The Theme That Always Resonates Me The Most In Stories Is “the World Is Cruel; Therefore I Won’t

TTWTT

Toonami using anime to inspire us.

Art tip #462

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It starts like this:

Cody stops dead in the middle of the hall, passkey tumbling from his fingers to clatter on the deck. Everything is grey and white and grim, and his armor is white white white without any markings at all. There’s an ache in his brain, a tremble in his hands, and not even the mercy of momentary amnesia to blunt the realization of what he’s done.

He remembers, vivid, vicious, the way it felt to take aim at Obi-Wan, the way he pulled the trigger. Remembers the fall, the look of surprise, the satisfaction. Remembers, too clear, what happened on the planet below just this morning, and the Rebel cell they put down, leaving no survivors.

There were children down there, he thinks, and feels sick to his stomach when before he’d only felt vague distaste.

Cody doesn’t know what happened. Doesn’t understand. There was the Emperor’s voice, the order—execute traitorous commanding officers, reliant on Palpatine’s verbal command alone—but…he doesn’t know how that became kill the Jedi, all the Jedi.

The 501st marched on the Temple. The 501stmurdered every child in the crèche.

Cody staggers, knees giving way. He stumbles into the wall, grabbing desperately for something to hold him on his feet, but there’s nothing. His stomach turns, and bile bubbles in the back of his throat as his vision wavers towards darkness.

Hells, but what have they done?

Instinct more than willpower pushes him back to his feet, gets him standing even as the world lurches. Cody thinks of his men, of the rest of the 212th, and has to swallow hard. He took casualty counts after they stormed the Rebel base. He saw the list of numbers marking the men who died, and all he felt was satisfaction at an operation successfully executed. No care for those under his command, his brothers. No thought for the lives cut short as anything other than statistics. And—it was him, it was him and Cody knows that, but what the hell was he even thinking? What was he doing? How could any part of him take that, accept that, and not even bother to spare a moment to grieve?

Cody’s breath hitches hard in his chest, not a sob but a close cousin, all tangled up with horror and remorse. All he has is slow-burn anger, the hotter burn of tears behind his eyes, and he aches.

His general is dead. His general is dead because Cody killed him, and Cody has spent the last two years serving an empire that declared every Jedi a traitor and burned the Republic to the ground.

A sob breaks through the quiet of the night-shift ship, loud and ragged and desperate, but it’s not from Cody’s throat. His head snaps up, and in an instant he’s moving, practically running down the corridor and around the next bend of the hall. There’s a figure in featureless armor slumped in the middle of the walkway, and Cody has one horrifying second where he can’t tell who it is. He looks and he doesn’t know, because the blank white armor is nothing but plastoid,

not even a hint of paint to set it apart from every other trooper on the ship. Hands are scrabbling at the helmet, hauling it off, but even that doesn’t help. Regulation haircut, no tattoos—they’re not allowed them, aren’t allowed any marks of individuality. Or maybe they just don’t want them, and that’s a thousand times more chilling to consider.

But—

But.

That gasping breath, that hitched sob. Cody remembers, because he’s the one who had to deliver the news of Waxer’s death in friendly fire. He’s the one who sat up for night after night, letting his brother cry into his shoulder, shaking, broken.

“Boil,” he says, and Boil chokes, shakes.

“We—we killed them,” he says, ragged, ruined, and Cody closes his eyes, reaches out. Hauls Boil in, clutching him close like he did after Waxer’s death, and tries not to think about how Boil’s face is just like every other clone’s, indistinct and unremarkable. How, ten minutes before, Cody would have thought of him by his CT number and seen nothing wrong with it, and Boil would have answered without so much as a second thought.

Cody doesn’t who which them Boil means. There have been far too many bodies left behind these last two years, too many victims. Too many Jedi, and Cody wants to shake, wants to curl up with Boil somewhere dark and hunker down until this all fades away, until they wake up, until it’s all a dream and it’s not real.

“Yeah, vod,” he says, and the name is unfamiliar on his tongue after two years without speaking it, clumsy and rough and half-forgotten. No brothers, in the Empire. Just soldiers. “We did.”

“It was us,” Boil whispers. “It was us but it wasn’t.”

There was something. Something that changed them. Not a lot. Not enough to take away memories or thoughts or training. But—they faded, after Order 66. They conformed. They let their generals and admirals do the thinking, took orders, followed them. there was nothing left of the individuals behind the identical faces, and no trace of the desire to find them.

Maybe that’s the most insidious thing of all. Whatever controlled them, it stripped away all thought of wanting to be people and not just weapons to be aimed and fired.

“Kriff,” Cody breathes, and digs his fingers into Boil’s hair. Sits back on his knees, lightheaded, and realizes that he’s shaking. He’s trembling, so hard he couldn’t aim a blaster even if he was pressing it against the side of his own head. And—maybe that’s a more tempting thought than it’s ever been. Maybe he would try, if he didn’t have Boil in his arms, coming apart.

Boil’s gauntlets scrape the plastoid of Cody’s armor, dig in. The sound that shatters out of is throat is almost a laugh, and he buries his face in Cody’s throat.

“Never heard you swear before, sir,” he manages.

Cody chokes on a breath, breathes out something that might be a chuckle in a kinder universe. “I was saving it,” he says, “for a time when it felt right.”

No need to say that that time is now. It’s obvious. So clearly, achingly obvious.

Boil’s words break into a sob before he can even get them out, and he digs his fingers into Cody’s armor like he’s going to try and claw his way through. “Waxer,” he breathes. “Waxer would shoot me himself, with what we did. He’d have executed me.”

Cody wants to argue, wants to protest. Waxer was kind. He was the kindest soul Cody ever met. But—

He thinks of Waxer, and then he thinks of Rex. Rex, lost during the Siege of Mandalore, dead and burned and gone, but if he could see Cody now—

Cody wouldn’t even deserve the mercy of a quick death, but Rex would probably give it to him anyway. And Cody wouldn’t even try to protest, knowing—everything.

It wasn’t them, but it was.

Cody doesn’t know what changed them, has even less of an idea what changed them back. But there was a change, there was something, and he knows it, feels it, sees it.

They’ve got their names back, and even if it’s much too little and far too late, they’re going to have to make the most of it.

.

(Or maybe it starts like this:

There’s a storm outside lashing the windows, but there’s always a storm on Kamino. There’s blood on the floor of the lab, a body, but Te Tinu can’t feel regret, can’t feel remorse. Not for this, not ever.

Her hand is steady on the blaster, unwavering as she presses it to the center of Nala Se’s chest. One hand on the weapon, her other on the computer, and she’s been studying for half a decade now to know how to do precisely this. The command is multilayered, delicate, precise, but Te Tinu is a scientist just as much as she’s a Rebel.

The Empire hasn’t reached its claws into Kamino yet. Nothing much has changed. But Te Tinu has seen the outside world, has watched the clones she grew from genetic material be born and raised and ruined, every shred of personhood stripped away.

Te Tinu is a scientist just as much as she’s a Rebel. They were creating souls in this lab, and Nala Se stripped all of that away with one organic chip, all for the sake of credits.

“You won’t be allowed to do this,” Nala Se says, coldly furious, but she keeps her hands raised, her body still. Her eyes are arctic, but Te Tinu meets them defiance, with hatred, with the resentment that she’s kept buried all these many, many years.

There are guards coming. That’s fine. Te Tinu never planned to leave this laboratory alive.

“You made your army, Nala Se,” she hisses. “You made your army and then you destroyed them. You stripped them of value, of meaning, for credits. You are the one who should have been stopped long ago.”

The computer chimes, the program loaded. Te Tinu smiles, even as Nala Se’s eyes widen.

“Look,” she says, and shifts just enough that Nala Se can see the holograms. The systems, the code she’s added, the command. “Look at this, Nala Se. Look at victory.”

“This isn’t victory, this is madness,” Nala Se tells her, but Te Tinu just smiles.

“It is a victory for science,” she corrects, and tips her head. “A victory for the Rebellion, too.”

Nala Se’s nostrils flare. “You will be slaughtered before you can take one step from this lab,” she says. “And I will undo every last piece of your shoddy work, Te Tinu.”

“Ah,” Te Tinu says, as though the thought hadn’t occurred to her before the threat. “That would be most inconvenient, wouldn’t it? I spent so long on this, after all.”

Nala Se registers what she’s about to do half an instant before Te Tinu pulls the trigger. She always was the smartest person in any given room.

Coldly, Te Tinu watches her body collapse, long limbs tangling, bright blue blood seeping out across the tile. Deftly, she holsters the blaster, checks that the other scientist is equally dead, and turns back to the computer. There’s a thump against the door, a raised voice, but Te Tinu ignores it, focusing on her program. The biochips implanted in the clone armies are as flawless as any other aspect of Kaminoan design, for all that they’re meant for a fundamentally flawed purpose, so they’re almost impossible to disrupt. Te Tinu doesn’t need to disrupt them, though, just…change their current function.

The pre-encoded orders can’t be stripped away, replaced by new ones. It would be like reprogramming the chips from the ground up, but they’re already active, already working. A soft reboot is what’s needed, and Te Tinu’s program will do just that.

There’s no more Chancellor to pass out orders. He’s the emperor now, and the coding in the chips is quite specific. Without the direct title of Supreme Chancellor, Palpatine’s commands will mean as little as anyone else’s.

A weakness, though Nala Se never would have termed it so.

The door of the lab shudders, creaks. Te Tinu doesn’t look back, types in the last set of commands and activates them.

There’s a long, long moment as the blood pools and the door groans and someone speaks loudly, quickly, fiercely, so very unlike a Kaminoan.

Then, soft, the computer beeps.

The chips reset.

Te Tinu smiles, even as the door gives way. She turns to face the Defense Force, one hand going for her blaster, the other hitting the button that will trigger a wipe of every computer in the lab and leave them unable to reverse her work.

“For science,” she says, and raises the blaster, taking a graceful step forward. “For liberty.”

The Defense Force fires, but they’re already far too late.

Te Tinu dies with a smile on her face, bright blood on the floor of the lab, and regrets nothing but the time it took to make it here.

She’s won.)

.

Or maybe, maybe, it starts like this:

Cody looks around the room, at the figures there, at the familiar faces. At the same face, repeated, and some have scars to set them apart, some have old tattoos, but most don’t. Most of them have lost their markers, their names. Most of them have been turned into nothing but puppets for a greater cause. Puppets for a cause they once gave their lives to stop.

Cody looks around the room, at the remnants of Ghost and Torrent and the Wolfpack, at trooper after trooper who woke up this morning with the desperate, horrified realization of what they became. Of what they did, and how their hands were forced, and how they killed their generals, killed civilians, killed for an empire that destroyed them.

His hands are still shaking. They haven’t stopped since he remembered himself.

Cody wishes, dearly, just for a moment, that he had Rex at his back again, or Wolffe. But they’re both dead, and probably better off for it. He can’t imagine what Rex’s reaction would have been to the massacre at the Temple. To the fact that the 501st was used to do it.

Jesse is sitting in the corner, side by side with Boil and Wooley. They’re tangled together, grieving together, and it’s only seeing them like that that makes Cody realize how long it’s been since he saw any brothers touching. Not something deemed essential to performance, and so it was quietly shunted away.

Cody breathes, and breathes, and still his hands won’t stop shaking.

It’s Neyo, of all the troopers, who steps up beside him. He curls a hand around Cody’s shoulder, and—

Oh, Cody thinks, and has to swallow. It’s been a hell of a long time since anyone touched him, hasn’t it? Before Neyo, before Boil—he can’t even begin to remember.

“Breathe,” Neyo says, short, curt, but not unkind. “We all know we’re going to do something. The only question is what.”

Cody was a marshal commander, once, before the empire rose. Back when he could think clearly enough to be a commander, rather than just another follower. He knows strategy, and he knows tactics, and he knows how to prioritize what has to be done over what he wants to do. And yet—

He can’t make that decision here. Looking at the identical, unaltered faces, the unchanging grey uniforms, the plain white armor, all he can think is that he wants to burn the whole damned cruiser down around them and be done with it.

The break room is empty of anyone who isn’t a clone. The other officers don’t come here, don’t care. The clones make good obedient drones, who work well without supervision and don’t need a firm hand to maintain their fanatic belief in the Empire. Or at least, that’s how it was. That’s how it’s been for two years now.

Cody doesn’t care. In this, at least, it’s valuable, because it lets the clones gather without anyone thinking things are off.

He leans forward, elbows on the table, trembling hands clasped. Tries not to think too hard, tries not to dwell, but—

“It’s all of us, now?” he asks Neyo.

Neyo pauses, mouth tightening. Cody pretends not to see the way he presses his fingers tight against the numbers tattooed beneath his eye. “As far as I could tell,” he says roughly. “I contacted three other clone commanders on different cruisers, and they’re all…”

“Awake,” Cody supplies quietly, because that’s the only word for it. They were in a daze, these last two years. Dreaming, maybe, trapped in a nightmare. Now they’re all awake, but unlike with a dream, they have to deal with the fallout now.

Neyo grimaces, but doesn’t argue. “We don’t even know what happened,” he says, and there’s a thread of anger to it. “Or if we could go back.”

Back to sleepwalking, placid and loyal. Back to the haze of not caring, not being. Cody breathes out, and it shakes, but—

With rage, this time.

“We might not know how, but we know who,” he says tightly. “Only one person benefitted from us becoming…that.”

“So what are we going to do about it?” Sinker, at the next table over, asks roughly. His eyes are red, and Boost is nowhere to be seen.

The Wolfpack shot Plo Koon out of the air over Cato Neimoidia, fired on him from behind and brought his fighter down in a ball of flames. Until yesterday, every last one of them was proud of that fact.

Cody closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to look at Sinker’s face, his once-white hair grown in dark again, because individuality was another thing stripped from them alongside their free will. So that he doesn’t have to think about firing on Obi-Wan, and watching him fall, and feeling glad to have carried out an order.

They all murdered their generals. The only people in the galaxy who ever tried to fight for them, who ever treated them like people in their own right, and he and his brothers slaughtered them right down to the last youngling.

Cody’s going to be sick. But—later. When he can lock himself in his bunk and be weak, just for a little while.

Right now his brothers need him.

Forcing his eyes open, his breathing back under control, Cody looks up. He meets Neyo’s eyes, then Sinker’s, and smiles. It’s a rictus, death’s-head grin, full of teeth. “Glory to the emperor,” he says. “Long may he reign.”

how to format your story, a crash course

because my writing major soul dies a little bit more every time i see a perfectly good story improperly formatted.

this is a guide specifically for ao3 posting

1. Put A Double Return (Enter) Between Each Paragraph Instead Of An Indentation

fanfic is not academic writing. you don't need an indent at the beginning of each line. for the sake of scrolling it just makes it more organized and easier to read. The double return puts a space between the two paragraphs as seen here:

2. Make A New Paragraph Every Time The Camera Moves Or A New Thought Is Addressed

what the hell does that mean, youre probably asking. allow me to show you.

these are each three separate thoughts. so they each get their own paragraph. think about it like the reader is taking a pause between each thought, where should those pauses go?

3. Put A New Paragraph Every Time A New Person Speaks

do not and i repeat DO NOT write your dialogue like this:

"blah blah blah" he said. "blah blah blah" she said. "blah blah blah" they said. "blah blah blah" he said. "blah blah blah" she said.

it is impossible to read and its confusing and people will click off your story. dialogue should look like this:

see how each time a different person talks there's a new line? there can be not dialogue mixed with the dialogue, but every time the person speaking changes, there would be a new line.

Oh gawd every time you think it's over it gers BETTER

🙌🏻 🙌🏻 🙌🏻 🙌🏻

YES! I wanna join!

Sensitive, Much?

Now, maybe this is just my cold, INTP logic kicking in here, but am I the only one who thinks that the fashion today is to be a victim? Because it seems that everyone is out there looking for an excuse to be offended about something.

And no, I’m not intending to offend anyone. Please, please, please. I’m not trying to step on any toes. And if I’m not thinking exactly like you, I most humbly beg your pardon for, oh, I dunno, being a different person with different beliefs and a different background and a different favourite flavour of ice cream.

The point is, there are real victims in the world. There are people who are actually hurting. There are children who are abandoned in the street because their mothers don’t like how they look when they’re born. There are young women who are kidnapped and sold as sex slaves. There are people who are living with the threat of bombs falling on their heads every day.

And then there’s you. Maybe your one of those real victims. Or maybe you just don’t like what someone said to you.

Ya know what I’m getting at? If someone disagrees with you or says something that strikes you as wrong, immediately you have to lash out and rip into them and tell them that they’re a horrible bigot or a wretched sinner. Do you honestly think that that’s going to change their mind?  And I’m not saying I’m always right. But I’m not always wrong, either.

I wonder if maybe all this oversensitivity on every side is occurring because people don’t have a sense of humour. (By sense of humour, I mean the ability to NOT take yourself seriously all the time.)

A while back my brother got mad at me for not taking life seriously all the time. Now, this isn’t quite true. I do take life seriously. But I most certainly try not to take myself seriously. That’s the most dangerous thing a person can do, because then he can get to thinking that he’s more important than he actually is. And when you start thinking that, then you think that everyone ought to recognize how important you are. You trade in personal dignity for annoying pompousness and personal kindness for condescension. You get offended easily because people are disagreeing with you, and HEAVEN FORBID that anyone should ever disagree with infallible you!

Perhaps we could all lighten up a bit. Just because someone doesn’t hold the same views that you do doesn’t mean that he’s out to get you and take away all your personal freedoms. Not every Muslim is an extremist and not every Christian is a hypocrite, for example. And just because you side with one or the other doesn’t mean you should get mad when someone who supports an opposite viewpoint expresses an opinion. Maybe if you don’t get offended, you’ll set a good example to others. Maybe if you laugh it off, rather than getting all huffy at what someone said. Maybe if you admit they have a point, and really mean it, you’ll make more of an impression than if you start lambasting them for being opposed to you.

The thing is, when we go around trying not to step on people’s toes, we’ll never give others the chance to think. If you’re never challenged you’ll never truly understand what you do believe in. You’ll never question, you’ll never grow, and you’ll never become stronger.

I suppose when we stop thinking ourselves the pinnacle and end result of the universe, we’ll start realizing that it’s okay to be different. And sometimes, it’s even okay to disagree with other people! I’m trying to break the trend of being a victim. I don’t want to have to avoid “trigger” subjects just because they aren’t topics that I like to converse on.

It’s good to talk about things that make you uncomfortable. You aren’t entitled to be comfortable. Comfortable people don’t grow and develop. Victims might be wounded, but heroes rise above their wounds.

Heroes forgive and forget.

So, I’ve decided that, while I’m not going to go out of my way to offend people, I’m also not going to shy away from stuff that I don’t like. And I’m not going to shy away from stuff just because other people don’t like it. I want to grow, even if it makes me uncomfortable.

Do you want to join me?

TTWTT I.... bootiful, just bootiful.

catch, and release

This is about Sci-Hub. yeah we get it.. gatekeep knowledge and protect the interests of capital…

CNN Live coverage when Trump was  walking towards the church

kirby has eaten trees meta