Jedi and Animals: So this was a lucky bit of information I came across a few months ago. I suspected Jedi could talk to animals given what I saw in Clone Wars, but Rebels pretty much confirmed it. Of course, Godzilla is no ordinary animal so I suspected it wouldn’t work the way it does with others. I suspected this would be a more involved effort on the part of any Jedi and that one would have to actually break through the mental barriers surrounding Godzilla’s mind. Luckily, Godzilla also has a history of psychics and telepathic empaths who all now and then try to speak to him or interpret him for others. Miki from the Heisei era comes to mind most readily.
Given the shared history of extra-normal powers within the universes with similar mental aspects, it felt like a perfect fit. In this way, I could reference those old scenes from the Godzilla films and actually explore a bit about Godzilla’s motivations. I’ll cover the mindscape in more detail later on, but this section is just to discuss my reasoning behind this narrative decision. I needed a reason for Godzilla to go to the facility and I felt it would be too convenient if he just showed up at the same time as the Rebels. It made more sense if they shared a mutual understanding of their goals. And, as I just mentioned, giving Godzilla a bit of character background was also nice. I was just lucky that this is a real power that actually exists in the Star Wars universe. If it wasn’t I’d be stuck trying to justify what was going on.
I only hope no one found it too corny or simplified. I made it clear that this was a very dangerous thing to do and it took its toll on the Jedi regardless of the success. Godzilla could’ve just as easily mentally snapped their minds with the enormity of his psyche. Like, looking at Cthulhu makes you go mad. Having three Jedi work in unison to achieve it also sold the idea in my mind, as it seems like speaking to Godzilla this way would be extremely difficult for any one Jedi of any rank.
Another thing it did, sell the conflict between Kanan and Ahsoka a bit more. I feel like this is going to be a thing that comes up in season two. That Ahsoka and Kanan are very different in their opinions on the Jedi and the Force. She is a Grey Jedi after all and he’s trying to return to the ideal of what the Order was in a way. Course in my opinion, given what is alluded to in New Dawn, he’s probably not interested in bringing back the “No Girlfriends” rule anytime soon. That’s a topic for another day though.
Nulon’s Death: This was inevitable. You can’t have a Darth Vader story without him at least trying to kill someone beneath him. It’s just how it works man. If Tarkin isn’t around, he’s basically a rabid dog that will turn on you in a second. I think that’s why Palpatine always planned to replace him at some point, dude goes through Apprentices fast.
I decided I didn’t want to do the choke death just yet though. You gotta savor that one cause you only really get one in a story. You keep doing it with every underling Vader kills it gets predictable. Guy has to be flexible in his punishments, right? I thought this one was particularly brutal, properly demonstrating how little Vader regards people like Nulon. He was probably going to do this no matter what Nulon did though. The whole suspicion of treason thing was just an excuse to do it earlier.
Poor Nulon though, he probably wasn’t as good an Overseer as he should’ve been, but he tried. Unfortunately, his panic got the better of him and his attempts to help Sakal only made things worse, for him mostly. Now his surviving colleagues know for certain that Vader isn’t kidding around. He will kill you if he finds a reason, think otherwise at your own peril.
Godzilla and Friends: I decided to use Godzilla’s intro scene in this chapter to talk about how he views his fellow Kaiju. It offers some references to the original films, but mostly it’s just how I view his relationships with the giant monsters he routinely encounters. I didn’t go into everyone, as I doubt any of the major rogues gallery is on Monster Island... or maybe even alive at this point. Godzilla rarely leaves survivors after all. I picked the most likely to be on Monster Island or those he viewed semi-favorably, like Mothra.
Angurius and Rodan to me are basically Godzilla’s closest companions. They’re his oldest allies so to speak, although they didn’t start out as friends of course. I figure Angurius is less violent and battle hungry than Godzilla, but still a warrior at heart. He just doesn’t think that fighting is all there is to life. Rodan is of course a cocky jerk, more akin to Godzilla’s own personality as stubborn jerk. Think of Rodan as the Dick Grayson to Godzilla’s Bruce Wayne, the Spider-Man to his Wolverine. Actually, I think Godzilla is a lot like Wolverine in many respects. The difference being that Rodan isn’t always looking for a fight. He’s looking for a place to settle down. He doesn’t like Humans, but he doesn’t feel the need for revenge like Godzilla.
I mentioned Titanosaurus in more detail because, well, he’s kind of a sad case. No one really seems to count him as an official enemy of Godzilla, as he’s mind controlled half the time during his only battle with him. He’s more like an unwitting pawn. Taking some ideas a few fans have considered in their own head canons and such that I liked, I figured that this was constantly the fate of the poor Kaiju. Like, half the time his will isn’t his own as other forces seek to use him for their own ends. I imagined what something like that would do to a giant monster and I figured it would make him more docile over the years. To keep from being controlled mentally, from having his brain screwed with, he basically lets himself be locked away and prefers security over freedom. He’s become an ally to Godzilla, but he’s not willing to stir up trouble and risk losing his mind for good this time. I always felt sorry for the poor guy myself, it wasn’t his fault he was helping those aliens after all. Thankfully the IDW comics gave him the chance to choose his own destiny.
The other lesser Kaiju I just rattled off pretty quickly. I don’t see Baragon as much of a threat. He’s more like bull elephant, you don’t bother him, he won’t bother you. The guy doesn’t carry grudges and he prefers to just soak up rays. Beach bum kaiju.
Kumonga and Kamacuras hanging out, um, yeah the reason for that is a bit embarrassing. When I was a kid, I actually made a bunch of Godzilla doodle comics at school. They were pretty stupid, basically I just had Godzilla as like the leader of the Kaiju acting as a semi-super hero team that stopped bad guys.
Mostly representations of Holidays. I had one called Doctor Cupidstein with his minion Heartgor or Hegor, it was one of the two. The former was basically a mad scientist who looked like Cupid and the latter was a stupid hunchback creature that was actually a humansized living human heart. Yeah. Basically Cupidstein’s plans revolved around him trying to get Mothra to love him... yeah, I was a weird kid. I did have them fight the traditional evil Kaiju from the series, but I was big on Holidays at the time. All kids were, it meant no school or special events at school.
Back to my original intended point, Kumonga and Kamacuras were usually part of the duo I would create for adventures. I wrote them as comic relief troublemakers within the team who constantly screwed up and made trouble for Godzilla and the other heroes with their ineptitude. Since then, I’ve always seen them in my mind as buddies. They hang out, they have a sorta symbiotic relationship where they share each other’s prey, that sort of thing. In retrospect, it kinda works since as Kaiju in the Toho line-up, they’re kinda the odd monsters out. Giant spiders and Praying Mantises are usually the go to monsters of American Monster Movie cinema. Think about it, how many movies are there with giant spiders in American Films? How many times are giant Praying Mantises referenced in pop culture? I think it’s because, as insectoid creatures, they’re the most visually distinctive and scary looking in the American psyche. Personally, I feel there should be more movies with giant Praying Mantises, because they’re pretty much my favorite insect. The Goosebumps Movie at least is smart enough to include one in its story. If nothing else, they did right by that choice.
Kamoebas, yeah, you ever think they killed him off at the start of Tokyo SOS as a finger to Gamera? I don’t know. I just decided to run with the idea that Godzilla doesn’t like the big turtle for whatever reason and sees him as a lazy slob who mooches for scraps in Monster Island’s bay. Maybe he snapped down on Godzilla’s toe one time by accident, either way I don’t think they get along too well. As a side note, Gorosaurus I think Godzilla likes just fine because he’s a fellow two legged saurian-like monster. And I swear to God, he taught Godzilla the kick move used in “Godzilla vs. Megalon.” You explain where that bit of crazy came from otherwise. You can’t!
Mothra was simple, given how that whole thing has... evolved. You know, when you’re the only confirmed female in a giant monster roster (Well, good guy Female any way, we’re not counting Biolante here), you tend to get paired up with the lead a lot. I have seen more Godzilla on Mothra fan art in the past year than I ever thought existed. Personally, I prefer Legend of the Deep’s depiction of the relationship. I really don’t think that it would work in any other way. I decided not to go the romance route, because... that’s not what my story is about. No offense to those who would like the two of them together, but I don’t need romance mudding my narrative at every turn. Godzilla here views Mothra respectfully in a semi-maternal fashion. He’s receptive to her beliefs and values, but doesn’t really believe them himself. Where Mothra wants him to accept a role as a defender and not a destroyer, Godzilla is reluctant to accept that, seeing it as surrender. Doesn’t stop Mothra from trying to reach him though and refocus his rage into a positive force for every living being on Earth. She probably doesn’t suspect him to go full hero, but she does want him to embrace his anti-hero side more.
Also, the reincarnation thing was something I borrowed from that fanfic the Bridge, because let’s be honest, that makes a lot of sense given Mothra’s religious symbolism. I like the idea of Mothra being a creature that exists in cycles in general. She passes her soul, her memories, her experiences down to each generation, in a constant desire to defend and protect the Earth at the cost of herself. Mothra in this respect is immortal, making her arguably stronger than any of the Kaiju as they all have only one life, whereas she will probably outlast them all. Considering Godzilla’s own ageless god-hood, it makes sense he would feel a small sense of kinship with her.
Final thoughts in this subject, I really want a redo of Destroy All Monsters, but with a proper Kaiju fight Avengers-Style. I want Godzilla and Co to be all like smashing shit as the camera pans around them in an epic fashion. Luckily I got a semblance of that this week when I finally got to read the finale to IDW’s “Godzilla: Rulers of Earth” which is pretty much the Destroy All Monsters we deserved from the start.
Also, speaking of Avengers, I have this crazy little idea stuck in my head that comes up now and again. Godzilla dressed as Captain America... let that sink in for you.
Eiji Tsuburaya: Let’s switch gears a little to talk about Godzilla’s daddy, Eiji Tsuburaya. Now I’m gonna be openly honest from the start, I’m have a great admiration for the man. He put a lot of work into the movies he was part of. Probably more than most today. This is a guy who saw King Kong in his youth and decided he wanted to make special effects like that. He Now of course, he never got to be a stop-motion animator, but he pioneered Suitmation instead. And in some ways that’s almost as involved as claymation. You’re working with an actor, stuck in a ribber suit, who can barely see what he’s doing half the time while sweating up a storm. That can’t be easy conditions for anyone and from what I’ve heard... it’s not.
I’ve seen a lot of Tsuburaya’s work at this point. Not just his monster movies, but his models and such. The art of destruction is very involved, considering you had to pre-cut the buildings so they destroyed the right way. And if something went wrong, you had to rebuild it all from scratch or basically delete the scene. And despite those challenges, he still managed to help create some great effects for a lot of great Showa Era Japanese Science Fiction. He strived hard for realism too, going so far as to have his crew use real plants as trees for the monsters to rip up.
Then, after doing this for a few years making a whole ton of movies, he actually made a TV series about all this. Ultraman, Japan’s greatest Superhero, and Tsuburaya’s baby in every respect. I actually purchased the complete original series and, I gotta say, it’s a lot of fun. Yeah, the effects might not be as up to par as they are with today’s standards, but they’re still really cool for their time. Can barely even see the wires half the time. The plots may be a little silly too, but that’s part of the charm for me and it’s just how Tsuburaya was.
Tsuburaya apparently shared my thoughts on one subject, that being a disdain for the grim and gritty. He was against making Godzilla more grim and gritty, realizing kids went to see these films and that not making it accessible to them would be a disservice to the fans. He specifically stated one time that they could not “destroy the dreams of children” by doing just that. I think it’s safe to say a lot of Godzilla’s heroism resulted from Tsuburaya’s influence. And I have to love the guy for it. For all his hard business man persona, his high expectations from his actors and crew, and his meticulous work ethic in perfecting his craft, the guy was really just a big kid who wanted to give young boys and girls what they wanted, monster brawls and space battles.
He was taken from us far too soon, as he could’ve gone on to do so much more in the seventies and perhaps even the eighties. I like to think Star Wars continued his legacy a bit, what with their own pioneering of techniques at ILM. With the new movie going back to a more practical way of doing the future films, it’s nice to see they’ve regained that a little.
Part of me wonders how Tsuburaya would’ve done some of the scenes were this fanfiction like a live action film. Just a thought experiment. I’m picturing a lot really neat wire work for the TIEs mostly, but I’m thinking more of upcoming scenes yet to come. Specifically the final battle which you suspect is coming.
In any case, Tsuburaya was one the greats in world cinema. His passion and drive created a whole genre in his country, without him and his series Ultraman, we probably wouldn’t have gotten the Power Rangers and Godzilla wouldn’t be the same without him. So here’s to Eiji Tsuburaya, kid at heart and master of monsters.
Godzilla’s Mindscape: I wondered if this was going to be controversial. I guess I’ll find out from the reviews after the chapter is posted. In accordance to what I suspect will be the more prevalent questions arising from this, I’ve decided to clarify a few things.
First, Godzilla isn’t really talking. He’s more thinking and the Jedi can hear his thoughts. They are abstract and muddled though, representing ideas and emotions more than actual words. The thoughts are then translated as best as possible onto the minds of those receiving them. The derived meaning the narration gives is simply the best of translation of Godzilla’s thoughts. In reality, they’re probably not as grammatically correct or well-spoken, at least not by our standards. This is just how the statements are formulated within the minds of the Jedi.
The words Godzilla uses to describe his many titles and names were derived from contact with the humans. He’s been able to pick up those titles from fellow kaiju, like Mothra who relays a lot of how humans perceive him to the big guy. Or from the humans themselves who have screamed the names, announced them on billboards or through the big bullhorn intercom Kiryu had installed in his mouth. The JSDF wanted to taunt the big lizard a little, you see.
The mindscape itself is basically the best way one can perceive the abstract inner workings of Godzilla’s mind. They are a mixture of where Godzilla feels safest, in places man cannot reach, the deep ocean, the thick jungle, the dark underground. It’s where he feels at home. So his mind forms these ideas into ready made constructs for the Jedi to see and process. In this way, the surroundings are basically Godzilla’s way of appearing to them more or less as well. I figured it would be less corny than having a pint-sized Godzilla speaking to them or something.
The images Godzilla shows are partly memories, partly what he has sensed or has been told by other Kaiju. I have the idea that as conflict raged on the surface and became more and more deadly, Godzilla stirred ever so slightly. That he could feel the destruction above him, even as he slept. It was the H-Bomb that finally broke him out of slumber, although he was probably already close to waking when Hiroshima happened anyway. So when the Jedi are seeing these images, they’re seeing a lot of man’s own history, Earth’s history. However, because the images are Godzilla’s interpretation or thoughts, they are filtered through his own mind, so they probably all merge together, informed by his memories, opinions and dreams.
For example, Godzilla was asleep during World War 2, but he’s probably aware of Hitler. However, what the Jedi would see would be a very loud, very angry looking shrouded figure doing a strange salute. The details wouldn’t be there because they don’t really matter to Godzilla. All he knows is that the bomb that woke him up and changed him was the result of a war with a madconqueror, other than that he doesn’t care.
Something like Vietnam though would be more clearer to him as he was awake at the time. In my mind, within this universe at least, the conflict drew him towards the DMZ, away from his homeland. He didn’t really stay too long, but he did do some damage, not that it affected much of anything. Most of the time he stayed close to the Pacific, unless a challenger or enemy cropped up somewhere else and he went off to fight it, because that’s what he does. He probably would be aware of other conflicts and wars, but only in so far that it he feels it justifies his actions. Humans create war, ergo they brought this upon themselves when they made that bomb.
Perhaps now is as good a time as any to properly address this Godzilla’s origins. It’s a mixture of all of them in a sense. Godzilla was an ancient dinosaur-like creature, but as the world changed, he retreated to a place where radiation would keep him sustained. The H-Bomb, however, was vastly different than what he suspected and it hit right where he chose to sleep. That brought him to the surface and the radiation itself changed him, making him bigger, smarter and augmented him, giving him more powers than he originally had or even making them stronger. Angry at what the humans had done to him and the planet he lashed out at the nearest civilization. Think Namor in the Marvel Comics Golden Age, only instead of America, it’s Japan. The Oxygen Destroyer was still used, but unlike the film it only came CLOSE to killing him. The weapon forced him to retreat to further depths, as his skin was melting off actually, so that just gave him a whole new reason to hate humans that seemed even more justified. At least to him. So we got a little of Showa Era’s origin, a little of the Heisei Era’s and of course Legendary’s, because we might as well address all of them. I left out the whole “Vengeful Spirits of those Japan killed in World War Two” thing because that gets a bit existential for our purposes.
I’m sure there are probably other questions about this idea of mine, of what the inside of Godzilla’s head looks like, and I’ll be happy to answer them if you want. Of course if anyone wants to ask if Godzilla has a Pixar-esque Inside Out Headquarters like in that movie recently, I will say probably not. Although if he did, it would probably be really hilarious... and Anger would almost always be at the controls.
Order 66: If any of you has seen the lost episodes of Star Wars: The Clone Wars that were supposed to be that series’ season six, you know the words Kamo repeats here. They come up again in the second issue of Kanan prequel comic series currently running, spoken by the Clone Troopers that gun down Kanan’s master. It seems that phrase is an implanted mantra, something Palpatine probably cooked up to make sure the Clones didn’t question their actions too much after. They’re soldiers, they follow orders, the Emperor asked them to do something and they did it. Simple, easy, no questions asked.
While there’s a few more revelations about what Kamo did in the Temple on that fateful night, it is safe to say at this point he doesn’t really remember much. He’s blocked it out mostly, probably another failsafe installed into the chip to make sure he won’t question his actions too much.
However, as a Clone who followed Order 66 and who’s chip was and still is active, it stands to reason that the program is still running. Whether or not that’s because of his old age and the chip has degraded a bit, or that it’s simply by design for Kamo to switch back to “Jedi Kill-Mode” when he confirms the presence of one, I can’t say. I really need to find out how Rex stopped himself from turning on the Jedi, or exactly what happened when all that shit went down. Again, this is something that seriously needs to be filled in at some point down the line. Preferably with an audiobook or comic or even short film, because damn it, now that I know Rex and Ahsoka are alive I wanna see what happened!
We’ll probably get filled in during this season eventually, but back to Kamo. He now knows that the Jedi are still alive. Worse, it seems Order 66 is still running in his brain. This will not end well. As some of you suspected, a lot of things are coming to a head. There’s more than just the confrontation between two giant monsters to look forward to, trust me on that.
No comments:
Post a Comment