Totally Responsible Consumption Of Tea

PSA

Just a heads up, there are bots going around on AO3 accusing people of using AI. Considering the timing, this is likely AI bros' retaliation for AO3 users calling them out for scraping their work. Examples of what you might be sent:

Screenshots from here.

If you get a comment like this, just report for spam and delete.

About two years ago I drew Cody holding a lightsaber and this is me bringing that BACK baby hell yes

the 212th have a meme that's just an image of Commander Cody's neutral resting face with the captain "The Commander Is Not Amused"

Cody eventually finds out about it, and is Not Amused

specifically, he takes issue with the holo still of him they used

naturally, he has multiple better options on hand to offer as alternatives

If I'm crying today, you are as well

Do you ever just go about your day, sip your little drink, open your little email, and then remember that Hardcase—our chaos ADHD king, our walking serotonin shot, our human thermal detonator—sacrificed himself with a grin and a quip so his brothers could escape? That he went out in a blaze of glory, piloting a stolen ship with literally no plan except “blow stuff up real good,” and the last thing he said was "live to fight another day boys, live to fight another day"???

Hardcase, who never stopped calling his brothers “sir” even when they told him to quit it. Hardcase, who probably never got promoted because he was “reckless.” Hardcase, who loved flying and loud noises and sunshine and probably didn’t understand why no one ever let him just have fun—and then he died for everyone else. Just. Like. That.

Do you ever remember Echo? Sweet, by-the-books, “regulations exist for a reason” Echo who lost everything and kept surviving anyway? Echo who got blown up during a rescue mission, turned into a cybernetic lab rat, hooked up to machines like a tool, stripped of his name, his agency, his brotherhood—and he still came back.

He came back and found out Fives was gone. He came back and the war was ending only to find out there was no end to begin with. He came back and nothing was the same, and he still kept going. That man has literally had half his body replaced with cyber-grade hardware and he's still more human than some Jedi.

Do you ever think about Fives? Fives who figured it out. Fives who knew about the chips. Fives who died saying the truth. He didn’t go down in glory. He wasn’t martyred. He bled out in a hangar, shaking and crying and trying to tell the people he trusted that everything was a lie. And NOBODY BELIEVED HIM. They said he lost his mind. THEY. SAID. HE LOST. HIS MIND.

Fives who just wanted to be loyal. Who just wanted to protect his brothers. Who died trying to save them all and didn’t live to see a single one freed.

Do you remember Jesse? That sweet, noble ARC trooper who wore the Republic symbol on his face like a badge of honor and who looked absolutely shattered when he turned on Ahsoka. He didn’t want to. You could see it. You could feel the war inside him. But the chip won. Because "good soldiers follow orders".

Do you remember Tup? That sweet, soft-spoken clone who glitched first. Who killed two jedi, because “Good soldiers follow orders,” like he was possessed. Because he was. Because the war broke him open before anyone was ready.

Do you ever remember Waxer and Boil? Waxer who kept an eye on a scared little Twi'lek girl Numa through a war zone. Waxer who died seeing his brothers were turning against each other because of Krell and his lies, and who apologized with his dying breath?

Do you remember that clones had names? Do you remember that they named themselves? That they forged their identities with paint and banter and nicknames and loyalty and found joy in being individuals even when everything about their existence was designed to erase that?

Do you remember that they aged twice as fast and weren’t supposed to live long enough to get tired?

That the GAR never intended to care for them after the war? That there was no post-war plan? That the Empire swept them aside for cheaper labor?

That Rex had to watch his brothers turn, die, disappear, and he STILL fought in the rebellion with a heart twice the size of Coruscant???

Do you ever think about how the clones were raised in pods, trained like blaster fodder, taught to say “Yes sir” and never think twice, and still found ways to be brave and kind and funny and GOOD???

DO YOU???

Anyway. I’m normal. Totally fine. Just sitting here naming my coffee cups after 501st troopers and crying into my caf. Would die for every single one of them. Even Dogma. ESPECIALLY Dogma. And Rex. And Fives. And Hardcase. And Echo. And Waxer. And-

We need this

Soulmate name marks au where Obi-Wan and Cody dont figure it out for the LONGEST time because their marks, which display a person's chosen or true name which often corresponds to a given name but not always, say "Ben" and "Kote"

Gorgeous

Codywan? In my Star Wars?

If there’s any argument for Tech dying or needing to be dead that I’m tired of—and I’m tired of all of them—it’s the idea that he must have died because he fell a long way. (Obligatory disclaimer that I’m still arguing that Tech is alive and was never actually killed off in the first place, and that that wasn’t dropped but just hasn’t played out yet before moving on):

Now, if Star Wars were a documentary? Sure. I’d buy it to some degree. I’d think that whoever was responsible for the documentary was remiss in not sending out a search party, since real life people have survived falls from upwards of 30,000 feet before, but on balance I’d think that he was likely, though not certainly, dead.

But Star Wars isn’t a documentary. It’s fiction, and genre fiction at that—a caricature of reality which abides by its own internal rules, shifting from story to story, and where both injury and likelihood of death alike are determined by narrative need rather than real world fatality. Short falls kill main characters in fiction all the time. Not always, there’s a degree of plot armor in many cases, but when they do, we see (or “see,” if it’s a written work) the immediate result. Perhaps not as graphically as it would appear in real life, perhaps with some artistic license and discretion depending on who’s watching, but we see it all the same.

Long falls, however, almost never kill any named characters in genre fiction. Not unless we immediately see the body afterwards. Even George Lucas—who, bless his heart, has some good ideas and some understanding of storytelling but has never thought a single implication all the way through and isn’t actually a very good writer—knew that. That’s why he cut Maul in half before throwing him into a pit. And that still wasn’t enough to keep him dead when Lucas changed his mind a decade or so later.

The utility of a long fall where you cut away before impact is that anything can happen in the gap the audience doesn’t get to see. In fact, the higher the fall, the more time the character falling has to do something about it. And what could they do? Well, the story of the bad batch, if we start from where it began in season seven of TCW, actually presents us with a number of different options for a character who found themselves in that position, including:

1. Use their collection of animal calls to summon some giant flying reptiles and ride them to safety (On the Wings of Keeradaks, Tech’s idea)

2. Just use the force to jump to safety and hope someone lies about them falling to their deaths dying (Aftermath, Caleb, can we talk about how “Where’s X?” and “X didn’t make it,” combo happens in exactly two places in the script for the whole show and one is Hunter lying to Cross about Caleb and the other is Hunter talking to Omega about Tech?)

3. Fall a long way in something that’s going to roll around and take most of the impact for them (Reunion, Tech’s idea again)

4. Just don’t die. Or I guess hit a bunch of things on the way down and hope their special armor protects them (War Mantle, Hunter, who doesn’t even break a rib, listen it would actually be flat out stupid for Tech to die in a fall in a situation that’s directly parallel (the terrain, Omega screaming at everyone to go back) to the one we watched Hunter walk away from. We watched it happen once; why should we believe it this time? The only difference is that we didn’t follow Tech all the way down.)

5. Hope the box they’re falling in has emergency thrusters to slow them down (Spoils of War, Omega’s idea, Tech was impressed and I’m sure remembers it, I mean seriously are we actually thinking Tarkin’s secret gondola doesn’t have some kind of safety back up in case it malfunctions with him inside? *Maybe* it doesn’t, but it very well might.)

6. Hope there’s water at the bottom after they fall through the mists (The Crossing, Omega and Tech. Funny how at least some of these involve Tech. Funny how there’s mists like in Plan 99.)

7. Have someone catch them on the way down before they hit the ground, which may be lava (Hunter catching Omega, Retrieval. You can almost count Phee catching Hunter and Hunter catching Phee in Entombed, I just don’t because they don’t fall first)

8. Grab onto something on the way down into the void (CX-2, Extraction)

9. Fall into water again (Also CX-2, Extraction)

This isn’t about actual survivability, by the way. The characters involved in most of these would have likely died if it happened in the real world, especially the ones with a water landing, but Star Wars doesn’t care about that. It will blow people up and light them on fire and decide they’re fine. Physical reality and how any of these would actually go (badly, they would go badly) is irrelevant.

The point here is about establishing audience expectations. We’ve got a situation in which a character whose body neither we nor his family ever see supposedly dying via a method the story itself—not even the conventional rules of the genre, the specific story being told—sets up as survivable. Never mind that “no body, no death” is a genre convention, never mind that “Faster” goes out of its way to set up that Tech works in milliseconds and that if anyone can find a way out of it, he can.

People watching are handed a set of survived long falls which set up the expectation that this fall could have been survivable, too, even if they’re not picking up on it. It’s just enough for people to go, hmmm, that’s weird, and not fully accept it. Which makes it more likely for people to accept that he survived instead if he should come back.

tl;dr: This is the implausible survival franchise. It’s a feature, not a bug, and any arguments about gravity or what would kill someone for real don’t matter.

Had he been in Orpheus place, Anakin would have also turned to look behind

Still love this one so posted it here again 😌

You can't hide lukie pookie in the tags, it needs to be there for everyone to see, just like this masterpiece!!!

Uncle Cody! He has my whole heart (and so does Luke. I contain multitudes)