[Image ID: Japanese actor Toshino Mifune depicted as Obi-wan Kenobi. He wears Obi-wan’s Episode II outfit, and the twin suns rest behind his head on a greay background. Purple shading covers the right half of his face and body. /end ID]
I wonder what it’s like being master to the Chosen One
since i’m on a han kick rn, i wanna talk about something i’ve noticed that goes against the Womanizer Trait everyone assigns him, which is that han is the first one to get attached between him and leia
first of all, we neverhear about han sleeping around or having “conquests” in the movies. i can’t speak much to the eu, but in the ot, the only thing he’s cocky about are his skills as a smuggler and pilot.
in empire strikes back, he’s the one who gets huffy and stomps off when leia doesn’t proclaim her love for him as he prepares to leave hoth. repeatedly, he tries to get her to admit her feelings for him, and is hurt or bothered by the fact that she doesn’t say it. my favorite moment of theirs is in return of the jedi, when han is jealous of leia’s vulnerability with luke and not him, he gets upset and storms away again.
and then, in a moment i will always love, he takes a deep breath and realizes it’s not leia’s fault that he’s jealous, and that she’s clearly upset and needs him to be there for her. and so he puts his own hurt aside to be whatever she needs. that’s so goddamn mature, and it shows how much he’s grown over the course of the trilogy.
which is why i think him saying “i know” at the end of esb is so important for han and leia, and really good insight on harrison ford’s part. leia has spent the past movie pretending not to care about han, and when she’s about to lose him, she panics, telling him he was right and she does love him. han doesn’t tease or dismiss her, and he also doesn’t assert his love for her, because it’s been clear the whole time.
instead he says the kindest thing you can say to someone who’s about to lose a loved one and worries they didn’t do enough to show how much they care (i’m speaking from experience here): he reassures her that he already knows.
I wanted to play around and “redo” the clone model, bc frankly it stinks. first I studied and rendered a version of Plunketts original clone sculpt as a base, then I sketched and intermediate, and then finished it off with a final render. The final render that I made is just a piggy-back off of Plunketts original design, a suggestion of some geometry changes they could make, but it if we’re me I would do a complete overhaul of the model to make it anatomy more like Temuera’s. Because I wanted to start at the (sort of) same starting place as Plunkett, I started with one of his original sculpts of the clones (the one I used is a sculpt of Fives).
Here is a written outline of the ALL changes I made:
removed extreme cheekbone geometry from the sides of the face in favor of a smooth plane
removed the extreme angles of the jaw in favor of Temuera’s rounded jawline, also lowered a tad
change of hairline to match Temuera’s hairline shape
complete change of the nose geometry, flatter, broader. Still “shapely” to fit the general style
lips are smaller and rounded
brows are lowered and relaxed like Temuera’s
added crease above nose and in between eyebrows
removal of wrinkles (they’re in their twenties what were you thinking)
added texture to the hair. I would suggest starting with large textured shapes and then do a painted texture on the model similar to how they did Trace and Admiral Rampart’s hair. the textures are simple but the painting makes the hair patterns more apparent on top of the model’s geometry.
(not pictured) add a more appropriate skin tone (I understand that the raw animation the clones are already pretty dark, but the shaders they use make the final rendering for animated clones SIGNIFICANTLY lighter, to combat this, make the ‘true color’ of the animated clones darker to compensate for the lightening in rendering or fix the shaders)
(not pictured) get rid of the grey/golden eyes, idk what it is about LFA’s refusal to give POC characters their dark brown eyes but just give em back, man. use the dark almost black eyes Temuera has.
I am NOT a 3D animator or a 3D modeler, however all of the things that I changed are completely realistic and achievable in 3D. (i elaborate on this more in the post)
When I started this process I made notes of some of the most glaring features on the first clone model, such as the extremely chiseled and angular face, large Eurocentric nose, straight hair, and (while it’s not pictured in my render) the obviously-too-light skin. This looks nothing like Temuera, not even if you squint. I made some notes of the features that they excluded from the model (1st image) and some notes of features that Temuera has that would help capture his likeness better (2nd image)
ALT
I’ve heard the argument a million times that the model isn’t whitewashed it’s just “the art style”. ABSOLUTELY NOT BABE, SIT DOWN AND TAKE A GANDER. This is Captain Typo’s character model, based on a Polynesian actor. LFA is clearly capable of sculpting and rendering Polynesian features and curly hair textures. They have dark skin, rounded face, DARK BROWN EYES, curls, rounded flat nose, etc. the argument that it’s ‘just the art style’ is a hot pile of garbage, stop using it.
Hair texture time! To elaborate more on the proposed hair texture in my model redesign, I wanted to explain what I’m talking about a little bit. LFA is capable of animating lots of different kinds of hair textures, they just elected to exclude it from the clone model for whatever reason. They achieve geometric texture, which is the actual geometry of the model, and painted textures, where there is simple geometry but most of the texturing is done with paint, the colors you see on top the 3D geometry. Either of these options would be acceptable for curly hair like Temuera’a. (Looking again Trace Martez’ hair might fall a bit in between the two categories, but the point is still the same)
I also understand that animation, especially 3D animation is hard. But that’s not an excuse for LFA! they’ve updated the clone model significantly about 3 times, and that doesn’t include some of the smaller geometry changes they’ve made to characters like Hunter and Rex. They can achieve rounded faces (Fennec, Typho, Trace Martez) and other appropriate features for people of color. With 3 major overhauls they should have at least tried to make them resemble Temuera Morrison.
Now you tell me, which one of these looks more appropriate for a Māori man in his twenties? (If you say the first you’re lying to yourself!)
I think a lot about how we as a culture have turned “forever” into the only acceptable definition of success.
Like… if you open a coffee shop and run it for a while and it makes you happy but then stuff gets too expensive and stressful and you want to do something else so you close it, it’s a “failed” business. If you write a book or two, then decide that you don’t actually want to keep doing that, you’re a “failed” writer. If you marry someone, and that marriage is good for a while, and then stops working and you get divorced, it’s a “failed” marriage.
The only acceptable “win condition” is “you keep doing that thing forever”. A friendship that lasts for a few years but then its time is done and you move on is considered less valuable or not a “real” friendship. A hobby that you do for a while and then are done with is a “phase” - or, alternatively, a “pity” that you don’t do that thing any more. A fandom is “dying” because people have had a lot of fun with it but are now moving on to other things.
I just think that something can be good, and also end, and that thing was still good. And it’s okay to be sad that it ended, too. But the idea that anything that ends is automatically less than this hypothetical eternal state of success… I don’t think that’s doing us any good at all.
ALT
