The Ides of March: How To More Effectively Confront a Sith Lord

ID: A painting by William Holmes Sullivan of the assassination of Julius Caesar, with the conspirators’ swords edited into blue and green lightsabers with one man in the foreground holding a purple lightsaber. Force lightning has been added coming from Caesar’s hand.

Tumblr comments truly never disappoint god bless

UNLIMITED SENATORIAL POWER (comment courtesy of @xandyflare)

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In light of the recent interviews that brought up again the controversial "somehow Palpatine returned"...

Return of the Jedi showed Palpatine's downfall as a consequence of his arrogance. Because even the most strategic player, after achieving significant success, eventually overplays his hand. Believing he could easily undermine a father-son bond in the same way he distrupted and exploited Vader's friendships, marriage and entire systems, is simply the overreach of someone who has started perceiving themselves as omnipotent. Palpatine's expectation of Luke to submit to his will without any proper build up, crucial in grooming his father, is the pinnacle of his delusions of grandeur. This perception is reinforced by Vader's decades of passivity under Palpatine's command, consumed by hatred and lacking any purpose beyond inflicting suffering on others, which makes Palpatine directly attempt to kill Luke in front of him without thinking of consequences.

That said "somehow Palpatine returned" ultimately doesn't fit well with the narrative explained above. Palpatine is fundamentally intended to be the antagonist of Anakin's tragedy, making it customary for his ultimate demise to come at the hands of the individual whose entire existence has been ravaged by his schemes, to preserve the last remaining piece of his family.

Return of the Jedi illustrated this by making Anakin the final decider of everyone's fate in the final twist, not Luke, who was the hero. That was Anakin's demon to defeat. This is why I believe Palpatine should have been omitted from the sequel trilogy. Not only to prevent leaving a bitter taste over the resolution of Episode 6 but also because the sequels needed to establish their own villains.

“chancellor palpatine, sith lords are our speciality.” funniest fucking line in star wars history. obi-wan, who has never killed a sith and knows he has never killed a sith, talking about himself and a guy who is going to become a sith lord within half a week, and speaking directly to the sith lord who is going to make that guy a sith lord, with FULL fucking confidence: “sith lords are our speciality.” he says this to palpatine’s face. to his face. to darth sidious’ face. in the most condescending fucking voice. completely unaware that he is speaking directly to the sith lord, to THE sith lord, who before the week is out is going to directly fuck over his entire life’s work and everything he loves and believes in: “sith lords are our speciality.” could you be any more cringefail. actually palpatine deserved his whole victory for not bursting into laughter then and there

i cannot emphasise enough that there is exactly sixty seconds between him saying this and him getting knocked fully unconscious. by a sith lord.

— The Revenge of the Sith Novelization

haha that's a nice starry-eyed ambition you've got there buddy. sure hope the narrative doesn't warp it into something ruthless and all-consuming

@clawedandcute

Yes 🤣🤣🤣

sw would have been so much shorter if one clone decided to murder palpatine in his office because. who are they gonna arrest. sadly the suspect looks like 1000+ other men and all of them forgot what they did last friday night

star wars heritage post

#THAT IS EXACTLY HOW PALPATINE’S KIDNAPPING WENT IN CANON #YOU CAN’T CONVINCE ME OTHERWISE #HONESTLY WHY PALPATINE WANTED ANAKIN FOR AN APPRENTICE IS BEYOND ME #HE DOESN’T APPRECIATE ANYTHING PALPATINE DOES #YEAH SURE HE’S AN EVIL SCUMBAG #BUT IT WOULD BE NICE IF SOMEONE NOTICED ALL THE EFFORT HE WENT TO

Palpatine’s Journey

According to the review I just read this video offers more of an explanation for why Palatine is still alive than the new movie does lmao

the way he turns into a polygonal 3D object as he falls is fucking poetic cinema

Every time I watch this I break out into giggles it’s just so funny idk even how to explain it but the animation and the dialogue and everything it gets me every time I love this

I have watched this at least 20 times and it gets funnier every time

Yoda: In peace, may you rest. Palps: *sneezes* *boing* Palps: Was ist this? Yoda: *yelping gasp* NO! DEAD YOU ARE! Palps: Yoooda. You. old. sponge. You look terrible. Yoda: Dead, I am, OKAY? Palps: I know. Yoda: Dead, I would like you to be AS WELL.

Me breaking everything in palpatines office in lego skywalker saga

Okay let’s talk about how this scene is really ONLY here for the eye candy. I don’t mean that in a ‘wow this is a female gaze movie’ because lol nOPE you couldn’t have a film more opposite. But serving these dark space prince Looks is literally the only GOOD thing about this scene, because everything also is either completely pointless or actively regresses from his character development in TLJ?? The Ben who said “The Jedi, the Sith, let it all die” and murdered Snoke had moved on from looking to mythic dark side figures for guidance/mentorship. And there’s no way this could indicate a lasting connection to or yearning for his grandfather, considering that incredibly Palpatine and Ben never ONCE(!!!) talk about the history of Vader and Palpatine’s role in Anakin’s fall. When the Ben we knew - who turned to the legacy of his grandfather for acceptance and belonging after he couldn’t find it with his parents or with Luke - would have asked that FIRST.

But no. SOMEHOW - in a movie titled The Rise of Skywalker, the last surviving descendent of the Skywalker line never once engages with the big bad villain about how said villain has been the reason for multiple generations of Skywalker trauma and dark side deception. Nope. Somehow it just didn’t come up. 

9 months later and I still get fucking worked up over how this movie was literally a string of random events happening with no character response/evolution and no connection to anything that came before. 

^^^ The last paragraph sums it up.

So what you’re saying is that Anakin being more of a disaster than he is in canon would have foiled Palpatine’s plans and saved the galaxy

The Chosen One indeed 😂

You see, his options are: A) don’t be dumb and instead be competent and make responsible choices, or B) lean into the fact that he doesn’t know how to do that shit and just go Full Helpless Doofus and let the universe get saved mostly by other people. Oh sure, he’ll pitch in when he needs to because eventually the Jedi are going to need him to help them take down the Sith and all, but until then he’ll just be over here posting on the SpaceSoapOperas.com forums (because that bitch Diane is SO WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING and Anakin needs to spend an entire day dismantling her incorrect take on the latest episode of Love Under the Alderaanian Sky.) 

Palpatine is going to be so, so pissed. He’s sunk all this time into brainwashing Anakin and now the guy keeps blowing him off because he decided to go get a manicure or sleep in or because he claims he forgot how the calendar app on his phone works. 

Mace doesn’t know WTF has gotten into Skywalker these days, but he’s causing a lot less trouble for everybody lately so he’s not complaining. Also the Chancellor seems really peeved, and for some reason Mace finds this very satisfying. It’s almost like the Dark Side is losing strength the more irritated Palpatine gets? Huh. Weird. 

Anakin is having the time of his life. He doesn’t know why he didn’t start doing this years ago. 

#star wars #ideas#I’d love to read a time-travel fix it with a post-ROTJ!Anakin going this route and gleefully making Palpatine sit through increasingly ridic#ulous soap operas as he exaggeratedly weeps over the drama and–at some point full of vindictive spite–turn to Palpatine with a grin that i#is more of a snarl and go “So have you heard of the tragedy of Darth Platypus the Stupid?”#It’s a FANTASTIC show #the sequel is pretty bad though#his successor is about as cheesy as you could get#I hope his new Apprentice offs him soon#I’d rather watch a series about HIM honestly (via @rhaegina)

OMG

It’s a pattern in Star Wars of taking the things that are associated with the Jedi--not just the Jedi themselves, not even murdering all of them, but taking everything that was even associated with them--and turning them into weapons of the Empire. They do it with lightsabers during the Clone Wars, where no longer seeing a lightsaber is just the Jedi or the Republic, but with people like Dooku and Grievous now as well.  Vader literally steals a Jedi’s kyber crystal, because Palpatine instructs him as a Sith that that’s the way to move forward--by stealing and crushing and bleeding and rewriting everything that a Jedi was. They do it with the Jedi Temple, turning it into the Imperial Palace:

There’s a whole huge running theme in the supplementary material about how Palpatine and the Empire not only hunted down Jedi, but they made speaking of them something you would “disappear” for, they literally taught students that the Jedi were a criminal gang during the Republic, they took over planets’ holonets and made them air Imperial propaganda. Palpatine didn’t just kill the Jedi on a physical level, he did his level best to murder their memory, their hope, their legacy, their everything. In the time of the Empire, you can’t look at anything from the Jedi without thinking of how it was stolen and used for the Empire’s purposes now.

#I have made fun of Palpatine doing so much work to overthrow the Jedi and sully their image on to lose his empire in 20 years#but when you lay out the scale of his purge of the Jedi this way#in destroying not just the Jedi physically but also turning the minds and hearts of the galaxy against them#that is is something that lasted far longer than any empire ever would#so perhaps in the end Palpatine really did win#because even though there are still Jedi after there are no more from those before Palpatine to impart their philosophy on#there’s also the matter of there not being enough Jedi or at least people who wanted to be one#before tcw there’s already very little Jedi to begin with so it only makes all the fledging attempts in an Jedi order in the ST quite frail#and now they have a lack of knowledge and past mentors as well as a galaxy terrorized into fearing them#jedi order#meta (via @thegreencarousel​) One thing that gives me hope is that there are prequel era Jedi there to impart their philosophy.  Yoda is still there to talk to Luke on Ahch-To.  Luke hears voices telling him to let go when he dies on Ahch-To.  Rey helps bring forward so many other Jedi in her most desperate moment against Palpatine.  Luke and Leia become Force Ghosts as well. It will still be a long, slow road to healing, but the Jedi of this era are still there, they can tell future generations about the philosophy that has come before, that every Jedi walks their own path, that the Jedi have always been about their students growing beyond them, from the era of the High Republic to the prequels to the sequels, every generation has directly expressed that their students will go further than them, and I love that the sequels Jedi, that Rey and Finn will have the foundations and knowledge of the Jedi Order to help them when they need it. Because Yoda and Obi-Wan (and now all the Jedi that showed up in TROS) can tell them what they know.  There are ancient texts, sure.  There are probably still some unfound holocrons around.  But also Yoda and Obi-Wan and the others are right there to help them, now that Rey has been able to find the connection with the Force Ghosts. So, fuck Palpatine, because he may have killed their physical bodies, he may have killed their image in others’ eyes, he may have killed their Temples and sacred places, but he couldn’t kill their spirits.

This concept art piece is absolutely cracking me up because it’s just after they’ve rescued Palpatine from the elevator shaft and you can tell EXACTLY how this went just from the motion blur of it.  THE MOTION BLUR IS SO FUNNY. That those two Jedi assholes swung the CHANCELLOR OF THE REPUBLIC through the first random doorway that opened for them, so that he landed RIGHT ON HIS ASS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE HALLWAY, probably still making this exact face:

Just thinking about that makes me absolutely LOSE IT.  LOOK AT IT! LOOK AT THE WAY HIS FEET AREN’T EVEN ON THE GROUND BECAUSE THEY SENT HIM FLYING THROUGH THE DOORWAY. LOOK AT THE WAY HE LITERALLY LANDS ON HIS ASS AND PROBABLY GOT A BRUISED TAILBONE OUT OF IT.  GOD, I HOPE HE HAD TO THROUGH THE REST OF THE PLOT OF REVENGE OF THE SITH WITH A PAINFUL TWINGE EVERY TIME HE SO MUCH AS STOOD UP OR SAT DOWN OR BREATHED WRONG. BUT JUST.  PALPATINE.  ON HIS ASS IN THE MIDDLE OF GRIEVOUS’ SHIP.  ROBES FLYING AROUND HIM, FEET NOWHERE NEAR UNDERNEATH HIM, LEGS AKIMBO AS HE FLAILED THROUGH THE AIR LIKE A DISCARDED FIDGET SPINNER, ALL WHILE THOSE JEDI GET TO USE THE FORCE TO BE COOL AND HAVE AWESOME LOOKING LANDINGS. IT’S SO FUNNY.

#Kjdjdjejwkw#You’re telling me this is CONCEPT ART??#I thought it was a screenshot or a scene and that’s why it’s so blurry (via @lightasthesun) I can’t be 100% certain, the book it’s from (Creating the Worlds of Star Wars: 365 Days) didn’t have a ton of concept art in it, it was more about the practical effects + sets of the prequels, but a) it did have some concept art in it and b) I have never seen anything from such a scene being filmed, so my assumption was concept art, but, like, if anyone has any info on any behind the scenes footage from this scene being filmed, I WOULD APPRECIATE YOU SHARING IT. Because concept art or screenshot IT IS SO FUNNY EITHER WAY. EITHER SOMEONE DREW PALPATINE THAT WAY ORRRRRRRRRRRR THEY THREW IAN MCDAIRMID ON HIS ASS IN REAL LIFE TO HAVE PALPATINE FLAILING AROUND WHILE EWAN AND HAYDEN SAIL MAJESTICALLY IN AND EITHER ONE OF THOSE SCENARIOS IS SENDING ME INTO FITS OF LAUGHTER GOD THE PREQUELS ARE THE BEST

The Emperor’s New … Apprentice? 

I’ve been sitting on these images for a long time now and finally decided to finish them up. It’s just a great combo. 

Palpatine: Why did I think you could do this? This one simple thing! It’s like I’m talking to a monkey.

Light-Side Anakin: Whoa now!

Palpatine: A really, really big stupid monkey named Vader!

Dark-Side Anakin: Ouch.

Palpatine: And do you want to know something else? I’ve never liked your spinach puffs!

All Anakins/Vader: GASP!

Palpatine: NEVER!

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[devinatART] - [instagram]

LEGO PALPATINE IS MY FAVORITE PALPATINE

The Lego Star Wars Canon is the Actual Best Canon okay

The best part is that this isn’t even that much of an exageration…this is GENUINELY WHAT HAPPENED in Revenge of the Sith O.O

Ewan McGregor & Hayden Christensen on set of ‘Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith’

Stunning victory for the Sith

I love how Christopher Lee turns around once he hears the challenge like this dude has killed before he’ll kill again