the thing about lotr that the movies don’t convey so fully is how the story is set in an age heavily overshadowed by all the ages before. they’re constantly traveling through ruins, discussing the glory of days gone by, the empires of men are much diminished, the elves (especially galadriel) are described as seeming incongruent, frozen in time….some of the imagery is even near-apocalyptic, like the ruins of moria and of course the landscape surrounding mordor
this is a strange thought to me, somehow: that the archetypal “high fantasy” story is set at the point where the…fantasy…used to be much higher? this is not the golden age; this is a remnant
Reblog this forever this is what I loved about LOTR; in every scene there is an underlying sense of age and history is not something that is forgotten in the dregs but very much lingering and clinging to the present. The past is so very important because it provides the base for the present and makes it so much more voluminous.
So I saw a mention of Arya and her list and the choosing whether to act on it being a choice between honour or revenge. I’m not sure that the post was serious but it rubbed me the wrong way because this is only the latest in a series of posts portraying Arya as being about revenge.
ASOIAF is a series where vengeance and justice are closely linked. Justice itself has ties to honour. Is it honourable to let rapists and torturers continue raping and torturing and preying on the smallfolk? If a person is in a position to end abuse, and that action serves to bring justice but also has an element of vengeance how can the two be viewed as separate?
Honour or revenge is a false dichotomy.
The example above is not about Arya. It actually brings to mind Lord Beric and the men Ned sent out to stop Gregor Clegane. Gregor committed atrocities and the men pursuing him were to bring justice. This is only one example but tbh it is really annoying that when men dispense justice, or vengeance, or justice as they see it with an element of vengeance, it is cheered. Think Frey Pies. Wyman Manderly does not get labelled a pyschopath or sociopath. He is badass rather than dishonourable. His vengeance is seen as justice.
The people on Arya’s list are bad people. They have done terrible things. Arya saw them do terrible things and was powerless to stop them. Her list is a cry for control, a prayer that these people will die because it is justice that they die, not just vengeance. The punishment for murderers is death and those on the list have committed terrible crimes.
She does not even plan to do it herself, not from the outset. It is unclear even now how much she intends to do herself given that her fondest desire is to return to her family. It was her mother she wanted, then Jon Snow. She wanted to go to the Wall and only went to Braavos when that was refused her. She feels she has nowhere else to go.
Yes she killed Raff. Yes she may kill others on her list yet, particularly if they are put in front of her but does that mean she lacks honour? I don’t think so. Her father was known for his honour and in killing these people herself she is following his teachings. The Northern way is the old way, they do not use executioners, they look into a man’s eyes before they die. It is horrific for a young girl to be dispensing justice in this way, to be robbed of her childhood but think about it this way. If you would not debate it as honour OR revenge for a man then it isn’t honour OR revenge for Arya either.
As with most questions of class, it comes down to questions of ideology and and power.
Ideologically, the ideals of the nobility and of the merchant class were entirely opposite: noblemen were supposed to be open-handed (especially since their power originated from them acting as “ring-givers” to armed men), ostentatiously luxurious (so as to display their glory and magnificence that set them apart from the common herd) and pleasure-seeking, bold and reckless in pursuit of fame and glory; merchants were supposed to be thrifty, sober, and prudent.
The nobleman saw in the merchant a coward who would debase himself (and debase others) for mere profit, and who valued his skin more than his honor; the merchant saw the nobleman as a hypocritical parasite who despised anyone who worked for a living and exalted his own idleness, while excusing mindless debauchery and bloodshed by appeal to obsolete virtues.
But as a Marxist historian would argue, there is always the means of production. The power of the nobility was in landed wealth and their rights to extract labor and taxes from those who dwelt on their land. The power of the merchant was in capital, and thus to a feudal mindset represented that terrifying impossibility: wealth not based on land and feudal tenure, notional, imaginary wealth that could fly through the air invisible like spirits and reshape entire economies, and somehow turn a peasant into a magnate richer than any nobleman, threatening the social hierarchy.
And to a merchant, the medieval order itself was the dead hand of the past, the obstacle to all progress. As Polayni notes, capitalism requires free markets in land, labor, and money – feudalism had frozen land into an unbreakable chain of agreements between lords and vassals; serfdom had chained men to their land and their ancestral occupations; faith had deemed lending money at interest to be a mortal sin.
A meme ask almost prompted me to give this long tangential answer, but I had the presence of mind to refrain from that and put it here instead:
On the topic of offbeat ideas about Numenorean society, and by extension, an offbeat but by no means unheard-of idea about society in earlier Arda in general, I headcanon thus: Numenor was the first society to invent real libraries! Especially, public lending libraries.
In the real world, the history of libraries and library loans is long and complicated. But Arda sure as hell bears little resemblance to real life history – which is kind of the whole point of the setting being Arda! Alternate and convergent explanations for history and the present day, with each one resting on wildly different constructions of reality. See, in Arda, my headcanon is that all throughout the Years of the
Trees and the First Age, libraries of any sort weren’t really a thing, and even written lore wasn’t really much of a thing. Dwarves in the First Age didn’t let most
non-dwarves come into their halls, and also wrote a huge proportion of
their lore in non-mobile stone engravings – the walls of their cave cities, steles – and in systems of non-text semiotics via their craftwork. Elves
both of ME and Aman were largely oral societies and writing was kind of,
extra, either for small-potatoes practical communication or for really
fancy stuff (this is just fun extrapolation given the
immortals-with-perfect-memory thing). And so were the Edain for the most
part (I think this is more canon, as a big part of the history of
humankind in Arda is that the ancestors of the edain abruptly stopped
passing down a certain cluster of oral traditions shortly before they
came to Beleriand, which left the later humans with significant gaping
holes in their history regarding the Fall etc).
Until, of course, the
speeded-up clusterfuck of wars and mass death starting with the
Bragollach. As the whole Beleriand debacle sped up through the Nirnaeth
and the kinslayings and on into the War of Wrath, people began
frantically writing stuff down and keeping haphazard hoards of it here
and there, Nargothrond and Gondolin, Doriath and, especially, Sirion
(Dirhavel was a BIG proponent of this due to having a deep appreciation
for the idea of information being lost via death, which is why the Narn i
Hin Hurin has so much more internal consistency than the Quenta
Silmarillion whose writing was….lets say not nearly as well-organized,
and Elwing and by extension the bb!twins were mad for Dirhavel.) And
then carting anything that survived off into Ossiriand after/during the
War of Wrath. SO. Very little written lore at all before this time.
In
the early Second Age, of course there would be a huge amount of work in Middle Earth among the groups who migrated from Beleriand, to get peoples’ knowledge gathered up, written down,
etc. But there’s lots of immortal elves, lots of oral tradition, lots of
unconnected disparate populations, etc, and also ME is kind of a
disaster zone due to the aforementioned continent-destroying war. Low
resources, low organization, lots of problems and probably violence to juggle, high strife, high scatter, high danger. Plus, there is
still plenty of conflict and enemy populations, to make security and
barriers to access important to keeping precious records safe. So just
gathering and compiling all the lore, or writing it down in the first place, would be the big challenge
in ME.
But Numenor! Numenor, otoh, is a peaceful island paradise with almost no
danger and more resources than anyone needs, with a single pretty
unified human population under a single king’s rule. The people born there
live a very long time, the men don’t need to do any fighting, children
are few per family, the childbirth and child-rearing period takes up
only a small fraction of womens’ lifetimes, and everyone has a whole ton
of free time after the first stage of building and establishing
communities and cities is done. Plus they’re friends with Tol Eressëa. This is when the second-generation Numenoreans decide
to do a huge push to get an army of scholars and librarians to get
everything written down, organized, catalogued, and made accessible to
everyone, since humans, unlike elves, can’t just live forever and remember
everything they’ve heard, and need to work as a relay race, maintaining
and building on the work of their predecessors in order for information
to remain intact. And given how much time and wealth just about
everyone has and how good life is for the whole population, it’s actually logistically feasible (even without (before? Numenor is firmly ahistorical) the printing press) to make multiple
copies of many tomes of various types of lore and just let people borrow
them whenever without a big security deposit beforehand – just return them in a set time okay!
Of course this was all restricted later on when control of
information became super important in order to control a population
through control of the narrative of the Numenoreans’ history, but well,
at least the concept caught on elsewhere!
By which I mean, of course Elros personally decided to make them, and of course Elrond deliberately ripped him off in Rivendell much later. What else did you expect from me, man.
It sure is convenient that all these songs that ostensibly weren’t written in English all rhyme when translated into English, isn’t it, Mr. Tolkien?
yknow what really bothered me for some reason?? he used ‘loud as a train’ or smth similar to describe the balrog’s roar. like, no ok so y’know if this is supposed to have been ‘translated’ like you tell us, then wouldn’t it have been smth other than a train, like a waterfall? idk it just really bothers me
Clearly he was talking about the train of Glorfindel’s robes which as everyone knows are covered in bells and jingle
1. I mean, he invented the languages he was going to translate, so if a rhyme didn’t work he could change the whole language if he wanted to. But actually, it’s not uncommon for translations (particularly older translations) to try to preserve or at least recreate rhyme schemes. For example, Tolkien translated “Pearl” into rhyming Modern English.
2. The train thing! It’s actually related to how Tolkien presents the hobbits as essentially “modern” characters who then go out and have adventures in the old heroic culture of myth and legend. As Tolkien says, “[The Shire] is in fact more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of the Diamond Jubilee…” (Letters, 230, #178). It’s very deliberately a part of the language. Think of all the modern, non-medieval things the hobbits have. It’s always a contrast between Modern English (Shire) and Old English (rest of Middle Earth). Even though Tolkien changed some foreign names to make them seem English, the hobbits still have
tobacco (pipeweed), a New World crop
drink tea in the modern English way
potatoes, another New World crop, made more English-sounding as “taters”
rabbits/coneys, which were imported to England in the 13th century
a regular postal service
mantelpiece clocks!
It was a deliberate choice that gave readers us a group of characters who can serve as tour guides to a mythical medieval adventure. Tom Shippey explains it better than I ever could:
…There is one very evident obstacle to recreating the ancient world
of heroic legend for modern readers, and that lies in the nature of
heroes. These are not acceptable any more, and tend very strongly to be
treated with irony: the modern view of Beowulf is John Gardner’s novel Grendel (1971). Tolkien did not want to be ironic about heroes, and yet he
could not eliminate modern reactions. His response to the difficulty is
Bilbo Baggins, the hobbit, the anachronism, a character whose initial
role at least is very strongly that of mediator. He represents and often
voices modern opinions, modern incapacities: he has no impulses towards
revenge or self-conscious heroism, cannot ‘hoot twice like a barn-owl
and once like a screech-owl’ as the dwarves suggest, knows almost
nothing about Wilderland and cannot even skin a rabbit, being used to
having his meat ‘delivered by the butcher ready to cook’. Yet he has a
place in the ancient world too, and there is a hint that (just like us)
all his efforts cannot keep him entirely separate from the past.
…
Bilbo’s behaviour is solidly anachronistic, for he is wearing a jacket, relying on a written contract, drawing a careful distinction between gain and profit, and proposing a compromise which would see Bard’s claim as running expenses (almost tax deductible). Where Bard and Thorin used archaic words (‘Hail!’, ‘foes’, ‘hoard’, ‘kindred’, ‘slain’), he uses modern ones: ‘profit’, never used in English until 1604, and then only in Aberdeen; ‘deduct’, recorded in 1524 but then indistinguishable from ‘subtract’ and not given its commercial sense till much later; ‘total’, not used as here till 1557; ‘claim’, ‘interest’, ‘affair’, ‘matter’, all French or Latin imports not adopted fully into English till well after the Norman Conquest. It is fair to say that no character from epic or saga could even begin to think or talk like Bilbo.
Basically, if Tolkien does a thing with words, there’s always a very good chance that the professor was having fun with language, and doing it very consciously (see: Mount Doom, name of).
And furthermore, the entire conceit behind the books is that they’re translated into English from the “original” Westron of the Red Book, meaning that a ‘modern’ translator could do whatever he wanted with the language to make it work for the equally modern audience while preserving the same feel/meaning. Heck, even the characters aren’t named what you think they are (Merry, for instance).
LotR is actually the story of Maura Labingi, Banazîr Galbasi, Ranazur Tûk and Kalimac Brandagamba. Maura lived at Laban-nec, but left Haubyltalan and Sûza altogether, first aiming for a hill-town just outside Sûza but eventually for Karnigul (or, in Elvish, Imladris). Maura’s older cousin and dearest friend (in one person) Bilba Labingi lived in Karnigul at that point.
The extent to which Tolkien goes to present LotR as an edited mediaeval text is actually DELIGHTFUL and also ABSURDLY GREAT; the prologue is actually a provenance and edition litany, explaining which recension of The Red Book he was working from in order to explain its likely oddities and inclusions (or exclusions).
I have often actually wanted an edition with all known or reasonably extrapolated Westron put back in, because I’m really curious how it would read.
It’s actually very cool how things were translated into what modern Anglophonic readers would parse as “normal” fantasy-names as opposed to like. Aragorn, or Thranduil, or Ecthelion, or Elbereth Gilthoniel. The untranslated names of the Hobbits fit much more neatly into the phonetic flavor of the Adûnaic that becomes the ‘Common Speech’ or ‘Westron’ in the Third Age (and which gives us names like ‘Tar-Minyatur’ and ‘Ar-Pharazôn’ and ‘Akallabêth’), but those names would be tonally jarring in an otherwise translated text.
That’s also why the Dwarves have names like ‘Dwalin’ and the Rohirrim… have… pretty much any names at all. Since the Professor was translating the affect of the Hobbit names into modern English and was also a linguistics nerd, he preserved the linguistic relationship between Westron, Dalish, and Rohirric by translating them as the equally-ish related Modern English, Old Norse, and Old English (not that literally anyone but him would probably actually notice, but.)
i used to think that a foot of parchment was a lot and feel bad when harry potter characters were assigned to write that much
but then i realized the paper i write on is 8.5 by 11 inches.
so a foot of parchment is the equivalent of like, a page and a half of paper.
they complained SO MUCH about essays that were like
a page and a half
wtf guys
get your shit together
No wonder Hermione always got onto the boys for not doing their homework.
it’s honestly not even a foot and a half it’s just one sheet of paper. a foot is 12 inches. like dang if i had to only write one page long essays in school about cool magic shit then i would have been ecstatic.
also 12pt times new roman— the standard assigned size and font for a lot of essay assignments— produces significantlysmaller text than a muggleborn teenageer with a pen and ink quill would be able to manage on the regular, no matter how dedicated she was. ron and harry are frequently noted to be using large handwriting on unlined paper. their homework would have been about three short paragraphs if they were feeling studious.
no wonder hermione was so fucking exasperated! muggle students their age would have strangled them.
I feel like just linking this fanart with @imindhowwelayinjune‘s tags is a cop-out answer even though it’s basically everything excellent about Maglor + twins in a nutshell, so uhhhh:
I like to headcanon Maglor had pretty good parenting skills, and was by this point quite self-aware of just how horrible, damaging, and unjustified the oath and the kinslayings were. IMO he pretty much hated himself, hated the oath, and simultaneously loved and hated his living brother, his dead brothers, and his dead father who had inflicted that oath on him in the first place. And I think he would have been extremely sensitive to the fact that, actually, trying to replace Elrond and Elros’s real parents and give them all the trust and love and affection they should have been getting and trying to make them an unproblematically happy family in such a horrifically twisted and unhealthy situation was not going to work in the long term without causing the twins even more psychological damage than he had already caused for them. Maglor’s own awful inescapable love for and devotion to Feanor would have made him even more hyperaware of, and even more committed to minimizing, the suffering that the twins would experience from the cognitive dissonance and emotional tug-of-war that would result from feeling love and trust and gratitude towards the person who destroyed their lives and did them so much hurt, when
they only feel that way because he gave them what they needed when no
one else was there for them, and it is his fault there is no one else. If he can’t undo what he did, and can’t bring himself to revolt against Maedhros and the oath enough to go and give the twins up to Gil-galad and Cirdan, he could at least try to make sure that the twins were raised as well as possible, in spite of him. Of course it’s bullshit, rationale-wise, but this is a matter of results – it’s morally unjustifiable on his part either way, but it’s still incredibly valuable to them for him to try to ensure they grow up to be good, resilient, and well-adjusted people, rather than letting them grow up to be warped brainwashed wrecks.
The least-problematic approach would, hypothetically, be to be a detached authority
figure and teacher who is predictable, if not trustworthy, and is
neither likable nor frightening. Except…kids this young kind of need
love and affection and trust and warmth, and since he took away anyone
who could give it to them, it’s his responsibility. And it’s near impossible to raise kids without some rapport and understanding, some love and trust and care, emerging in spite of itself, through these day by day interactions, for years on end. After all, it also wouldn’t be helpful for him to be constantly reminding them how he’s a monster who caused their mother to jump off a cliff, that would only make them feel unsafe, insecure, and placating, and do more to soothe his own conscience than help them.
So my headcanon is that Maglor’s approach to parenting, as influenced by his own experience of his father’s and his mother’s parenting, would have been incredibly careful, agonizingly restrained, and as neutral and based around prompting them to work out truth and lies and right and wrong for themselves as possible, rather than delivering these ideas and lessons to them with the weight of his utterly fraught authority behind it, and it’s this respectful distance more than anything that allows them to actually somewhat trust him in a sincere rather than completely circular and twisted manner, though they’d be too small to think of it so consciously. Hence, he cherished them, and love grew between them, as little may be thought. It’s also probably really fortunate Elrond and Elros are, well, twin brothers, and therefore Maglor is only their secondary, not primary, source of intimacy and feedback, they have more of a buffer there to carve out their own vantage point on reality than a single child would have.
So one of the things I love about watching Star Wars: A New Hope after having watched all the other Star Wars movies is how… well… how normal Luke’s upbringing appears to have been.
It’s not just that he was loved. It’s clear that Breha and Bail Organa loved Leia immensely. But she was a princess functionally from birth, and then became a senator at–what? eighteen, nineteen, twenty? Something like that. She was much loved and much trusted, obviously, but her upbringing must have been… “unusual” would be putting it mildly. As a teenager she was learning statecraft and politics–and deception.
And their mother must have been the same way, queen from such a young age, raised and trained to rule. And their father–loved, yes, deeply, and I have no doubt that his mother did her best to protect Anakin from the worst parts of slavery–but he was still a slave, as was she, and there was only so much they could do.
But Luke! Luke got the gift of a perfectly normal childhood. All the jokes about Luke, the whining about wanting to go to TOSCHE station to pick up some POWER CONVERTERS–the snippy teenagery conversation he has with his uncle about waiting “a whole nother year????”–the shooting womp rats in his T-16 back home–the fact that left to his own devices, at the same age that Leia is deciding THE FATE OF HER PLANET, he’s still playing with model spaceships…..
…they’re all signs that he had a normal childhood. That he’s a normal eighteen, nineteen, twenty, whatever year old.
I mean, he grew up in a situation where it was completely safe for him to whine to his parent figures. He knew that Lars and Beru wouldn’t make him pay for his “but I wanted to go to TOSCHE STATION” or for his “I want to go to the academy THIS year” or whatever. Unlike basically every other Skywalker ever he grew up without a ton of extra pressure, without a “oh by the way you’re going to be king of [planet]” stuff, without “also you’re the Destined Future of the Jedi.” They didn’t raise a legacy, or a scion–they just raised a child. (In point of fact, that’s why Yoda almost rejects him: he’s too old, and he was raised too normal.)
And since Owen and Beru obviously knew perfectly well who and what he was, that’s actually an astonishing accomplishment. They were delivered an infant who they knew had the approximate destructive power of a nuclear device, and they still raised him as… a kid, a child, a boy who they loved with the same mixture of exasperation and devotion as any parent-figures.
He grew up as a kid, with a gruff but loving uncle and a sweet-tempered aunt, he grew up skeet-shooting womp rats and hanging out with his friends in Anchorhead when he had an excuse to go into town–and it’s clear how safe he feels with them because he does whine and moan and have fits without any apparent worry that he’s going to pay for it later. He whines and moans in the way I did at that age: in perfect confidence that while my parents might temporarily snap at me, they would never hurt me, and they would always love me. And that all they really wanted for me was to grow up safe and happy.
tl;dr: Luke Skywalker: the last of the Jedi(?) but also maybe the first of the Jedi to grow up in a normally functional childhood.
(I also really, really want to see the story in which he grieves his aunt and uncle for more than ten seconds. Perhaps I will write it.)
Man, even Barriss’s confession is framed such that she conflates light with good and dark with evil–iirc, she says that the Order has fallen to the dark side.
Which … It didn’t. That’s part of the problem. It was so inflexibly Light, so unforgiving, so obsessed with its own purity and righteousness, that it was incapable of changing or adapting or compromising for the sake of minimizing harm. Which led, obviously, to a hell of a lot of suffering.
And having Barriss, who at that point had fallen, herself, accuse the Jedi Order of falling? The hypocrisy kinda takes the teeth out of her speech, from the Jedi’s perspective.
Which is heartbreaking because the *substance* of her accusation–that the Jedi have become the villains, that they’re not a force for good, that they should not be participating in this war, not like this, they need to STOP and reconsider what the fuck they’re even doing–that’s absolutely true.
But since she called them fallen, and that’s demonstrably false, well, pfffft, who gives a crap, clearly she was too deep in the dark side to see the truth, clearly she was blinded by her own corruption blah fuckity blah.
And I guess that’s how the Council could offer Ahsoka a Knighthood, claim she’d passed some spiritual Trial by enduring their abuse, and phrase it all like they were doing her a favor–but an apology? Nah. They just made a little mistake, they didn’t do anything REALLY wrong!
Star Wars has this habit of putting legitimate criticisms of the Jedi Order in the mouths of the bad guys. It doesn’t make them any less right, but it undermines the strength of their argument as far as the Jedi (and often the viewer) are concerned.
Dooku tells Obi-Wan that there is a Sith in the Senate, but why investigate when he’s clearly the enemy. Slick, the Clone who betrays the Republic, points out that the Clones are slaves, but he’s just a traitor so what does he know. Pong Krell tells the Clones exactly how disposable the Republic thinks they are and that the Sith are going to win, but he’s evil so fuck him anyway. Evil slaver queen whats-her-face tells Anakin that the Jedi are basically the Republic’s slaves, but its clearly an attempt to make him doubt himself so why listen. Barriss says the Order is no longer a force for good, but she blew a bunch of people up and framed her BFF so clearly she’s wrong.
They do this over and over and over. Is it an attempt to highlight all the missing opportunities for course correction on the part of the Jedi? Or is it just that the writers can’t bring themselves to fully acknowledge that the Jedi are actually morally compromised?
I suppose this is why some people think that the Jedi “had it coming” or that the Sith are better, or at least less hypocritical and right about the Jedi. If a designated bad guy says something that is actually true but the Jedi themselves very rarely consider their flaws and never do anything about them (unless something extraordinary like 99,9% of them being killed happens).
That’s obviously not intended as they Jedi are clearly meant to be a force for good and protectors of peace (even though they totally fail at the latter during the Clone Wars, not that they had many good options at that point).
I think this might be because the Jedi Order is based on real monasteries and orders, the members of which usually don’t have flashy superpowers that they use for missions (given by the government and ranging from diplomatic negotiations to solving crimes to fighting in wars).
So the Jedi Order, the only major organization of Force users in the whole galaxy (meaning that there aren’t any alternatives for Force-sensitives or their parents), is focused both on teaching Force-sensitives and on serving the Republic. It’s hardly surprising that the first goal becomes less important whenever the Republic has too many problems, seeing as there’s apparently no one who controls how the Jedi handle their education but the Jedi can’t refuse the Republic or pick their own missions.
I only just had this idea while writing this post, but I wonder what it would’ve been like if the Jedi hadn’t tried to have it both ways and had instead had at least two wholly different organizations? Like, one boarding school for teaching children and a separate organization that serves the Republic, plus the AgriCorps and whatever else they had for kids who didn’t become padawans. With every organization having their own Council, and graduates from Jedi school being able to choose which one they want to join and being able to switch if their abilities allow it.
“This weapon is your life,” is a statement that, I believe, gets a lot of unwarranted criticism and is frequently misunderstood, particularly amongst the Western, Star Wars fandom. The general opinion that I have found on the subject is that it indicates that the Jedi are teaching people to think of themselves as weapons, and/or that it shows hypocrisy as Jedi are supposed to discourage “possession,” and/or that saying a weapon is your life, encourages or advocates violence. I am here as an apologist for that phrase, because for the reasons indicated below, I think that that phrase is awesome.
What one must first understand is that George Lucas took a lot of inspiration for Star Wars from eastern sources, Japan in particular. Darth Vader’s mask was based upon the Samurai mask, C-3P0 and R2-D2 were inspired by a Japanese movie told from the perspective of two slaves who are caught up in the conflict going around them, and the Sith and the Jedi were inspired by the notion of rival Samurai clans. As such, I feel the lightsabre, its value, its treatment, and its symbolism come from Bushido, the Samurai code, and the katana.
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