EII: ep 4 – Canon Folklore of the Old Republic, pt. 1

[00:00:01] Nicole, did you ever notice how the sign by Ace of Bass has really strange key changes?

[00:00:06] I did not, Mark. I'm a real person.

[00:00:08] Well, let me tell you about it. I'll let you talk about neuroscience gal di guc.

[00:00:12] Yes! I thought you'd never ask.

[00:00:13] This is the Never Mind the Music Podcast.

[00:00:15] We're one psychologist.

[00:00:17] And one musician.

[00:00:18] Deep dive into the songs you love.

[00:00:20] So you don't have to.

[00:00:21] And there's plenty of time to get off topic.

[00:00:23] From semi-charmed life to the way you move.

[00:00:25] And who could forget the crossroads?

[00:00:27] Is it THE crossroads or THE crossroads?

[00:00:29] Save it for the episode, Mark.

[00:00:31] Listen to Never Mind the Music.

[00:00:33] Wherever you get your podcasts.

[00:00:54] Welcome to the Star Wars Canon Timeline Podcast.

[00:00:57] I'm your host, Elisha, checking back in on the old republic part of the timeline,

[00:01:01] thousands of years before the films.

[00:01:03] And I am not alone.

[00:01:05] In a moment, I will be joined by Marilyn Arpaquilla,

[00:01:08] literary and history scholar extraordinaire,

[00:01:11] to talk through three Canon short stories

[00:01:13] in universe folklore set in the Old Republic.

[00:01:17] So we're going to talk about what happens in these stories.

[00:01:19] What's the key lore we can take away from them?

[00:01:22] And also really just who tells stories and why in a galaxy far, far away

[00:01:27] or one much closer to home.

[00:01:29] So first for the record, this was recorded in two parts.

[00:01:33] The discussion with Marilyn was recorded August 5th, 2024.

[00:01:37] And this intro and the outro were recorded September 5th, 2024.

[00:01:42] Usual disclaimer applies.

[00:01:44] Everything was true as far as we know at the time of recording.

[00:01:47] I'll make sure you're updated if anything changes with future releases.

[00:01:51] I also wanted to point out that I'm doing a new type of a new way

[00:01:56] of doing flashback episodes because just, I think,

[00:02:00] perhaps the way that it's going to mess with the timeline,

[00:02:03] the least is that if you're listening to this live,

[00:02:07] you'll have seen that another little mini episode will have dropped

[00:02:13] at the time of the release, you know, on the current date.

[00:02:18] And that is going to that episode's only going to be up for two weeks

[00:02:23] until the next episode drops.

[00:02:25] And that's just to help people find this episode further back

[00:02:29] in the timeline since most people don't seem to get notifications

[00:02:32] when episodes are backdated.

[00:02:34] So I will go into this a little bit more in that episode.

[00:02:41] But again, yeah, that's going to be taken down within two weeks.

[00:02:44] So if you're listening to this later, you will not see it in your timeline.

[00:02:47] It will be retired, which means that it will be available

[00:02:50] in perpetuity to Ken and Padawan subscribers and storyings.

[00:02:57] So we're going to give that a go, see how that works for the flashbacks.

[00:03:00] And if anyone has any opinions on any of the methods

[00:03:03] that I've tried with the flashback episodes, please let me know.

[00:03:07] But I think that this is going to be the easiest one.

[00:03:11] I also wanted to say something now we are earlier in the timeline

[00:03:16] than the Acolytes, but since this is the first episode I'm releasing

[00:03:18] since the leak that it seems that there are not continuing

[00:03:23] with the season two as of now.

[00:03:25] Obviously, I am super devastated about it, even more devastated

[00:03:29] by some of the horrible responses to that, you know,

[00:03:33] it's never OK to go after people online, whether they're cast or fans

[00:03:37] or anybody else.

[00:03:39] There are, for those of you who feel passionately about the show as I do,

[00:03:43] there are ways to show your support as, you know, Disney still hasn't made

[00:03:47] an official announcement, you know, it doesn't hurt to show support.

[00:03:50] Obviously, rewatching getting more people to watch is the best way.

[00:03:55] There's a petition going around.

[00:03:56] There are some other tips that I'll talk

[00:03:58] through a little bit more in the temporary episode

[00:04:02] that will be released alongside this one.

[00:04:05] OK, just one final note in the first part of my discussion with Marilyn,

[00:04:09] we refer to six stories that we will be covering,

[00:04:12] but we actually cover these stories over two episodes.

[00:04:16] So there's this episode and then part two will be coming out in two weeks.

[00:04:21] And today we are going to be talking about a Star Wars blood myth

[00:04:24] and two tales of the dread, wily Sith Lord Darth Caldoth.

[00:04:30] OK, let's begin.

[00:04:34] Welcome, Marilyn.

[00:04:36] Thank you for joining and weighing in with your thoughts on the two canon

[00:04:40] and ancient. Sorry, I just touched the mic.

[00:04:43] All right. Thank you for weighing in with your thoughts

[00:04:45] in the two canon ancient myths of Batu episode that we people can check

[00:04:49] that out in the first era section of the timeline.

[00:04:52] And I'm really glad that you're able to join and talk about these myths in person.

[00:04:56] That's wonderful to be here.

[00:04:57] Thank you for inviting me.

[00:04:59] Now, we always call you our favorite token scholar,

[00:05:01] but you obviously have you have a broader background

[00:05:05] in the study of like mythology and history.

[00:05:07] And do you want to summarize it for those who haven't met you yet?

[00:05:11] I'm using your quotes, Mets.

[00:05:13] Sure. Well, I I

[00:05:15] my advanced degree is in history, so that's where that whole piece comes from.

[00:05:19] But I taught courses for 35 years on and off at Colby College in Central

[00:05:24] Maine, and it took me a while to figure this out.

[00:05:27] But in retrospect, I realized that the common thread between them all

[00:05:31] was sacred story.

[00:05:33] So I started with Tolkien sources, and then I went on to

[00:05:39] women in myth and fairy tale, which was a big piece of that.

[00:05:43] And that's what kind of ties in with this.

[00:05:45] And then I did the religion of contemporary witchcraft

[00:05:48] and finally religious responses to Harry Potter.

[00:05:52] So you can also hear religion is something of a common theme.

[00:05:56] Yeah, particularly given that Tolkien was, you know,

[00:05:59] his Catholic faith was central to who he was and how he wrote

[00:06:03] and all those things.

[00:06:05] Would you see the Jedi and or Sith as a religion?

[00:06:09] That is a fascinating question.

[00:06:11] I know a lot of people do.

[00:06:13] From my perspective, I think it's more like a philosophy.

[00:06:19] You know, Buddhism.

[00:06:22] Is from a Buddhist perspective, it is not a religion

[00:06:25] because there's no deity.

[00:06:27] Now, you do have branches of Buddhism,

[00:06:30] right, the Tibetan Buddhism that have all kinds of,

[00:06:33] you know, images of deities.

[00:06:36] And those come from the folk traditions

[00:06:39] that were already there when the when the Buddhism began to spread and so forth.

[00:06:44] I don't think the Jedi are a religion

[00:06:46] because I've never heard them talk about deities.

[00:06:49] OK, never heard them pray prayers.

[00:06:52] I've never heard them.

[00:06:55] Making offerings.

[00:06:56] I mean, to my mind, if it's going to be religion,

[00:06:59] it could be a spiritual practice.

[00:07:01] No doubt about that.

[00:07:03] And I think a lot of people see it that way.

[00:07:06] But that's that's my take, you know, others will vary.

[00:07:09] Now, I said if I said another episode,

[00:07:12] I think if they have any deity, it's the force.

[00:07:16] Yeah, well, that's an interesting way to look at it, isn't it?

[00:07:19] And some contemplative practices

[00:07:23] practitioners today might say

[00:07:26] what most people refer to as God is, in fact, a force.

[00:07:31] You know, God is a verb and not a noun.

[00:07:33] God is not obviously the old man in the sky

[00:07:36] with white beard, etc., etc.

[00:07:38] And so one's experience of divine could be considered to be

[00:07:43] connecting with, you know, the force that binds us together

[00:07:47] and all the things that the Jedi have said about the force, too.

[00:07:51] So yeah, well, it's interesting you brought up Buddhism,

[00:07:54] maybe not on purpose.

[00:07:55] I mean, maybe not by accident because George Lucas famously

[00:07:59] that is the spiritual practice that he ties with the Jedi

[00:08:03] in his own thinking.

[00:08:05] And in his own thinking, let's emphasize that.

[00:08:09] Obviously, as I said, there are variations

[00:08:11] in our world of how people understand the practice Buddhism.

[00:08:14] Then George kind of brought his own spend in the mix.

[00:08:17] Yeah.

[00:08:19] And so in the ancient myths episode, we talked about the two stories

[00:08:22] and I called Silent Circle a myth and the skiff in the galleon a fable.

[00:08:28] Do you agree with that classification for those two?

[00:08:31] Certainly the Silent Circle is a myth.

[00:08:33] It seems to fit well to me.

[00:08:35] And the fable aspect of skiffing galleon,

[00:08:39] the tortoise and the hare, I think you talked about that yourself.

[00:08:43] Yeah.

[00:08:43] When you did that episode makes it so very much like a fable.

[00:08:48] I also kind of think of it as a legend.

[00:08:50] OK, because it seems to me it has the most

[00:08:55] tenable historical base, if you will.

[00:08:58] I think legends tie in with some kind of historical sense.

[00:09:03] OK. You know, it could have happened kind of thing.

[00:09:06] It was embroidered on something very

[00:09:10] different from what you come up with in the end,

[00:09:13] like I'm thinking of like Robin Hood.

[00:09:15] You know, the legends of Robin Hood.

[00:09:18] Right. There's a couple of possible historical origins.

[00:09:22] Right. And it certainly ties in with political figures we know are real, you know.

[00:09:26] Right. Exactly. Exactly.

[00:09:28] That kind of approach.

[00:09:30] So I think that's I might say about that.

[00:09:33] So what would you say is because, yeah,

[00:09:36] we'll talk about canon versus legends in Star Wars separately in a moment.

[00:09:40] But in general, what would you say is a difference between myths,

[00:09:43] fables, fairy tales and legends?

[00:09:46] Yeah.

[00:09:49] Starting with myth, this is a sacred story.

[00:09:52] Often explanatory and almost invariably will involve some form of deity

[00:09:58] or sacred being.

[00:10:00] So we talked today about the myth of alligators in the sewer,

[00:10:05] but that's that is more of a contemporary expression.

[00:10:09] Hmm. A folk tale is an oral tale in origin.

[00:10:16] There's no written element in its origin.

[00:10:18] It's something that people told to one another in small communities.

[00:10:23] It's often associated with local landmarks.

[00:10:26] So you could tell a folk tale about that strange looking hole in the stone

[00:10:30] near the lake is where author's horse stamped in the stone

[00:10:33] when he was defeating the monster that lived in the lake kind of thing.

[00:10:37] And you can have similar folk tales

[00:10:40] because of the tail types, which I'll get to in a minute,

[00:10:43] in different regions.

[00:10:45] And in one region, it'll involve a serpent and a pond.

[00:10:49] And another region, it'll involve a genie and a desert

[00:10:52] because of the environments.

[00:10:55] Right.

[00:10:56] So that's the kind of thing that that folk tales will often draw from.

[00:11:01] More often than not, they're about folks like us.

[00:11:03] They're not necessarily about, you know, princes and

[00:11:07] and queens and that sort of thing.

[00:11:08] And more often than not, there is some kind of moral

[00:11:13] involved in a folk tale.

[00:11:16] OK. Now, the fairy tale, by contrast, is a literary form.

[00:11:21] So we didn't really have, at least what scholars consider to be genuine

[00:11:25] fairy tales until about the 1600s in Europe.

[00:11:30] And it's often based on the folk tales.

[00:11:33] On the oral traditions and on those tale types.

[00:11:37] But they alter the details often to reflect more upper class audiences

[00:11:41] because, of course, again written, so it assumes literate.

[00:11:46] Now, you can still tell a fairy tale orally, obviously,

[00:11:50] but it was this 16th, early 1700s period when people

[00:11:55] who were not of the folk started writing these things down

[00:12:00] and embroidering them.

[00:12:03] Legend, as I said.

[00:12:05] Oh, and another thing, sorry about fairy tales.

[00:12:08] I'm with Tolkien on this one.

[00:12:10] If it really is a genuine fairy tale, it should have a happy ending.

[00:12:13] But can I ask a question about that?

[00:12:15] Do you think then that, for example, Hans Christian Andersen's

[00:12:19] The Little Mermaid, which if anyone who doesn't know,

[00:12:22] it does not have the Disney ending, would you consider that a fairy tale?

[00:12:27] Yes and no.

[00:12:30] It's almost like a short novelette.

[00:12:32] I would say.

[00:12:33] OK.

[00:12:36] He's definitely using drawing upon that

[00:12:42] fairy tale once upon a time.

[00:12:44] But as I think he were alluding to,

[00:12:47] he doesn't always have the happy ending.

[00:12:49] In fact, most of his stories are pretty dark,

[00:12:51] which I think reflect him personally, possibly,

[00:12:55] you know, his environment and so forth.

[00:12:57] So I think that's an example of a writer taking a literary form

[00:13:02] and using it for different reasons.

[00:13:06] I mean, you could also argue that there are there are a lot of feminist

[00:13:10] fairy tales now, which are clearly intended

[00:13:13] to have a particular perspective and to be containing a message

[00:13:16] in addition to whatever the original story was, often completely changing the story

[00:13:21] as a means of conveying

[00:13:25] some other belief philosophy, whatever you want to call it.

[00:13:29] To emphasize, to make a point.

[00:13:31] Yeah. Right. Exactly.

[00:13:32] And I don't know what kinds of points Hans Christian Anderson was trying to make.

[00:13:38] Life sucks.

[00:13:39] And then you. Yeah.

[00:13:40] Right. Exactly.

[00:13:42] When you're a very someone else.

[00:13:43] Fine, if that's how you want to present life.

[00:13:47] But I think Tolkien was right that the genuine fairy tale has

[00:13:51] what he called the catastrophe, the unexpected happy ending

[00:13:57] in the midst of what seems to be a tragedy.

[00:13:59] Mm hmm. Yes.

[00:14:01] Yes. Or Frodo getting the ring to Mount Doom and going falling into the pit with it.

[00:14:06] Mm hmm.

[00:14:07] So legend, as I mentioned, could have a possible historical basis,

[00:14:11] but it's almost ever the true story.

[00:14:14] And they're embellished to fit the rhetoric of the times

[00:14:18] and give people senses of adventures.

[00:14:21] So I mentioned Robin Hood, Dick Turpin is another one.

[00:14:25] And, you know, the Lord Hans has a podcast about the

[00:14:28] the new adventure of Dick Turpin.

[00:14:30] So people want to understand that from that perspective.

[00:14:33] Go take a listen to those.

[00:14:35] Very Robin Hood meets what we do in the shadows.

[00:14:39] Yeah. A lot of people have mentioned other series

[00:14:42] that they are reminded of by Dick Turpin, which I find interesting.

[00:14:45] I haven't heard of any of them or watched any of them.

[00:14:48] So I can't really comment on that.

[00:14:50] But it just fascinates me that

[00:14:53] we want to make ballads and plays and

[00:14:57] retelling of stories about criminals.

[00:15:01] Mm hmm. Yeah.

[00:15:03] In basic fact, and the actual story of Dick Turpin, which we have,

[00:15:06] we have a lot of historical evidence about him.

[00:15:09] It was not a good story.

[00:15:11] Not somebody I'd want to hang out with.

[00:15:13] Thank you very much.

[00:15:14] I think it's where he talks about

[00:15:16] and this is taking place before this in the timeline of this podcast.

[00:15:20] So some people will hear this later,

[00:15:21] but I talked about with the acolyte

[00:15:24] that the showrunner talked about wanting to tell a story

[00:15:28] about the Sith because of that sense of freedom,

[00:15:31] that sense of doing what you want.

[00:15:34] And that's something that people yearn for.

[00:15:37] Often for valid reasons, you know, like,

[00:15:39] like she talked about being a gay woman, you know?

[00:15:42] Right, right.

[00:15:43] And like I understand those, you know,

[00:15:45] are you an outlaw because society says you are.

[00:15:48] Right.

[00:15:49] Or are you genuinely someone who is, you know,

[00:15:51] harming people and doing horrible things for the sake of your own ends

[00:15:54] and to feel powerful?

[00:15:55] I mean, freedom.

[00:15:58] What does that mean if it means ultimately the power

[00:16:00] to be able to overcome everybody?

[00:16:02] Well, that's something else we're talking about there.

[00:16:05] Yeah, yeah.

[00:16:06] So the fable, a story created entirely

[00:16:09] for the purposes of expressing a moral or lesson,

[00:16:12] you know, ease up the fables.

[00:16:15] It almost hinges on metaphor in a way,

[00:16:19] but it reveals itself quite openly.

[00:16:22] Metaphor tries to be, you know,

[00:16:24] somewhat circumspect about it.

[00:16:26] So I mentioned tail types.

[00:16:28] Tail types are things that anthropologists

[00:16:32] and other scholars have collected for,

[00:16:36] oh, over a century now.

[00:16:38] And more or less organized and call us

[00:16:42] into this art form of the fable.

[00:16:43] So there are no Thompson with their tail types index

[00:16:45] or the ATU, which if you go online,

[00:16:48] you can actually find some online versions of this.

[00:16:50] And so they take particular stories

[00:16:54] that they have collected or seen or heard

[00:16:57] from multiple communities

[00:16:59] and recognize the essence of the story.

[00:17:02] So for example, brothers who were turned into birds

[00:17:05] is tail type 451

[00:17:07] and that's where the youngest sister saves her brothers.

[00:17:11] OK.

[00:17:12] So there's so many that they have a whole tail type for it.

[00:17:16] Exactly, exactly.

[00:17:18] And that's a very specific one.

[00:17:19] There are others about, you know,

[00:17:21] youngest sibling saves or whatever.

[00:17:24] And there was a bit of a flavor of that

[00:17:27] in one of the stories that I guess we'll be discussing

[00:17:29] in another time.

[00:17:31] But my favorite example of how that works

[00:17:34] is the animal husband myth.

[00:17:37] Tail type 425C.

[00:17:40] Give you an idea about how organized this is the 19th century

[00:17:44] when everybody was all into categorizing and organizing

[00:17:46] and they had to chop off a toe to make it fit will so be it.

[00:17:50] So these things are more varied than people

[00:17:54] who were trying to organize them tend to imply.

[00:17:58] So the interesting thing about animal husband

[00:18:01] is that you have the basic tail type

[00:18:03] and in each different culture,

[00:18:06] the animal is a different animal.

[00:18:09] So in China, the beast is a dragon.

[00:18:12] In Africa, the beast is a snake.

[00:18:16] And we have multiple stories

[00:18:19] that are familiar in Western culture.

[00:18:21] The mythic form of the animal husband story

[00:18:23] is psyche and Cupid.

[00:18:25] Right. Right.

[00:18:27] The folktale version east of the sun west of the moon

[00:18:30] is a Norse folktale.

[00:18:33] And so in that case, the monster is a polar bear.

[00:18:37] The fairy tale version, very famous, very popularly,

[00:18:40] these states beauty and the beast.

[00:18:42] Tail is all this time.

[00:18:43] Exactly.

[00:18:44] And the interesting thing is you look at the illustrators

[00:18:47] and you can't really they had all different kinds of ideas

[00:18:51] through time of what the beast actually looked like.

[00:18:53] It's kind of a fascinating study.

[00:18:56] And it doesn't come as a legend

[00:18:59] because there's really not a whole lot there

[00:19:01] that is historical in nature.

[00:19:02] I mean, you can't say, oh, yeah, you know,

[00:19:04] my uncle Sam knew this critter that lived in a palace

[00:19:07] that was surrounded by magic.

[00:19:09] You know, it doesn't work.

[00:19:12] But then Apuleus, who was a Roman author

[00:19:17] in the turn of the millennia, if you will,

[00:19:23] wrote a version that most people

[00:19:26] turn to when they talk about the myth of Psyche and Cupid.

[00:19:30] But I would argue that his is actually a novel form

[00:19:34] because he's taken the deities involved,

[00:19:39] in his case, Romans, so Venus and Cupid

[00:19:42] and kind of turned them into satires of Roman matrons

[00:19:47] and upper class society and so forth.

[00:19:49] Because he had a bone to pick

[00:19:51] and he had a religious bone to pick.

[00:19:53] He wanted to make the gods look ridiculous

[00:19:55] because he felt they were all nonsense

[00:19:57] and he was actually an acolyte of Isis,

[00:20:01] who was the universal one true deity.

[00:20:03] So, you know, all kinds of agendas

[00:20:06] in the retelling of this basic story.

[00:20:09] And of course, nowadays, you know, Beauty and the Beast

[00:20:12] had a TV series for a while.

[00:20:15] So it just I still watch that.

[00:20:17] Yeah, I never watched it, but I was interested

[00:20:19] when I saw it and the beast there looks kind of.

[00:20:23] Right. It's a very this was what you're saying.

[00:20:25] It's a very modern retelling for to put the emphasis

[00:20:28] on societal ills, basically.

[00:20:32] Yeah, right. Exactly.

[00:20:34] And the women in France who wrote the fairy tale version

[00:20:39] Madame Horace de Beaumont and her fellow women

[00:20:43] were part of the salon culture of the early 1700s in France.

[00:20:47] And they were writing a subversive message.

[00:20:50] Right. Because in the original story, she had suitors,

[00:20:54] but she didn't want any of them.

[00:20:56] And so her older sisters who were mean and jealous,

[00:20:59] Yadda Yadda, one of them married a wit

[00:21:01] and one of them married a very wealthy person

[00:21:03] and they were both miserable.

[00:21:05] Whereas Beauty is happy with her beast

[00:21:09] before he even transforms into handsome prince

[00:21:11] because he has a good heart.

[00:21:13] Right. Right.

[00:21:14] So young women of the court.

[00:21:16] Nice guys win, yeah.

[00:21:17] Young women of the court, you know,

[00:21:18] don't be fooled by wit and jewels.

[00:21:20] Go for the kind guy because he's the one.

[00:21:24] So yeah, this gets even more complicated in Star Wars terms

[00:21:27] because then we also have what I've talked about previously,

[00:21:30] canon versus legends in Star Wars terms.

[00:21:33] So I think for the sake of these episodes,

[00:21:37] I am going to avoid using legends to refer to that,

[00:21:42] which is not canon in Star Wars storytelling.

[00:21:44] I'm going to use the extended universe,

[00:21:45] which is basically the same thing.

[00:21:48] So canon versus extended universe,

[00:21:50] because it's hard not to use the word legends,

[00:21:53] especially talking about this group of stories

[00:21:55] because we're pulling from two books.

[00:21:57] The first book is Myths and Fables,

[00:22:00] and that's the same book that the other two myths,

[00:22:04] the myth in the fable slash legend from the first

[00:22:06] dawn of the Jedi, you know, the ancient myth of Batu episode

[00:22:10] that comes from this myths and fables book.

[00:22:13] And in this episode,

[00:22:16] we're going to talk about two stories from there.

[00:22:18] One is a flood story called Vengeful Waves

[00:22:20] and a Sith story called Gaze of Stone.

[00:22:24] And then the second book is called Dark Legends.

[00:22:27] So well, there we go.

[00:22:29] Legends right in the title.

[00:22:30] We're going to talk about four stories from that book.

[00:22:33] The Sith stories, The Gilded Cage, A Life Immortal

[00:22:36] and The Sleep of Ages and a werewolf story, Blood Moon

[00:22:41] and The Sleep of Ages, by the ways,

[00:22:43] from the target edition of Dark Legends,

[00:22:46] which is a bit more difficult to find.

[00:22:49] So, yeah, these are canon stories.

[00:22:53] They're not extended universe,

[00:22:54] but that doesn't mean that they're true fully, at least.

[00:23:00] And let me just ask a question here.

[00:23:02] When you say they're not true,

[00:23:04] are you saying they're not true or they're not factual?

[00:23:07] OK, there we go.

[00:23:08] Factual, that's a better way to put it.

[00:23:10] It's an important distinction that I make

[00:23:11] when I taught my courses

[00:23:12] that something can be true without being factual.

[00:23:17] Right. So the way that it was put in George Mann, by the way,

[00:23:22] he's the one who wrote all these stories

[00:23:23] that we're talking about.

[00:23:25] And he in an interview in the Tales of Enlightenment

[00:23:28] short story collection, which is another thing

[00:23:31] I've been reading for the hyper public.

[00:23:34] He wrote a lot of hyper public stories, George Mann.

[00:23:37] But he said in this interview,

[00:23:39] Michael Siglain, creative director of Lucasfilm Publishing,

[00:23:43] thought it would be great if there were legends

[00:23:44] and oral stories within the Star Wars galaxy.

[00:23:47] The kind of stories Luke and Leia would have told at bedtime

[00:23:50] like Grimm's fairy tales.

[00:23:52] We didn't want to disabuse official lore.

[00:23:54] So while there would be a kernel of truth in each of the stories,

[00:23:57] the retelling of them over the years

[00:23:59] might have twisted them slightly.

[00:24:02] That's classic example of how a tale type

[00:24:07] becomes altered.

[00:24:09] Yeah, retelling and through cultural change

[00:24:11] and the things that we were talking about.

[00:24:13] Yeah. And I actually, I did not read that before

[00:24:15] doing the kind of myths of that too,

[00:24:17] but I did say that we should interpret them in that way.

[00:24:20] So I think he did a good job of conveying that through his collections.

[00:24:25] Are you familiar with JF Beerline or the book Parallel Myths?

[00:24:30] No, I've not encountered it.

[00:24:31] No, it's just basically a collection and light analysis

[00:24:36] of similar folklore from around the world.

[00:24:37] It was published in 1994.

[00:24:40] And he says in there,

[00:24:42] it is generally agreed that myth is largely

[00:24:44] the product of oral history passed down from generation to generation.

[00:24:48] As myth begins with the creation of the world,

[00:24:50] it is truly a quote unquote a history of the prehistory.

[00:24:54] Do you agree with that sentiment?

[00:24:56] More or less, yes.

[00:24:58] I think maybe the word myth is being used a little more lightly than

[00:25:02] right. Some we just discussed.

[00:25:04] Right. But I understand what he's saying here that, yes,

[00:25:07] the stories told around campfires become

[00:25:12] part of the culture, the particular group.

[00:25:15] And as they expand, the culture changes,

[00:25:17] they the stories change their form, but not their basic content.

[00:25:21] Yeah. Yeah.

[00:25:23] And it's appropriate that sort of phrasing

[00:25:26] I actually went there because I was reviewing his section on flood myths.

[00:25:30] And I just I had dog ear that page.

[00:25:32] I was like, why do I doge the page?

[00:25:34] I was like, oh, this quote.

[00:25:37] But it's appropriate because we're talking about the old republic.

[00:25:40] You know, we're moving into an area of

[00:25:45] from prehistory, which was the last two myths.

[00:25:48] You know, I'm just calling the myths loosely now to be simple

[00:25:52] into now what is early history.

[00:25:55] So the era that we're discussing today stretches from 25,000

[00:26:00] to 1,000 years before the original Star Wars movie or even the acolyte,

[00:26:04] which is just, you know, 100 years before the original, basically.

[00:26:09] So like our early history, you know,

[00:26:12] we don't actually even have recorded history of the stretches back that long.

[00:26:15] The events and facts and figures from this time period

[00:26:18] can be, you know, would be hazy at best.

[00:26:22] But the stories are phrased as though, you know, they're telling the truth

[00:26:26] the same way when we gather around a campfire and tell legends.

[00:26:30] Yeah, it's an interesting concept prehistory.

[00:26:32] And historians who work in that era are now looking for different terms

[00:26:37] to use it because it's easy to dismiss it as, oh, well, that was prehistory.

[00:26:42] And, you know, when history begins, that's when the real important stuff happens and so on.

[00:26:47] So it's nice to have these vast stretches of time

[00:26:52] to see what kind of stories come out of it.

[00:26:55] Right. And but also to keep in the back of your mind that

[00:27:00] these stories are, for lack of a better word, dressed up in

[00:27:05] the kinds of things as we've heard earlier that Luke and Leia would have heard at bedtime.

[00:27:10] So, you know, maybe they were flying around on pterodactyls,

[00:27:14] but, you know, for Luke and Leia they got to be flying around in spaceships.

[00:27:17] Right? So, right.

[00:27:18] They actually do have versions of pterodactyls we'll mention in these stories.

[00:27:23] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:27:26] But then, of course, you get the question of, well, how did they survive?

[00:27:30] Why did they survive?

[00:27:31] And that gets into the whole what is the meaning of this story

[00:27:34] for the culture, which is always a fascinating question.

[00:27:37] Yeah. Yeah.

[00:27:38] So the reason that George Mann got tapped to do this,

[00:27:41] he said in a Star Wars dot com interview in, he says,

[00:27:44] in 2017, I wrote a novel called Which Would?

[00:27:47] A spooky mystery story that featured a fictional Saxon mythology

[00:27:50] that was tied to modern day crimes.

[00:27:52] And so when Michael Siglain, the creative director,

[00:27:57] Lucasfilm Publishing, when he read the book, he was like, oh, yeah,

[00:28:01] you got to come do this for Star Wars, too, basically.

[00:28:05] We want that.

[00:28:06] And we'll be back to talk about the Star Wars flood myth,

[00:28:10] vengeful waves, right after a quick break.

[00:28:26] Yeah. And I think I actually noticed so the first story we're going to talk about

[00:28:31] is the least like the others.

[00:28:32] It's the flood story, vengeful waves.

[00:28:34] And I noticed I think you and I took the most notes about this one.

[00:28:39] But I think it's interesting that flood myths, they pop up

[00:28:43] like countless times across cultures.

[00:28:45] You obviously know as arc is a very prominent one

[00:28:49] in our Western culture, there's a Zeus flood myth.

[00:28:53] There's Manu and the Fish in India.

[00:28:54] There's Babylonian, Hawaiian, Aztec, Inca, Egyptian,

[00:28:59] tons of different Native American flood myths, including

[00:29:02] the Potawatomi creation myth is also a flood myth.

[00:29:06] So why do you think this particular type of myth is so ubiquitous?

[00:29:12] Well, there's one theory that this is cultural memory of

[00:29:16] the end of the final ice age when the earth warmed.

[00:29:21] And so a lot of the glacial ice was melting and the sea levels were rising.

[00:29:25] And I believe I'm correct in saying that there are.

[00:29:30] You can look and see, you know, sometimes ancient remains.

[00:29:35] If you know what to look for.

[00:29:37] At one point, the continent of Europe was connected by a land bridge

[00:29:42] to England, Scotland, you know, that whole mass of islands there.

[00:29:48] Doggerland, they called it.

[00:29:50] People who are looking back and realizing this.

[00:29:52] His dark materials, by the way, preserves that in their alternate reality.

[00:29:56] But sorry. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Very interesting.

[00:29:59] Yeah, they didn't do it in the show, but it's in the books.

[00:30:01] And so you get stories of the sunken cities or

[00:30:07] at lines of the church below the waves.

[00:30:10] And if you listen, you can hear the bells ring or there's the Welsh story of

[00:30:15] the guard who got drunk one night and was not on guard at the seawall.

[00:30:20] And so he didn't have time to warn the people on the sea.

[00:30:22] Washington and everybody was drowned.

[00:30:24] I've been to the marshes in central

[00:30:29] Cumbria where that story is supposedly located, which is the Welsh

[00:30:33] name for Wales for anyone. Oh, sorry. Yes.

[00:30:36] Yes.

[00:30:38] So there you have an example of, I don't know.

[00:30:42] Do you call it a myth in its origins?

[00:30:44] Becoming a local folk tale to explain why you have this boggy area here.

[00:30:51] And that turns up in Susan Cooper's series, The Darkest Rising, to very good effect.

[00:30:57] So these stories get used over and over and over.

[00:31:00] But I love that series growing up.

[00:31:02] Oh, it's a wonderful series.

[00:31:04] I think that that's what I usually think of when I think of why flood myths,

[00:31:09] why flood stories.

[00:31:11] And, you know, that's the basis, of course, as you were mentioning for Atlantis,

[00:31:16] you know, Plato's imagined tale.

[00:31:20] And people usually seem to use that form of the story as some kind of a moral judgment.

[00:31:27] Yeah. In this case, for sure.

[00:31:30] You know, bad bad things, bad things are not supposed to happen

[00:31:33] to good people. Therefore, this bad thing happened.

[00:31:36] Therefore, they must not have been good.

[00:31:38] I don't agree with that calculus, but yeah, it often shows up in these sorts of things.

[00:31:43] In in Native American myth, it's often the water is often a portal

[00:31:48] to the world in which we live now.

[00:31:51] Lovely.

[00:31:52] And so it's it's often tied to creation stories.

[00:31:55] So I know there are others where you like pass through.

[00:31:58] I can't remember which tribe it is.

[00:31:59] You like pass through five layers eventually getting to this to this world.

[00:32:05] There's a part of me myth where, you know, the original man

[00:32:10] is helped by animals, particularly in muskrat to start to build land

[00:32:15] and build right on Island, which is the potterman,

[00:32:17] potterman word for North America.

[00:32:20] And, you know, so it's interesting that it's there.

[00:32:24] It's and I wonder I can't speak for all tribes,

[00:32:28] but the Pottawatomie history is tied to woods and water.

[00:32:32] So right, right.

[00:32:33] And I think maybe it's a different approach.

[00:32:35] Yeah, I think the DNA are the ones who have the legend of the five levels.

[00:32:39] Yeah, there's a few tribes.

[00:32:41] Yeah, there's the DNA being what some people call the Navajo.

[00:32:44] And, you know, they're surrounded not by water or by rights

[00:32:48] in that particular landscape.

[00:32:50] So it would make sense that they might not have a water based story like this one.

[00:32:54] Yeah.

[00:32:55] But in the case of this story that we're talking about,

[00:32:58] vengeful waves, it's set on a primarily predominantly water planet,

[00:33:03] Glee and some, which is in the Jaller system in the mid rim.

[00:33:08] And yeah, so actually, so George Mann, fun story about him

[00:33:11] is he seems to be buddies with Kevin Scott,

[00:33:14] who's a very prolific Star Wars writer.

[00:33:17] And so when he got brought in and started,

[00:33:21] these were his first stories,

[00:33:22] he started to write for Star Wars.

[00:33:24] But as I said, he's now been doing a lot more,

[00:33:26] especially in the High Republic.

[00:33:27] And he and Kevin Scott started to compare notes

[00:33:31] and they started to put Easter eggs for each other's stories

[00:33:34] in each other's stories.

[00:33:36] So before he published this vengeful wave story,

[00:33:41] Kevin Scott wrote a little reference

[00:33:45] to an Atlantis like myth in Choose Your Destiny

[00:33:48] and Obi Wan and Anakin adventure

[00:33:51] to give me a good starting point, he says.

[00:33:53] And I jumped on that building out from the work he'd already done.

[00:33:57] So this Choose Your Adventure book is actually

[00:34:01] it's set during the prequel era, so I'm not going to talk about

[00:34:06] the plot and all of that.

[00:34:08] But Marilyn, would you mind reading

[00:34:12] the excerpt from there about this planet?

[00:34:15] Glee and Glee.

[00:34:15] Sure.

[00:34:16] It's beautiful.

[00:34:18] Anakin exclaimed as the shuttle dipped into Glee and Selma's atmosphere.

[00:34:23] Obi Wan agreed of veritable paradise.

[00:34:27] Crystal blue seas stretched below them, dotted by tiny tropical islands.

[00:34:33] The planet had no major land masses,

[00:34:35] which meant no one ever really went there.

[00:34:38] The denizens of Glee and Selma had little interest

[00:34:41] in trading with the galaxy at large

[00:34:42] and the planet had yet to become a tourist trap.

[00:34:47] It's handful of beaches shimming with golden sand were untouched

[00:34:51] and crested reptavians soared through the sapphire skies.

[00:34:56] This is Kit Fisto's home, right?

[00:34:58] Anakin asked us the shuttle skim the water.

[00:35:01] Obi Wan nodded, yes.

[00:35:03] And the Tolans are primary species, dwelling largely beneath the waves,

[00:35:07] although some and Selma still survive.

[00:35:10] And Selma, land dwellers, unable to breathe underwater.

[00:35:15] Anakin gazed over the boundless oceans, not much land to go around.

[00:35:21] Obi Wan nodded, it does put them at something of a disadvantage, yes.

[00:35:26] Legend has it there used to be a vast continent teaming with life

[00:35:31] that sank to the seabed millennia ago.

[00:35:34] It's certainly a big planet, Anakin said.

[00:35:37] Yeah, so that key set millennial ago.

[00:35:42] So that story that you just read from is 26 BBY.

[00:35:46] So that means this is set sometime before like 2026 BBY.

[00:35:50] So early in the old republic, I would probably,

[00:35:54] I would guess even before that, I imagine.

[00:35:58] But there's also the reference in there to the,

[00:36:01] it's not a tourist trap yet.

[00:36:03] But we do find out Woody Harrelson's character from the solo movie,

[00:36:08] Tobias Beckett is from this planet and he's human.

[00:36:11] So humans do obviously come and settle there.

[00:36:14] We do find out another show that there are tours going on there.

[00:36:20] So tourism does hit the planet.

[00:36:22] So sad, but this is long before that.

[00:36:25] I think, yeah, so in the Clone Wars they talk about this planet

[00:36:29] and they apparently the team had concept art depicting the Nautolans

[00:36:33] living in cities on the backs of enormous turtles

[00:36:36] that surface for breath every few centuries.

[00:36:41] Giving like light discworld vibes or...

[00:36:44] Oh yes, yes.

[00:36:45] Well, and also Hindu vibes and you know,

[00:36:49] turtles holding up earths and civilizations is a common theme.

[00:36:55] You mentioned pterodactyls before.

[00:36:57] They in Star Wars lore, there's different types of what we might call pterodactyls

[00:37:02] and they're called reptavians.

[00:37:03] I thought that was the question.

[00:37:05] Yeah, it's a good name for it.

[00:37:07] You can hear it.

[00:37:09] And yeah, so the Naut...

[00:37:10] So there's the two races here.

[00:37:12] So we have to talk about who these, what these races are, their backgrounds.

[00:37:16] The Nautolans, they're the ones that they said live underwater.

[00:37:19] Probably the most famous example of that is Kit Fisto,

[00:37:22] who's an era from, sorry, Jedi from era four.

[00:37:27] We also talked in the Young Jedi Adventure Season One episode about Rick Togano,

[00:37:32] who is a sky skimmer in that show, who taught the kids how to do that.

[00:37:37] And so they're amphibian.

[00:37:39] They're generally laid back, but they can be fierce when pushed to fight.

[00:37:43] There's...

[00:37:44] Sometimes they veer a little uncomfortably close to Jamaican stereotyping,

[00:37:48] to be honest.

[00:37:49] They have, you know, they don't have dreadlocks.

[00:37:53] They have, they call them tendrils.

[00:37:54] And that is actually a cool thing, a cool aspect of them.

[00:37:58] They're highly sensitive olfactory receptors.

[00:38:02] So they can use to sense chemicals, also pheromones of other people.

[00:38:08] So this helps them to interpret emotions better.

[00:38:13] And so they're very good empaths.

[00:38:14] And apparently their own language, Nautila,

[00:38:17] involves the use of these pheromones to communicate as well,

[00:38:20] in addition to verbal and motion.

[00:38:24] They are often green, not always.

[00:38:27] They have big black eyes so that they can see in the depths of the ocean.

[00:38:32] And their blood can be red or green, says Wikipedia.

[00:38:36] And it's like a book that I'm pretty sure only lists them as having green blood.

[00:38:40] So it's just one of those, you know, we'll squint and sure.

[00:38:44] Definitely green, maybe also red.

[00:38:47] And they also, they're well suited to withstanding extreme environments.

[00:38:53] They are, yeah, I guess going along with this empath vibe,

[00:38:58] they like to say hello and goodbye by pressing cheek against cheek.

[00:39:02] So they're generally like kind of a more well-liked group in the galaxy

[00:39:06] versus the Anselmi who are seen as bigots

[00:39:10] because they call the Neltole and skill heads.

[00:39:12] But I have questions I'll bring up later about

[00:39:17] whether there's a little bigotry going both ways.

[00:39:19] But yeah, from the story, they say the Anselmi, although resembling their cousins,

[00:39:24] could easily be told apart to the user their blue flesh and smooth pates

[00:39:28] which were marked only by a pair of twitching antennae.

[00:39:33] Only their squatter, they have only four fingers per hand

[00:39:36] and three toes per foot and thin tails.

[00:39:39] And yeah, the supposedly less bigoted Neltole

[00:39:44] is called the Anselmi primitive savages.

[00:39:47] Kit Fisto himself said those words.

[00:39:51] And there was going to be an Anselmi on screen.

[00:39:55] There's going to be Dar-Sana and Anselmi senator

[00:39:58] was going to be in episode two, Attack of the Clones.

[00:40:00] But she got cut, but she is in the novelization.

[00:40:04] So you see them a lot less.

[00:40:06] There are many fewer of them in the galaxy it seems.

[00:40:09] For reasons which we will discover as we explore the story.

[00:40:12] Right, right.

[00:40:13] And I also wonder if they're painted as poor.

[00:40:16] So even if, even though their numbers are less,

[00:40:18] maybe they also have less means to be traveling around.

[00:40:22] Well, as we heard, there's not a lot of landmass, right?

[00:40:25] There's just lots of little islands.

[00:40:27] Yeah.

[00:40:28] Now I'm thinking Earthsea.

[00:40:30] Yeah, true.

[00:40:32] Yeah, so when I was talking in the cannabis of Batu,

[00:40:36] the part of the skiff in the Galleon where they're just going

[00:40:39] and going and going into the unknown, that reminded me a lot of Earthsea.

[00:40:44] I guess it was supposed to invoke the sea.

[00:40:48] Do you want to read the summary of the story,

[00:40:52] which I have to thank Wikipedia for and I edited it.

[00:40:56] Sure thing.

[00:40:58] For thousands of years, the two amphibious races,

[00:41:01] the Natolans and Anselmi,

[00:41:02] lived peacefully on the planet Gleoncel,

[00:41:05] progressing from cave dwellers to builders of spectacular underwater cities.

[00:41:10] However, tensions began to rise as the Anselmi nation

[00:41:13] flourished and their needs grew.

[00:41:15] The Natolans were generous and gave the Anselmi some of their territory.

[00:41:19] The Anselmi took the territory and continued to grow and flourish.

[00:41:22] As time went on, the Anselmi continued to expand

[00:41:25] and competed for resources with the Natolans.

[00:41:28] Some Anselmi simply wished to take what they needed,

[00:41:30] increasingly believing that the Natolans to be weak and ignorant.

[00:41:34] Knowing that war with the Natolans would be unwise,

[00:41:37] the Anselmi emperors instead decided to claim ownership

[00:41:40] of the lands above the sea.

[00:41:42] In the years that followed, the Anselmi expanded over the vast island,

[00:41:46] building temples and inspired cities and dams and dikes to protect it all.

[00:41:51] Ever expanding, the Anselmi constructed great dams around their island,

[00:41:55] pushing back the ocean and claiming more land for themselves.

[00:41:59] The Natolans sent warnings that the Anselmi were out of balance

[00:42:02] and risked angering the ocean spirit,

[00:42:04] but the warnings went unheard.

[00:42:06] Then the ocean spirit rose against them and sent tidal waves and storms

[00:42:10] until the dams broke and flooded the Anselmi island.

[00:42:14] Balance had been restored, but only a handful of Anselmi survived.

[00:42:18] And now no longer able to breathe underwater,

[00:42:21] their territory had been reduced to the little land left.

[00:42:25] So I have to say as a side note, just reading this from the Dutch perspective

[00:42:29] of this story and how they are like,

[00:42:31] you should not reclaim land from the sea, respect the sea.

[00:42:34] I'm like, whoop.

[00:42:36] Yeah, that is sort of interesting, isn't it?

[00:42:40] Just build better dikes, I don't know.

[00:42:42] Well, I have some biological questions here concerning how they...

[00:42:49] Breathing underwater, breathing air, how do they make this transition

[00:42:53] and then they eventually lost the breathing underwater?

[00:42:56] I mean, we're talking real fast evolution there.

[00:42:58] Yeah, so, I mean, okay, we can start with that question,

[00:43:02] is how much of this is true?

[00:43:04] And that is something like...

[00:43:06] That is a question I have.

[00:43:07] Did the Anselmi ever actually live underwater?

[00:43:10] Or are there just fewer of them because there's less land?

[00:43:12] And maybe there was warring.

[00:43:14] Yeah, no, that's an interesting question.

[00:43:17] I think we are agreeing that the Natolans are the ones who told the story.

[00:43:21] Yes, I think so.

[00:43:22] So it has to be from their perspective as to...

[00:43:28] Well, I mean you could call it an origin story, I suppose.

[00:43:30] And one of the questions it proposes to answer is why are there so few Anselmi

[00:43:36] compared to the Natolans?

[00:43:39] One wonders, as you say, were they ever both living under the ocean?

[00:43:43] Were they ever one being, one culture, one biological entity?

[00:43:53] And from the descriptions and everything, if they were,

[00:43:57] that must have been a very long time ago.

[00:43:59] And evolutionarily, this other group developed.

[00:44:04] So again, thinking and harking back to our Earth stories of evolution,

[00:44:08] of fish crawling out of the water and onto the land.

[00:44:11] Because I think in looking at these at all times,

[00:44:13] we have to remember that the ultimate author is a human from Earth.

[00:44:17] Right, from our real world, yeah.

[00:44:19] And those ancient stories are going to influence whatever we read here.

[00:44:26] It's very, very hard to create culture from a culture that does not exist.

[00:44:31] Right.

[00:44:32] And to have it be entirely other.

[00:44:34] I think Ursula K. Le Guin is probably the one who does the best with that.

[00:44:37] Yeah, yeah, well that's why she's the goat.

[00:44:41] Indeed.

[00:44:42] But yeah, I do have to wonder though, like in...

[00:44:46] I wonder, you know, things like Noah's Ark in our world,

[00:44:50] could this be because there was an ice age and then a period of glacial melting?

[00:44:55] So there was more land and then lost, you know?

[00:44:58] Right, right.

[00:44:59] We know this happened in the Mediterranean for instance.

[00:45:02] Exactly.

[00:45:03] Exactly.

[00:45:04] And then, yeah, could there also be truth in that they...

[00:45:09] If they look quite similar but with very distinctive differences

[00:45:13] between these two races species, however you want to...

[00:45:16] Species I guess we have to say, could they have indeed at some point

[00:45:21] evolved from the same, you know, like we have a common ancestor with the chimpanzees

[00:45:28] somewhere back along the line.

[00:45:30] Right.

[00:45:31] They have a common ancestor.

[00:45:33] Even further back we have a common ancestor among the fishes.

[00:45:36] Right, exactly.

[00:45:37] And that difference is so extreme.

[00:45:39] These two seem like chimpanzees.

[00:45:42] Well, we did too for a while but we all come from the sea.

[00:45:48] Yeah.

[00:45:50] So then the question is why are the Nautolans passing this story down?

[00:45:55] And first of all, it seems like they want to make themselves sound good.

[00:46:00] Do you get that vibe as well?

[00:46:02] Well, they certainly do wind up sounding pretty good which is another reason

[00:46:06] why we're guessing that it was supposed to be the Nautolans who told the story.

[00:46:12] It's, you know, this is why things are the way they are now kind of thing.

[00:46:18] It can sound like, you know, we're bigging ourselves up here.

[00:46:22] We don't know any Anselmi creation stories, right?

[00:46:26] Right.

[00:46:26] So we really don't have any comparison and we don't know a whole lot about how this whole situation evolved

[00:46:32] or as you said, you know, was it always, you know, physically the way it is now.

[00:46:40] But well, I can talk about this later but there do seem to be certain underlying

[00:46:46] morals that are going on here and how you tell the story is always reflective of whoever is telling it.

[00:46:55] Yeah.

[00:46:57] Well, I notice they really seem to be patting themselves in the back at certain points in this story like

[00:47:03] one line directly from it is deep beneath the ocean the Nautolans wept for the loss of their neighbors

[00:47:08] for they had ever wished only to protect the Anselmi from themselves.

[00:47:13] Yeah.

[00:47:15] Well, that's very patronizing.

[00:47:17] Very patronizing.

[00:47:19] On the other hand, if you look at how they flourished and the Anselmi didn't flourish,

[00:47:24] you know, for whatever reasons, right?

[00:47:27] If you're trying to come up with a reason then it's going to be, yeah, they blew it.

[00:47:32] However, that actually manifests.

[00:47:36] Yeah.

[00:47:37] Yeah, I mean, I wonder if this is also a way of justifying their ongoing feud because of,

[00:47:42] I do to say later in the timeline, we'll see some of it.

[00:47:45] They Anselmi do terrorist, take terrorist actions against them.

[00:47:51] But then of course when that happens like in the real world, there's a bigger story behind it.

[00:47:57] Let me ask without, you know, spoiling anything.

[00:48:01] Am I right in saying that we see examples of these two species in appearing in the Mandalorian at some point?

[00:48:10] That was the Mung Kalamari and the Quarren, another pair of water-based warring species that we'll see more of later in the Clone Wars.

[00:48:19] Right, which I've only seen parts of.

[00:48:22] Okay, yeah.

[00:48:24] The story arc about this is not one of the story arcs people are going to recommend to you.

[00:48:29] Right.

[00:48:30] It's not bad.

[00:48:31] It's just, you know, it's not one of the great ones.

[00:48:33] It's not one of the ones that people love the Clone Wars for.

[00:48:36] Yeah, so you were mentioning values and the values that I pull from this are respect limits.

[00:48:45] Smallest, better cooperation, not competition.

[00:48:49] And I say those things and I think right away of what was going on in the world at this time when this human author came up with this whole concept.

[00:49:00] And I don't know how.

[00:49:01] 2019 was when it was published at least.

[00:49:05] Okay, so you know, you've got climate change, you've got, you know, pollution, you've got warfare, you've got all these things going on.

[00:49:15] So these values, I mean, I would hope would be universal values but of what values the earthly author intended to convey, these all sound very reflective of the time period.

[00:49:28] Right.

[00:49:30] And I also got a sense of almost anti-colonization feeling to it because the Anzalmi as the quote unquote mistaken ones are behaving like colonizers.

[00:49:44] You know, literally doing a land grab.

[00:49:47] Right.

[00:49:48] And then carrying on more and more with whatever technology they have to try and expand what land they have.

[00:49:53] And then the humans come and colonize them later.

[00:49:57] Right.

[00:49:58] As humans are want to do in this universe and the real world.

[00:50:01] But colonization is the basis of all Star Wars, is it not?

[00:50:06] Yeah.

[00:50:07] Yeah, we have all these worlds on all these planets and by golly look at all the humanoids that are all in them.

[00:50:13] If we assume, of course, this is not our galaxy so maybe that galaxy all kinds of planets produced humans at some point.

[00:50:21] I mean, there is it is believed that maybe Coruscant was the human homeworld but somewhere at least in the in the core worlds or maybe the deep core.

[00:50:32] But yeah, no, it definitely this is a story of colonization and not just humans too but like the Mandalorians were terrible column colonists during the old republic especially.

[00:50:42] And yeah, lots of different species are.

[00:50:46] And I see that as really being tied deeply into our own human approach to storytelling and I'm still looking for that rare human who wants to tell a story that instead of conflict it is transformation that is at the core.

[00:51:05] And how can we do that without the same old tired stories of you know, bigger and better and colonizing the perceived weaker and misunderstanding of cultures between one another and all those sorts of things.

[00:51:22] Yeah.

[00:51:25] Well, just two more things I wanted to note about this story was that first of all it's kind of these are both matriarchal societies are at least in this story they're both ruled by the queen of the Netherlands and the Empress of the Anselmi it is found that interesting.

[00:51:41] And we do see they do have seem to have some sort of religion or spiritual practice where they worship the ocean spirit and believe that the ocean spirit maintains the balance of nature on Glee and some.

[00:51:53] Yes, I like that a lot because as we were discussing earlier you don't often get a lot of overt statement of religion or deity or anything of that nature.

[00:52:04] I also noted again of this sort of self presentation the now Tolans only have a queen whereas the Anselmi Empress.

[00:52:17] Oh, I just thought that was an interesting way of coloring right how we saw the two people making them sound more aggressive more empirical.

[00:52:27] Yeah, yeah, which is kind of ironic because of course there are only two cultures.

[00:52:34] Yeah.

[00:52:34] Well, yeah, it makes it very easy to us versus them them.

[00:52:38] Right.

[00:52:39] And also to proclaim oneself, you know, imperially without actually doing anything about it because, you know, in this story the Anselmi don't ever really harm the no Tolans they threaten.

[00:52:55] And they, you know, try to claim more and more.

[00:52:58] Mm hmm.

[00:52:59] But I guess the author didn't want to tell a story of genocide and, you know, that sort of thing.

[00:53:06] Right.

[00:53:06] You know, I'm just as happy.

[00:53:08] Right.

[00:53:08] There's lots of genocide in Star Wars we don't necessarily need more.

[00:53:12] Exactly.

[00:53:13] Exactly.

[00:53:14] Did you have any other thoughts you wanted to add or passages you wanted to shout out?

[00:53:19] Well, I've I really course we've already mentioned the Atlantis myth and that seems to be the closest analog but given my involvement with Tolkien.

[00:53:29] I also had to think about Calabash, which is a story of a downfall.

[00:53:34] Right.

[00:53:35] And it that author the human author of the story doesn't seem to be picking up on that piece of it quite as much.

[00:53:44] Yeah.

[00:53:45] So this is in the back of the book known as a Silmarillion.

[00:53:49] So you have the Silmarillion stories about the first age and then you have a Calabash talking about what happens next.

[00:53:55] And if any of you are following Rings of Power, you will know that it's Numenor, which is the island kingdom.

[00:54:04] And so that's the story of that particular culture.

[00:54:09] Not there in the rings.

[00:54:10] Well, you know, in episode four they kind of spoil it for us anyway, right?

[00:54:13] No, I mean it's not there in the ring.

[00:54:16] Right.

[00:54:17] Exactly.

[00:54:18] Which I think even people who have not read the books will recognize.

[00:54:23] But again, who the author is makes such a difference for Tolkien.

[00:54:26] It was all about judgment of behavior and how human beings don't do well when everything is good.

[00:54:36] So I don't know how much of that could be applied to the Natolans and the Insomni.

[00:54:43] But I don't know if I agree that I think that good times just don't last long.

[00:54:51] Right, which is both are observations of how things go but to my mind it's a cycle.

[00:54:57] Things rise and fall.

[00:54:58] And I don't really particularly agree either that human beings are better at overcoming adversity than they are living peacefully with good stuff.

[00:55:13] But again, this is kind of what the story says is everything was peaceful and whatever but what was it in the Insomni

[00:55:20] that led them to break this wonderful dual culture.

[00:55:27] Even the ocean spirit looked on and awed their achievements, their achievements the Insomni and the Natolani

[00:55:32] and was proud of its children for all they had done.

[00:55:35] So this again, paradise lost.

[00:55:39] Big theme here too.

[00:55:41] Once everything was beautiful and perfect and then something happened.

[00:55:45] So you know it's not true because nothing is ever beautiful and perfect always.

[00:55:49] Well, the way this story puts it left unchecked success breeds greed.

[00:55:55] And for the greedy possession leads only to the desire to possess more.

[00:56:00] So it was with the Insomni for as their nation flourished and their needs became ever greater they began to look upon the Natolans with envy.

[00:56:06] Now why did they envy the Natolans?

[00:56:10] Why did the Natolans envy the Insomni?

[00:56:12] I mean, this is the kind of setup if you want to don't mean that pejoratively.

[00:56:17] But clearly there was an intention to make this change.

[00:56:22] I don't necessarily agree that success breeds greed.

[00:56:26] I think there's something else at work with greed and I think it's fear.

[00:56:31] So what were the Insomni afraid of?

[00:56:34] I don't know.

[00:56:35] Probably the Natolans.

[00:56:36] And why was that?

[00:56:38] So you know if the Insomni as you said if the Insomni were telling this story, what would be different?

[00:56:44] Right.

[00:56:44] Yeah.

[00:56:45] Which would be very interesting to find out.

[00:56:47] Yeah.

[00:56:48] I would love their version.

[00:56:49] And you know the Natolans preaching peace and the philosophers of the Insomni.

[00:56:55] So there you get a sense of the Natolans are more at one with the spirit deity because they're preaching and the Insomni are philosophizing.

[00:57:04] It's a very interesting choice of language.

[00:57:07] And they were all about self-belief and the rights of the Insomni above all others.

[00:57:11] Now where did that come from?

[00:57:12] When did that happen?

[00:57:13] That's you know we kind of gloss over a lot of this stuff.

[00:57:17] And they began to other than Natolans and think they were weak and less than and all.

[00:57:23] You know we classic, classic progress unfortunately that we see.

[00:57:28] So you know underneath all of their different visual features they really are being depicted as another set of humans I'm afraid.

[00:57:40] And there was an interesting section here about you know conflict or whatever and the Insomni knowing that it would not be wise to provoke a war because the Natolans were great warriors despite their disavowal of violence.

[00:57:55] And they said what?

[00:57:57] Yeah.

[00:57:58] Excuse me?

[00:57:59] Yeah exactly how would you know?

[00:58:02] How does this work?

[00:58:04] I don't think the other understand the concept of non-violence.

[00:58:07] How can you disavowal violence and yet maintain the might of the warrior?

[00:58:10] But it's not the warrior.

[00:58:11] Yeah it's not.

[00:58:12] I think that this is the through the Natolan lens that they are like because it is true that the Natolans are you know well I can tell you Kit Fisto is very hearty athletic Jedi.

[00:58:25] And the Natolans that we've seen they are you know strong physical specimens who can yeah they are good warriors.

[00:58:34] And I just think that I'm calling bullshit on the Natolan version of the story you know.

[00:58:39] I think that there was I don't know who started it who knows who cares who started the you know you have the what's it called the Brackens and the Blackwoods in House of the Dragon.

[00:58:54] You have the Hatfields and the McCoys who knows who started these things but I don't think the Natolans are nearly as innocent as they're painting themselves.

[00:59:02] Well of course there they have a wonderful means of depicting that ultimately they are in the right because it's the ocean spirit that ultimately destroys the Anselmé.

[00:59:13] Exactly.

[00:59:14] With its endless storms and destruction of barriers and all the kinds of things that we talked about.

[00:59:21] Yeah.

[00:59:22] And again the statement balance had been restored and the Anselmé had been brought to their knees nothing of the island remained.

[00:59:29] The sunken domain down beneath the tumultuous waves all trace the Anselmé empire gone again that word empire with the Empress.

[00:59:39] And they've been now reduced to a scarce few pockets of survivors left to eke out an existence scavenging among the detritus of their former glory.

[00:59:47] I mean that language really is tutelary shall we say.

[00:59:53] And yet you know we were just told all trace of their empire and their island was gone so where were they living?

[01:00:00] Right.

[01:00:01] I mean it's yeah.

[01:00:04] No it's yeah it's you can see the cracks in the story here and the Natalans had only ever wished to protect the Anselmé from themselves.

[01:00:14] Right.

[01:00:14] I mean gag me with a spoon.

[01:00:17] Talk about infantilizing and infantilizing it just ugh.

[01:00:25] So yeah I have to say that I came out of this with like this story even though it presents the Natalans in such a positive way I actually came out of it questioning them more than I ever had before.

[01:00:40] Interesting.

[01:00:41] Because the Anselmé other people are also like oh the Anselmé suck you know the few times that they come up and lower but this makes me think like are they maybe a little bit misunderstood?

[01:00:53] Well I guess we'll never know until the Anselmé write their own story so which they may have but um and so again I'm stepping back in a meta way and saying why did this human author write this story in this particular way?

[01:01:08] Mm-hmm.

[01:01:09] What were they trying to convey?

[01:01:11] Yeah.

[01:01:12] Was it a story for us human readers more than for Luke and Leia?

[01:01:18] Well yeah maybe this one isn't particularly for Luke and Leia but this one is I do think it's what Kitt Fisto grew up hearing.

[01:01:28] Okay all right so that's like a key to his character and you know if you've grown up all your life saying yeah we're the good guys then that does remove a certain amount of self loathing if you will.

[01:01:43] Yeah.

[01:01:43] Or self doubt.

[01:01:44] It doesn't do much for your humility quotient.

[01:01:47] Yeah.

[01:01:48] But maybe that comes along with the daily challenges of life anyway as we were talking about.

[01:01:54] Yeah.

[01:01:55] Yeah and anyone who doesn't know who Kitt Fisto is don't worry we'll talk about him in the next era.

[01:02:01] We'll take a quick break here and then we'll be back to talk about two stories about the Sith Lord Darth Caldoth which will be our last two stories for today.

[01:02:22] The other stories are all kind of on the darker side well four of them are literally about the Sith so which is definitely more my taste than yours Marilyn so thank you for joining me to talk about them.

[01:02:35] Well it's always interesting to see how these are darker sides are being portrayed.

[01:02:41] Right and it also ties into we recently watched the Acolyte some listeners will be shortly after this going through the Acolyte part of the timeline so it isn't just interesting to see how they tie together because that is as advertised a Sith story of sorts.

[01:03:01] And yeah so we're going to talk and of course the old Republic is the heyday of the Sith this is when before the rule of two the rule of two happens at the end of the old Republic and that's something we talked about in previous episodes I won't go too much into it here.

[01:03:18] But especially because these stories mostly take place before that we'll talk about the four together or rather in clusters of two because they tend to kind of interact with each other.

[01:03:30] George Mann the writer said about this collection in a Star Wars dot com interview the conflicts between light and dark sides of the forces fertile grounds for the sort of moral lessons delivered by fables such as these cautionary stories about not giving into your anger and hatred.

[01:03:47] Additionally we're talking about a universe where monsters are real so the boogeymen might really come for you if you're not careful or stray too far from home.

[01:03:55] And this was him talking about the collection as a whole which includes the stories we're talking about but also others as well so I think that this applies to some of the stories but not all of them.

[01:04:08] It's just interesting to know it's framework.

[01:04:12] Yeah the whole boogeyman thing you know the boogeyman can come for on any of us because any culture has its boogey people whether they are Sith or they are abusers or whatever.

[01:04:25] So you know in that sense it's not all that different.

[01:04:29] Yeah yeah so because these are Sith stories that means they must all be set after around 5000 BBY which is when the Sith splintered off from the Jedi.

[01:04:39] Although it does seem to be much later after millennia of war have left because they refer to several wasted planets and ancient ruins so it seems like the Sith have already been around for millennia by the time of these stories.

[01:04:52] Now I tell you I would like to hear stories about the splitting of the Sith and the Jedi.

[01:04:58] I don't know if there are any but if there are I hope sometime to explore.

[01:05:02] Only like in an in universe folklore really.

[01:05:08] Yeah a little bit more in legends but yeah not really that the whole old republic is like fertile ground for canon to fill out.

[01:05:19] Yeah and then combined with the whole so called mortis ark that we saw in rebels was finally seeing and then also in clone wars when Obi Wan and it can go and actually see the father and the daughter and the son and the embodiment of the force being those are all kinds of areas that I wish somebody would explore at some point.

[01:05:41] Yeah it does seem they're showing more interest in it and of course you know we've talked about Abeloth the dark mother figure and people keep waiting for her to pop up in canon so I think they are starting to get a little more weird in Star Wars again so I'm glad for that personally.

[01:06:00] But we do know that at least three of these stories are set before the rule of two as I said so rule of two what is your understanding of the rule of two by this point Marilyn.

[01:06:12] Well I think after the huge breakup between Seth and Jedi in the Sith we're all fighting each other and eventually one said came along and said look this is not going to work because we're too visible.

[01:06:27] And so we're going to reduce it to just to a master and an apprentice and what I find particularly ironic in this arrangement is that it is expected that at some point the apprentice will kill the master and become the new master.

[01:06:44] And then the former apprentice is allowed to find their own apprentice and you know abuse them for a long period of time until said apprentice rises up and kills said master it sounds like kind of a depressing life.

[01:07:01] Yeah well we see in these old republic stories even before the rule of two so rule of two was implemented by Darth Bane around 1032 BBY and even with more and legends but yeah not not really that the whole old republic is like first will ground for canon to fill out.

[01:07:23] Yeah and then combined with the whole so called mortis arc that we saw in rebels finally seeing and then also in Clone Wars when Obi Wan and and it can go and actually see the father and the daughter and the son and the embodiment of the force being those are all kinds of areas that I wish somebody would explore at some point.

[01:07:44] Yeah it does seem they're showing more interest in it and then of course you know we've talked about Abel off the dark mother figure and people keep waiting for her to pop up in canon so I think I think they are starting to get a little more weird and Star Wars again so I'm glad personally.

[01:08:03] But we do know that at least three of these stories are separate before the rule of two as I said so rule to what is your understanding of the rule of two by this point my own.

[01:08:15] Well I think after the huge breakup between Seth and Jedi and the Sith were all fighting each other and eventually one said came along and said look this is not going to work because we're too visible.

[01:08:30] And so we're going to reduce it to just to a master and an apprentice and what I find particularly ironic in this arrangement is that it is expected that at some point the apprentice will kill the master and become a new master.

[01:08:47] And then the former apprentice is allowed to find their own apprentice and you know abuse them for a long period of time until said apprentice rises up and kills said master it sounds like kind of a depressing life.

[01:09:04] Yeah well we see in these old republic stories even before the rule of two so rule of two was implemented by Darth Bane around 1032 BBY and even before that like they still had this master apprentice which is a Jedi also have the master Padawan relationship so it's a dark mirror of that but indeed there's always the expectation you know you want to train someone because you want their help or whatever.

[01:09:32] You want from them but there's also you also know that probably they're going to be the end of you.

[01:09:39] Which is why they were always running around looking for immortality.

[01:09:43] Right and that also is interesting about the first figure we're going to talk about dark Caldoth but before we get into that you have a note here about Milton's Paradise Lost.

[01:09:54] Yeah what I see in this is the fascination with the big bad.

[01:10:00] Some criticism of Milton's Paradise Lost which is a story that came out.

[01:10:05] I don't have all the details and I should but I believe it was early 1700s don't at me if I'm way off base.

[01:10:11] In any case, Protestantism was still a new thing and so this was the first really big Protestant epic that was describing the Bible through a Protestant lens

[01:10:21] and so you have the creation of the world.

[01:10:24] You have the fall of the angels.

[01:10:25] You have Satan depicted and you have Adam and Eve and so on and so on and the thing that people kept saying probably through the centuries is that Satan is a far more interesting character in this story than God or Jesus or even Adam and Eve.

[01:10:41] And some people find that problematic because why do you want the bad one to be the most attractive and the most interesting?

[01:10:52] I think it speaks to my personal understanding of human nature is that we contain both.

[01:11:02] And our journey is to recognize that except that and to choose how are we going to manifest that.

[01:11:14] And this, you know, the grand Darth Caldoth, you know, I thought, yeah well there you go Satan right there.

[01:11:22] Better terrain and hell than to serve in heaven is his famous quote.

[01:11:26] I think Satan.

[01:11:27] When, you know, when people like Jean get frustrated with the Jedi, I think that often and I have this also with certain like characters and literature and institutions in the real world.

[01:11:43] I think there's a frustration with groups that pretend to be perfect, you know, that pretend not to have foibles or temptations or dark thoughts.

[01:11:55] And so maybe the villain in stories that speaks to people's recognition of like, no, see, if you make a sexy villain, it helps me explain why I'm weak sometimes.

[01:12:08] Sure, sure.

[01:12:09] No, but that's absolutely the case.

[01:12:11] And to my mind, it's the important thing is not so much to show how you can remove yourself from temptations, but it is to show how you deal with the times when you are tempted.

[01:12:25] Mm hmm. Absolutely.

[01:12:26] Rather than say I can put myself in a position where I won't be tempted.

[01:12:30] Well, I'm sorry.

[01:12:30] Right.

[01:12:31] Anybody who ever tries to tell me that they have a way to make a perfect society, I'll smile politely and look for the nearest exit.

[01:12:37] Right.

[01:12:38] But sooner or later, that involves domination of some kind.

[01:12:41] Yeah.

[01:12:42] No, it's sympathetic and charming villain is still a villain.

[01:12:44] And I would say Dark Caldoth is neither.

[01:12:47] No, I don't think so either.

[01:12:49] I mean, I'm reading the story again.

[01:12:50] Good Lord, why would they tell me these stories?

[01:12:53] His bedtime stories to Luke and Leia.

[01:12:55] Are you kidding me?

[01:12:56] No, yeah.

[01:12:57] You don't have to pound it in.

[01:12:59] We know that the Sith are not kindly people.

[01:13:03] I mean, let's just put it at that.

[01:13:04] I don't think this is a Luke or Leia.

[01:13:06] I don't think any of these stories are Luke or Leia stories personally.

[01:13:09] Maybe the last one, maybe the werewolf one.

[01:13:12] But yeah, so there's two stories that are actually about the same figure, Dark Caldoth,

[01:13:17] Gaze of Stone from Miss and Fables, and The Gilded Cage from Dark Legends.

[01:13:25] And this also, this was another case where George Mon and Scott Kavan worked together

[01:13:31] and they, he, so Scott Kavan also planted a reference to Dark Caldoth in Dooku, Jedi Lost,

[01:13:38] which is an audio novel.

[01:13:41] One of my favorites because it's also features ventures.

[01:13:46] So yeah, this is, this is another one.

[01:13:48] We might hear more stories about Darth Caldoth in the future.

[01:13:52] And Darth, of course, I'm not sure if I've said on the podcast yet,

[01:13:55] but it's basically it's a Dark Lord of the Sith.

[01:13:58] That's the title.

[01:13:59] Started with Darth Vader and then they just retroactively applied it to other Sith Lords.

[01:14:04] One of many retcons in the Star Wars universe.

[01:14:06] Right, always retconning, including the name of the Sith homeworld.

[01:14:11] So it was always Coroban and Legends.

[01:14:13] And then they started calling it Morban and Canon.

[01:14:16] And so this story, I think it was actually this story that finally said,

[01:14:20] by the way, Morban sometimes called Corban.

[01:14:23] So it was like, yes, it's canon.

[01:14:24] It is the same planet.

[01:14:27] Well, can I tell you what Morban makes me think of?

[01:14:29] What?

[01:14:30] Morban.

[01:14:31] Right.

[01:14:33] Dead static.

[01:14:34] That's probably why they're changing.

[01:14:36] That's probably where it came from.

[01:14:37] Yeah.

[01:14:37] Well, I'm wondering.

[01:14:39] Yeah.

[01:14:39] So yeah, it says Sith World and the Outer Rim.

[01:14:42] And this is settled here because they found a system of dark side users

[01:14:46] who were eager to worship and follow them.

[01:14:49] And back then in the beginning, it was actually like a nice planet.

[01:14:52] You know, there was life.

[01:14:54] But now it is desolate, red mountain landscape.

[01:14:58] It's been abandoned for most of history after being destroyed in ancient wars.

[01:15:03] So we will see it on screen later in the timeline.

[01:15:07] But during the Old Republic, it was still a ceremonial and place of burial

[01:15:12] for the importance of Sith.

[01:15:13] So this made me think of you, Marilyn, with, you know,

[01:15:15] is a place of ritual for the Sith.

[01:15:17] Right.

[01:15:18] And so the burial ceremony of a dark lord of the Sith would be

[01:15:21] accompanied by hundreds of Sith warriors carrying the body of the fallen master.

[01:15:26] The corpse was stored in the tomb along with precious objects

[01:15:29] and an escort of slaves accompanied the deceased on his journey to the spirit realm.

[01:15:34] Very Egyptian.

[01:15:36] Yes, and also a polite way of saying they murdered them.

[01:15:39] Yes.

[01:15:39] Stuffed them in the tombs.

[01:15:41] Mm-hmm.

[01:15:42] And the last Sith that we know of who was buried there was Darth Bane,

[01:15:45] the creator of the rule of two again.

[01:15:47] And then of course there was no one but his apprentice to bury him.

[01:15:50] And she's the one who killed him.

[01:15:53] According to his own rule.

[01:15:55] And the other peoples I think of when I think of, you know,

[01:15:58] killing people and shoving them in the burial with the masters,

[01:16:02] that this is, this was also sometimes practiced by the Norse Vikings.

[01:16:07] Okay.

[01:16:08] There's a wonderful account by an Arabian trader,

[01:16:13] and I'm not going to remember his name, I apologize,

[01:16:16] who was able to witness a funeral ritual of a Viking warrior.

[01:16:21] And you know, the slave woman was chosen and she was given a drink and dance,

[01:16:25] you know, all the sorts of tropes that we know.

[01:16:28] Yeah.

[01:16:30] So I watched, did you ever watch a TV show by Vikings?

[01:16:34] I never did.

[01:16:35] Sorry, too much historian, you know.

[01:16:37] No, I know.

[01:16:38] And they took a lot of liberties.

[01:16:39] But then in some ways I think that they represented certain aspects

[01:16:43] of their culture more accurately, more honestly than you generally see.

[01:16:48] You know?

[01:16:49] Well, they were primarily traders.

[01:16:51] They were primarily traders.

[01:16:52] There's no doubt about that.

[01:16:53] Yeah, but also of their spiritual culture.

[01:16:56] Right, exactly.

[01:16:57] I mean all the Norse myths that we have and so forth.

[01:17:00] Yes, they're definitely multifaceted like virtually any other culture

[01:17:03] that you would expect.

[01:17:05] But you know, I didn't want to go for the history

[01:17:08] and I definitely didn't want to stay for the blood.

[01:17:09] Yeah, no, no, of course that's true.

[01:17:11] Why did I even ask you?

[01:17:13] That is definitely high on the, so anyone who doesn't know,

[01:17:16] I think we've mentioned on this podcast, we have the Pukin Scale,

[01:17:19] which is how is it too violent for Marilyn to watch basically in that one.

[01:17:25] Which I have, please no, I did not create this.

[01:17:27] No, no, no, no.

[01:17:28] David and John and I just genuinely try and, it makes me blush.

[01:17:32] Just genuinely trying to decide,

[01:17:35] is this a movie that we would recommend Marilyn Watch?

[01:17:37] Yeah.

[01:17:41] So Darth Caldoth, though he is a duros,

[01:17:45] duros species and so he's green but they can also be blue.

[01:17:50] Another famous duos is Cad Bane.

[01:17:53] Have you, you saw him and show up probably?

[01:17:56] Oh sorry that's a spoiler, I should delete that.

[01:17:59] Do you want me to respond then?

[01:18:01] Sure, go ahead.

[01:18:02] Okay, the name is vaguely familiar.

[01:18:04] I can't remember any of the scenes in which they're present,

[01:18:09] but I'm sure that you will cover it in future episodes.

[01:18:13] Yeah, so Cad Bane's the other most famous one.

[01:18:16] He shows up also in the next era.

[01:18:19] He's blue bounty hunter, big red eyes.

[01:18:22] The duros tend to have big red eyes, not just the Sith ones

[01:18:25] because there are Jedi duro too.

[01:18:28] Like yeah we'll talk about one in a minute,

[01:18:30] but they are noseless, apparently distantly related to the Neimoidians

[01:18:35] who are the trade federation.

[01:18:37] Sure, sure, sure.

[01:18:39] Did he wear a cowboy hat?

[01:18:41] Yes, Cad Bane wears cowboy hat.

[01:18:43] I remember Cad Bane.

[01:18:45] Yeah and they kind of look like the classic little green

[01:18:49] men type aliens but full human sized and they also have very blood.

[01:18:52] Not that little about them.

[01:18:53] No, they are tall.

[01:18:57] And yeah, so they're from the planet Duro which is one of the core worlds.

[01:19:02] And the core worlds are like Coruscant and these are you know,

[01:19:05] so you have the deep core which is difficult to travel around

[01:19:09] because it's so packed.

[01:19:10] But you have the core worlds which is like the most wealthy

[01:19:14] central area where people like to live.

[01:19:17] But Duro is a little bit of an odd man out there.

[01:19:20] It is like a temperate planet.

[01:19:22] It's a kingdom but it has many predators.

[01:19:26] And so they've mostly evolved past that by you know,

[01:19:31] history points in the timeline when we're talking about the planet of Duro.

[01:19:34] But the Duros people evolved just trying to always out smart

[01:19:40] and out fight predators to survive.

[01:19:43] So that says a lot about who they are as a culture.

[01:19:48] They were also one of the first ones to get hyper drives

[01:19:50] because of the location of their planet.

[01:19:52] So they have spread far and wide.

[01:19:55] Like I said, there are several known Jedi like T'Ami is a Jedi in

[01:20:00] well who will talk about in the High Republic phase one

[01:20:04] which is a second phase we're going to talk about

[01:20:06] because they were published out of order.

[01:20:09] So in the book Lighted the Jedi she explains she could feel oil

[01:20:13] gathering so she's going through a stressful situation

[01:20:16] and she's trying to do her powers and breathe at the same time.

[01:20:20] She could feel oil gathering in the sacks along her ribs

[01:20:23] her body's involuntary response to great strain

[01:20:26] the acrid stink of the stuff filled her cockpit

[01:20:29] an evolutionary throwback and defense mechanism from the days

[01:20:33] when the Duros were liable to be eaten by any number of things

[01:20:36] prowling their world.

[01:20:38] Interesting to give that particular protective biological response

[01:20:44] to a humanoid.

[01:20:46] I associate it mostly with I don't know if it's toads or frogs.

[01:20:50] Yeah, well I feel like with their coloring and such

[01:20:54] there is some suggestion of similarities.

[01:20:57] Yeah, and some butterflies will evolve patterning

[01:21:02] of other butterflies that taste really bad

[01:21:07] so that predators will overlook them.

[01:21:10] Right.

[01:21:10] I think it's butterflies.

[01:21:11] There are other species too probably.

[01:21:13] Oh yeah, I remember that the butterflies.

[01:21:15] It doesn't like someone copies the monarch or something.

[01:21:17] Something like that.

[01:21:19] Yeah.

[01:21:21] So our other main character in the first story

[01:21:24] that we'll talk about with Darth Caldoth is Rye Nimbus

[01:21:28] and he is a twilight or twelik.

[01:21:32] I've mentioned him before.

[01:21:34] I've mentioned the species but yeah this is one of the most

[01:21:37] common species in Star Wars that come up a lot.

[01:21:39] Their home planet is Ryloth.

[01:21:42] We'll definitely visit their on screen starting with the Clone Wars again.

[01:21:46] Everything happens in the Clone Wars.

[01:21:49] They are near human.

[01:21:50] They can produce offspring with human but their skin can be

[01:21:54] of many different colors and their distinguishing trait

[01:21:57] is instead of hair on their heads.

[01:22:00] They have these two appendages that are called leku.

[01:22:05] There's usually two sometimes there's up to four

[01:22:07] and they can grow from either the crown of the skull at the top

[01:22:10] or the base of the skull.

[01:22:12] Sometimes they're prehensile and they can like lightly grab things.

[01:22:16] So they're literally like head tails.

[01:22:18] Think of the tail of a cat.

[01:22:20] They can be used differently by different people.

[01:22:23] Although yeah don't call twilight head tails it's rude.

[01:22:27] I'll remember that.

[01:22:29] Next time I encounter a twilight.

[01:22:31] Do we know why some get to and some get forward?

[01:22:34] I thought that might be a subspecies differentiation

[01:22:36] but maybe nobody's ever bothered to go with that.

[01:22:38] I don't think they've really explained it.

[01:22:42] It could be a mutation of sorts.

[01:22:43] It is rare to have more than two but it's more,

[01:22:46] I think there's only like, I can only think of one with four.

[01:22:50] There's a few with three but it's almost always two.

[01:22:53] Well I can think of a very prominent one with four

[01:22:55] but we won't talk about that one for a while.

[01:22:58] Oh wait are you thinking of a tukruta?

[01:23:02] Oh is that's different.

[01:23:04] That's right.

[01:23:05] That is different thank you.

[01:23:07] So the twilight language, trilaki,

[01:23:10] it combines verbal sounds and they also use

[01:23:13] subtle language with their leku.

[01:23:15] For instance if they cross the tips of their leku

[01:23:18] that means I love you.

[01:23:22] When they speak basic which is English to our ears

[01:23:26] this can sound like French accent to our ears.

[01:23:29] Oh golly I have so many questions for first

[01:23:32] our world.

[01:23:35] Reasons for doing that.

[01:23:37] Yeah no it was a decision they made in the Clone Wars

[01:23:39] and now it's not always used

[01:23:43] but then they do show, they show some code switching.

[01:23:46] For instance Hera is one of the most famous

[01:23:49] twilight characters and when Hera goes back

[01:23:51] to visit her family sometimes her accent drifts

[01:23:54] a little bit you know code switching.

[01:23:57] Stereotype.

[01:24:00] I mean I think it's just to explain like why

[01:24:02] some have this accent on ryloth and then

[01:24:05] when they leave ryloth they don't.

[01:24:08] Another interesting feature is they have gender

[01:24:11] dimorphic ears so women usually have

[01:24:15] very sensitive cones instead of like

[01:24:17] lobed ears like we have.

[01:24:20] So that's why you often see the female

[01:24:22] twilight characters like Hera they wear

[01:24:23] ear coverings most of the time because

[01:24:26] they're protecting their ears and males

[01:24:29] often sharpen their teeth to points

[01:24:30] that's not how they grow that's just like a

[01:24:33] cultural thing some do but they do run hot

[01:24:36] compared to humans.

[01:24:38] That's a try.

[01:24:39] In more ways than one?

[01:24:40] Yeah I guess it depends.

[01:24:44] So the first story with these two characters

[01:24:47] Darth Caldoth the Duros and

[01:24:50] Rai Nimbus the twilec or twilec if you prefer

[01:24:53] is called Gaze of Stone and it's from

[01:24:55] myths and fables.

[01:24:57] Eileen do you want to read the first part

[01:24:59] is the excerpt from the start of the story

[01:25:02] and then I'll continue with the second

[01:25:04] part which is the summary of the rest

[01:25:06] of the story.

[01:25:08] Okay on the desolate planet Moribund

[01:25:12] high on a weatherworn mountaintop

[01:25:14] stands the statue of a robed twilec

[01:25:17] for a thousand years or more since the

[01:25:19] ancient times when the world was known

[01:25:21] by the name Korriban this lonesome figure

[01:25:24] has cast its gaze upon the bleak

[01:25:26] landscape below and pilgrims venturing to

[01:25:30] Moribund in search of sucker and forbidden

[01:25:33] knowledge have detoured to pay tribute

[01:25:35] to the unnamed figure a man to whom

[01:25:38] they imagine great deeds to be ascribed

[01:25:40] for he must have been a Sith warrior

[01:25:43] startling renowned to have such a monument

[01:25:45] raised in his honor some such pilgrims

[01:25:49] have scoured the records and ancient

[01:25:51] texts for mention of the lonesome figure

[01:25:54] but if his deeds were ever written they

[01:25:56] have long been expunged from the

[01:25:58] histories of the galaxy for not a single

[01:26:00] trace of him might be found all that is

[01:26:03] left for the pilgrims is the eerie

[01:26:05] maudlin atmosphere they feel as they

[01:26:07] gaze upon the twilec's graven face

[01:26:10] and the stories they have since

[01:26:12] imagined of how he once conquered

[01:26:15] whole worlds in viewing himself with

[01:26:17] such power that all who knew him

[01:26:19] quaked in fear it is coming for to see

[01:26:22] his face meant certain death there are

[01:26:25] others who claim that they have seen

[01:26:27] the statue weep an ebb and tear upon

[01:26:29] the coming of the dawn a single

[01:26:32] droplet rolling down its cold hard cheek

[01:26:34] as if the stone were lamenting the

[01:26:36] passing of another day thus the

[01:26:39] statue has earned a variety of

[01:26:41] monikers including the weeping one

[01:26:43] the silent watcher and the graven

[01:26:47] lord and many have theorized its true

[01:26:50] nature none however has come close to

[01:26:53] the truth for the statues origins are

[01:26:56] far stranger and more tragic and even

[01:26:59] the most creative of pilgrims might

[01:27:01] guess so this story which purports to

[01:27:05] know the truth goes on to describe

[01:27:06] the exploits of the Sith twilec

[01:27:08] rye nimbus shrouded his entire life

[01:27:11] in darkness who as a child was

[01:27:13] adopted by Darth Caldoth and put

[01:27:16] through enslavement fighting pits and

[01:27:18] more great hardships to train him to

[01:27:20] be his apprentice when he came to

[01:27:22] collect the now fearsome boy rye

[01:27:24] nimbus charged at his master with

[01:27:26] anger impressing him but losing one of

[01:27:28] his leku in the process together the

[01:27:31] two traveled the galaxy searching for

[01:27:33] mysterious artifacts to add to

[01:27:34] Caldoth's growing collection during

[01:27:36] that time nimbus visited an ancient

[01:27:39] temple sacred to the sith on an

[01:27:41] abandoned moon and wild space for

[01:27:43] seven days nimbus traversed the

[01:27:45] ruins succumbing to visions of his

[01:27:46] mother and other people from his past

[01:27:48] as well as a vision of what he might

[01:27:50] become soon after Caldoth sent nimbus

[01:27:53] against a female knight which he fought

[01:27:55] and killed for her own saber as his

[01:27:57] power grew so too did nimbus's hate

[01:28:00] for his master over the years nimbus

[01:28:02] began increasingly to believe that

[01:28:04] Caldoth was holding knowledge from him

[01:28:06] and nimbus began to plot against his

[01:28:08] master after years of doing his

[01:28:10] bidding the day came for nimbus to

[01:28:12] defeat his master nimbus planned to

[01:28:15] use a stolen alchemical ritual to bind

[01:28:17] Caldoth and stone after luring Caldoth

[01:28:20] to a mountaintop on Korriban nimbus

[01:28:23] began enacting the ritual however

[01:28:25] Caldoth was prepared for nimbus's

[01:28:27] eventual betrayal and altered words

[01:28:30] in the ritual so that it would

[01:28:31] affect the caster himself instead of

[01:28:34] his target in a futile attempt to

[01:28:36] entomb Caldoth nimbus recited the

[01:28:38] words to the ritual forever encasing

[01:28:40] himself in stone so yeah

[01:28:44] sithiness aside I think as a duro

[01:28:46] hard him by this planet of predators

[01:28:48] as I talked about it I think it makes

[01:28:50] sense that Caldoth thinks this would

[01:28:52] be the best way to train his

[01:28:53] apprentice

[01:28:54] mm-hmm

[01:28:56] yeah there's definitely connection

[01:28:58] I do love all these stories

[01:29:01] that are basically about sith

[01:29:04] nerds and I love the sith

[01:29:05] nerds basically they're just driven

[01:29:07] to prolong their own life so they're

[01:29:09] just hunting artifacts all the time

[01:29:11] and so you see like in this case

[01:29:13] they want he wants to have

[01:29:15] the the apprentice to

[01:29:18] help him secure things

[01:29:20] and do dangerous things he doesn't

[01:29:21] want to do himself a research

[01:29:23] assistant right a research

[01:29:24] assistant yeah hopefully none of you

[01:29:27] listening who are doing research where

[01:29:29] the people have that kind of a

[01:29:30] master to work for no I hope they

[01:29:32] don't put you in fighting pits and

[01:29:34] I also found it interesting that there

[01:29:36] was a specific mention of

[01:29:38] his mother and that

[01:29:40] threw me right back to

[01:29:42] a certain

[01:29:45] Jedi who was

[01:29:47] eventually

[01:29:49] in part discouraged

[01:29:51] because of having mother issues I don't know how

[01:29:53] free you want me to be

[01:29:55] with my names at this point no I know

[01:29:56] who you mean she means the main one guys

[01:30:00] but

[01:30:01] yeah I think

[01:30:02] the difference here that I found really interesting

[01:30:05] about this is in the story itself they

[01:30:07] emphasize how

[01:30:08] there was a darkness

[01:30:10] around Ryan Nimbus as a child so

[01:30:13] like even his mother and everyone else was

[01:30:14] just kind of like I don't know there's something off about that kid

[01:30:17] which is not the case

[01:30:19] for the other one who was no

[01:30:20] not at all yeah okay Trare

[01:30:22] yeah

[01:30:24] so yeah I found that interest that there was

[01:30:26] just a so when someone came

[01:30:28] and said like I know how to

[01:30:30] turn your son's darkness into greatness mom

[01:30:33] was like take him

[01:30:36] well and also

[01:30:37] the fact that the Jedi

[01:30:38] in this story that was killed

[01:30:40] for the saber was a woman

[01:30:44] I don't know maybe it was just

[01:30:46] I think maybe it's there to have gender balance

[01:30:48] yeah nothing deeper there but see

[01:30:51] this is how our minds work are in stories

[01:30:52] yeah yeah we see pieces

[01:30:55] that and then match

[01:30:57] them to our own bits and pieces

[01:30:59] that we've collected over the years

[01:31:00] and come up with our own explanations

[01:31:03] well this story

[01:31:04] is a good you know

[01:31:06] it lays out nicely

[01:31:08] the Sith rights of passage

[01:31:10] as we know them so we have

[01:31:12] the first Sith right of passage is some sort

[01:31:14] of interaction with the dark side

[01:31:16] virgins and confronting your own visions

[01:31:18] which interestingly is the same thing that the Jedi do

[01:31:22] ah

[01:31:22] so this has a virgins okay

[01:31:25] yeah so he went on

[01:31:26] to the sith temple

[01:31:28] and saw those visions he was in a dark side

[01:31:30] virgins

[01:31:31] okay I hadn't picked up that particular

[01:31:34] term I guess I must have

[01:31:35] no they didn't say it in the story

[01:31:37] it's just a oh well then I feel much better

[01:31:40] I'm always trying to know it's a virgin

[01:31:41] but you don't tell me it's a virgin

[01:31:44] I'm telling you now you're telling me now

[01:31:46] thank you thank you for enlightening me

[01:31:48] or darkening me I don't know

[01:31:50] but it is yes so we have the first

[01:31:52] right of passage is you

[01:31:53] face a virgins you face these

[01:31:55] visions you confront

[01:31:57] your past and your inner

[01:32:00] darkness and as a Jedi

[01:32:01] you um

[01:32:03] you learn not to give that darkness power

[01:32:05] but as a sith you

[01:32:07] you know you want to slay the darkness you want

[01:32:09] to um

[01:32:11] you want to overpower it rather

[01:32:13] than letting it exist separate from you

[01:32:16] hmm

[01:32:18] yes so those of you

[01:32:19] who have watched the acolyte this is going to

[01:32:21] have a lot of yeah

[01:32:23] exactly yeah so

[01:32:25] yeah we've we definitely see

[01:32:26] material for contemplation

[01:32:28] we definitely see some

[01:32:30] virgins throughout the story sometimes it's a cave

[01:32:33] maybe just a helmet

[01:32:34] hem

[01:32:37] wink wink nudge nudge

[01:32:39] and no more

[01:32:41] and then the final sith

[01:32:43] initiation is he killed

[01:32:45] a jedi to steal

[01:32:46] and bleed her saber so

[01:32:49] you'll see bleeding saber on screen later but it's

[01:32:52] yeah when you take the jedi's

[01:32:54] saber and

[01:32:55] you corrupt the kyber crystal

[01:32:58] so that it's red like a sith

[01:33:00] saber

[01:33:01] so are all of these steps laid out

[01:33:04] somewhere in some other document or do people

[01:33:06] kind of pull them together over the years from

[01:33:08] all these different stories that are helpful

[01:33:09] I mean at some point

[01:33:11] it is

[01:33:12] at some point it was invented

[01:33:15] but it is now it is

[01:33:17] it is known it is

[01:33:19] a common practice that we see happen

[01:33:21] over and over

[01:33:22] so the showrunners of acolyte would

[01:33:25] yes they knew yeah

[01:33:27] known all of this

[01:33:29] yeah probably you can look it up

[01:33:31] in wukapedia right well yeah

[01:33:33] I mean but also Leslie headlands deep

[01:33:35] into the stories there's a reason she wanted to

[01:33:37] do that sort of sith story

[01:33:39] with witches this is

[01:33:41] superb background information I wish I'd done

[01:33:43] this before seeing acolyte

[01:33:45] but you know you can do it

[01:33:47] retrospectively some people are going to hear this

[01:33:49] before that fair point

[01:33:51] but I hope it adds context even if you watch

[01:33:54] the acolyte first

[01:33:54] but yeah so

[01:33:57] Darth Caldoth he set

[01:33:59] Ryan in bis up because he demanded

[01:34:01] a monument

[01:34:03] so this is how he outwitted

[01:34:05] his apprentice and you know

[01:34:07] stayed alive himself

[01:34:09] yeah

[01:34:11] he basically gave him the chance

[01:34:13] to betray him and then

[01:34:16] had there be

[01:34:17] dire consequences to it

[01:34:19] yeah it was a

[01:34:21] little jazz handsy for me as to

[01:34:23] how this all actually happened you know

[01:34:25] how does the great

[01:34:27] bad do what the apprentice is

[01:34:29] doing and flips it around I mean that

[01:34:31] seems to be another theme from a couple of these

[01:34:33] stories you know changing

[01:34:35] the words of a ritual so does that mean that he

[01:34:37] kind of put the

[01:34:39] whole ritual in the path of his

[01:34:41] apprentice and the apprentice would find it and then

[01:34:43] yeah yeah that's how I interpret it yeah

[01:34:46] so the question

[01:34:47] is who is I don't think this is

[01:34:49] this is a story being told to Luke and Leia

[01:34:51] my theory is no I think

[01:34:53] this is a story that Sith masters

[01:34:55] passed down to

[01:34:57] keep their apprentice

[01:34:58] in line and to

[01:35:01] warn them of the dangers of trying to

[01:35:03] outwit their masters

[01:35:05] yeah well it makes sense to me

[01:35:06] I also think there's a certain amount of

[01:35:09] um

[01:35:11] okay if you really think the dark is attractive

[01:35:13] just know what you're getting yourself

[01:35:15] in for

[01:35:16] yeah

[01:35:18] yeah could be also

[01:35:19] um this one

[01:35:22] I don't this one feels closer to truth

[01:35:24] to me I don't know

[01:35:25] maybe not the exact ritual or something

[01:35:28] but

[01:35:29] there's we have at least reference to

[01:35:32] dark Darth Caldoth

[01:35:33] elsewhere so he's real

[01:35:35] in Star Wars history

[01:35:38] have you ever heard

[01:35:39] the tragic story

[01:35:41] of Darth

[01:35:42] Lagos

[01:35:44] so it probably that's the way it's getting passed

[01:35:47] on which would make it an oral tradition

[01:35:49] yeah for

[01:35:51] the Sith culture which is kind of

[01:35:53] interesting yeah I think

[01:35:55] it is yeah something masters passed down

[01:35:57] to their apprentices and then forget when they

[01:35:59] killed their masters

[01:36:01] well I mean this is the thing did we ever have

[01:36:03] a master who just up and died

[01:36:05] who died of like old age

[01:36:08] um some have gotten

[01:36:09] close but of course yeah a lot

[01:36:11] of the old

[01:36:13] Sith stories were

[01:36:15] from the extended universe

[01:36:16] which is not stuff that George Lucas wrote

[01:36:18] or anything and George Lucas kind of disavowed

[01:36:20] all that stuff so they just wiped the lake clean

[01:36:23] and they're bringing some of that

[01:36:24] into it so yeah we'll see

[01:36:26] we'll see what they do with it this is some of the

[01:36:29] earliest

[01:36:30] yeah these are the earliest Sith stories we have

[01:36:32] in canon

[01:36:33] yeah I'm thinking ahead to the

[01:36:36] final of the final trilogy

[01:36:38] and then like

[01:36:39] yeah well now they're shaky

[01:36:41] shaky shaky yeah

[01:36:44] and yet I mean you can fit it

[01:36:45] into the pattern

[01:36:47] you know the constant desire

[01:36:49] for eternal life which

[01:36:51] has always puzzled me but yeah there you are

[01:36:54] just when it's full of so much

[01:36:56] darkness and suffering I mean

[01:36:58] was there anything you want to died about this one

[01:37:00] before we moved on

[01:37:02] well I think in most of my comments

[01:37:05] were

[01:37:06] summarized but I did mention

[01:37:08] the moribund part

[01:37:10] earlier

[01:37:12] and

[01:37:13] you know the moral of the story

[01:37:15] quote-unquote so it was that

[01:37:17] Rhydenimbus was destroyed by his own hubris

[01:37:21] alright so if this is a Sith

[01:37:22] warning one of you Sith apprentices

[01:37:24] about hubris

[01:37:26] they're not going to get many apprentices

[01:37:28] because it seems to me that hubris is a

[01:37:30] pretty it's a pre-requisite

[01:37:31] crucial Sith requisite right

[01:37:33] but the thing is yeah warning about hubris

[01:37:36] but do the people with hubris

[01:37:38] heed warnings about hubris ever

[01:37:40] well fair point fair point

[01:37:43] well he was destroyed

[01:37:44] but you know he was he was just stupid

[01:37:46] I wouldn't get full yeah okay

[01:37:48] I can see that

[01:37:50] can see that

[01:37:52] and this

[01:37:53] the statement in the in the story

[01:37:56] Darth Caldwell had anticipated

[01:37:58] that chain of events

[01:37:59] and his triumph was and I figure

[01:38:03] probably heard

[01:38:04] that particular version of this story

[01:38:06] right he's like

[01:38:08] he did it

[01:38:09] I have foreseen it all

[01:38:12] from one of the movies you haven't gotten yet

[01:38:15] yeah oh let's call him Sidious

[01:38:16] can you say Sidious

[01:38:18] oh Sidious okay so

[01:38:20] because I'm not using I'm not

[01:38:22] using his government name

[01:38:23] okay so

[01:38:25] Darth Sidious must have

[01:38:27] read this story given the wording

[01:38:29] mm-hmm yeah I agree

[01:38:32] so in the next

[01:38:33] story we see

[01:38:35] this story we just talked about from a new

[01:38:37] perspective and we see it

[01:38:39] from the perspective of the night sisters

[01:38:41] which are the most prominent

[01:38:43] witches in Star Wars

[01:38:45] so we're just learning

[01:38:47] through stories that are being released

[01:38:49] right now that are set later in the timeline

[01:38:51] that they seem to have originally once upon

[01:38:53] a time long before this come from another galaxy

[01:38:55] and they tamed

[01:38:57] the Pergol which are the hyperspace traveling

[01:38:59] whales so that they could cross the stars

[01:39:01] and come to this galaxy

[01:39:02] and settle on the planet of Dathomir

[01:39:06] yeah we'll talk

[01:39:07] about the night sisters a lot more I've talked about them a little

[01:39:09] bit before we'll talk about a lot more

[01:39:11] going forward in the timeline

[01:39:14] but

[01:39:14] from a source

[01:39:16] book for a fantasy flight scheme

[01:39:19] TTRPG called Collapse

[01:39:21] of the Republic there's this quote about them

[01:39:23] set during this era

[01:39:25] according to a commonly told story

[01:39:27] the first night sisters were trained in the ways of the force

[01:39:29] by Alia a female Jedi

[01:39:31] whom the Jedi council had sent into exile

[01:39:33] on the mysterious planet of Dathomir

[01:39:35] however the Jedi council had no records

[01:39:37] of an exile named Alia and the night sisters

[01:39:40] themselves had other contradicting

[01:39:41] tales about their origins

[01:39:43] even if she was not the founder of the sisters

[01:39:45] it was true that Alia wrote

[01:39:47] the book of law which taught

[01:39:49] them sisters to dislike the Jedi

[01:39:52] yeah there's always

[01:39:53] a textual basis for

[01:39:55] discrimination and what not somewhere isn't there

[01:39:57] right a disgruntled Jedi

[01:39:59] but I think

[01:40:00] there's also just the fact that the night sisters

[01:40:03] are dark side users so

[01:40:06] they

[01:40:07] isn't going to endear them to the Jedi

[01:40:08] no it's not the Jedi's favorite kind of people

[01:40:11] um

[01:40:11] yeah and they are exclusively female

[01:40:15] they call their leaders mother or great mother

[01:40:18] and

[01:40:18] as I mentioned aside from the witches

[01:40:21] we meet in the acolyte and star wars lore

[01:40:23] to date all witches tend to

[01:40:25] come from the red blighted planet

[01:40:27] of Dathomir which is not dead

[01:40:29] but it's like blighted in the

[01:40:31] wheel of time way where it's like

[01:40:33] this kind of grotesque

[01:40:35] wildlife

[01:40:38] um they

[01:40:39] are you get to run around there

[01:40:41] by the way a lot in Jedi fallen order

[01:40:43] haha

[01:40:45] um do you want to

[01:40:46] well yeah

[01:40:48] if it's blighted

[01:40:49] the other one you also visit

[01:40:52] there the wookie planet of Kashyyyk

[01:40:53] which is a planet and actually

[01:40:55] Kashyyyk is kind of in some way scarier

[01:40:58] because everything there will eat you

[01:40:59] it's like jungle Australia

[01:41:00] yeah yeah yeah and you can't see

[01:41:03] what's coming because it's all such dense

[01:41:06] yeah

[01:41:08] um so the night sisters are dark

[01:41:10] side users they use green

[01:41:12] and they call it magic which

[01:41:13] and they're especially known for necromancy

[01:41:15] but they use this green stuff

[01:41:17] they called a magical icor

[01:41:20] which is a glowing green mist

[01:41:22] they pull from the planet

[01:41:23] and harness to use

[01:41:25] um but it's also

[01:41:27] yeah they do it is

[01:41:29] in a way of manipulating the force

[01:41:32] in a very different way it's been confirmed

[01:41:33] but Marilyn I think night sisters

[01:41:35] interest you but you were more keen on our light

[01:41:38] side counterparts the mountain clan

[01:41:40] yes well I do tend in that direction more anyway

[01:41:43] but I find it fascinating that

[01:41:45] they're using the magic with the K

[01:41:48] spelling because that originated

[01:41:50] on in

[01:41:54] ITRW

[01:41:54] in the real world

[01:41:55] um

[01:41:57] with a particular practitioner

[01:41:59] who was

[01:42:01] kind of dicey

[01:42:03] um but some of his he was one

[01:42:05] of the earliest ones to be public

[01:42:07] and so some of his sayings stuck

[01:42:09] such as

[01:42:10] do what you will

[01:42:13] love is the will love under law

[01:42:14] um but anyway

[01:42:16] I'm getting it mixed up because I didn't take notes

[01:42:18] but he decided to spell magic with a K

[01:42:21] in order to distinguish it

[01:42:23] from press the digitation

[01:42:24] okay or stage magic

[01:42:26] right and a lot

[01:42:28] of practitioners thought that was

[01:42:30] kind of pretentious

[01:42:32] perhaps is a good word for what they know about

[01:42:35] but

[01:42:35] I always find it fascinating when these bits and pieces

[01:42:39] of

[01:42:40] the history of contemporary

[01:42:42] practice of

[01:42:44] witchcraft magic

[01:42:46] paganism whatever your particular path

[01:42:49] show up in these

[01:42:51] um popular genres

[01:42:53] yeah

[01:42:54] and green magic

[01:42:56] in our world is nothing at all

[01:42:59] like what the night sisters are

[01:43:01] it's really kind of fascinating

[01:43:02] well and this is the first time I've seen

[01:43:04] anything

[01:43:06] that remotely suggests

[01:43:08] an interest in nature

[01:43:11] which is the

[01:43:12] basis for most magical practitioners

[01:43:15] these days you know

[01:43:16] the nature based religions

[01:43:18] are what we're talking about in contemporary

[01:43:20] times not exclusively I mean there's

[01:43:23] you know there are

[01:43:24] gardenering covens and all kinds of other

[01:43:26] creative

[01:43:29] approaches to this idea

[01:43:31] well okay when I say

[01:43:33] green magic though I don't

[01:43:34] mean um nature

[01:43:36] based magic per se

[01:43:37] they are pulling it from their

[01:43:40] planet they are pulling it from

[01:43:42] like you know the mantle of their planet

[01:43:45] although it's not their planet is not

[01:43:47] like a leafy planet so it is green in a way

[01:43:49] because it's from their nature but then

[01:43:51] they have a

[01:43:53] um Dathomir

[01:43:54] said to be bathed in the dark side

[01:43:57] so

[01:43:58] um so actually I have

[01:44:00] to give credit to the mountain clan

[01:44:02] for being light side users on a planet

[01:44:04] that almost wills them to be

[01:44:06] dark

[01:44:07] yeah yeah I did like

[01:44:10] that group very much and

[01:44:11] wanted to

[01:44:13] see more and hear more about them and their development

[01:44:16] hope maybe that will be an area

[01:44:18] that future story writers

[01:44:20] will want to explore and uncover

[01:44:21] but there is there is another group

[01:44:24] um on in the high

[01:44:26] republic uh we hear about a group

[01:44:28] called the Lonto and they show up

[01:44:30] they are one of the groups of

[01:44:32] force users on the planet of Jeddah which

[01:44:34] is kind of where all these different force

[01:44:36] users come together it's also the setting

[01:44:38] for a lot of the movie Rogue One

[01:44:40] um and

[01:44:42] yeah the Lonto are more

[01:44:44] like typical

[01:44:45] which you would think like growing plants

[01:44:48] with use of the force and using that

[01:44:50] to adorn themselves and to fight

[01:44:52] into you know just very

[01:44:54] green in that way

[01:44:56] well and even

[01:44:57] the um night sisters that we

[01:44:59] saw in that collight are using the Bantu

[01:45:02] tree

[01:45:02] right so there is the

[01:45:05] well they're not night sisters the witches

[01:45:07] sorry the witches yeah yeah yeah

[01:45:09] yeah friend duck yeah so

[01:45:11] the official Star Wars

[01:45:13] data bank says about Dathomir

[01:45:15] it is a remote planet in the outer rim

[01:45:17] drenched in blood red light

[01:45:19] from its central star the planet

[01:45:21] has continents overrun by twisted

[01:45:23] vegetation with forests

[01:45:25] of bent trees burdened by large

[01:45:27] cocoon like fruit bordering

[01:45:29] dense swamp lands is the massive stone

[01:45:31] fortresses of the night sisters a witch

[01:45:33] clan the night sisters kept to themselves

[01:45:36] but had it on occasion been known

[01:45:37] to offer their services to those

[01:45:39] who piqued their interests far

[01:45:41] from the night sisters live the night brothers

[01:45:43] a tattooed clan of Zabrak warriors

[01:45:45] who were subservient to their female counterparts

[01:45:48] and Maul is

[01:45:49] the most famous night brother

[01:45:52] so I also pulled from here

[01:45:55] a quote from

[01:45:57] star wars dot com

[01:45:59] about the magic

[01:46:01] with a K they used you want to read that quote

[01:46:03] sure

[01:46:06] although their understanding of it was unique

[01:46:08] to their world and culture

[01:46:09] the magic the sisters

[01:46:11] wielded was seemingly connected

[01:46:13] to the force just

[01:46:15] used in a vastly different way than the Jedi

[01:46:17] or the cyst

[01:46:19] where those groups followed strict dogmas

[01:46:21] and use the force in arguably more simple

[01:46:23] ways such as pushing and pulling

[01:46:25] the night sisters use their magic

[01:46:27] to cast spells perform rituals

[01:46:30] and brew potions

[01:46:32] so it's does that

[01:46:33] um yeah you had a lot of questions

[01:46:36] about what

[01:46:37] the interaction

[01:46:39] is between magic and the forces doesn't exactly

[01:46:42] clarify it but it clarifies

[01:46:44] that there is some sort of

[01:46:45] it is force based

[01:46:48] well you know

[01:46:49] I just see it as it's all the same

[01:46:53] energy and everybody's calling it different

[01:46:55] names and using it differently

[01:46:58] other people might

[01:46:59] disagree with that

[01:47:01] and certainly in world I'm sure people would

[01:47:03] disagree with that

[01:47:04] but um

[01:47:07] we make up names for things

[01:47:09] that we don't understand

[01:47:11] and interact with them

[01:47:13] and use them you know to the best

[01:47:15] and the worst of our abilities

[01:47:16] and make stories

[01:47:19] about how and why we use

[01:47:21] them um why

[01:47:23] they're there where to be first learned

[01:47:25] all those kinds of things that we're talking

[01:47:27] about here today

[01:47:29] so

[01:47:31] I could make a case where at the end of the day

[01:47:33] it's all just the same power

[01:47:34] and it's to some degree

[01:47:36] shaped and fashioned by how people approach it

[01:47:39] and what they want to use it for

[01:47:40] yeah

[01:47:41] I was more interested in the cultural understanding

[01:47:44] and how people

[01:47:46] might be distinguishing magic

[01:47:48] from using the force

[01:47:50] yes well we see in this

[01:47:52] as we see in other things like the clone wars

[01:47:54] and other night sister stories

[01:47:57] that they do they have their

[01:47:59] they have their own well developed

[01:48:00] culture and we're only just starting

[01:48:02] to learn about it

[01:48:04] in for instance the series of soca

[01:48:06] how where this originated

[01:48:08] from but they have like these

[01:48:10] they have their own documents and dogma

[01:48:12] and rituals and everything that are completely

[01:48:14] separate from the Jedi

[01:48:16] or the Sith or other force users

[01:48:18] mm-hmm

[01:48:19] so maybe they wind up occupying

[01:48:22] the gray position

[01:48:23] well yeah in this particular setup

[01:48:27] yeah I mean they lean dark

[01:48:28] but like you know maybe like

[01:48:30] not black like dark red

[01:48:32] you know

[01:48:33] well I mean the darkest on the eye of the beholder

[01:48:35] right exactly and so one of their

[01:48:38] and I think they're seen

[01:48:39] as darker because of their necromancy

[01:48:41] so one of their practices they're most known for

[01:48:43] these burial pods

[01:48:44] so the night sisters

[01:48:46] this is a quote from

[01:48:49] the story

[01:48:50] the night sisters had long before adopted a practice

[01:48:53] of mummifying their dead and committing them

[01:48:55] to pods of animal skin which they hung

[01:48:57] from structures that resembled trees

[01:48:59] decorated with tassels and animal bones

[01:49:01] in times of extreme crisis

[01:49:03] these dead night sisters could be resurrected

[01:49:05] stirring from their pods like

[01:49:07] nightmarish shadow moths

[01:49:09] to defend their living sisters

[01:49:11] and yes you do fight them in video games

[01:49:13] ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

[01:49:16] and you'll see them on screen before that as well

[01:49:20] um another cool fact about the night sisters

[01:49:22] is and this is something I'm dying

[01:49:24] to see on screen but they are rank or

[01:49:26] writers so

[01:49:28] rankors are like these big

[01:49:30] ugly beasts that maybe have a softer

[01:49:32] side I kind of like rankors

[01:49:34] they're often used to scare

[01:49:36] people but they you know they're animals

[01:49:38] they have a softer side um

[01:49:39] yeah they're massive though

[01:49:42] but according to

[01:49:44] according to

[01:49:46] some of the

[01:49:47] more questionable canon but canon nonetheless

[01:49:51] they teamed up

[01:49:52] to drive out with the rankors

[01:49:54] and the night sisters teamed up to drive out

[01:49:56] the six-armed snake like from

[01:49:58] path species who used to live on

[01:50:00] Dathomir but tax the planet's resources

[01:50:02] too much and

[01:50:04] yeah we'll talk about this more in a novel that's tied

[01:50:06] to the movie solo

[01:50:09] um so

[01:50:11] Darksiders yeah add odds with the Jedi

[01:50:12] but clearly

[01:50:13] their manipulation of life and

[01:50:16] death is something that Darth Caldoth would have

[01:50:18] been very interested in

[01:50:20] no doubt

[01:50:22] so I'll read

[01:50:24] a summary of the story and then

[01:50:26] I've pulled a quote from it below

[01:50:28] if you'll read that afterwards

[01:50:31] but so the story

[01:50:32] the gilded cage

[01:50:34] from Dark Legends

[01:50:36] Dark Caldoth stole the mummified

[01:50:38] remains of a night sister from the planet Dathomir

[01:50:40] in order to learn the secrets behind the night

[01:50:42] sisters reanimation process

[01:50:44] considering this act a decree of war

[01:50:46] the night sisters plan the revenge upon

[01:50:48] Caldoth after gathering

[01:50:50] six sisters and putting them through

[01:50:52] great trials the young sister named

[01:50:54] Zeldin was selected to carry out their revenge

[01:50:56] following defeat of Caldoth by the Jedi

[01:50:59] Bran Aath Morath

[01:51:01] the night sisters performed a ritual

[01:51:03] to project Zeldin's thoughts

[01:51:05] into Caldoth's mind there she

[01:51:07] observed and slowly broke down

[01:51:09] Caldoth's mental barrier so she could influence

[01:51:11] his thoughts she influenced

[01:51:12] Caldoth to recruit an apprentice

[01:51:14] Rye Nimbus who the night sisters

[01:51:16] thought could defeat him but Rye Nimbus

[01:51:19] was tricked by Caldoth and imprisoned

[01:51:21] forever as a statue

[01:51:22] they then tried to lure Caldoth

[01:51:25] to the moon of Obsidia and let

[01:51:27] its spirit guardian defeat him

[01:51:28] but yet again he prevailed

[01:51:30] angered Zeldin planned a final trap

[01:51:33] stoking Caldoth's flames of hatred

[01:51:35] for the Jedi Bran Aath Morath

[01:51:37] they hoped to lure Caldoth

[01:51:40] into falling to the Jedi's blade

[01:51:41] Caldoth attacks the world of Qizan

[01:51:44] and the Jedi responded

[01:51:45] this time Caldoth defeated and killed the Jedi

[01:51:48] on Dathomir

[01:51:49] Zeldin screamed in frustration

[01:51:51] for she had once again failed

[01:51:52] their patience gone the night sisters

[01:51:54] resorted to drastic measures

[01:51:56] they prepared a ritual that would allow

[01:51:58] Zeldin to assert their fuller control

[01:52:00] over Darth Caldoth but Caldoth

[01:52:02] had known of the night sister presence

[01:52:04] all along and his mastery

[01:52:06] of the force allowed him to instead trap

[01:52:08] Zeldin within his mind

[01:52:10] the night sisters fearing Caldoth's power

[01:52:13] gave up on their revenge and committed

[01:52:15] Zeldin's body to a pod for burial

[01:52:18] so this is a quote from the story

[01:52:20] Zeldin feared Darth Caldoth above all else

[01:52:23] yet she knew there could be no turning back

[01:52:26] for the vengeance of the night sisters was absolute

[01:52:29] failure would lead to

[01:52:30] terrors of a different kind

[01:52:32] her body was committed to a pod

[01:52:34] and hung on the very same structure

[01:52:36] from which Caldoth had first stolen

[01:52:38] the mummified remains of Zeldin's sister

[01:52:41] she was never heard from again

[01:52:44] except by Darth Caldoth

[01:52:45] who from time to time was given to listen

[01:52:47] to her screams and smile

[01:52:51] so yeah we really see this

[01:52:54] exactly

[01:52:54] it's a boogie story for the night sisters

[01:52:57] so I'm wondering is this another

[01:52:59] Sith story

[01:53:01] don't mess with the Sith because they're even scarier

[01:53:03] than the night sisters

[01:53:05] well yeah I mean that's certainly

[01:53:08] one possible

[01:53:09] message in meaning and interpretation

[01:53:11] and justification as it were

[01:53:15] but who are the they who are passing it down

[01:53:17] is it the night sisters

[01:53:19] well no that's a question

[01:53:20] is it the Sith

[01:53:22] like I was saying with the last one

[01:53:23] or is this one that would be passed down through the night sisters as a warning

[01:53:28] yeah I mean I don't know what there isn't here for the Sith

[01:53:31] we know that Darth Caldoth prevails

[01:53:33] but we don't know anything about how he prevailed

[01:53:36] he had super spidey senses

[01:53:38] and knew from the beginning that she was there

[01:53:40] alright so how do you develop that

[01:53:42] unless it's

[01:53:43] you know supposed to encourage

[01:53:46] an apprentice to think that

[01:53:48] yeah I can defeat night sisters too

[01:53:50] right but I think it's

[01:53:52] much more a night sister story

[01:53:53] yeah probably I mean the protagonist

[01:53:56] is a night sister we don't really see that much

[01:53:58] of Darth Caldoth at all

[01:53:59] that's a good point that's a good point

[01:54:02] so what do you think it's a word of warning

[01:54:04] like don't mess with the Sith

[01:54:06] it's that but I think it's also

[01:54:08] something of a

[01:54:10] instruction about

[01:54:12] you know if you're going to be one of us

[01:54:14] as one of us

[01:54:15] your life is going to be hard

[01:54:17] we're going to put you through tests

[01:54:19] we're going to ask you to do very difficult things

[01:54:21] we're going to ask you to put your life on the line

[01:54:24] when we are threatened

[01:54:25] mm-hmm

[01:54:27] and we will love you and we will honor you

[01:54:29] and we will treat you with respect

[01:54:32] and it's going to be

[01:54:33] a really tough life

[01:54:34] right and failure

[01:54:36] is not

[01:54:37] forgiven failure is not

[01:54:39] forgiven there's nothing soft about it

[01:54:42] hmm

[01:54:44] how true and or factual

[01:54:46] do you think this might be

[01:54:49] oh I think

[01:54:50] you could definitely say it's true whether or not

[01:54:52] you could say it's factual

[01:54:54] well here's an interesting thought

[01:54:57] maybe it was

[01:54:58] a story created by Darth Caldoth

[01:55:00] and circulated among the night sisters

[01:55:02] mm-hmm

[01:55:04] and they

[01:55:05] took it up and

[01:55:06] embellished it and you know

[01:55:08] made it a story for Tootalich

[01:55:10] for the younger sisters

[01:55:13] um but

[01:55:14] Caldoth still wanted to implant

[01:55:16] in their culture

[01:55:18] this very deep

[01:55:20] fear and

[01:55:23] don't mess with the sith message

[01:55:24] right

[01:55:26] right I could see it either way

[01:55:28] mm-hmm

[01:55:31] did you have any passages you wanted to shout out

[01:55:33] or ideas

[01:55:34] to share well it

[01:55:36] again the fact that

[01:55:38] she was still young barely attained adulthood

[01:55:41] but strong and

[01:55:42] marked for greatness by the elders I mean

[01:55:44] the whole sacrificial nature

[01:55:47] of it is really

[01:55:49] really pretty intense

[01:55:51] yeah everyone remember this

[01:55:53] when we get to Ventress in the next age

[01:55:54] in the next era well there you go

[01:55:57] yeah so it does seem

[01:55:59] to be drawing from that not that I know Ventress's

[01:56:01] story very well at this point

[01:56:03] but that the chilling

[01:56:05] sentence that she had me read about absolute

[01:56:07] fear would lead to tears of a different kind

[01:56:09] mm-hmm

[01:56:10] you know but what are you supposed

[01:56:13] to do you know you're a night sister

[01:56:15] you're on this planet how can

[01:56:17] you flee and decide no I want to be

[01:56:19] a you know a servant of

[01:56:20] a secret fire

[01:56:24] doesn't sound like it's

[01:56:25] going to be possible

[01:56:26] interesting that it brings up the living force

[01:56:29] mm-hmm

[01:56:31] yes there are different

[01:56:32] types of force indeed so

[01:56:35] exactly so like I said yeah the night

[01:56:36] sisters they are pulling from

[01:56:38] the land it's just maybe not that sort

[01:56:41] of they don't really have trees

[01:56:42] so to speak to

[01:56:44] not anymore well

[01:56:46] yeah I don't know if Dathomir ever did

[01:56:48] I think Dathomir is actually

[01:56:50] because Dathomir is alive it's just

[01:56:52] twisted

[01:56:54] okay

[01:56:55] and you know a rite of

[01:56:57] a ritual excuse me of prognostication

[01:56:59] mm-hmm

[01:57:01] so they're future gazers which is

[01:57:03] interesting and I'm not sure

[01:57:05] I'm not sure I've seen much of that in

[01:57:07] Star Wars except for you know

[01:57:09] Sith Lords proclaiming that they've

[01:57:10] foreseen it all the best

[01:57:13] night sister stuff comes

[01:57:14] from the

[01:57:17] Clone Wars

[01:57:19] certain books

[01:57:20] in certain video games

[01:57:23] mm-hmm

[01:57:24] and now a soga

[01:57:26] but the whole notion of

[01:57:29] well I guess

[01:57:30] I guess Yoda does say

[01:57:31] you can use the force to foresee the future

[01:57:34] yeah often it's

[01:57:36] they don't use it very much no

[01:57:38] often they that you'll see them

[01:57:40] go to a virgins and that will help them

[01:57:42] see different types of visions

[01:57:44] right right

[01:57:46] but this seems to be a really core practice

[01:57:48] yes because I mean is there

[01:57:50] I think it's

[01:57:52] it's associated with witches and

[01:57:54] in our culture so you got to have

[01:57:56] some kind of version of a fortune telling

[01:57:58] you know a crystal ball sort of a thing

[01:58:00] well I think you're gonna argue real witches

[01:58:01] I think you can argue that their entire planet

[01:58:04] is a sort of dark side virgins which

[01:58:06] is why the witches thrive there

[01:58:08] hmm

[01:58:10] well they choose to thrive there

[01:58:11] they allow themselves to be shaped by the land

[01:58:14] right even I mean and they

[01:58:16] if they came from another galaxy then they chose that planet

[01:58:19] fair point

[01:58:21] and it brings up

[01:58:24] this notion of

[01:58:26] different forms of eternity

[01:58:29] you know she's gonna live forever inside

[01:58:31] Darth Caldoth's mind

[01:58:32] if Darth Caldoth lives forever

[01:58:34] yeah the twilight

[01:58:36] is gonna live forever but he's encased

[01:58:38] in stone right

[01:58:39] you know these ideas and immortality seem

[01:58:42] to run through an awful lot of these

[01:58:44] stories right I also

[01:58:46] find interesting yeah so we decided

[01:58:48] to save the other three

[01:58:50] stories for a part two episode

[01:58:52] because we've we've gone deep

[01:58:54] and I knew we would and I'm so glad we did

[01:58:57] but the

[01:58:58] other two cis stories we're gonna be

[01:59:00] talking about are about

[01:59:03] to happen

[01:59:04] to both be female sith

[01:59:06] seeking immortality and finding it in

[01:59:08] different ways or not

[01:59:11] or I think everything

[01:59:12] we know about sith lords after you know

[01:59:14] dark red lightsaber etc

[01:59:16] is they want to live forever

[01:59:20] yes and that seems

[01:59:22] to be a well because we chose this

[01:59:24] stories it's a strong theme but

[01:59:27] it's interesting how many different

[01:59:28] ways they depict

[01:59:30] quote-unquote immortality

[01:59:32] this the quest for eternal existence

[01:59:34] mm-hmm right and

[01:59:36] most of them seem to be pretty awful

[01:59:38] in my opinion

[01:59:40] yeah well in these Darth

[01:59:42] Carledoth stories you know he

[01:59:44] wins in both of them

[01:59:46] the other two stories

[01:59:48] I don't think are sith stories

[01:59:50] because they do not

[01:59:52] go well actually the last

[01:59:54] one the last one

[01:59:56] I think so yeah

[01:59:58] I think so

[02:00:00] and I also it was

[02:00:02] interesting that it did hint at one point

[02:00:06] I think it's some point Zeldin

[02:00:08] finds herself wondering

[02:00:09] gee I wonder how Carledoth

[02:00:11] knew about this thing and made use of it

[02:00:15] and that was

[02:00:16] the clue to the reader that

[02:00:18] he was already tapped into her

[02:00:20] knew what was going on draw things from

[02:00:22] her and incorporate them into his own stuff

[02:00:24] so that was interesting yeah

[02:00:26] I mean I have to say overall Carledoth

[02:00:28] so we just get

[02:00:30] these two stories and the mention of him

[02:00:33] and I think

[02:00:34] they say the names of a bunch of sith

[02:00:36] in another story that's set later

[02:00:38] in the timeline but yeah I want

[02:00:40] more

[02:00:41] I want a Darth Carledoth movie

[02:00:44] or have him be the nemesis

[02:00:46] against some

[02:00:48] early Jedi

[02:00:50] he's a cool character

[02:00:51] he's a bad dude but a cool character

[02:00:54] for folks who

[02:00:56] like that sort of thing it's

[02:00:58] he's definitely multifaceted

[02:01:00] and has a lot of potential

[02:01:02] there yeah because you

[02:01:04] I mean not that I like the bad guys

[02:01:06] to win but you know Star Wars

[02:01:07] has so many tales of the good guys

[02:01:10] winning which is great good yay

[02:01:11] but

[02:01:14] sometimes it's fun to have

[02:01:15] that guy's really scary

[02:01:18] he even got the night sisters

[02:01:20] yeah well and I think that was a lot of the

[02:01:22] intention of the story

[02:01:23] yeah

[02:01:26] okay well that was

[02:01:28] super interesting and fun to talk

[02:01:30] through with you and I look forward

[02:01:32] to talking through the other three stories

[02:01:34] soon yes I think

[02:01:36] it'll be good and we can refer back to

[02:01:38] a lot of the things that we've said today so

[02:01:40] I hope folks will be able to keep both

[02:01:42] stories close at hand when they listen to the next

[02:01:44] episode of this yes

[02:01:46] yeah and uh yeah I'll give

[02:01:47] for people who are listening

[02:01:50] liberally so give you some time to think

[02:01:52] and process through what we talked today and

[02:01:53] indeed we'll use that as the basis for

[02:01:55] the next round sounds good

[02:01:58] thank you so much Marilyn for joining

[02:02:00] me today oh thank you

[02:02:02] it's been a lot of fun that's it's uh

[02:02:04] there's nothing like having

[02:02:06] interesting questions tossed your way

[02:02:08] to open up all kinds of new

[02:02:10] venues and connections

[02:02:12] and recollections and so on

[02:02:14] it's it's fun yeah

[02:02:15] now it's great to I don't know to flesh out

[02:02:18] the star world world in this way

[02:02:20] you know

[02:02:20] all right until next time

[02:02:24] until next time knock I mean

[02:02:26] as I say on my podcast

[02:02:28] which means till next time

[02:02:31] wait is that in

[02:02:32] quenya or was it

[02:02:34] that's that's finished

[02:02:35] oh that's finished oh sorry I don't know

[02:02:37] but isn't quenya based on finish

[02:02:39] yes it is okay okay

[02:02:41] and that's a lot of the ring's language or sorry tolki

[02:02:43] language

[02:02:46] okay

[02:02:47] okay be well

[02:02:50] thank you listeners and I'd also

[02:02:53] like to give a special thank you to listu

[02:02:55] for becoming the og can in

[02:02:57] padawan and ken w for

[02:02:59] becoming the og stories

[02:03:01] in these titles you shall

[02:03:03] hold forever so

[02:03:05] for anyone who's wondering what that means

[02:03:07] um the can in padawan timeline

[02:03:09] is basically it's a

[02:03:11] bonus model that runs alongside

[02:03:13] this podcast you do get all of

[02:03:15] these episodes early at

[02:03:17] free um but

[02:03:19] then also you have access

[02:03:21] to a timeline that's

[02:03:23] in uh that's in release

[02:03:25] order so that you can compare it with this

[02:03:27] chronological order one in the public feed

[02:03:29] and also you will retain

[02:03:31] all uh extra episodes

[02:03:33] like retired episodes like the

[02:03:35] like the one that I said is

[02:03:37] released alongside this one plus

[02:03:39] some bonus episodes like spoilery

[02:03:41] episodes for example coming

[02:03:43] up there will be the skeleton

[02:03:45] crew tv show and

[02:03:47] I won't be covering it in the public feed

[02:03:49] just yet because it's much further down

[02:03:51] the timeline but I will be having some

[02:03:53] uh coverage in the can

[02:03:55] in padawan timeline feed

[02:03:57] and stories in that is

[02:03:59] a new option that's

[02:04:01] available via supercast

[02:04:03] where you can sign up

[02:04:05] for both the can

[02:04:07] in padawan timeline and the

[02:04:09] will shift us book club with all of

[02:04:11] those benefits for a reduced

[02:04:13] price for the combined subscription

[02:04:15] so you'll find links to

[02:04:17] that in the show notes if you want

[02:04:19] more information and you'll also find links

[02:04:21] in the show notes to the email address

[02:04:23] if you want to send feedback I'd love

[02:04:25] to hear it any and everything

[02:04:27] star wars uh will

[02:04:29] include it in the appropriate

[02:04:31] episode you can send feedback to

[02:04:33] sw timeline podcast at

[02:04:35] gmail.com and

[02:04:37] you'll also find in the notes the laurhounds

[02:04:39] website where you'll find links to all

[02:04:41] the podcasts in the laurhounds family

[02:04:43] including my own wool shift dust

[02:04:45] podcast next up in the public feeds going to be the

[02:04:47] dune book breakdown

[02:04:49] and a silo trailer breakdown

[02:04:51] whenever one of those drops

[02:04:53] in the book club we're busy

[02:04:55] finishing off the silo books and stories

[02:04:57] where we're ramping up for a pre

[02:04:59] season two season one rewatch

[02:05:01] and so that abbey and I can talk through

[02:05:03] all of the book spoilers there

[02:05:05] and the main laurhounds feed is deep

[02:05:07] into rings of power

[02:05:09] coverage which I am not

[02:05:11] part of but I'm thoroughly enjoying

[02:05:13] so uh all of

[02:05:15] the lore to explain rings of power

[02:05:17] and I will be

[02:05:19] participating in with Jean weekly

[02:05:21] agatha coverage so that's coming out

[02:05:23] in two weeks is going to be an agatha

[02:05:25] prep episode in the laurhounds feed

[02:05:27] before that plus Jean

[02:05:29] and I are starting our DC coverage

[02:05:31] this week and you can also look out

[02:05:33] in the laurhounds feed for alien romulus

[02:05:35] and beetle juice beetle juice one

[02:05:37] shots coming up soon and more

[02:05:39] coming up in the weeks to come

[02:05:41] uh you can catch up on

[02:05:43] episodes of rings and rituals properly

[02:05:45] howard and radioactive ramblings

[02:05:47] but please do check out

[02:05:49] the newest member of the laurhounds family

[02:05:51] nevermind the music we finally

[02:05:53] have a music podcast so

[02:05:55] nevermind the music features two academics

[02:05:57] casually talking about the music that made

[02:05:59] them with laid back deep dives

[02:06:01] into the science and stories behind the songs

[02:06:03] and some snazzy editing

[02:06:05] you can already check out the teaser

[02:06:07] episode in their feed and their

[02:06:09] first full episodes drop on September 10th

[02:06:12] as for this feed next up is part

[02:06:14] two of my discussion of star wars

[02:06:16] canon folklore from the old republic with marilin

[02:06:18] we're going to be discussing two more

[02:06:20] Sith stories and a werewolf sorry

[02:06:22] mad she's divanan story

[02:06:24] you might want to know what a she's divanan is

[02:06:26] before uh skeleton crew begins

[02:06:28] and in that episode

[02:06:30] I will also be joined at the end by

[02:06:32] dead eye Jedi bob and by marchin

[02:06:34] and healthy who have joined me to talk

[02:06:36] through our first old republic mail bag

[02:06:38] then in the following

[02:06:40] episode we're jumping back to the high republic

[02:06:42] to talk through two more star wars

[02:06:44] visions episodes combined with the high republic mail bag

[02:06:47] followed by the next

[02:06:49] episode a breakdown

[02:06:50] of season 2 a of young

[02:06:53] Jedi adventures the first 11 episodes

[02:06:55] of the second season and

[02:06:57] after that you'll get a breakdown

[02:06:58] of the legends darth plague

[02:07:01] is spoke with dead eye Jedi bob

[02:07:02] and I which will lead us right into

[02:07:04] the fourth era after the plague

[02:07:06] is episode I'll release an era overview

[02:07:08] episode talking about how the content

[02:07:10] will be covered the central

[02:07:12] eras packed with content will be handled

[02:07:14] slightly differently than these earlier eras

[02:07:17] and in the high republic phase 2

[02:07:19] IE the earliest phase

[02:07:20] book coverage is also coming soon

[02:07:22] once the participants are a little less

[02:07:24] overwhelmed with the crush of content this fellowship fall

[02:07:27] that's all for now

[02:07:28] see you again in a couple weeks live listeners

[02:07:30] for those of you listening later

[02:07:32] the next episode awaits and just remember

[02:07:34] never try to outsmart a sith

[02:07:38] music

[02:07:56] Nicole did you ever notice how the sign

[02:07:58] by ace of base has really strange

[02:08:00] key changes I did not

[02:08:02] mark I'm a real person well let me

[02:08:04] tell you about it I'll let you talk about

[02:08:06] neuroscience golly-gook yes I thought

[02:08:08] you'd never ask this is the never mind

[02:08:10] the music podcast where one psychologist

[02:08:12] and one musician deep dive into

[02:08:14] the songs you love so you don't have

[02:08:16] to and there's plenty of time to get off topic

[02:08:18] from semi-charm life to the way you

[02:08:20] move and who could forget the crossroads

[02:08:23] is it the crossroads of the crossroads

[02:08:25] save it for the episode mark listen

[02:08:27] to never mind the music wherever you get

[02:08:29] your podcasts