Hello guys, sorry I’ve been offline for so long. Things have been a bit rough, I lost my dog to cancer, was having minimum sleep and I had to take a time for myself outside from social media to keep stress in control.
But now I’m back for good 🙂
That being said, I’m really close to finishing the last commission I have in hand, so I decided to open new slots. I don’t know if I’ll be able to do another row of commissions before holidays (I’ll try), but this one is guaranteed to be delivered until the end of this month.
Thank you so much for being so patient with me, I have a few Reylo sketches to post tomorrow, I was recharging but I promise it’ll be worth the wait.
So far, for all the noise about TLJ supposedly taking big risks and cutting against expectations, they are actually on the safest, most well-trodden possible ground in terms of theme. If you look at the ST as a narrative model and ask what it is saying vs what the OT was saying, absolutely nothing about the current direction of the story should be surprising. It’s only surprising if you don’t look at it that way. It only seems risky because people think in terms of individual characters and stand-alone films rather than archetypes and three-act structure. Killing Han and Luke seems crazy if you think of it in terms of ‘sequel kills off Han Solo and Luke Skywalker!!’ but if you think of it as a new trilogy with a new hero’s journey and them as ‘the Father’ and ‘the Mentor’ it’s basically a forgone conclusion.
And, to me, I just don’t believe smart business executives and creatives who understand SW alike are going to look at the flagship film which is supposed to stand as the grand culmination of the entire saga and leave us with the final word on what SW is about and think ‘this is the time and place to fuck with the audience’. That’s a terrible idea. The place for a twist is the second act, not the climax (which we did get in TLJ). And, as I’ve said before, twists in SW are character twists which serve the overall theme, not bullshit to shock the audience (the Luke/Leia sibling reveal ass-pull was bad writing, but it’s a side-plot which exists to tie up loose ends and doesn’t undermine the narrative, so it doesn’t really matter).
As much as the esoteric theory enthusiasts lose sight of this, SW is a simple adventure franchise about the triumph of love. The overwhelming majority of the audience wants and (absolutely justifiably) expects a feel good happy ending. Disney and Lucasfilm know this. Failure to deliver on a positive, uplifted feeling about the whole Skywalker saga as people leave the cinema is guaranteed to hurt their bottom line.
Anyway, in the current media climate, it seems to me like staying true to the SW message of hope and radical forgiveness is more ‘edgy’ and counter cultural than some retribution=justice revenge fantasy or half-assed ‘realism’. Hope was considered cheesy and unfashionable in late seventies cinema, too, and I think serving up some of that old-1930s-serial optimism is actually part of why people loved Star Wars so much in the first place.
If you’d like to participate, please fill out this form by November 17th.
The exchange will work almost exactly as it did last year. The deadline is quite a bit sooner not only to allow more time to get cards sent, especially international ones, but because Hanukkah is ten days sooner this year!
How does it work?
The form does ask for your first name, email and mailing address. If you are not comfortable with providing this information, please do not feel pressured to participate.
18 and up please
There is no minimum. Send as many or as few cards as you have time/money/energy for.
There is a spot to indicate what winter holiday you celebrate, if any. (New Year’s Eve totally counts!)
I will collect information through November 17, then send out a spreadsheet with information.
If more than 24 people sign up (we had 43 in 2017!) I will divide the list into smaller groups. This limits the number of people anyone’s info is exposed to, as well as making it more likely that everyone on the list will receive a few cards.
Please have your Tumblr inbox open so that I can verify your signup.
Fill out this form to participate, and remember the November 17 deadline! Please let me know of any questions or concerns.
“I’m not a method actor. I like to stay focused on set but it’s not because I have a process that I’m imposing on everybody else. Sometimes you have to be more focused in between scenes because what’s happening is that, on something like Star Wars, it’s pure comedy in between takes. It’s stormtroopers running into walls because they can’t see through their helmets. So I don’t know where the intense thing came from.”
Reylo Source 