backward, momentum-gaining swings from Duel of the Fates look very familiar, but who trained Qui-Gon? (And who notoriously had a problem with Ataru and might've pushed his student on some workarounds or encouraged him to cut out bits he didn't like, such as aerials?) And speaking of, is it a stretch to think that Dooku’s own casual backflips are less a considered choice and more an old habit, being himself trained by a Master who has only a theoretical relationship with gravity? 

All this to enjoy just another example of how personal the lightsaber forms can be to specific Jedi, and what wonderful fun it is to unpack the ways they use them differently because of their unique personalities and lineage.