On General Grievous

 As a heads up, we might not have a Saturday Note next week, as I will be out.

If everything goes according to plan soon I will be trying to read the Spanish edition of Eragon and I don’t know how that will go! I haven’t seriously tried Spanish reading in ages, and I will have the English edition side by side with it, so I hope it works and is a learning experience.

I am in a weird mood, thinking about mortality, the state of souls, and I’m having some more “Maybe I should be a monk” thoughts again. So let’s talk about General Grievous. This is less of a criticism entry and more of a run-through of the character’s development over time and how I feel about it.

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On General Grievous

Recently in the Book Diary I shared that I read a Star Wars comic released by Dark Horse (so before the Disney purchase of Lucasfilm) titled “General Grievous”, and I also recently rewatched the Genndy Tartakovsky Clone Wars series, and so I’ve been thinking a lot about General Grievous.

Also this Tumblr post I made recently.

So a rundown for people new to Star Wars and General Grievous. For Revenge of the Sith George Lucas asked the team to create a new villain named “General Grievous” (because George Lucas is not subtle with names), a commander for the Droid army who kills Jedi and collects their lightsabers. This guy went through a LOT of iterations before they settled on the skeletal cyborg look. He was then slated to be featured in the Clone Wars multimedia project. His first appearance was in the final episode of Volume 1 of Clone Wars.

And how is his first appearance to fans? It’s insane, is what it is. We’re first told that he’s completely obliterated a Republic attack force, and then we see him take on six Jedi at once. Granted, it’s partly through cybernetic enhancements, and if you watch the fight he does his best to separate them as much as possible–almost every takedown he makes is done by getting one of the Jedi alone. But that doesn’t change that he’s an incredible swordsman and fighter, he’s implied to be an excellent strategist, he can hold/fight with lightsabers with prehensile feet, and he’s fast enough to dodge the Force what the fudge.

To be fair Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars is incredibly stylized in its depiction of action sequences. Each individual Jedi is depicted as basically a one-man/woman army, so of course someone who beats them has to be even more intense. So throughout his other appearances in the series, along with different comics and books, General Grievous was depicted as an absolute BEAST. In the original animated series, it’s noticeable that no one actually beats him. He’s stopped from killing Ki-Adi Mundi by the arrival of a squad of ARC Troopers (who he starts killing instead) and a gunship attack, and even then he’s not beaten as much as driven back while they grab the survivors and get out of there. The only other ones who come close are Shaak Ti (who has fought him before and survived, and so is able to anticipate his tricks better than most) and Mace Windu, who refuses to actually engage him and just Force crushes his chest.

He’s also given a sympathetic backstory. He was a war hero on his homeworld, locked in eternal conflict with another race. And then their enemy joined the Republic, and the Jedi came in and helped obliterate his side’s army. The Separatists approach him to become a leader, and he refuses, but he’s caught in a freak shipwreck (which Dooku definitely had a part in). Dooku has his body rebuilt as a cyborg, including adding chips to his brain to get him to be more aggressive. Then they add 

And then we see him in Revenge of the Sith and he’s… not. At all. At least, in comparison to his other appearances. He’s constantly coughing, his speed and strategic knowledge are absent, and while he’s an intimidating duelist, he shows nowhere near the warrior we knew him as. There are in-universe reasons for it–this scene in Clone Wars for starters, but  in short it turns out that George Lucas didn’t actually think of him as being a particularly effective villain. For him, he was just a mustache-twirling douchebag who will run at almost every challenge. He’s more serial killer than a general.

I distinctly remember the movie coming out, and all of my friends thinking he was cool because he can spin lightsabers. And I’m like, “No, you don’t understand! That’s nothing! He should be able to fight with his feet! He should be fast enough to dodge Force attacks! He’s so much better in the cartoon!”

No one believed me.

The 2008 CGI The Clone Wars series leans more towards George Lucas’s interpretation. Whereas the Tartakovsky version has a warped sense of armor, guaranteeing a “warrior’s death” to the Jedi he’s about to fight, and pretty much always killing in combat. The one time he grabs a Jedi not in combat, he doesn’t kill her, he ties her up. CGI Grievous, on the other hand, is straight-up a genocidal serial killer–he frequently kills by pulling a gun, or getting his goons to do it while enemies are distracted. His lair has a collection of Padawan braids. He straight-up tells Master Koth that he doesn’t think that killing Jedi counts as murder because Jedi are filth. 

The backstory is a bit more complicated. There’s an ad with voiceover by Ahsoka which claims that Grievous had himself made into a cyborg because he was envious of Jedi, and so wanted a way to beat them himself. The episode “Lair of Grievous” is a lot more ambiguous, and while Grievous does claim that he chose to become a cyborg, he barks it very quickly as an angry retort to his maintenance droid saying it was done to him–possibly implying that he’s very touchy about it, and doesn’t want to admit any other possibility. Dave Filoni admits that he made the episode to be ambiguous as to his origin because he knew fans felt strongly about it, and so it can be taken any way they want. That doesn’t change that Grievous is significantly Nerf’d from his original (now non-canon) appearances in the original cartoons.

So General Grievous is this very weird, fascinating character for me to think about. This happens all the time in large fiction properties with multiple writers and artists involved. Comic books are like this a lot. Very often a character will be hyped up by one writer, and then another with little interest in the character, or with a different vision, will have the character act differently. But this strikes me as one of the highest profile examples of what TV Tropes calls ‘Depending on the Writer’--a character whose traits and personality are obviously changed between one work and another.

[Snoke is also another Star Wars example–compare how he talks in The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi and you’ll notice that it’s pretty much a different character. But he’s so mysterious and we had so many questions that most of us didn’t notice until it’s pointed out to us.]

Here we had this awesome, cool, unstoppable villain with a complex backstory, and then it turns out that George Lucas didn’t really have much in mind for the character other than to be killed so that Obi-Wan is somewhere else while Anakin turns evil. And instead of trying to go back to that original character fans loved so much Lucasfilm doubled down on the new characterization–probably for the sake of consistency with the films rather than malice against fans. But they also haven’t really done anything with the character, despite just about everyone else getting their own spin-off comics and books. It’s frustrating and weird.

This can hardly be one of those advice Notes, like, “Don’t do this to a character!” because, well, I highly doubt that you guys have any say in multimedia projects from big companies with multiple writers. But if  you are ever to make a character that goes anywhere other than your own work, be aware that when you hand him or her off to another creator that creator may take the character in a completely different direction. You might get something like what happened to Grievous.

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Centaurworld

 My stomach has not been kind to me this past week. I had thought that I’d get a good walk in to help balance it out, but this morning it’s pouring rain so I suppose that is not going to happen this weekend.

Still debating when would be a good time to see The Batman.

I was between talking about this and talking about General Grievous (comparing him in 2003 Clone Wars to later appearances), and landed on this because it’s more out there.

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On Centaurworld

So I watched Centaurworld on Netflix recently. It’s weird. It’s really freaking weird. I don’t think it ever reaches Adventure Time weird, but then again I don’t know that there’s very much that does.

[Side note: I think someone out there should do a dissertation on the influence of Adventure Time on modern animation.]

The premise goeth thusly: There is a Rider, and there is a Horse. They’re very close. They are transporting an artifact through a war-torn apocalyptic landscape when they’re attacked by the enemy, an army of minotaurs. Horse and Rider get separated and Horse finds herself awake in Centaurworld, a magical, colorful, musical world populated by different kinds of centaurs. Horse can talk now, suddenly, and finds herself adopted by a herd that helps her on her quest to return to the human world and reunite with Rider.

For reference, in the show, “centaur” is loosely defined as any being that is part animal with a human torso coming out of where the neck would be. Most of the “centaurs” we meet are not part horse. Out of the main herd, none of the centaurs are: Wammawink is part alpaca, Zulius is part zebra, Durpleton is part giraffe, Glendale is part antelope, and Ched is part finch. Likewise, it seems that “minotaur” means any animal-headed humanoid, but we don’t see that many unarmored for most of the show’s run. The one we do see is a reptilian figure, but is notably still called a minotaur.

The show is very silly, for the most part. There are hints throughout the first season that there’s something much darker going on in the background, that Centaurworld wasn’t always a happy cheerful place. There are episodes heavily relying on Horse’s despair at being separated from Rider and how she’s afraid that the changes she  makes in Centaurworld will prevent her from even being recognized. And then we get to the season finale, which properly introduces the Nowhere King, the monster that resides in the rift between Centaurworld and the human world.

Also he gets this creepy lullaby-sound theme song.

One might think that after that the show turns serious, but it doesn’t really? The serious moments become more frequent, but (to the annoyance of viewers who wanted things to be darker) the show remains incredibly chipper for a while before getting to the final battle–though there are some fairly dark scenes as we see what the Nowhere King is up to.

While I think the series is good and the finale is excellent, I think the fact that the story doesn’t play to these darker elements plays against the show to an extent. There is an emotional resolution to the Nowhere King’s final defeat and last meeting with the Mysterious Woman who appears throughout the series. And their relationship is hinted at throughout, especially in the season one finale, but since neither of them interacts with the heroes all that much the reveal about their backstory doesn’t feel quite as emotionally satisfying as it’s supposed to. Basically, all of the Nowhere King’s backstory is in the finale–and it’s well done, and the finale is over an hour, so it works. But it would have worked better had that been more teased throughout.

But other than that, this series is really good? Surprisingly good? It’s weird, yeah, incredibly so, because it has a very bubbly cartoon-y style to it. This lends to the humor. The magic in it isn’t always what you’d expect from a fantasy setting. All the main centaurs can shoot tiny versions of themselves out of their hooves. There’s an episode that indicates that since Wammawink usually makes them food with magic, the others don’t have a clue where to find food, or even what food is. And a series like this could easily fall flat if the main characters were boring or unfunny, but I never head that problem? I liked all the main characters, and they’re all entertaining in their own weird ways. Maybe these characters would be grating to some people, but they didn’t for me. These characters consistently made me laugh.

The series is rated for children but I don’t think it’s really made for children. There’s a lot of silly humor, but plenty of the humor isn’t for children. That’s not to say it’s a lot of sex jokes or violence (though there is some suggestive humor, notably Wammawink’s merman magazine), but it’s stuff I don’t know really makes sense for kids to laugh about. The birdtaurs are, for instance, a string of jokes about fandom culture and social media. Comfortable Doug’s whole schtick is about how socially awkward he is. Kids might enjoy them, but it’s not humor that’s aimed at them.

It also sticks out to me that this show only lasts two seasons. It works? Mostly? There was only two seasons worth of story, so they had two seasons, and I know they could have stretched it more if they’d wanted to but it would have felt extraneous. And I appreciate it when a story knows exactly what it’s planning to do as an ending. At the end of season two, the story is over, there’s nowhere else for the story to go. It is a self-contained adventure. I appreciate that. I appreciate that there’s this silly-but-also-serious cartoon that I only need to invest two seasons worth of story for and then moving on, and feeling satisfied when it’s over.

So I enjoyed this. I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected, considering it’s a fun little series on Netflix that seemingly no one I know is talking about (although I had a similar experience with Kipo). I had fun, I felt like it was a series that knew when to end, and I had a lot of laughs along the way.

And now a lot of these songs are stuck in my head so I kind of have to deal with that.

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On Ukraine

 I have thoughts about Agravaine after reading Kingdom of Summer by Gillian Bradshaw, but I don’t know how to turn that into a full Note, other than what I already said in the Book Diary.

Also I have some thoughts on Saruman? Except that I feel as if there’s a Tumblr post that describes a lot of the things I’d talk about anyway, but I’m not on Tumblr for Lent

Am I allowed to do Saturday Notes on not fiction? I don’t know but I’m doing it anyway.

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On Ukraine

The past year or so, it feels like the world has gone insane. I mean, crazy stuff has been happening for a while, and I’ve seen people being more polarized about different topics for years. But the pandemic has made it worse. I thought I found a good crowd on Tumblr only for a large chunk of them to go absolutely rabid on the idea of vaccines and I’m just so infuriated that things like basic public health measures have become hot button topics and saying you took a vaccine for a virus that’s the cause of a worldwide pandemic is apparently a controversial statement. People are dividing over really stupid stuff, mostly without even bothering to understand or define the terms of what they’re arguing about.

So it’s a bit weird, but also amazing and relieving, to see people of all types agreeing that Vladimir Putin can shove it.

I remember thinking about a year ago that maybe, just maybe we’d all see what was happening in China, with President Winnie the Poop being a dictator and enforcing actual genocide through concentration camps in his country that people Left and Right would sort of unite against that. And to be fair, I have seen condemnation for it on the Left and Right, but it was hardly the uniting enmity that I was hoping for. 

But this? This is! Both Democrats and Republicans have made public proclamations calling for measures against Russia and to help Ukraine and its people. Our senator even tweeted that someone should assassinate Putin–which is a terrible idea, no matter how you slice it, you would think people would know we’re trying not to start a nuclear war here–but gosh someone cares. There are collections at Mass, I see people all across the Internet sharing links for places to donate, organizations both religious and secular are making displays of support, it’s dominating the news on both the Left and Right. This is…I don’t know, unheard of.

And I’m not going to be stupid and suggest that support for Ukraine is universal in the US. There are noticeable persons (on the Right I’ve noticed) who, for reasons completely beyond my comprehension, think Russia is doing the right thing. The argument I saw from someone on social media, which was quite stunning in its absolute idiocy, was that Russia had to invade Ukraine to prevent World War III, because NATO is corrupt and outdated and somehow the answer to this is assaulting foreign citizens, shelling cities, setting fire to nuclear power plants and firing on firefighters, and hiring assassins to kill high-profile targets, and arresting citizens at home who protest unjust invasion of neighbors. Any take on world events that is built on the notion that Putin is a reasonable man is doomed from the start. That there is a former president of our country who declared, on air, that Putin was brilliant to initiate a war should, in a remotely good timeline, be the last straw and I think that I’m going to lose it if I see another Trumpville tent while driving down a rural road.

I have also someone argue that it’s not our business and only going to cause trouble  in the long-run for US citizens, which is still monumentally dumb. But like, less so. Which is a low bar, I’ll admit.

And I think there’s definitely an argument to be made that yes, the reason that Western media is so zeroed in on this and not other wars that have been happening around the world for decades is because it’s happening to white people. Which isn’t actually entirely true, there are people of color in Ukraine, and they’re not having a great time right now because of racist BS in acceptance of refugees, apparently. But there is also a difference between civil war in Syria and the president of a nuclear superpower declaring that it’s time to invade his neighbor and threatening war on the rest of the world if they interfere.

I suspect that this won’t last. I suspect that we as a country are going to fall into squabbling again, and to be honest I think it will probably be because of the Right. We already have Republicans deciding that the real person at fault in all this is Biden, and though there have been a large number of prominent Republicans who have condemned Trump’s praise of Putin they’ll probably fall back in line and beg forgiveness, like they did after the insurrection attempt on January 6, just like they always do when faced with him being angry at them.

And let’s face it there are stupid people in our country who think Putin’s the Man because…I don’t know why. I just know that’s something we’re going to have to deal with sooner or later.

But for a short while in history, just about everyone I knew had basically the same opinion about a world event and a world figure. And that… that was kind of beautiful.

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