Dystopian Novels Be Like “there’s No Music But Our National Anthem And This Forbidden Rebel Song”

I can assure you that I am not in fact, a clone.

I think anyway

Any advice for someone looking to improve their marksmanship score? I want to get onto the team this year but my scores have been garbage lately.

Play a real sport, ideally one that involves exercise and teamwork. Guns are not toys.

Vader: [opening a desk drawer in Obi-Wan’s old room] Let’s see what this old fool kept in here…[picking up a piece of paper]  Obi-Wan: [in a letter] 

Dear Anakin, 

If you’re reading this, then you must be rifling through my belongings, which means you are either extremely bored (in which case I suggest going and tidying up your quarters, which I don’t need to see to know are a disaster,) or I’ve been missing for an extended amount of time and the Order needs the room to store extra chairs, or I’ve died, possibly while trying to rid the galaxy of General Grievous. If I am in fact dead, I hope this letter finds you well in spite of it, and that you have not gone off the deep end or murdered anyone in an attempt to avenge me. (…unless it’s Grievous, I suppose.)

You will find attached to this letter the receipts for several items in my room, such as the electric tea kettle. I hope you can at least return them for store credit. 

I’ve set up a college savings plan with the Galactic Bank of Coruscant, because I noticed that Senator Amidala is obviously pregnant, and since I am not nearly as dense as you apparently think I am, I presume the child is yours. The account information is in my safe, which I would give you the combination to except that I know you have been breaking into it since you were 14. 

If you do intend to eventually leave the Order, as I suspect you might, please make sure that you give the Council two weeks’ notice. It’s only polite, and you never know when you may need to use them as a reference. Even though I know you clash with them, they do care about you.

Finally, please make sure Duchess Satine’s nephew gets the inheritance I’ve left him (the information is also in my safe, and no, I’m not going to tell you any more details about this. I realize how much this is going to torment you, and I’d be lying if I said that’s not bringing a smile to my face.) 

Your blanket is in the hamper. Wash it on the gentle cycle. The password for the wi-fi, in case you’ve forgotten, is BuyYourOwnDataPlanAnakin.

Be well, my Padawan, and I shall see you again someday – hopefully many years from now – when you, too, rejoin the Force. Don’t forget to change the payment settings for Netflix now that I’m dead or you’ll fall behind on your programs. 

Yours,  Obi-Wan Kenobi  PS: Don’t let Vos speak at my funeral. 

What’s your love language?

Uh blame the youtube comment section for this hdbcjs

Wrong friend but this was better than I thought.

By the way who's gonk droid is this then?

How would you feel if someone hypothetically tried to steal Gonky? Asking for a friend.

I didn't know @princeofdathomir had a friend.

She wouldn't have if she knew that Trisha was gonna be her mother

Rex: Nothing in life is free.

Padmé: Love is free!

Ahsoka: Adventure is free.

Obi-Wan: Knowledge is free.

Anakin: Everything is free if you take it without paying.

“Haha isn’t it funny that Neil Gaiman is the only celebrity we haven’t run off this site?” Actually no, it isn’t funny that tumblr has repeatedly launched harassment campaigns against every vaguely popular person who dared to be accessible and no, we didn’t “decide to let Neil stay”, he’s received a metric shitton of harassment he just refuses to be bullied off of social media by a bunch of teenagers with nothing better to do than to be shitty to people online just because they’re there

“For some time, Hollywood has marketed family entertainment according to a two-pronged strategy, with cute stuff and kinetic motion for the kids and sly pop-cultural references and tame double entendres for mom and dad. Miyazaki has no interest in such trickery, or in the alternative method, most successfully deployed in Pixar features like Finding Nemo, Toy Story 3 and Inside/Out, of blending silliness with sentimentality.”

“Most films made for children are flashy adventure-comedies. Structurally and tonally, they feel almost exactly like blockbusters made for adults, scrubbed of any potentially offensive material. They aren’t so much made for children as they’re made to be not not for children. It’s perhaps telling that the genre is generally called “Family,” rather than “Children’s.” The films are designed to be pleasing to a broad, age-diverse audience, but they’re not necessarily specially made for young minds.”

“My Neighbor Totoro, on the other hand, is a genuine children’s film, attuned to child psychology. Satsuki and Mei move and speak like children: they run and romp, giggle and yell. The sibling dynamic is sensitively rendered: Satsuki is eager to impress her parents but sometimes succumbs to silliness, while Mei is Satsuki’s shadow and echo (with an independent streak). But perhaps most uniquely, My Neighbor Totoro follows children’s goals and concerns. Its protagonists aren’t given a mission or a call to adventure - in the absence of a larger drama, they create their own, as children in stable environments do. They play.”

“Consider the sequence just before Mei first encounters Totoro. Satsuki has left for school, and Dad is working from home, so Mei dons a hat and a shoulder bag and tells her father that she’s “off to run some errands” - The film is hers for the next ten minutes, with very little dialogue. She’s seized by ideas, and then abandons them; her goals switch from moment to moment. First she wants to play “flower shop” with her dad, but then she becomes distracted by a pool full of tadpoles. Then, of course, she needs a bucket to catch tadpoles in - but the bucket has a hole in it. And on it goes, but we’re never bored, because Mei is never bored.”

“[…] You can only ride a ride so many times before the thrill wears off. But a child can never exhaust the possibilities of a park or a neighborhood or a forest, and Totoro exists in this mode. The film is made up of travel and transit and exploration, set against lush, evocative landscapes that seem to extend far beyond the frame. We enter the film driving along a dirt road past houses and rice paddies; we follow Mei as she clambers through a thicket and into the forest; we walk home from school with the girls, ducking into a shrine to take shelter from the rain; we run past endless green fields with Satsuki as she searches for Mei. The psychic center of Totoro’s world is an impossibly giant camphor tree covered in moss. The girls climb over it, bow to it as a forest-guardian, and at one point fly high above it, with the help of Totoro. Much like Totoro himself, the tree is enormous and initially intimidating, but ultimately a source of shelter and inspiration.”

“My Neighbor Totoro has a story, but it’s the kind of story that a child might make up, or that a parent might tell as a bedtime story, prodded along by the refrain, “And then what happened?” This kind of whimsicality is actually baked into Miyazaki’s process: he begins animating his films before they’re fully written. Totoro has chase scenes and fantastical creatures, but these are flights of fancy rooted in a familiar world. A big part of being a kid is watching and waiting, and Miyazaki understands this. When Mei catches a glimpse of a small Totoro running under her house, she crouches down and stares into the gap, waiting. Miyazaki holds on this image: we wait with her. Magical things happen, but most of life happens in between those things—and there is a kind of gentle magic, for a child, in seeing those in-betweens brought to life truthfully on screen.”

A.O. Scott and Lauren Wilford on “My Neighbor Totoro”, 2017.