Stress is an inevitable part of life, but its excessive presence can wreak havoc on our physical and mental well-being. Recent research has shed light on the profound effects of stress on our health, highlighting the need for effective management strategies. In this blog post, we’ll delve into the latest findings on stress and explore actionable steps to mitigate its detrimental impacts.
Understanding the Science Behind Stress: Recent studies have deepened our understanding of the physiological mechanisms underlying stress. Cortisol, commonly known as the stress hormone, plays a central role in the body’s stress response. Chronic stress leads to persistently elevated cortisol levels, triggering a cascade of negative effects such as increased blood glucose, insulin resistance, and abdominal weight gain.
Moreover, stress has been linked to various health issues, including cardiovascular diseases, immune system dysfunction, digestive disorders, and mental health conditions like anxiety and depression. The latest research underscores the urgent need to address stress as a significant contributor to these health problems.
Latest Research Insights: Recent studies have provided compelling evidence of the detrimental effects of stress on health. One study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association found that chronic stress significantly increases the risk of developing cardiovascular diseases, including heart attacks and strokes.
Furthermore, research published in Psychoneuroendocrinology revealed a strong correlation between chronic stress and immune system dysfunction, making individuals more susceptible to infections and inflammatory conditions.
Another groundbreaking study in Frontiers in Psychiatry highlighted the role of stress in exacerbating mental health disorders, emphasizing the importance of early intervention and effective stress management techniques.
Effective Strategies for Stress Management: Fortunately, there are several evidence-based strategies for managing stress and improving overall well-being. These include:

1. Mindfulness and Meditation: Engaging in mindfulness practices, such as meditation and deep breathing exercises, can help reduce stress levels and promote relaxation.
2. Regular Exercise: Physical activity has been shown to alleviate stress by releasing endorphins, the body’s natural mood boosters. Aim for at least 30 minutes of moderate exercise most days of the week.
3. Quality Sleep: Prioritize sleep hygiene by establishing a consistent sleep schedule, creating a relaxing bedtime routine, and optimizing your sleep environment to ensure restorative sleep.
4. Nutritious Diet: Consuming a balanced diet rich in fruits, vegetables, lean proteins, and whole grains can support your body’s ability to cope with stress. Avoid excessive caffeine, sugar, and processed foods, which can exacerbate stress levels.
5. Supplements: Certain supplements, such as ashwagandha, magnesium, and omega-3 fatty acids, have been shown to have stress-reducing properties. Consult with a healthcare professional before incorporating supplements into your routine.
6. Social Support: Cultivate strong social connections with friends, family, and community members to provide emotional support and encouragement during stressful times.

In conclusion, the latest research underscores the significant impact of stress on our health and well-being. By understanding the science behind stress and adopting effective management strategies, we can mitigate its negative effects and improve overall quality of life. Prioritizing self-care, seeking social support, and implementing healthy lifestyle habits are key steps towards achieving resilience in the face of stress. Take proactive steps today to protect your health and well-being for years to come.

Raksha Bandhan, the festival that celebrates the bond between brothers and sisters, is a time-honored tradition filled with love, affection, and cherished memories. While many siblings celebrate Raksha Bandhan with elaborate rituals and gatherings, the beauty of a single Rakhi lies in its simplicity and sincerity. Let's explore why a single Rakhi holds a special place in this meaningful celebration.

Embracing Simplicity

1. Symbol of Unity: A single Rakhi symbolizes the unbreakable bond between siblings. Just as a thread is made stronger when woven together, the bond between a brother and sister is fortified with love, trust, and mutual respect.
2. Focus on Essence: With a single Rakhi, the focus shifts from material extravagance to the essence of the festival – the expression of love, protection, and gratitude. It reminds us that it's the thought and sentiment behind the Rakhi that truly matters.

Significance of Single Rakhi

1. Uniqueness: Each Rakhi is unique, representing the individuality of the bond between siblings. A single Rakhi serves as a reminder of the special connection shared between a brother and sister, unique in its own right.
2. Simplicity: Single Rakhis come in various designs, from traditional to contemporary, catering to different preferences. Whether adorned with beads, threads, or charms, a single Rakhi exudes simplicity and elegance.

Celebrating Single Rakhi

1. Personalized Touch: Customize the single Rakhi with your brother's favorite colors, motifs, or symbols that hold significance to your relationship. Adding a personal touch makes the Rakhi even more meaningful.
2. Heartfelt Message: Accompany the single Rakhi with a heartfelt message or letter expressing your love, appreciation, and best wishes for your brother. Let him know how much he means to you and how grateful you are to have him in your life.
3. Virtual Celebration: In today's interconnected world, distance may separate siblings during Raksha Bandhan. However, technology allows for virtual celebrations, enabling siblings to connect and celebrate the occasion despite being miles apart. Send your brother a single Rakhi through mail or opt for virtual Rakhi ceremonies through video calls.

The beauty of a single Rakhi from Rakhi.com lies in its simplicity, sincerity, and the profound bond it represents between siblings. Whether elaborate or understated, Raksha Bandhan is a celebration of love, protection, and cherished memories shared between brothers and sisters. Embrace the beauty of a single Rakhi this Raksha Bandhan and celebrate the enduring bond that unites siblings in a lifelong journey of love and support.

(TLDR at bottom)
I grew up as an only child with an essentially single mother (weird dynamic between my parents). My parents were together, but they never lived together due to how different their lives were, and then officially broke up when I was 4/5.
I don’t know whats going on with my mum, but there’s definitely something there, most likely Cluster B, but I’m unsure, she experienced a great deal of trauma from her own father who sounded like an unaware pwNPD.
Because it was only me and her most of the time, and living a very stressful and chaotic life (my mum cannot handle stress at all). I was exposed to this dynamic since birth. My only consistent model of being a human has been my dysfunctional mum. She has always been overly emotional, reactive, overbearing, overthinking, stressing etc, and I remember as a child, I’d be so so embarrassed of her because I noticed how different she was from other peoples parents and mums. I’d notice their reactions towards her - their apprehension, they were obviously uneasy around her. She’d over share and people please, but then also over react over the tiniest of inconveniences and be demanding - it all felt so so uncomfortable and anxiety inducing for me. I’d feel ashamed to be around her in public. But at the same time, because she was all I had, she was my consistent primary caregiver, I always desperately needed her to survive.
So as a kid, because of seeing her being overly emotional and reactive, and noticing how that effected others, I clammed up tight. I would be dead silent outside of my safe spaces, be polite and the good girl, dissociate from my body and needs due to the chronic anxiety. She’s always made decisions for me, put me on a pedestal, compared me to others etc. and because of being so anxious and dissociated from such a young age, i never got that chance to let my true core self learn for itself. The shame swallowed me up because of the shameful enmeshment with mum.
It’s like because she was so emotional (and embarrassing to me), it felt unsafe to be present with her because her capacity to self regulate and soothe and rationally/logically/calmly solve a problem have always been non existent. I think I’ve rejected her because of this humiliation and unsafety to recognise my own needs and have them met by her because her reactions and emotions were shameful to me. But because I’ve rejected her, I’ve completely rejected myself - because at those very young ages, we haven’t individuated from our parents. So to a little kid, the emotions that are exposed to us feel like our own, and if these are too dangerous to feel, we learn ways to shut down and stop those feelings. I think this is the beginnings of learning to ‘split’ - seeing someone as all good or all bad, to attach or discard. For my mum, it’s discard, but because of our enmeshment - I can’t fully because I NEED her. I never individuated from her because of the pain I internalised from neglect and loneliness - it has always felt so unsafe to exist as me.
And then this creates the disorganised attachment wound. Desperately needing someone, but also pushing them away because of the shame of needing them/being exposed of getting hurt.
My question is, how can I heal this attachment? I realise I can’t heal my mum, so how do I heal my own attachments wounds when they’re so deep and have essentially been lifelong. Naturally I want to avoid her and discard her for the shame it brings up to be in association with her. But I’m also starting to realise how she’s her own person, separate from me. How do I re-parent myself when I’ve never been shown what a calm and functional parent looks like? How I internalise being a functional person when I never learned that?
TLDR: My mum has been the person I’ve grown up with, so as a child, I’ve soaked up her behaviour, have felt unsafe, rejected her, then rejected myself for fear of becoming like her dysfunctional self, but enmeshed af, disorganised attachment, how do I individuate, re-parent and relieve shame?

You all must know very well about GBWhatsApp. If you have used it well then you will know what features you get in this WhatsApp and how you can use all those features. Otherwise, if you have not used it and want to know more information about it. So you have to stay with our article till the end. So that you can know well about every good and bad feature of it. Actually, there is no such bad feature in this WhatsApp due to which you have to face any kind of problem. But still, let us tell you that this is a third-party app, so you have to use it very carefully.
Although GBWhatsApp promises that no user’s data or any other information will ever be leaked, but still you have to run it very carefully so that you do not face any problems related to it in the future. In further information, we are going to tell you about some special features of GBWhatsapp and its excellent privacy. You have to read it very carefully, only then you will be able to know the real importance of WhatsApp and how to use it. Making it popular among millions of users around the world. If you want more privacy, more control over your chatting experience, or want a way to add some fun and excitement to your conversations then GB WhatsApp is a great solution for you.

Download GBWhatsApp (112 MB)

Through which you can do everything which you cannot do in normal WhatsApp. GB WhatsApp is your preferred medium for your chats with more privacy, control and convenience. Enjoy the innovative features and customization of GBWhatsApp that attracts millions of people globally. Experience the best messaging with GB WhatsApp and take your chats to the next level. This is the only application which is used all over the world. And the best thing about it is that whoever uses this application once never thinks of using normal WhatsApp again. This WhatsApp has made a good place among the people in a very short time.What is GB WhatsApp & Its Other Detail
GB WhatsApp is actually one of the many versions of WhatsApp with rich features and is a very great application. It has many more features than WhatsApp, like secret, automatic reply, selecting to send message to more people simultaneously. It also has many other amazing features like sending text messages and even large video files. GB WhatsApp is the second version of WhatsApp. That said, there isn’t much difference in terms of look and structure between the original WhatsApp, GB WhatsApp, or GB WhatsApp Pro, or even FM WhatsApp. As you know the main difference between GB WhatsApp and WhatsApp is that GB WhatsApp has more features. That’s why people like to use GB WhatsApp. The latest version of GBWhatsApp is easily available on Android smartphones and anyone interested in using it can do so.
What is GB WhatsApp & Its Other Detail

GBWhatsApp APK History & Why Should I Download It?

The Facebook company made all the basic files for WhatsApp Messenger available as open-source software in late 2016. Now anyone can use those codes to develop a messaging service that competes with WhatsApp. An Android developer from the Arab world named Atnfas_hoak, better known as Omar. Uses those codes to create a chat application that connects directly to WhatsApp’s native database. Although he created this mobile application for entertainment. But the interesting thing is that it provides more features than the initially released WhatsApp and that is why the number of people using this WhatsApp is increasing day by day.
After one year of use it has more than 100k users which indicates a substantial increase in popularity. Also if you are satisfied with the normal WhatsApp application and its built-in capabilities then you can skip the need of getting the GB WhatsApp APK. However if you also want to be persistent then you should download the latest GBWhatsApp APK version. So that you always get to see something new with every update.

• Even WhatsApp doesn’t currently enable you to send large files to just anyone. But GB WhatsApp allows you to do so. The maximum file transmission capacity on GBWhatsApp can reportedly increase to 2GB.
• The ability to completely alter the app’s design and theme.
• Integrated function to reduce the length of the WhatsApp document to save up memory
• There are no flaws or mistakes.
• Along with this, there are many reasons which force you to download this WhatsApp at any cost.

The Special Feature of GBWhatsApp

• Auto Reply:-First of all you can use this auto-reply feature in gbwhatsapp when you want to reply to any of your friends at any time. You can use it to promote your business by sending unlimited bulk messages to a chat or group. Through this feature you will not be able to forget any of your friend’s birthday or any other event.
  
• Filter messages:- GB WhatsApp Pro APK is designed with Filter Messages feature that provides the user with the option to clear chats which can also filter your messages. You will benefit from this that if you want to view any of your chats separately then you can use this feature. Which is a very amazing feature and is also very useful for the people.
  
• Download Status:- Another great feature of this app is that you can download status photos and videos uploaded by other contacts which is great. Now you don’t need to use any third party application, you can easily save any type of status from your contact list, that too in its original quality. If we talk about normal WhatsApp then no such feature is included in it.
  
• Send High Quality Image:- Sometimes we have to send Images in Original Quality, and for that, we use the Document Option. Now GBWhatsApp Pro Allows you to end Images in the Highest Quality.
  
• Bulk Sender:- GB WhatsApp This tool lets you send bulk messages. This means you can send unlimited messages to contact and prank your friends with this amazing tool. This tool helps you send personalized WhatsApp messages to multiple people, even if you haven’t added them to your phonebook. It works with WhatsApp and WhatsApp Business on your mobile phones and laptops and is 100% secure and free to use.
  

The Special Feature of GBWhatsApp

• Pop-up notifications:- Similar to messaging app WhatsApp, GB WhatsApp also offers pop-up notifications with response opportunities. You can hide these notifications from view by opening the app’s notification options and turning off pop-up notifications. So that no one can bother you by sending messages again and again and you can do your work without any interruption.
  
• Amazing Fonts:- If you have used normal WhatsApp till now, then you would know that only one font is given for use in it, after seeing which the person gets bored. But you do not need to worry, after downloading GB WhatsApp, you get many more fonts in it which you can use as per your convenience. You can change the huge amount of fonts available every day.
  
• Infinite Themes:- The main advantage of GBWhatsApp APK with stunning fonts is its imaginative appearance as it offers an unlimited number of themes that can be used to help make WhatsApp look great. By simply browsing GB WhatsApp Themes you will be able to download the themes using any web browser. Not only this, if you do not like your WhatsApp theme then you can download the theme separately and apply it on your WhatsApp.
  

Change Colors

• Universal Color:- Changes Color everywhere, including UI
• Universal ActionBar Text Color:- Changes the color of the Actionbar on all screens
• Background:-Change Color of Background. Default is White
• List Background:- Change Background of list Chats in One UI.
• Status Bar:- Change Color of StatusBar on Every Screen
• Navigation Bar:- Change Color of NavigationBar on
• Tabs background color:- Change the background color for the Tabs in home screen
• Page Title Text Color:- Change color of ‘CHATS’, ‘STATUS’, ‘CALLS’
• Page Selected Title Text Color:- Change Selected color of ‘CHATS’, ‘STATUS’, ‘CALLS’
• Unread message counter color:- Change the background color for the unread message

GBWhatsApp Other Features and Advance Privacy

• Anti-revoke:- GBWhatsapp comes with an anti-revoke message feature, which means that even if someone sends any kind of message and then deletes everything on your behalf, you can still see those deleted messages by default.
  
• App Lock:- App Lock allows you to require a pattern, PIN, password or fingerprint to enter apps and access your messages. This adds a layer of security, and makes your WhatsApp chats even more secure so that no stranger can access your personal chats. And also keeps your messages hidden from people who have access to your phone. If you want, you can show the PIN and password while typing.
  
• DND Mode:- It has an inbuilt Do Not Disturb mode. If you are using any other app on your Android phone and do not want to be disturbed by WhatsApp messages then you can use the DND feature to disable the internet connection only for GB WhatsApp Pro. can do. Through this feature you can pause your WhatsApp for some time. And you can use other apps without any problem.
  
• People Nearby:- Developers added People Nearby to WhatsApp to exchange contact information face-to-face. With this update, people nearby can help you meet new friends. This allows you to automatically connect with everyone around you without any contact.
  
• Anti-Ban:- Some users may have trouble using third-party WhatsApp mods GB WhatsApp developers have integrated anti-ban features to reduce the risk. This assurance means you can enjoy additional features without the constant fear of losing access to the account. Now you can use this WhatsApp for a long time, this time the developers have given anti-ban form to this WhatsApp.
  
• Hide Last Seen:- With GB WhatsApp you can hide your last seen status. This allows you to appear offline to others and also see their last seen status. Unlike the original WhatsApp where hiding your last seen prevents you from seeing the last seen of others. GB WhatsApp offers the ability to hide your own Last Seen while retaining the ability to view the Last Seen of others.
  
• Block and Restrict Calls:- Now restrict callers without blocking them with GBWhatsApp Apk download. This is an amazing feature of this app because you don’t need to block the person or turn off the internet if you don’t want to talk to them. Go to the calls section of the app and block the caller from calling you. He will be able to text you and share his voice notes with you, which you can listen to at your convenience.
  
• Show Double Ticks after Reply:- This is an exciting feature of this app that you can use to take your privacy to the next level. The messages will be delivered to you. But the sender will see a tick on his message. Double and blue ticks will be visible to him only when you reply otherwise he will think that you are offline or for some reason his message has not been delivered yet.
  
• No In-App Ads:- Despite being a free application, it is an ad-free app. Advertisements are the main reason to distract users from using any app. GBWhatsApp comes with an ad-free interface and just like the original WhatsApp, you will never see a single ad while using this app.
  
• Change Chat Names:- GBWhatsApp app will allow you to have maximum control over the chat. You can easily change the name of a chat without changing the name of the contact in the contact list. Set nicknames for your chat with this beautiful app and talk to them with more passion and love.
  

Other Features

• Forward messages to anyone without forwarding the tag.
• You can select all chats at once from the home screen of this app.
• Add new fonts and icons.
• Anti-ban feature, you will not be banned from using WhatsApp.
• Stickers from other apps can be added.
• You can select all chats at once from the home screen.
• Enable drag to reply in group call.
• Hide the last seen.
• You can send a private reply to groups.
• The ability to send a group message supported by photos and videos.
• One-time photo and video viewing.
• Feature hide visiting cases to your friends.
• Hide the two check marks (correct) when receiving the message.
• Get notified of deleted messages.
• You can now read the description of the group in the title as the normal case.
• Airplane mode has been added so that the internet can be locked off from the WhatsApp application only.
• The possibility of sending 100 documents at once instead of 30.
• The feature of uploading your friends’ statuses.
• Video Now you can send a file size of up to 50 MB.
• You can send a group message to up to 600 people at once.
• With the theme option you can easily change the appearance.
• Make a list of who can contact you.
• Send up to 90 photos at once.
• The possibility of making a lock for Watts GP against blocking.
• You can download gbwhatsapp for free with a direct link

Conclusion

In today’s article we have told you about some special features of GBWhatsapp. We hope that you have understood all this information well. As we have mentioned earlier that WhatsApp is a third party app which cannot be trusted blindly. Most of the people around the world are using it but some people also say that all the data of this app has been leaked. Actually GB WhatsApp promises its users that no WhatsApp user’s data will be leaked. But you have to use it very carefully so that you never face any problem due to which you have to worry. Apart from this, there are many other flaws in it due to which people have to get a little worried.
Therefore you will have to be very careful while using it. Although we have given you all the information about this WhatsApp, but if you have any doubt about this article then you can tell us by commenting. We will definitely solve all your problems. Apart from this, we write many useful articles on our website which are very useful for people. If you want to know more things related to this, then you will have to visit our website as much as possible. So that you can read our every post first. GBWhatsApp Pro is a great app for those who want a more personalized and feature-rich WhatsApp experience.

Just like in the Title what are some Worldbuilding tropes you always subvert and change to make it different than what it is intended to? Here are some tropes that I love to subvert:

1. Evil Empiree, Good Rebellions, Republic; Not all Empires are bad and not all Rebellions and Republics are good because there's this thing that is called Grey Morality which is the blend between what is right and what is wrong and what is good and what is evil. Just like how the most authoritarian and draconic empire in my world treats queers, women and minorities as equals and are given human rights. And how it's counterpart the "good" republic is actually an extremely bigoted, sexist, queerphobic, racist, xenophobic nation that gives democracy, liberty and justice if you are the correct race, sexually and color.

2: Underdog Heroes and Powerful Villains; Fuck this if I can't find a story where the protagonist is the strongest person belonging to the strongest family belonging to the strongest country belonging to the strongest world belonging to the strongest solar-system blah, blah, blah! And the villain is just a poor, pathetic, useless person then I'm making my own.
3: Evil Hiveminds: Again as a Hivemind Advocate I am disgusted by the amount of Hivephobia the Media have because of the relation between shared consciousness and communism. And since there are so extremely few amount of Hivemind species done right I had decided to do a complete 180° to my Hivemind race and made them actually interesting and not a blatant all-devouring swarm that farms biomasses.

In the whimsical world of slime enthusiasts, there exists a fate worse than an over-activated batch: the self-imposed slime ban. Whether it's driven by budget constraints, the desperate need to declutter, or simply the desire to prevent total slime overload, going on a low- to no-slime diet can feel like the end of days. Picture it: your once vibrant world of stretchy, squishy goodness reduced to a barren wasteland. But fear not, for I am here to guide you through this dramatic ordeal. Brace yourself, though; the journey ahead is not for the faint of heart, but it is one we must all walk one day.
1. Playing with the Slime You Already Have
Ah, the initial stage of the ban. You stand before your glorious collection, a dragon surveying its hoard. "No need to worry," you tell yourself. "I have plenty of slime." You start with the classics, the old favorites that never let you down. You stretch, squish, and poke, reveling in the familiar textures and scents. But soon, the euphoria fades. You realize you're rationing your slimes, treating each session like it's your last meal before the guillotine. Every stretch feels bittersweet, every poke a reminder of the dwindling days ahead.
2. Making Your Own Slime
Desperation sets in. "DIY," you think, clutching at straws. You scour your house for ingredients: shampoo, baking soda, glue—anything that might come together into that beloved goo. The kitchen becomes a mad scientist's lab, complete with frantic mixing and questionable experiments. Some attempts fail spectacularly, leaving you with sticky hands and a ruined mixing bowl. Others succeed, but it's not the same. You stare at your homemade slime, proud yet hollow. It's like eating a cake made of sawdust—it fills the void, but it's not the real thing. (I have a great guide here.)
3. Designing Virtual Slimes
The digital age offers a glimmer of hope. You download slime apps, creating virtual masterpieces with the swipe of a finger. It's oddly satisfying, watching your screen fill with glittery, gooey creations. But there's no tactile joy, no sensory delight. It's like looking at a photo of food when you're starving—beautiful, but ultimately unfulfilling. Still, you persist, crafting digital slimes at all hours, your eyes glazing over as you chase the phantom sensations.
4. Starting a Slime Bartering System
Your social circle becomes your lifeline. You propose trades, offering up prized possessions in exchange for slime. A rare book here, a cherished trinket there—nothing is off-limits. Friends and acquaintances look at you with a mix of pity and amusement, but some take the bait. You find yourself with new slimes, each one a brief oasis in your desert of deprivation. But the trades come with their own costs, and soon your shelves are empty, save for the slimes.
5. Begging for Slime
Pride be damned, you resort to begging. You compose heartfelt pleas, sending them to friends, family, even strangers on the internet. "Please," you write, "I just need a little slime to get through the day." The responses vary—some sympathetic, some mocking. A few kind souls send you small amounts, their generosity a beacon of hope. But it’s never enough. The hunger gnaws at you, relentless and unyielding.
6. Playing with Pretend Slime
Madness looms on the horizon. You find yourself pretending—imagining slimes that aren’t there. You close your eyes and describe them in excruciating detail, picturing every color, texture, and scent. You stretch invisible slimes, poke at thin air, your mind clinging to the ghostly sensations. It's a temporary balm, a fleeting escape. But reality always crashes back in, leaving you more desperate than before.
7. Begging for Slime Again
If at first you don’t succeed, beg, beg again. Persistence is key, my friends. Ask nicely, and maybe someone will take pity on you and share their precious slime. Try different approaches: poetic pleas, heartfelt letters, or even over-the-top dramatic monologues about your dire situation. The more creative, the better. Sometimes, the third time’s the charm. Don’t be afraid to ask for slime from every possible source. Your persistence might just pay off.
8. Keeping a Slime-Less Journal
You turn to writing, chronicling your ordeal in a slime-less journal. Each day, you document the cravings, the dreams, the near-misses. The pages fill with angst and longing, your words dripping with melodrama. You draw pictures, tape in scraps of failed DIY slimes, create a tangible testament to your suffering. It’s therapeutic, in a way, a way to process the madness. But it also solidifies your obsession, turning your journey into a saga of epic proportions.
9. Joining a Slime Support Group
Misery loves company. You find fellow sufferers, forming a support group of the slime-deprived. Together, you share stories, vent frustrations, and offer solace. Virtual meetings become your lifeline, each session a cathartic release. You bond over your shared struggle, finding strength in numbers. But the group also feeds your obsession, each member a mirror reflecting your own desperation.
10. Complaining About It on slime
Reddit is the perfect place to vent your frustrations. Head over to slime and share your woes with the community. Post dramatic rants, share memes about your slime-less existence, and seek advice from fellow slime lovers. Sometimes, a good rant is all you need to feel a bit better. Plus, you might find some empathetic souls who are willing to share their own tips and tricks for surviving the slime ban.
11. Casting a Magic Spell
In your darkest hour, you turn to the arcane. You gather candles, draw circles, and chant incantations, hoping to summon slime from the ether. It’s a mix of desperation and whimsy, a last-ditch effort to conjure relief. The rituals become elaborate, theatrical performances that blur the line between sanity and insanity. You laugh at the absurdity, but part of you truly believes in the magic.
12. Planning a Slime Heist
Delusion takes hold. You scheme, plot, and plan an elaborate slime heist. Blueprints cover your walls, your mind consumed with the minutiae of the perfect crime. You envision breaking into stores, raiding friends' stashes, even sneaking into slime conventions. It’s a fantasy, a thrilling diversion from your torment. The line between reality and fiction blurs, your heist becoming an epic tale of rebellion.
13. Begging for Slime Again
You circle back to begging, now with a fervor that borders on mania. You leave no stone unturned, no contact unasked. You compose dramatic letters, stage impassioned speeches, and flood social media with your pleas. The world watches, amused and bewildered by your relentless pursuit. But amidst the laughter, slivers of hope appear—small packages, anonymous gifts, glimmers of slime in the darkness.
14. Forgetting the Ban
Alright, it's been long enough. Buy some slime.

I've used Cratejoy as a seller on and off for a handful of years. I had a stationery/scrapbooking subscription box that was extremely successful to the point where I had to discontinue it because I couldn't keep up with demand. And even then, I had customers emailing me for months afterwards asking when I'd be back. I went through this cycle three times, between around 2018-2023. Back then, when I would submit the box for review, it was generally be approved within 24 hours or so. Likewise, if I needed customer support and opened a ticket, it would be responded to within a day.
I recently tried to start back up again. It took 13 days for the box to get approved. The two times I opened a support ticket, it took upwards of a week to get a response. I've had my box listed now for about two months. On that time I've gotten two subscribers. Two. When I've done the exact same box in the past, I would get new subscribers within a week. Two months in, I had around 50 customers. My box is listed on the first page in it's category, currently. So visibility is not an issue. I've also added a second box and it hasn't had a single sign up. It's been over a month. I check my stats daily and it looks like between the two boxes, I'm getting 1 or 2 clicks a day, if that. Between the extremely low amount of sign ups and the extremely long time for tickets to be answered, I'm wondering if no one is using that website anymore. If not, is there another subscription box marketplace that people have moved to? I understand that I can set up my own website through Shopify, but I'm looking for a subscription box marketplace where people go to browse hundreds of different subscription boxes, rather than trying to have them find my individual page. How are other people selling subscription boxes, these days?

J. V. Stalin
The Party's Tasks Report Delivered at an Enlarged Meeting of the Krasnaya Presnya District Committee of the R.C.P.(B.) With Group Organisers, Members of the Debating Society and of the Bureau of the Party Units December 2, 1923 Source : Works, Vol. 5, 1921 - 1923 Publisher : Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1954 Transcription/Markup : Salil Sen for MIA, 2008 Public Domain : Marxists Internet Archive (2008). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit "Marxists Internet Archive" as your source.
Comrades, first of all I must say that I am delivering a report here in my personal capacity and not in the name of the Central Committee of the Party. If the meeting is willing to hear such a report, I am at your service. (Voices : "Yes.") This does not mean that I disagree with the Central Committee in any way on this question; not at all. I am speaking here in my personal capacity only because the commission of the Central Committee for drafting measures to improve the internal situation in the Party 1 is to present its findings to the Central Committee in a day or two; these findings have not yet been presented, and therefore I have as yet no formal right to speak in the name of the Central Committee, although I am sure that what I am about to say to you will, in the main, express the Central Committee's position on these questions.
Discussion — A Sign of the Party's Strength The first question I would like to raise here is that of the significance of the discussion that is now taking place in the press and in the Party units. What does this discussion show? What does it indicate? Is it a storm that has burst into the calm life of the Party? Is this discussion a sign of the Party's disintegration, its decay, as some say, or of its degeneration, as others say?
I think, comrades, that it is neither one nor the other: there is neither degeneration nor disintegration. The fact of the matter is that the Party has grown more mature during the past period; it has adequately rid itself of useless ballast; it has become more proletarian. You know that two years ago we had not less than 700,000 members; you know that several thousand members have dropped out, or have been kicked out, of the Party. Further, the Party membership has improved, its quality has risen in this period as a result of the improvement in the conditions of the working class due to the revival of industry, as a result of the return of the old skilled workers from the countryside, and as a result of the new wave of cultural development that is spreading among the industrial workers.
In short, owing to all these circumstances, the Party has grown more mature, its quality has risen, its needs have grown, it has become more exacting, it wants to know more than it has known up to now, and it wants to decide more than it has up to now.
The discussion which has opened is not a sign of the Party's weakness, still less is it a sign of its disintegration or degeneration; it is a sign of strength, a sign of firmness, a sign of the improvement in the quality of the Party's membership, a sign of its increased activity.
Causes of the Discussion The second question that confronts us is: what has caused the question of internal Party policy to become so acute precisely in the present period, in the autumn of this year? How is this to be explained? What were the causes? I think, comrades, that there were two causes.
The first cause was the wave of discontent and strikes over wages that swept through certain districts of the republic in August of this year. The fact of the matter is that this strike wave exposed the defects in our organisations; it revealed the isolation of our organisations— both Party and trade-union—from the events taking place in the factories. And in connection with this strike wave the existence was discovered within our Party of several secret organisations of an essentially anti-communist nature, which strove to disintegrate the Party. All these defects revealed by the strike wave were exposed to the Party so glaringly, and with such a sobering effect, that it felt the necessity for internal Party changes.
The second cause of the acuteness of the question of internal Party policy precisely at the present moment was the wholesale release of Party comrades to go on vacation. It is natural, of course, for comrades to go on vacation, but this assumed such a mass character, that Party activity became considerably weaker precisely at the time when the discontent arose in the factories, and that greatly helped to expose the accumulated defects just at this period, in the autumn of this year.
Defects in Internal Party Life I have mentioned defects in our Party life that were exposed in the autumn of this year, and which brought up the question of improving internal Party life. What are these defects in internal Party life? Is it that the Party line was wrong, as some comrades think; or that, although the Party's line was correct, in practice it departed from the right road, was distorted because of certain subjective and objective conditions?
I think that the chief defect in our internal Party life is that, although the Party's line, as expressed in the decisions of our congresses, is correct, in the localities (not everywhere, of course, but in certain districts) it was put into practice in an incorrect way. While the proletarian-democratic line of our Party was correct, the way it was put into practice in the localities resulted in cases of bureaucratic distortion of this line.
That is the chief defect. The existence of contradictions between the basic Party line as laid down by the Congresses (Tenth, Eleventh and Twelfth), and the way our organisations put this line into practice in the locali-ties—that is the foundation of all the defects in internal Party life.
The Party line says that the major questions of our Party activities, except, of course, those that brook no delay, or those that are military or diplomatic secrets, must without fail be discussed at Party meetings. That is what the Party line says. But in Party practice in the localities, not everywhere, of course, it was considered that there is really no great need for a number of questions concerning internal Party practice to be discussed at Party meetings since the Central Committee and the other leading organisations will decide these questions.
The Party line says that our Party officials must without fail be elected unless there are insuperable obstacles to this, such as absence of the necessary Party standing, and so forth. You know that, according to the Party rules, secretaries of Gubernia Committees must have a pre-October Party standing, secretaries of Uyezd Committees must have at least three years', and units secretaries a year's, Party standing. In Party practice, however, it was often considered that since a certain Party standing was needed, no real elections were needed.
The Party line says that the Party membership must be kept informed about the work of the economic organisations, the factories and trusts, for, naturally, our Party units are morally responsible to the non-Party masses for the defects in the factories. Nevertheless, in Party practice it was considered that since there is a Central Committee which issues directives to the economic organisations, and since these economic organisations are bound by those directives, the latter will be carried out without control from below by the mass of the Party membership.
The Party line says that responsible workers in different branches of work, whether Party, economic, trade-union, or military workers, notwithstanding their specialisation in their own particular work, are interconnected, constitute inseparable parts of one whole, for they are all working in the common cause of the proletariat, which cannot be torn into parts. In Party practice, however, it was considered that since there is specialisation, division of labour according to properly Party activity and economic, military, etc., activity, the Party officials are not responsible for those working in the economic sphere, the latter are not responsible for the Party officials, and, in general, that the weakening and even loss of connection between them are inevitable.
Such, comrades, are, in general, the contradictions between the Party line, as registered in a number of decisions of our Congresses, from the Tenth to the Twelfth, and Party practice.
I am far from blaming the local organisations for this distortion of the Party line, for, when you come to examine it, this is not so much the fault as the misfortune of our local organisations. The nature of this misfortune, and how things could have taken this turn, I shall tell you later on, but I wanted to register this fact in order to reveal this contradiction to you and then try to propose measures for improvement.
I am also far from considering our Central Committee to be blameless. It, too, has sinned, as has every institution and organisation; it, too, shares part of the blame and part of the misfortune: blame, at least, for not, whatever the reason, exposing these defects in time, and for not taking measures to eliminate them.
But that is not the point now. The point now is to ascertain the causes of the defects I have just spoken about. Indeed, how did these defects arise, and how can they be removed?
The Causes of the Defects The first cause is that our Party organisations have not yet rid themselves, or have still not altogether rid themselves, of certain survivals of the war period, a period that has passed, but has left in the minds of our responsible workers vestiges of the military regime in the Party. I think that these survivals find expression in the view that our Party is not an independently acting organism, not an independently acting, militant organisation of the proletariat, but something in the nature of a system of institutions, something in the nature of a complex of institutions in which there are officials of lower rank and officials of higher rank. That, comrades, is a profoundly mistaken view that has nothing in common with Marxism; that view is a survival that we have inherited from the war period, when we militarised the Party, when the question of the independent activity of the mass of the Party membership had necessarily to be shifted into the background and military orders were of decisive importance. I do not remember that this view was ever definitely expressed; nevertheless, it, or elements of it, still influences our work. Comrades, we must combat such views with all our might, for they are a very real danger and create favourable conditions for the distortion in practice of the essentially correct line of our Party.
The second cause is that our state apparatus, which is bureaucratic to a considerable degree, exerts a certain amount of pressure on the Party and the Party workers. In 1917, when we were forging ahead, towards October, we imagined that we would have a Commune, a free association of working people, that we would put an end to bureaucracy in government institutions, and that it would be possible, if not in the immediate period, then within two or three short periods, to transform the state into a free association of working people. Practice has shown, however, that this is still an ideal which is a long way off, that to rid the state of the elements of bureaucracy, to transform Soviet society into a free association of working people, the people must have a high level of culture, peace conditions must be fully guaranteed all around us so as to remove the necessity of maintaining a large standing army, which entails heavy expenditure and cumbersome administrative departments, the very existence of which leaves its impress upon all the other state institutions. Our state apparatus is bureaucratic to a considerable degree, and it will remain so for a long time to come. Our Party comrades work in this apparatus, and the situation—I might say the atmosphere—in this bureaucratic apparatus is such that it helps to bureaucratise our Party workers and our Party organisations.
The third cause of the defects, comrades, is that some of our units are not sufficiently active, they are backward, and in some cases, particularly in the border regions, they are even wholly illiterate. In these districts, the units display little activity and are politically and culturally backward. That circumstance, too, undoubtedly creates a favourable soil for the distortion of the Party line.
The fourth cause is the absence of a sufficient number of trained Party comrades in the localities. Recently, in the Central Committee, I heard the report of a representative of one of the Ukrainian organisations. The reporter was a very capable comrade who shows great promise. He said that of 130 units, 80 have secretaries who were appointed by the Gubernia Committee. In answer to the remark that this organisation was acting wrongly in this respect, the comrade pleaded that there were no literate people in the units, that they consisted of new members, that the units themselves ask for secretaries to be sent them, and so forth. I may grant that half of what this comrade said was an overstatement, that the matter is not only that there are no trained people in the units, but also that the Gubernia Committee was over-zealous and followed the old tradition. But even if the Gubernia Committee was correct only to the extent of fifty per cent, is it not obvious that if there are such units in the Ukraine, how many more like them must there be in the border regions, where the organisations are young, where there are fewer Party cadres and less literacy than in the Ukraine? That is also one of the factors that create favourable conditions for the distortion in practice of the essentially correct Party line.
Lastly, the fifth cause—insufficient information. We sent out too little information, and this applies primarily to the Central Committee, possibly because it is overburdened with work. We receive too little information from the localities. This must cease. This is also a serious cause of the defects that have accumulated within the Party.
How should the Defects in Internal Party Life be Removed ? What measures must be adopted to remove these defects?
The first thing is tirelessly, by every means, to combat the survivals and habits of the war period in our Party, to combat the erroneous view that our Party is a system of institutions, and not a militant organisation of the proletariat, which is intellectually vigorous, acts independently, lives a full life, is destroying the old and creating the new.
Secondly, the activity of the mass of the Party membership must be increased; all questions of interest to the membership in so far as they can be openly discussed must be submitted to it for open discussion, and the possibility ensured of free criticism of all proposals made by the different Party bodies. Only in this way will it be possible to convert Party discipline into really conscious, really iron discipline; only in this way will it be possible to increase the political, economic and cultural experience of the mass of Party members; only in this way will it be possible to create the conditions necessary to enable the Party membership, step by step, to promote new active workers, new leaders, from its ranks.
Thirdly, the principle of election must be applied in practice to all Party bodies and official posts, if there are no insuperable obstacles to this such as lack of the necessary Party standing, and so forth. We must eliminate the practice of ignoring the will of the majority of the organisations in promoting comrades to responsible
Party posts, and we must see to it that the principle of election is actually applied.
Fourthly, there must exist under the Central Committee and the Gubernia and Regional Committees permanently functioning conferences of responsible workers in all fields of work—economic, Party, trade-union and military; these conferences must be held regularly and discuss any question they consider it necessary to discuss; the interconnection between the workers in all fields must not be broken; all these workers must feel that they are all members of a single Party family, working in a common cause, the cause of the proletariat, which is indivisible; the Central Committee and the local organisations must create an environment that will enable the Party to acquire and test the experience of our responsible workers in all spheres of work.
Fifthly, our Party units in the factories must be drawn into dealing with the various questions relating to the course of affairs in the respective enterprises and trusts. Things must be so arranged that the units are kept informed about the work of the administrations of our enterprises and trusts and are able to exert an influence on this work. You, as representatives of units, are aware how great is the moral responsibility of our factory units to the non-Party masses for the course of affairs in the factories. For the unit to be able to lead and win the following of the non-Party masses in the factory, for it to be able to bear responsibility for the course of affairs in the factory—and it certainly has a moral responsibility to the non-Party masses for defects in the work of the factory—the unit must be kept informed about these affairs, it must be possible for it to influence them in one way or another. Therefore, the units must be drawn into the discussion of economic questions relating to their factories, and economic conferences of representatives of the factory units in a given trust must be called from time to time to discuss questions relating to the affairs of the trust. This is one of the surest ways both of enlarging the economic experience of the Party membership and of organising control from below.
Sixthly, the quality of the membership of our Party units must be improved. Zinoviev has already said in an article of his that here and there the quality of the membership of our Party units is below that of the surrounding non-Party masses.
That statement, of course, must not be generalised and applied to all the units. It would be more exact to say the following for example: our Party units would be on a much higher cultural level than they are now, and would have much greater authority among non-Party people, if we had not denuded these units, if we had not taken from them people we needed for economic, administrative, trade-union and all sorts of other work. If our working-class comrades, the cadres we have taken from the units during the past six years, were to return to their units, does it need proof that those units would stand head and shoulders above all the non-Party workers, even the most advanced? Precisely because the Party has no other cadres with which to improve the state apparatus, precisely because the Party will be obliged to continue using that source, our units will remain on a somewhat unsatisfactory cultural level unless we take urgent measures to improve the quality of their membership. First of all, Party educational work in the units must be increased to the utmost; furthermore, we must get rid of the excessive formalism our local organisations sometimes display in accepting working-class comrades into the Party. I think that we must not allow ourselves to be bound by formalism; the Party can, and must, create easier conditions for the acceptance of new members from the ranks of the working class. That has already begun in the local organisations. The Party must take this matter in hand and launch an organised campaign for creating easier access to the Party for new members from workers at the bench.
Seventhly, work must be intensified among the non-Party workers. This is another means of improving the internal Party situation, of increasing the activity of the Party membership. I must say that our organisations are still paying little attention to the task of drawing non-Party workers into our Soviets. Take, for example, the elections to the Moscow Soviet that are being held now. I consider that one of the big defects in these elections is that too few non-Party people are being elected. It is said that there exists a decision of the organisation to the effect that at least a certain number, a certain percentage, etc., of non-Party people are to be elected; but I see that, in fact, a far smaller number is being elected. It is said that the masses are eager to elect only Communists. I have my doubts about that, comrades. I think that unless we show a certain degree of confidence in the non-Party people they may answer by becoming very distrustful of our organisations. This confidence in the non-Party people is absolutely necessary, comrades. Communists must be induced to withdraw their candidatures.
Speeches must not be delivered urging the election only of Communists; non-Party people must be encouraged, they must be drawn into the work of administering the state. We shall gain by this and in return receive the reciprocal confidence of the non-Party people in our organisations. The elections in Moscow are an example of the degree to which our organisations are beginning to isolate themselves within their Party shell instead of enlarging their field of activity and, step by step, rallying the non-Party people around themselves.
Eighthly, work among the peasants must be intensified. I do not know why our village units, which in some places are wilting, are losing their members and are not trusted much by the peasants (this must be admitted)—I do not know why, for instance, two practical tasks cannot be set these units: firstly, to interpret and popularise the Soviet laws which affect peasant life; secondly, to agitate for and disseminate elementary agronomic knowledge, if only the knowledge that it is necessary to plough the fields in proper time, to sift seed, etc. Do you know, comrades, that if every peasant were to decide to devote a little labour to the sifting of seed, it would be possible without land improvement, and without introducing new machines, to obtain an increase in crop yield amounting to about ten poods per dessiatin? And what does an increase in crop yield of ten poods per dessiatin mean? It means an increase in the gross crop of a thousand million poods per annum. And all this could be achieved without great effort. Why should not our village units take up this matter? Is it less important than talking about Curzon's policy? The peasants would then realise that the Communists have stopped engaging in empty talk and have got down to real business; and then our village units would win the boundless confidence of the peasants.
There is no need for me to stress how necessary it is, for improving and reviving Party life, to intensify Party and political educational work among the youth, the source of new cadres, in the Red Army, among women delegates, and among non-Party people in general.
Nor will I dwell upon the importance of increasing the interchange of information, about which I have already spoken, of increasing the supply of information from the top downwards and from below upwards.
Such, comrades, are the measures for improvement, the course towards internal Party democracy which the Central Committee set as far back as September of this year, and which must be put into practice by all Party organisations from top to bottom.
I would now like to deal with two extremes, two obsessions, on the question of workers' democracy that were to be noted in some of the discussion articles in Pravda.
The first extreme concerns the election principle. It manifests itself in some comrades wanting to have elections "throughout." Since we stand for the election principle, let us go the whole hog in electing! Party standing? What do we want that for? Elect whomever you please. That is a mistaken view, comrades. The Party will not accept it. Of course, we are not now at war; we are in a period of peaceful development. But we are now living under the NEP. Do not forget that, comrades. The Party began the purge not during, but after the war. Why? Because, during the war, fear of defeat drew the Party together into one whole, and some of the disruptive elements in the Party were compelled to keep to the general line of the Party, which was faced with the question of life or death. Now these bonds have fallen away, for we are not now at war; now we have the NEP, we have permitted a revival of capitalism, and the bourgeoisie is reviving. True, all this helps to purge the Party, to strengthen it; but on the other hand, we are being enveloped in a new atmosphere by the nascent and growing bourgeoisie, which is not very strong yet, but which has already succeeded in beating some of our co-operatives and trading organisations in internal trade. It was precisely after the introduction of the NEP that the Party began the purge and reduced its membership by half; it was precisely after the introduction of the NEP that the Party decided that, in order to protect our organisations from the contagion of the NEP, it was necessary, for example, to hinder the influx of non-proletarian elements into the Party, that it was necessary that Party officials should have a definite Party standing, and so forth. Was the Party right in taking these precautionary measures, which restricted "expanded" democracy? I think it was. That is why I think that we must have democracy, we must have the election principle, but the restrictive measures that were adopted by the Eleventh and Twelfth Congresses, at least the chief ones, must still remain in force.
The second extreme concerns the question of the limits of the discussion. This extreme manifests itself in some comrades demanding unlimited discussion; they think that the discussion of problems is the be all and end all of Party work and forget about the other aspect of Party work, namely, action, which calls for the implementation of the Party's decisions. At all events, this was the impression I gained from the short article by Radzin, who tried to substantiate the principle of unlimited discussion by a reference to Trotsky, who is alleged to have said that "the Party is a voluntary association of like-minded people." I searched for that sentence in Trotsky's works, but could not find it. Trotsky could scarcely have uttered it as a finished formula for the definition of the Party; and if he did utter it, he could scarcely have stopped there. The Party is not only an association of like-minded people; it is also an association of like-acting people, it is a militant association of like-acting people who are fighting on a common ideological basis (programme, tactics). I think that the reference to Trotsky is out of place, for I know Trotsky as one of the members of the Central Committee who most of all stress the active side of Party work. I think, therefore, that Radzin himself must bear responsibility for this definition. But what does this definition lead to? One of two possibilities: either that the Party will degenerate into a sect, into a philosophical school, for only in such narrow organisations is complete like-minded-ness possible; or that it will become a permanent debating society, eternally discussing and eternally arguing, until the point is reached where factions form and the Party is split. Our Party cannot accept either of these possibilities. This is why I think that the discussion of problems is needed, a discussion is needed, but limits must be set to such discussion in order to safeguard the Party, to safeguard this fighting unit of the proletariat, against degenerating into a debating society.
In concluding my report, I must warn you, comrades, against these two extremes. I think that if we reject both these extremes and honestly and resolutely steer the course towards internal Party democracy that the Central Committee set already in September of this year, we shall certainly achieve an improvement in our Party work. (Applause.)
Pravda, No. 277, December 6, 1923
Notes 1. This refers to the commission set up in conformity with the decision of the Political Bureau and of the Plenum of the Central Committee of the R.C.P.(B.) which took place on September 23-25, 1923.
Collected Works Index Volume 5 Index Works by Decade J. V. Stalin Archive Marxists Internet Archive

hello there, I have been chatting with one girl for over a year and have met her irl 4-5 times. she studies in a different country but comes to visit her homeland (my country where I study) on breaks. recent meeting was very unusual, I went to another country and surprised her with showing up to next her doorstep. she got too excited and emotional, we went to parks and just wandered around a city. I started holding her hands, when we found place to sit, she laid her head on my shoulder. I occasionally went too far and gave her forehead kisses, she didn’t refused. then tried to kiss her lips but she didn’t respond and pushed her head back even though there was a cheek kiss.
we are, I believe, emotionally bounded and have compassion towards each other. that evening I learned from her that she is in her healing stage and we getting to quick in our relationship, dynamics of it is kind of fast and she still living her feelings up after breakup. she shared that her past relationship was completely over this winter.
that evening I was invited to her house and we enjoyed starry night projector and some vinyl music in the background. then we went to sleep, even though we shared a bed, there was no single touch. I believed that getting physical is what might make it even worse.
after that, next morning we went places and enjoyed other things like visiting tourist area and so on. somewhere in between we kept discussing our relationship and tried to communicate about it. as for now, she says, she is in weirdest stage of her life and I appeared there randomly. she has tremendous emotional intelligence and bit of anxiety in putting trust in people (2 weeks ago her best friend and roommate put her down and they had a not a simple conflict, but scandal). If she says I am too quick (despite having been talking to each other for a year) and just met irl 4-5 times only and refuses to think about relationships for now is that over for me? She has important exams within next two weeks and I showed up this unexpectedly, this makes me think that I am extra pushy :( I want to be there for her and not to leave, sorry she is an overthinker as me, I blame myself for being disctractous. what can I do? just keep silent until she brings things up? I don’t say anything like “I need certainty”, “why would you escape?” or “why are you not responding to me?”. It’s not what bothering me, just want to know if she is okay or what can I do for her. I feel so stuck. what do you think?

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Drakkenheim is no more. An eldritch storm of falling stars devastated the city on that woeful eve, leaving behind a meteorite that would have lasting effects. Fifteen years later, Drakkenheim is a dismal urban wasteland contaminated by otherworldly magic and haunted by hideous monsters. Fantastic wealth, lost knowledge, and powerful artifacts lie ready for the taking by adventurers brave or foolish enough to venture into the ruins. However, even those who survive the dangers of Drakkenheim may not return unmarked by its terrors!
Hello everyone! I’m Emma (she/her) and me and our group (all of us are around 25 y/o) are looking for another player to join our ongoing Dungeons of Drakkenheim game. You’ll be the fourth player in a group that really enjoys roleplay and a DM who will help you bring your character to life - this will be facilitated by a personal quest, which will tie you directly to the world. This campaign strives to be a balance between roleplay, combat and exploration, sometimes skewed to one of the three pillars more depending on what’s currently going on. Your characters and choices matter and will eventually decide the fate of Drakkenheim itself.
Currently, we've got:

• a Scribes Wizard looking to put his brother on the throne,
  
  • an Old Gods Barbarian plagued by visions of the meteor and the crater, and

-a Glory Paladin looking to give missing family members a proper burial outside of the city.
We play on Wednesdays at 20:00 CEST for three hours (with a small break in the middle somewhere).
We’re playing in Roll20. You just need to have a decent mic and a discord account (voice only, no video required). You create your character at level 3, and the module is set to go all the way to level 2. You generate stats with point buy and can either choose a personal quest from a list or work with me to create a custom one. All official classes and subclasses are allowed, as well as material from Sebastian Crowe’s Guide to Drakkenheim. You’ll be given plenty of time to create your character; I wouldn’t want you to rush the process!
THE WORLD
The world of Drakkenheim, in the fifteen years since the meteor fell, has known civil war and unrest. All the while, the city is covered in the Haze, contaminated mists that hide and empower the horrors that wander the ruined streets. It also harbors delerium, strange crystal chips and fragments that are well-sought after by mages and scoundrels alike for their magical properties and high market value. But be warned: not just anyone would dare to face the city. What brings your character there? Whatever it is, it is something they fiercely believe in, something that will drive them to return to the city every single morning and that will face the risks. Not just death awaits within the city; the chance of a horrible death pales in comparison to the monstrous transformation you may undergo once the contamination seeps into your bones.
CONTENT WARNING
Drakkenheim portrays a dark fantasy world. References to the following are common in this adventure:

• Violence, murder, blood, gore, cannibalism, and body horror.
  
• Degenerative mutations that cause physical disfigurement and madness/insanity.
  
• Rats, spiders, insects, demons, undead, ghosts, and other monsters.
  
• Natural disasters, large-scale loss of life, civil war, displaced persons, and refugees.
  
• Moral ambiguity, social/political manipulation, religious zealotry and military nationalism.
  

The campaign does not contain explicit sexuality, sexual assault, racial prejudice, systemic racism, homophobia, or transphobia.
If you are interested, please fill in the following form and I’ll get back to you soon. Love to hear from you!

To clarify, I now know that there are different definitions of the word “ship”, but for the purposes of this article and to keep things simple I will use the definition of “a relationship that’s rushed and/or forced with no real development.” I hope you can understand as I do not know of any other single word to describe that concept. If you do, perhaps you can tell me. Also, fair warning, this is long form content (some 10 pages), if you like it but can’t read it all at once you can save it and come back to it over a period of time, or you can stop reading whenever you get tired of it and still discuss those parts of it with me that you have read. But keep it civil if you want a civil response.
With that, to qualify the title, no, Ezra and Sabine do NOT absolutely have to be a couple, but if they were to become one, it would NOT be a ship. Ezra and Sabine’s relationship has had years of development. Could they remain as simply friends? Yes, but ironically, it was their “friendship” that felt like more of a ship. It felt like the Ahsoka show, helmed by Dave Filoni, was going out of its way to tell us: “no, they’re not a couple, they’re just friends.”
I believe that Filoni made some very poor writing choices to stress something that didn’t really need to be stressed, such that it almost felt like he was in denial. The line “I love you like a sister” was never in Rebels, Filoni essentially had that retconned in, and like many I was put off by their (largely) emotionless reunion. Even if they were “just friends” I believe there would be a great deal more emotion displayed between two people that hadn’t seen each other in some ten years, especially when one of them was in a precarious situation when they parted. I also believe Ezra would be far more curious about Sabine being Force sensitive, perhaps even offering to help train her when she told him that her training hadn’t gone as well with Ahsoka. He did help to train her with the Darksaber, didn’t he? Why that never came up is another discussion, but for now, let’s focus on shipping.
In case you think I’m desperate to have them as a couple, no I’m not. I’m about the furthest thing from it. Like many millennials and Gen-Z’ers (and perhaps some Gen-Xers and boomers) I DESPISE shipping. Absolutely DESPISE it. With a flaming passion. Perhaps for this reason, and maybe some others, like many millennials and Gen-Z’ers (and perhaps some Gen-Xers and boomers), I’m generally wary of nearly all romance in fiction, and generally avoid it in my own work. The sad reality is that romance is perhaps the most abused genre in all of fiction, all throughout history. It has been so badly abused that many people, including myself for the longest time, have equated romance with shipping, though I’m slowly beginning to see that they are not the same thing, and one does not necessarily have to go with the other.
But sadly, many writers, through time immemorial, have not been able to separate them, going back into ancient times and perhaps even into pre-history, that is before languages were actually written down. Some of what is considered great literature; classics like Romeo and Juliet, are predicated on shipping, though at least the consequences of this “whirlwind romance” are shown to be fairly stark. Star Wars itself is no stranger to shipping, resulting in a very awkward incestuous kiss when Luke was shipped with Leia, then Leia was placed with Han and Lucas made Luke and Leia brother and sister, apparently having forgotten his original ship. Later Lucas essentially shipped Anakin and Padme, resulting in some of the most cringeworthy dialog in the history of film. Many fans of the Prequels even have been somewhat critical of Anakin’s portrayal, particularly in regards to the “romantic” scenes, with many describing them as “creepy”. Some have speculated that this was intentional, though personally I think it was just the result of bad writing on the part of George Lucas, and an impatience on his part for Anakin and Padme to become a couple, hence “shipping”.
One might wonder why this is so prevalent in fiction, and tragically, one does not have to look far. Fiction is merely a reflection of reality, therefore the reason that shipping is so common in our stories is that we fall so easily into it in real life. Indeed, entire cultures may be based around shipping, or at least very heavily wrapped up in it. Throughout history arranged marriages have been the norm, and the idea of marrying for “love” is something relatively new. To be fair, I’ve actually met people in arranged marriages who seemed to be fairly happy, but those same people were very open in telling me that many despise that aspect of their culture, and that it is quite normal for those in an arranged marriage to try to get out.
People might come together for “love” without marrying, but even then it often creates expectations that might turn into a burden. Even when a marriage is voluntary and for “love”, people are often left unsatisfied, such that today in the West the divorce rate is something like 50%. Happy, stable, long term relationships seem to be the exception across cultures and across the breadth and width of time. And yet pursuit of love and some kind of relationship seems to be the highest calling for many people, both in real life and in fiction. And it could be that the accumulated disgust is finally starting to boil over.
To be fair, this may not be the first time in history that the pendulum has shifted. You may recall that in Victorian times attitudes changed drastically, as compared to the previously bawdy Elizabethan times. Looking at a play from Shakespear, if you can understand the language, you’ll see all kinds of vulgar references, as well as what I believe are fairly sappy romances like in the aforementioned Romeo and Juliet, though I can’t say for certain whether Shakespear was actually endorsing that type of attitude towards “love” or presenting it as a cautionary tale, maybe even something to be ridiculed in some of his other plays.
But regardless, Victorians as you may well know had a very conservative attitude towards anything to do with romance, and would often avoid the subject in many places, or tread very carefully around it, as if walking on eggshells. It’s not that people stopped being romantic, in fiction or real life, but it was treated as something very serious and even dangerous, with many urges repressed or even suppressed entirely. This had all kinds of effects on society, both positive and negative. On the positive side, it reinforced the ideal of people being committed to their partners, and of marriage as a sacred institution rather than a “casual hookup” as was more common in Elizabethan times. Likewise it reinforced ideals of modesty and chastity, which may be coming back into vogue, though under different names. But just as there were positive aspects to these attitudes, so were there negative ones.
Just because the urges I described were repressed did not mean that they disappeared. In fact, they often morphed into things that many would consider “unhealthy”. From one statistic that I saw, in Victorian times about one in every 60 houses was a brothel, with the modern rate being closer to one in 6000. Additionally, the rights of women were often repressed, such that they could not fully express themselves and find their own identity, and path in life, as individuals. Just as Elizabethan ideals gave way to Victorian ones, so did the Victorian ideals gradually begin to erode.
Perhaps it began with the Jazz Age of the 1920’s (the “Roaring Twenties”), or with the increased interconnectivity of people traveling to different parts of the world during World War I, not to mention the cynicism that pervaded throughout the West in response to failed old ideals leading to the deadliest war in history up to that point, but many Victorian ideals began to be seen as a joke, and even resented for their “oppression”, which to be fair was not entirely unjustified. But regardless, people gradually, and at times not so gradually, became more and more “liberated” and promiscuous. This culminated in the Sexual Revolution in the late 1960’s, when what had previously been seen as a vice and even a sin was now seen as not only “normal” but as a healthy form of expression, a virtue even. And just as these ideas were embraced in real life, so too were they reflected in our films, TV shows, and other media, often to the consternation of older people and institutions, like the Vatican. The Catholic Church even went so far as to “ban” certain films, that is to declare them immoral for good Catholics to watch. Many of the films that were banned back then, or at least controversial, like The Graduate with Dustin Hoffman, are fairly tame by today’s standards.
It continued through the 70’s, at times warming and at times cooling through the rest of the century, until you could argue it reached a kind of crescendo in the early 21st century with the advent of so-called “dark romance” and the publication of books like Fifty Shades of Grey. (Ironically, many of the themes within this “dark romance” can trace their roots back to the Victorian era, yet another indication that repressing urges without addressing them often doesn’t work out as one might hope.) But as happens all too often, just as something reaches peak popularity is when it begins to go out of style, and that is what we may be experiencing right now. As weird as it may sound, we may actually have come full circle and may be on the cusp of a “New Victorian Age” (complete with “dark romance”, even). Web sites like Porn Hub and OnlyFans, as well as other similar sites, may be the new “brothels”, and what was once openly celebrated may be going underground, to an extent. The effects of this on society have been interesting to say the least, and at times I would even say bizarre.
Whilst many younger people seem content with these changes, many older people are concerned. I’ve seen a number of books, films, and other media receive positive reviews for example based specifically on their lack of romance. Many of these books/films, etc. fall into the “young adult” category, meaning that it is young adults obviously who mostly consume them. At the same time I’ve heard a number of older people, mostly boomers and Gen-Xers, criticize these same books/films for their lack of romance. Even some older millennials seem upset by the changes, as perhaps evidenced by Jennifer Lawrence’s latest film No Hard Feelings (though to be fair that film may be lampooning the older generation’s frustration as well as the younger generation’s frigidity). So just as in the past older people were concerned about the promiscuity of the youth, now it actually appears that many older people are concerned about the youth’s lack of promiscuity.
Who could have seen that coming? But to be fair, the younger generation hasn’t gone completely frigid. As stated earlier, much of the promiscuity has gone “underground”, or online, which many would argue is not very healthy as it might undermine actual relationships, whether they are romantic in nature or simple friendships. And speaking of that, friendships within stories nowadays often aren’t portrayed in a very authentic or compelling manner, perhaps because in ditching romance modern writers haven’t quite yet learned how to replace it with something else. In other words, the “New Victorian Age” may not be an exact repeat of the previous one, but may have its own twists and turns, for better and for worse.
This may all essentially be a manifestation of the Human Condition, in that we just can’t seem to find a happy medium, neither in real life nor in fiction. Thus we keep swinging from one extreme to the other, apparently getting wilder with each swing.
So where does all this leave us? What is it that we really want in our lives, and in our stories? Especially in regards to relationships? I think at some level we all want to see good and healthy relationships between people and/or characters, whether romantic or platonic. I believe at some point we would like to see good examples of both friendship and romance, and I would argue that the best examples of romance have them combined. Even a toxic relationship, if well portrayed or documented, can be instructive and serve as a good example of what to avoid in our lives that we might be happier and relate better to each other. A good relationship, by contrast, can give us something to aspire to and inspire us to not only look for the right kind of person to complement our lives, but to make ourselves worthy of that person. And here I’ll add that I’m perfectly aware that in real life (and thus in fiction) relationships can be very complicated and heavily nuanced, with elements of both “good” and “bad” in them. Just as people change over time so can the relationships between them change, at times getting better and at times worse, sometimes breaking entirely and sometimes growing stronger. Relationships can have just as many layers and dimensions as characters, more even perhaps, and a skilled writer should be able to reflect this complexity. At other times a relationship can be fairly straightforward, simplicity sometimes being the best approach. But regardless, the audience should be able to relate and identify with what they are seeing, such that hopefully they can incorporate the lessons from it in their own lives.
Where can we find good examples of relationships to study? There may be a number of them in the real world, but the trouble with studying real world relationships is that they’re often much more complicated than fictional ones (just as real people are more complicated than fictional characters), and for many of them it is almost impossible to know all the details and nuances because they are often kept private, understandably so, and even if they aren’t it can still be difficult, due to unique circumstances, to see how to relate them to our own lives. Additionally there may be far more disagreement about a real life situation than a fictional one, with many more points of view. To keep things simple, for the purpose of this article I would like to focus on fictional relationships. (And fair warning, there will be some spoilers.)
One of the best places to look, I would argue, would be the films of Hayao Miyazaki. (And this is pretty significant to Star Wars as you will see in a bit.) A film of his that stands out to me the most is Princess Mononoke. Like many of Miyazaki’s films it has elements of romance, and yet subverts them in a way that makes complete sense and feels very genuine, without taking away from any of the accompanying charm. It starts with two young people, San and Ashitaka, and as soon as they encounter each other there is a kind of expectation of romance. This may be inevitable to some degree when you have a man and a woman of about the same age encounter each other in a story, especially if they happen to be adolescents. The expectation may not be inherently bad, and Miyazaki does play with it. Both characters are thrust into dangerous situations, at various points end up saving each other’s lives, and at a certain point I think it is obvious that they have feelings for each other. I was certain that at the end of the film, they would be together, and if things had gone that way, it would make complete sense. Instead, they go in different directions, but remain good friends, and considering their backgrounds and differing worldviews, this ends up making even more sense to the story.
Essentially, Miyazaki could have gone for the more conventional, tried and true “love conquers all” narrative, where the characters’ feelings for each other would negate everything that comes between them, they would somehow find a common ground in spite of their differences, the romance would not only take over the narrative but somehow also solve all the problems in the story, and then the couple would live “happily ever after”. Such an approach is not inherently bad or wrong, and is fairly common in Western media and storytelling. We can see it in films like Fern Gully, and more recently James Cameron’s Avatar, both of which have been compared to Princess Mononoke. As you can probably guess, the problem is that at a certain point such a narrative can become fairly simplistic, and lack nuance.
Miyazaki’s films, by contrast, are very heavily nuanced, and are anything but simplistic. In Princess Mononoke the characters San and Ashitaka don’t help each other simply because they are “in love”, but because it is the right thing to do, regardless of how they might feel about each other. Yes, romantic feelings are certainly alluded to, but they are not essential to the plot, for it could have worked just as well without any romantic allusions. And ironically, this makes those allusions even more valid, even if they are unrequited. How so?
Consider that if love is essential to a given narrative, is it not relegated to being nothing more than a plot device? Again, this is quite common in Western media and storytelling, and is not inherently bad or wrong, but when it becomes a trope or cliche, I believe it is the essence of where shipping comes from. Many storytellers get caught up in this, usually without realizing it, and while a story can still work even with shipping, I believe that it usually works that much better without it.
This extends not only to Miyazaki’s handling of romance but also to other things like environmentalism, the conflict between man and nature, and the contrasting ideals of human progress vs. preserving the natural order. Movies like Fern Gully and Avatar, as already mentioned, handle these themes in a fairly simplistic and I would even say hamfisted manner, whereby all progress and technology is shown as being inherently “bad” and in service to “evil”, while everything that’s “natural” is shown to be inherently “good”. Even our notions of good and evil, and right vs. wrong, are challenged by Miyazaki, with nearly all of his characters having complex motives and multiple dimensions to them, as well as understandable reasons for doing the things that they do. Rarely can any one of his characters be branded as a simple “villain”, and rarely is any one individual the source of conflict in his stories, again in contrast to most Western narratives.
I’ll reiterate once more, a simple, straightforward narrative is not inherently a bad thing, whether the themes being dealt with are romantic or anything else. Sometimes it is in fact the best approach. But the best stories in my opinion are usually the most nuanced, that challenge our notions of what we believe to be true, and that force us to think about what we do with our lives and what we could do differently. To that end Miyazaki introduces all manner of themes and motifs within his films that are familiar to us but shows them in a light most of us might not have considered, thus giving more dimension to our understanding of things.
“How is any of this related to Star Wars?” you might ask. It is quite related, and you don’t even have to look all that closely to see it. A very influential figure within Star Wars was very heavily inspired by the works of Miyazaki, and that figure is Dave Filoni.
This video shows the connections in some detail:
https://youtu.be/Q_4L0BbSpHo?si=04jDo6qFCnZT135w
But to summarize if you’ve seen any of Miyazaki’s films, especially Princess Mononoke, I think the callbacks in Filoni’s work will be all too obvious, especially in Star Wars Rebels. Some of the scenes in Filoni’s work look like they were taken directly from Miyazki’s films, and many of the same themes and motifs often come up. The relationship between San and Ashitaka I would argue is very similar to the relationship between Ezra and Sabine, and not just because both couples rode wolves together.
Incidentally, Dave Filoni was also heavily involved in Avatar: The Last Airbender, which I would also argue was at least to some degree inspired if not by Miyazaki then by Japanese anime in general. The relationship between Aang and Katara was developed with great care and was allowed to build very slowly, as opposed to simply shipping them. Likewise other characters very gradually developed as individuals and in their relationships, at times stumbling as they did so, and making mistakes, before finding their way back to the right path.
All of this is in stark contrast to George Lucas, whose character development is often very rushed at best, and at times some might say almost non-existent. So essentially, even though Lucas has said that Filoni has been “like a son” to him, and I believe referred to Filoni as his “padawan”, I would argue that Filoni is ultimately as much a student of Miyazaki as he is of Lucas.
Again, you might ask, “What does all this mean for Star Wars?” It means a great many things. It means that Dave Filoni has taken Miyazaki’s lessons to heart, and can handle things like romance, as well as other kinds of relationships, quite well most of the time. Like Miyazaki he can play with romance, tease the audience with it at times even, leave the romance unrequited, and yet still have it feel satisfying. A prime example of this is the love triangle that Ahsoka was involved in with the young Separatist Senator, Lux Bonteri, and Steela Gerrera. As wary as I am of romance and as much as I despise shipping, love triangles I normally despise even more, but this one seemed to actually work. It never took over the main story, and even though Ahsoka’s feelings were ultimately not reciprocated, she still learned from the experience, and grew and developed further as a character because of it. The other characters involved in this triangle also grew and developed from their involvement, though unfortunately not all of them made it. All in all it was a good bit of storytelling and gave the audience something to consider.
When a relationship in one of Filoni’s stories does bloom into a full blown romance he also generally handles it quite well. For one Filoni is sparing with actual romance, so that when it does occur, it can be that much more appreciated. And rather than rushing or shipping it, Filoni normally takes his time to build it up. An example of this is the relationship between Kanan and Hera. Some might argue that this is perhaps the best developed romance in all of Star Wars, at least in Canon. Built up over four seasons, at times it wasn’t certain whether it was a romance or a friendship, or perhaps even a professional partnership. Perhaps even the characters themselves were not certain, though it was hinted all throughout the narrative that something was going on. To this day I don’t believe anyone can say definitively when it became an actual romance, and I believe Filoni did this intentionally because he wanted to be subtle, rather than making things too obvious and having the romance take over the narrative, as it usually does. When it finally did become obvious as to what was happening, it felt very much earned, in a way that is seldom accomplished in other works of fiction, including Star Wars.
The relationship between Ezra and Sabine was also fairly well written, for the most part anyway, at least in Star Wars Rebels. Ezra was almost immediately smitten with Sabine, but being a young teenage boy, it was understandable that he would feel that way about an attractive girl. Over time he learned to see her more respectfully, as a colleague and even as part of his adopted family, not just as a pretty face. Sabine for her part found Ezra annoying at first (c’mon, what teenage boy isn’t?), but as he matured and she found out more about him she came to understand and respect him more, and see him as a friend and almost a brother, with there being potential for something more.
There were times when the relationship could have been better written, like in the episode “Blood Sisters”, where Ezra was written to be a bit too immature to make Sabine look wiser. But overall, the bond between them developed fairly well; both saved one another at various times, and took risks and made sacrifices for each other’s sake. Both reassured and comforted the other when they needed it, and it was endearing to hear their banter when they became more familiar and trusting of each other.
So why then was I so disappointed in how they were portrayed in the Ahsoka show? The thing is, after how well their relationship was built up in Rebels, as I’ve already mentioned it was strange to see how lackluster and uninspired their reunion was.
Within the Ahsoka show itself Sabine was shown to be almost obsessed with finding Ezra, living in what used to be his home, watching a recording of him over and over again, and calling out his name as she woke up in the middle of the night. She even risked bringing Thrawn back into the Galaxy, which ultimately happened, just so she could see Ezra again. After all that, when she finally does encounter him, her reaction seems fairly casual, as does his, as if they’ve been apart for no more than a week, rather than 10 years. Not too much happens between them afterwards either. Like I said Ezra does not appear all that curious about what happened with Sabine, how she found him, and how it was that she was now Force sensitive. Sabine likewise did not seem curious about what had happened with Ezra, and how he had gotten away from Thrawn. And with Ezra rescued and returned home, suddenly it didn’t seem as though Sabine was all that interested in him anymore, nor he all that concerned with her, though they were just as far apart as they had been at the start of the show. To be completely honest it made me wonder what the point of the whole show was. Were they just working to set up Thrawn’s return to the Galaxy? As some have said, Ezra felt like nothing more than a Macguffin in the show. Was Sabine and Ahsoka’s search for him just a plot device?
Considering how skillfully Dave Filoni had written his stories in the past, what happened in this latest project of his does not make much sense. Was he so concerned about “shipping” and so desperate to avoid it that he inadvertently “shipped” them in the other direction? Was there some sort of external pressure on him about how to write this story to have more of an appeal to “modern audiences”? Maybe some combination of those factors?
And here I’ll add that when I say “modern audiences” I don’t mean that in a contemptuous sense, though you may think I do. If there is any contempt on my part it is for those in charge of telling our stories, or those in charge of those telling our stories, who do not seem to grasp these basic truths. The truth is that audiences at their core don’t really change throughout the ages, only superficially so. Trends come and go but certain truths and ideals are eternal, and universal. How people relate to each other fundamentally does not change, whether they are friends, or more than friends. And deep down, I believe everyone (or nearly everyone at least) wants the same things. Nearly everyone at some point wants some kind of a connection with another human being, to know that they are not alone in the world, and to know that there is someone else who sees and understands things as they do. While this desire can certainly lead to abuse, and absolutely has, it is still innate to us and is not inherently wrong. Finding ways of connecting and relating to other people is one of the great challenges of life, but many would argue it is the most worthwhile of challenges. It may be the whole point of life if you think about it. As complex as it may be, many would argue it is what makes life worth living, and likewise makes for the best stories. Just as it may be the whole point of life many would say that is what most stories are about at their core: people trying to relate to one another.
Sadly, just as in real life, most stories unfortunately don’t quite get it, and the Ahsoka show in my opinion was an example of this, made all the sadder by the fact that Dave Filoni had done quite well with these characters up to that point. We may never know for certain what exactly went wrong and why, or if it can ever be “fixed” at this point, but I can’t help but feel curious. Maybe in the future Filoni will find a way to make it make sense, but I’m not sure how. And to be completely honest I don’t feel quite as enthusiastic to find out as I used to.
Also for the record I would like to add here that there are other factors that put me off from the show, such as Sabine’s Force sensitivity, that came about without much build up. But in this article I specifically wanted to focus on shipping because there seems to be so much misunderstanding around it.
I hope that I was able to clarify some, if not most of this misunderstanding, so that people could better appreciate what shipping is, where it comes from, as well as what it isn’t. Many people today are understandably sick of shipping characters, myself included. But I hope people realize that in overcompensating for something, we often come back around into the very thing that we are overcompensating for. Or sometimes, into something even worse. This may apply to nearly every facet of life, by the way, not just shipping. Finding a happy medium in how we portray our fictional relationships may help us to better understand relationships in real life, as well as how to navigate them. Neither fictional nor actual relationships can ever be perfect but they can always be better. To this understanding then I hope that I was able to give my own modest contribution, and if nothing else I hope we can connect on that.

To clarify, I now know that there are different definitions of the word “ship”, but for the purposes of this article and to keep things simple I will use the definition of “a relationship that’s rushed and/or forced with no real development.” I hope you can understand as I do not know of any other single word to describe that concept. If you do, perhaps you can tell me. Also, fair warning, this is long form content (some 10 pages), if you like it but can’t read it all at once you can save it and come back to it over a period of time, or you can stop reading whenever you get tired of it and still discuss those parts of it with me that you have read. But keep it civil if you want a civil response.
With that, to qualify the title, no, Ezra and Sabine do NOT absolutely have to be a couple, but if they were to become one, it would NOT be a ship. Ezra and Sabine’s relationship has had years of development. Could they remain as simply friends? Yes, but ironically, it was their “friendship” that felt like more of a ship. It felt like the Ahsoka show, helmed by Dave Filoni, was going out of its way to tell us: “no, they’re not a couple, they’re just friends.”
I believe that Filoni made some very poor writing choices to stress something that didn’t really need to be stressed, such that it almost felt like he was in denial. The line “I love you like a sister” was never in Rebels, Filoni essentially had that retconned in, and like many I was put off by their (largely) emotionless reunion. Even if they were “just friends” I believe there would be a great deal more emotion displayed between two people that hadn’t seen each other in some ten years, especially when one of them was in a precarious situation when they parted. I also believe Ezra would be far more curious about Sabine being Force sensitive, perhaps even offering to help train her when she told him that her training hadn’t gone as well with Ahsoka. He did help to train her with the Darksaber, didn’t he? Why that never came up is another discussion, but for now, let’s focus on shipping.
In case you think I’m desperate to have them as a couple, no I’m not. I’m about the furthest thing from it. Like many millennials and Gen-Z’ers (and perhaps some Gen-Xers and boomers) I DESPISE shipping. Absolutely DESPISE it. With a flaming passion. Perhaps for this reason, and maybe some others, like many millennials and Gen-Z’ers (and perhaps some Gen-Xers and boomers), I’m generally wary of nearly all romance in fiction, and generally avoid it in my own work. The sad reality is that romance is perhaps the most abused genre in all of fiction, all throughout history. It has been so badly abused that many people, including myself for the longest time, have equated romance with shipping, though I’m slowly beginning to see that they are not the same thing, and one does not necessarily have to go with the other.
But sadly, many writers, through time immemorial, have not been able to separate them, going back into ancient times and perhaps even into pre-history, that is before languages were actually written down. Some of what is considered great literature; classics like Romeo and Juliet, are predicated on shipping, though at least the consequences of this “whirlwind romance” are shown to be fairly stark. Star Wars itself is no stranger to shipping, resulting in a very awkward incestuous kiss when Luke was shipped with Leia, then Leia was placed with Han and Lucas made Luke and Leia brother and sister, apparently having forgotten his original ship. Later Lucas essentially shipped Anakin and Padme, resulting in some of the most cringeworthy dialog in the history of film. Many fans of the Prequels even have been somewhat critical of Anakin’s portrayal, particularly in regards to the “romantic” scenes, with many describing them as “creepy”. Some have speculated that this was intentional, though personally I think it was just the result of bad writing on the part of George Lucas, and an impatience on his part for Anakin and Padme to become a couple, hence “shipping”.
One might wonder why this is so prevalent in fiction, and tragically, one does not have to look far. Fiction is merely a reflection of reality, therefore the reason that shipping is so common in our stories is that we fall so easily into it in real life. Indeed, entire cultures may be based around shipping, or at least very heavily wrapped up in it. Throughout history arranged marriages have been the norm, and the idea of marrying for “love” is something relatively new. To be fair, I’ve actually met people in arranged marriages who seemed to be fairly happy, but those same people were very open in telling me that many despise that aspect of their culture, and that it is quite normal for those in an arranged marriage to try to get out.
People might come together for “love” without marrying, but even then it often creates expectations that might turn into a burden. Even when a marriage is voluntary and for “love”, people are often left unsatisfied, such that today in the West the divorce rate is something like 50%. Happy, stable, long term relationships seem to be the exception across cultures and across the breadth and width of time. And yet pursuit of love and some kind of relationship seems to be the highest calling for many people, both in real life and in fiction. And it could be that the accumulated disgust is finally starting to boil over.
To be fair, this may not be the first time in history that the pendulum has shifted. You may recall that in Victorian times attitudes changed drastically, as compared to the previously bawdy Elizabethan times. Looking at a play from Shakespear, if you can understand the language, you’ll see all kinds of vulgar references, as well as what I believe are fairly sappy romances like in the aforementioned Romeo and Juliet, though I can’t say for certain whether Shakespear was actually endorsing that type of attitude towards “love” or presenting it as a cautionary tale, maybe even something to be ridiculed in some of his other plays.
But regardless, Victorians as you may well know had a very conservative attitude towards anything to do with romance, and would often avoid the subject in many places, or tread very carefully around it, as if walking on eggshells. It’s not that people stopped being romantic, in fiction or real life, but it was treated as something very serious and even dangerous, with many urges repressed or even suppressed entirely. This had all kinds of effects on society, both positive and negative. On the positive side, it reinforced the ideal of people being committed to their partners, and of marriage as a sacred institution rather than a “casual hookup” as was more common in Elizabethan times. Likewise it reinforced ideals of modesty and chastity, which may be coming back into vogue, though under different names. But just as there were positive aspects to these attitudes, so were there negative ones.
Just because the urges I described were repressed did not mean that they disappeared. In fact, they often morphed into things that many would consider “unhealthy”. From one statistic that I saw, in Victorian times about one in every 60 houses was a brothel, with the modern rate being closer to one in 6000. Additionally, the rights of women were often repressed, such that they could not fully express themselves and find their own identity, and path in life, as individuals. Just as Elizabethan ideals gave way to Victorian ones, so did the Victorian ideals gradually begin to erode.
Perhaps it began with the Jazz Age of the 1920’s (the “Roaring Twenties”), or with the increased interconnectivity of people traveling to different parts of the world during World War I, not to mention the cynicism that pervaded throughout the West in response to failed old ideals leading to the deadliest war in history up to that point, but many Victorian ideals began to be seen as a joke, and even resented for their “oppression”, which to be fair was not entirely unjustified. But regardless, people gradually, and at times not so gradually, became more and more “liberated” and promiscuous. This culminated in the Sexual Revolution in the late 1960’s, when what had previously been seen as a vice and even a sin was now seen as not only “normal” but as a healthy form of expression, a virtue even. And just as these ideas were embraced in real life, so too were they reflected in our films, TV shows, and other media, often to the consternation of older people and institutions, like the Vatican. The Catholic Church even went so far as to “ban” certain films, that is to declare them immoral for good Catholics to watch. Many of the films that were banned back then, or at least controversial, like The Graduate with Dustin Hoffman, are fairly tame by today’s standards.
It continued through the 70’s, at times warming and at times cooling through the rest of the century, until you could argue it reached a kind of crescendo in the early 21st century with the advent of so-called “dark romance” and the publication of books like Fifty Shades of Grey. (Ironically, many of the themes within this “dark romance” can trace their roots back to the Victorian era, yet another indication that repressing urges without addressing them often doesn’t work out as one might hope.) But as happens all too often, just as something reaches peak popularity is when it begins to go out of style, and that is what we may be experiencing right now. As weird as it may sound, we may actually have come full circle and may be on the cusp of a “New Victorian Age” (complete with “dark romance”, even). Web sites like Porn Hub and OnlyFans, as well as other similar sites, may be the new “brothels”, and what was once openly celebrated may be going underground, to an extent. The effects of this on society have been interesting to say the least, and at times I would even say bizarre.
Whilst many younger people seem content with these changes, many older people are concerned. I’ve seen a number of books, films, and other media receive positive reviews for example based specifically on their lack of romance. Many of these books/films, etc. fall into the “young adult” category, meaning that it is young adults obviously who mostly consume them. At the same time I’ve heard a number of older people, mostly boomers and Gen-Xers, criticize these same books/films for their lack of romance. Even some older millennials seem upset by the changes, as perhaps evidenced by Jennifer Lawrence’s latest film No Hard Feelings (though to be fair that film may be lampooning the older generation’s frustration as well as the younger generation’s frigidity). So just as in the past older people were concerned about the promiscuity of the youth, now it actually appears that many older people are concerned about the youth’s lack of promiscuity.
Who could have seen that coming? But to be fair, the younger generation hasn’t gone completely frigid. As stated earlier, much of the promiscuity has gone “underground”, or online, which many would argue is not very healthy as it might undermine actual relationships, whether they are romantic in nature or simple friendships. And speaking of that, friendships within stories nowadays often aren’t portrayed in a very authentic or compelling manner, perhaps because in ditching romance modern writers haven’t quite yet learned how to replace it with something else. In other words, the “New Victorian Age” may not be an exact repeat of the previous one, but may have its own twists and turns, for better and for worse.
This may all essentially be a manifestation of the Human Condition, in that we just can’t seem to find a happy medium, neither in real life nor in fiction. Thus we keep swinging from one extreme to the other, apparently getting wilder with each swing.
So where does all this leave us? What is it that we really want in our lives, and in our stories? Especially in regards to relationships? I think at some level we all want to see good and healthy relationships between people and/or characters, whether romantic or platonic. I believe at some point we would like to see good examples of both friendship and romance, and I would argue that the best examples of romance have them combined. Even a toxic relationship, if well portrayed or documented, can be instructive and serve as a good example of what to avoid in our lives that we might be happier and relate better to each other. A good relationship, by contrast, can give us something to aspire to and inspire us to not only look for the right kind of person to complement our lives, but to make ourselves worthy of that person. And here I’ll add that I’m perfectly aware that in real life (and thus in fiction) relationships can be very complicated and heavily nuanced, with elements of both “good” and “bad” in them. Just as people change over time so can the relationships between them change, at times getting better and at times worse, sometimes breaking entirely and sometimes growing stronger. Relationships can have just as many layers and dimensions as characters, more even perhaps, and a skilled writer should be able to reflect this complexity. At other times a relationship can be fairly straightforward, simplicity sometimes being the best approach. But regardless, the audience should be able to relate and identify with what they are seeing, such that hopefully they can incorporate the lessons from it in their own lives.
Where can we find good examples of relationships to study? There may be a number of them in the real world, but the trouble with studying real world relationships is that they’re often much more complicated than fictional ones (just as real people are more complicated than fictional characters), and for many of them it is almost impossible to know all the details and nuances because they are often kept private, understandably so, and even if they aren’t it can still be difficult, due to unique circumstances, to see how to relate them to our own lives. Additionally there may be far more disagreement about a real life situation than a fictional one, with many more points of view. To keep things simple, for the purpose of this article I would like to focus on fictional relationships. (And fair warning, there will be some spoilers.)
One of the best places to look, I would argue, would be the films of Hayao Miyazaki. (And this is pretty significant to Star Wars as you will see in a bit.) A film of his that stands out to me the most is Princess Mononoke. Like many of Miyazaki’s films it has elements of romance, and yet subverts them in a way that makes complete sense and feels very genuine, without taking away from any of the accompanying charm. It starts with two young people, San and Ashitaka, and as soon as they encounter each other there is a kind of expectation of romance. This may be inevitable to some degree when you have a man and a woman of about the same age encounter each other in a story, especially if they happen to be adolescents. The expectation may not be inherently bad, and Miyazaki does play with it. Both characters are thrust into dangerous situations, at various points end up saving each other’s lives, and at a certain point I think it is obvious that they have feelings for each other. I was certain that at the end of the film, they would be together, and if things had gone that way, it would make complete sense. Instead, they go in different directions, but remain good friends, and considering their backgrounds and differing worldviews, this ends up making even more sense to the story.
Essentially, Miyazaki could have gone for the more conventional, tried and true “love conquers all” narrative, where the characters’ feelings for each other would negate everything that comes between them, they would somehow find a common ground in spite of their differences, the romance would not only take over the narrative but somehow also solve all the problems in the story, and then the couple would live “happily ever after”. Such an approach is not inherently bad or wrong, and is fairly common in Western media and storytelling. We can see it in films like Fern Gully, and more recently James Cameron’s Avatar, both of which have been compared to Princess Mononoke. As you can probably guess, the problem is that at a certain point such a narrative can become fairly simplistic, and lack nuance.
Miyazaki’s films, by contrast, are very heavily nuanced, and are anything but simplistic. In Princess Mononoke the characters San and Ashitaka don’t help each other simply because they are “in love”, but because it is the right thing to do, regardless of how they might feel about each other. Yes, romantic feelings are certainly alluded to, but they are not essential to the plot, for it could have worked just as well without any romantic allusions. And ironically, this makes those allusions even more valid, even if they are unrequited. How so?
Consider that if love is essential to a given narrative, is it not relegated to being nothing more than a plot device? Again, this is quite common in Western media and storytelling, and is not inherently bad or wrong, but when it becomes a trope or cliche, I believe it is the essence of where shipping comes from. Many storytellers get caught up in this, usually without realizing it, and while a story can still work even with shipping, I believe that it usually works that much better without it.
This extends not only to Miyazaki’s handling of romance but also to other things like environmentalism, the conflict between man and nature, and the contrasting ideals of human progress vs. preserving the natural order. Movies like Fern Gully and Avatar, as already mentioned, handle these themes in a fairly simplistic and I would even say hamfisted manner, whereby all progress and technology is shown as being inherently “bad” and in service to “evil”, while everything that’s “natural” is shown to be inherently “good”. Even our notions of good and evil, and right vs. wrong, are challenged by Miyazaki, with nearly all of his characters having complex motives and multiple dimensions to them, as well as understandable reasons for doing the things that they do. Rarely can any one of his characters be branded as a simple “villain”, and rarely is any one individual the source of conflict in his stories, again in contrast to most Western narratives.
I’ll reiterate once more, a simple, straightforward narrative is not inherently a bad thing, whether the themes being dealt with are romantic or anything else. Sometimes it is in fact the best approach. But the best stories in my opinion are usually the most nuanced, that challenge our notions of what we believe to be true, and that force us to think about what we do with our lives and what we could do differently. To that end Miyazaki introduces all manner of themes and motifs within his films that are familiar to us but shows them in a light most of us might not have considered, thus giving more dimension to our understanding of things.
“How is any of this related to Star Wars?” you might ask. It is quite related, and you don’t even have to look all that closely to see it. A very influential figure within Star Wars was very heavily inspired by the works of Miyazaki, and that figure is Dave Filoni.
This video shows the connections in some detail:
https://youtu.be/Q_4L0BbSpHo?si=04jDo6qFCnZT135w
But to summarize if you’ve seen any of Miyazaki’s films, especially Princess Mononoke, I think the callbacks in Filoni’s work will be all too obvious, especially in Star Wars Rebels. Some of the scenes in Filoni’s work look like they were taken directly from Miyazki’s films, and many of the same themes and motifs often come up. The relationship between San and Ashitaka I would argue is very similar to the relationship between Ezra and Sabine, and not just because both couples rode wolves together.
Incidentally, Dave Filoni was also heavily involved in Avatar: The Last Airbender, which I would also argue was at least to some degree inspired if not by Miyazaki then by Japanese anime in general. The relationship between Aang and Katara was developed with great care and was allowed to build very slowly, as opposed to simply shipping them. Likewise other characters very gradually developed as individuals and in their relationships, at times stumbling as they did so, and making mistakes, before finding their way back to the right path.
All of this is in stark contrast to George Lucas, whose character development is often very rushed at best, and at times some might say almost non-existent. So essentially, even though Lucas has said that Filoni has been “like a son” to him, and I believe referred to Filoni as his “padawan”, I would argue that Filoni is ultimately as much a student of Miyazaki as he is of Lucas.
Again, you might ask, “What does all this mean for Star Wars?” It means a great many things. It means that Dave Filoni has taken Miyazaki’s lessons to heart, and can handle things like romance, as well as other kinds of relationships, quite well most of the time. Like Miyazaki he can play with romance, tease the audience with it at times even, leave the romance unrequited, and yet still have it feel satisfying. A prime example of this is the love triangle that Ahsoka was involved in with the young Separatist Senator, Lux Bonteri, and Steela Gerrera. As wary as I am of romance and as much as I despise shipping, love triangles I normally despise even more, but this one seemed to actually work. It never took over the main story, and even though Ahsoka’s feelings were ultimately not reciprocated, she still learned from the experience, and grew and developed further as a character because of it. The other characters involved in this triangle also grew and developed from their involvement, though unfortunately not all of them made it. All in all it was a good bit of storytelling and gave the audience something to consider.
When a relationship in one of Filoni’s stories does bloom into a full blown romance he also generally handles it quite well. For one Filoni is sparing with actual romance, so that when it does occur, it can be that much more appreciated. And rather than rushing or shipping it, Filoni normally takes his time to build it up. An example of this is the relationship between Kanan and Hera. Some might argue that this is perhaps the best developed romance in all of Star Wars, at least in Canon. Built up over four seasons, at times it wasn’t certain whether it was a romance or a friendship, or perhaps even a professional partnership. Perhaps even the characters themselves were not certain, though it was hinted all throughout the narrative that something was going on. To this day I don’t believe anyone can say definitively when it became an actual romance, and I believe Filoni did this intentionally because he wanted to be subtle, rather than making things too obvious and having the romance take over the narrative, as it usually does. When it finally did become obvious as to what was happening, it felt very much earned, in a way that is seldom accomplished in other works of fiction, including Star Wars.
The relationship between Ezra and Sabine was also fairly well written, for the most part anyway, at least in Star Wars Rebels. Ezra was almost immediately smitten with Sabine, but being a young teenage boy, it was understandable that he would feel that way about an attractive girl. Over time he learned to see her more respectfully, as a colleague and even as part of his adopted family, not just as a pretty face. Sabine for her part found Ezra annoying at first (c’mon, what teenage boy isn’t?), but as he matured and she found out more about him she came to understand and respect him more, and see him as a friend and almost a brother, with there being potential for something more.
There were times when the relationship could have been better written, like in the episode “Blood Sisters”, where Ezra was written to be a bit too immature to make Sabine look wiser. But overall, the bond between them developed fairly well; both saved one another at various times, and took risks and made sacrifices for each other’s sake. Both reassured and comforted the other when they needed it, and it was endearing to hear their banter when they became more familiar and trusting of each other.
So why then was I so disappointed in how they were portrayed in the Ahsoka show? The thing is, after how well their relationship was built up in Rebels, as I’ve already mentioned it was strange to see how lackluster and uninspired their reunion was.
Within the Ahsoka show itself Sabine was shown to be almost obsessed with finding Ezra, living in what used to be his home, watching a recording of him over and over again, and calling out his name as she woke up in the middle of the night. She even risked bringing Thrawn back into the Galaxy, which ultimately happened, just so she could see Ezra again. After all that, when she finally does encounter him, her reaction seems fairly casual, as does his, as if they’ve been apart for no more than a week, rather than 10 years. Not too much happens between them afterwards either. Like I said Ezra does not appear all that curious about what happened with Sabine, how she found him, and how it was that she was now Force sensitive. Sabine likewise did not seem curious about what had happened with Ezra, and how he had gotten away from Thrawn. And with Ezra rescued and returned home, suddenly it didn’t seem as though Sabine was all that interested in him anymore, nor he all that concerned with her, though they were just as far apart as they had been at the start of the show. To be completely honest it made me wonder what the point of the whole show was. Were they just working to set up Thrawn’s return to the Galaxy? As some have said, Ezra felt like nothing more than a Macguffin in the show. Was Sabine and Ahsoka’s search for him just a plot device?
Considering how skillfully Dave Filoni had written his stories in the past, what happened in this latest project of his does not make much sense. Was he so concerned about “shipping” and so desperate to avoid it that he inadvertently “shipped” them in the other direction? Was there some sort of external pressure on him about how to write this story to have more of an appeal to “modern audiences”? Maybe some combination of those factors?
And here I’ll add that when I say “modern audiences” I don’t mean that in a contemptuous sense, though you may think I do. If there is any contempt on my part it is for those in charge of telling our stories, or those in charge of those telling our stories, who do not seem to grasp these basic truths. The truth is that audiences at their core don’t really change throughout the ages, only superficially so. Trends come and go but certain truths and ideals are eternal, and universal. How people relate to each other fundamentally does not change, whether they are friends, or more than friends. And deep down, I believe everyone (or nearly everyone at least) wants the same things. Nearly everyone at some point wants some kind of a connection with another human being, to know that they are not alone in the world, and to know that there is someone else who sees and understands things as they do. While this desire can certainly lead to abuse, and absolutely has, it is still innate to us and is not inherently wrong. Finding ways of connecting and relating to other people is one of the great challenges of life, but many would argue it is the most worthwhile of challenges. It may be the whole point of life if you think about it. As complex as it may be, many would argue it is what makes life worth living, and likewise makes for the best stories. Just as it may be the whole point of life many would say that is what most stories are about at their core: people trying to relate to one another.
Sadly, just as in real life, most stories unfortunately don’t quite get it, and the Ahsoka show in my opinion was an example of this, made all the sadder by the fact that Dave Filoni had done quite well with these characters up to that point. We may never know for certain what exactly went wrong and why, or if it can ever be “fixed” at this point, but I can’t help but feel curious. Maybe in the future Filoni will find a way to make it make sense, but I’m not sure how. And to be completely honest I don’t feel quite as enthusiastic to find out as I used to.
Also for the record I would like to add here that there are other factors that put me off from the show, such as Sabine’s Force sensitivity, that came about without much build up. But in this article I specifically wanted to focus on shipping because there seems to be so much misunderstanding around it.
I hope that I was able to clarify some, if not most of this misunderstanding, so that people could better appreciate what shipping is, where it comes from, as well as what it isn’t. Many people today are understandably sick of shipping characters, myself included. But I hope people realize that in overcompensating for something, we often come back around into the very thing that we are overcompensating for. Or sometimes, into something even worse. This may apply to nearly every facet of life, by the way, not just shipping. Finding a happy medium in how we portray our fictional relationships may help us to better understand relationships in real life, as well as how to navigate them. Neither fictional nor actual relationships can ever be perfect but they can always be better. To this understanding then I hope that I was able to give my own modest contribution, and if nothing else I hope we can connect on that.

This is my attempt at a re-submission due to some misunderstandings on the first attempt. I now know that there are different definitions of the word “ship”, but for the purposes of this article and to keep things simple I will use the definition of “a relationship that’s rushed and/or forced with no real development.” I hope you can understand as I do not know of any other single word to describe that concept. If you do, perhaps you can tell me. Also, fair warning, this is long form content (some 10 pages), if you like it but can’t read it all at once you can save it and come back to it over a period of time, or you can stop reading whenever you get tired of it and still discuss those parts of it with me that you have read. But keep it civil if you want a civil response.
With that, to qualify the title, no, Ezra and Sabine do NOT absolutely have to be a couple, but if they were to become one, it would NOT be a ship. Ezra and Sabine’s relationship has had years of development. Could they remain as simply friends? Yes, but ironically, it was their “friendship” that felt like more of a ship. It felt like the Ahsoka show, helmed by Dave Filoni, was going out of its way to tell us: “no, they’re not a couple, they’re just friends.”
I believe that Filoni made some very poor writing choices to stress something that didn’t really need to be stressed, such that it almost felt like he was in denial. The line “I love you like a sister” was never in Rebels, Filoni essentially had that retconned in, and like many I was put off by their (largely) emotionless reunion. Even if they were “just friends” I believe there would be a great deal more emotion displayed between two people that hadn’t seen each other in some ten years, especially when one of them was in a precarious situation when they parted. I also believe Ezra would be far more curious about Sabine being Force sensitive, perhaps even offering to help train her when she told him that her training hadn’t gone as well with Ahsoka. He did help to train her with the Darksaber, didn’t he? Why that never came up is another discussion, but for now, let’s focus on shipping.
In case you think I’m desperate to have them as a couple, no I’m not. I’m about the furthest thing from it. Like many millennials and Gen-Z’ers (and perhaps some Gen-Xers and boomers) I DESPISE shipping. Absolutely DESPISE it. With a flaming passion. Perhaps for this reason, and maybe some others, like many millennials and Gen-Z’ers (and perhaps some Gen-Xers and boomers), I’m generally wary of nearly all romance in fiction, and generally avoid it in my own work. The sad reality is that romance is perhaps the most abused genre in all of fiction, all throughout history. It has been so badly abused that many people, including myself for the longest time, have equated romance with shipping, though I’m slowly beginning to see that they are not the same thing, and one does not necessarily have to go with the other.
But sadly, many writers, through time immemorial, have not been able to separate them, going back into ancient times and perhaps even into pre-history, that is before languages were actually written down. Some of what is considered great literature; classics like Romeo and Juliet, are predicated on shipping, though at least the consequences of this “whirlwind romance” are shown to be fairly stark. Star Wars itself is no stranger to shipping, resulting in a very awkward incestuous kiss when Luke was shipped with Leia, then Leia was placed with Han and Lucas made Luke and Leia brother and sister, apparently having forgotten his original ship. Later Lucas essentially shipped Anakin and Padme, resulting in some of the most cringeworthy dialog in the history of film. Many fans of the Prequels even have been somewhat critical of Anakin’s portrayal, particularly in regards to the “romantic” scenes, with many describing them as “creepy”. Some have speculated that this was intentional, though personally I think it was just the result of bad writing on the part of George Lucas, and an impatience on his part for Anakin and Padme to become a couple, hence “shipping”.
One might wonder why this is so prevalent in fiction, and tragically, one does not have to look far. Fiction is merely a reflection of reality, therefore the reason that shipping is so common in our stories is that we fall so easily into it in real life. Indeed, entire cultures may be based around shipping, or at least very heavily wrapped up in it. Throughout history arranged marriages have been the norm, and the idea of marrying for “love” is something relatively new. To be fair, I’ve actually met people in arranged marriages who seemed to be fairly happy, but those same people were very open in telling me that many despise that aspect of their culture, and that it is quite normal for those in an arranged marriage to try to get out.
People might come together for “love” without marrying, but even then it often creates expectations that might turn into a burden. Even when a marriage is voluntary and for “love”, people are often left unsatisfied, such that today in the West the divorce rate is something like 50%. Happy, stable, long term relationships seem to be the exception across cultures and across the breadth and width of time. And yet pursuit of love and some kind of relationship seems to be the highest calling for many people, both in real life and in fiction. And it could be that the accumulated disgust is finally starting to boil over.
To be fair, this may not be the first time in history that the pendulum has shifted. You may recall that in Victorian times attitudes changed drastically, as compared to the previously bawdy Elizabethan times. Looking at a play from Shakespear, if you can understand the language, you’ll see all kinds of vulgar references, as well as what I believe are fairly sappy romances like in the aforementioned Romeo and Juliet, though I can’t say for certain whether Shakespear was actually endorsing that type of attitude towards “love” or presenting it as a cautionary tale, maybe even something to be ridiculed in some of his other plays.
But regardless, Victorians as you may well know had a very conservative attitude towards anything to do with romance, and would often avoid the subject in many places, or tread very carefully around it, as if walking on eggshells. It’s not that people stopped being romantic, in fiction or real life, but it was treated as something very serious and even dangerous, with many urges repressed or even suppressed entirely. This had all kinds of effects on society, both positive and negative. On the positive side, it reinforced the ideal of people being committed to their partners, and of marriage as a sacred institution rather than a “casual hookup” as was more common in Elizabethan times. Likewise it reinforced ideals of modesty and chastity, which may be coming back into vogue, though under different names. But just as there were positive aspects to these attitudes, so were there negative ones.
Just because the urges I described were repressed did not mean that they disappeared. In fact, they often morphed into things that many would consider “unhealthy”. From one statistic that I saw, in Victorian times about one in every 60 houses was a brothel, with the modern rate being closer to one in 6000. Additionally, the rights of women were often repressed, such that they could not fully express themselves and find their own identity, and path in life, as individuals. Just as Elizabethan ideals gave way to Victorian ones, so did the Victorian ideals gradually begin to erode.
Perhaps it began with the Jazz Age of the 1920’s (the “Roaring Twenties”), or with the increased interconnectivity of people traveling to different parts of the world during World War I, not to mention the cynicism that pervaded throughout the West in response to failed old ideals leading to the deadliest war in history up to that point, but many Victorian ideals began to be seen as a joke, and even resented for their “oppression”, which to be fair was not entirely unjustified. But regardless, people gradually, and at times not so gradually, became more and more “liberated” and promiscuous. This culminated in the Sexual Revolution in the late 1960’s, when what had previously been seen as a vice and even a sin was now seen as not only “normal” but as a healthy form of expression, a virtue even. And just as these ideas were embraced in real life, so too were they reflected in our films, TV shows, and other media, often to the consternation of older people and institutions, like the Vatican. The Catholic Church even went so far as to “ban” certain films, that is to declare them immoral for good Catholics to watch. Many of the films that were banned back then, or at least controversial, like The Graduate with Dustin Hoffman, are fairly tame by today’s standards.
It continued through the 70’s, at times warming and at times cooling through the rest of the century, until you could argue it reached a kind of crescendo in the early 21st century with the advent of so-called “dark romance” and the publication of books like Fifty Shades of Grey. (Ironically, many of the themes within this “dark romance” can trace their roots back to the Victorian era, yet another indication that repressing urges without addressing them often doesn’t work out as one might hope.) But as happens all too often, just as something reaches peak popularity is when it begins to go out of style, and that is what we may be experiencing right now. As weird as it may sound, we may actually have come full circle and may be on the cusp of a “New Victorian Age” (complete with “dark romance”, even). Web sites like Porn Hub and OnlyFans, as well as other similar sites, may be the new “brothels”, and what was once openly celebrated may be going underground, to an extent. The effects of this on society have been interesting to say the least, and at times I would even say bizarre.
Whilst many younger people seem content with these changes, many older people are concerned. I’ve seen a number of books, films, and other media receive positive reviews for example based specifically on their lack of romance. Many of these books/films, etc. fall into the “young adult” category, meaning that it is young adults obviously who mostly consume them. At the same time I’ve heard a number of older people, mostly boomers and Gen-Xers, criticize these same books/films for their lack of romance. Even some older millennials seem upset by the changes, as perhaps evidenced by Jennifer Lawrence’s latest film No Hard Feelings (though to be fair that film may be lampooning the older generation’s frustration as well as the younger generation’s frigidity). So just as in the past older people were concerned about the promiscuity of the youth, now it actually appears that many older people are concerned about the youth’s lack of promiscuity.
Who could have seen that coming? But to be fair, the younger generation hasn’t gone completely frigid. As stated earlier, much of the promiscuity has gone “underground”, or online, which many would argue is not very healthy as it might undermine actual relationships, whether they are romantic in nature or simple friendships. And speaking of that, friendships within stories nowadays often aren’t portrayed in a very authentic or compelling manner, perhaps because in ditching romance modern writers haven’t quite yet learned how to replace it with something else. In other words, the “New Victorian Age” may not be an exact repeat of the previous one, but may have its own twists and turns, for better and for worse.
This may all essentially be a manifestation of the Human Condition, in that we just can’t seem to find a happy medium, neither in real life nor in fiction. Thus we keep swinging from one extreme to the other, apparently getting wilder with each swing.
So where does all this leave us? What is it that we really want in our lives, and in our stories? Especially in regards to relationships? I think at some level we all want to see good and healthy relationships between people and/or characters, whether romantic or platonic. I believe at some point we would like to see good examples of both friendship and romance, and I would argue that the best examples of romance have them combined. Even a toxic relationship, if well portrayed or documented, can be instructive and serve as a good example of what to avoid in our lives that we might be happier and relate better to each other. A good relationship, by contrast, can give us something to aspire to and inspire us to not only look for the right kind of person to complement our lives, but to make ourselves worthy of that person. And here I’ll add that I’m perfectly aware that in real life (and thus in fiction) relationships can be very complicated and heavily nuanced, with elements of both “good” and “bad” in them. Just as people change over time so can the relationships between them change, at times getting better and at times worse, sometimes breaking entirely and sometimes growing stronger. Relationships can have just as many layers and dimensions as characters, more even perhaps, and a skilled writer should be able to reflect this complexity. At other times a relationship can be fairly straightforward, simplicity sometimes being the best approach. But regardless, the audience should be able to relate and identify with what they are seeing, such that hopefully they can incorporate the lessons from it in their own lives.
Where can we find good examples of relationships to study? There may be a number of them in the real world, but the trouble with studying real world relationships is that they’re often much more complicated than fictional ones (just as real people are more complicated than fictional characters), and for many of them it is almost impossible to know all the details and nuances because they are often kept private, understandably so, and even if they aren’t it can still be difficult, due to unique circumstances, to see how to relate them to our own lives. Additionally there may be far more disagreement about a real life situation than a fictional one, with many more points of view. To keep things simple, for the purpose of this article I would like to focus on fictional relationships. (And fair warning, there will be some spoilers.)
One of the best places to look, I would argue, would be the films of Hayao Miyazaki. (And this is pretty significant to Star Wars as you will see in a bit.) A film of his that stands out to me the most is Princess Mononoke. Like many of Miyazaki’s films it has elements of romance, and yet subverts them in a way that makes complete sense and feels very genuine, without taking away from any of the accompanying charm. It starts with two young people, San and Ashitaka, and as soon as they encounter each other there is a kind of expectation of romance. This may be inevitable to some degree when you have a man and a woman of about the same age encounter each other in a story, especially if they happen to be adolescents. The expectation may not be inherently bad, and Miyazaki does play with it. Both characters are thrust into dangerous situations, at various points end up saving each other’s lives, and at a certain point I think it is obvious that they have feelings for each other. I was certain that at the end of the film, they would be together, and if things had gone that way, it would make complete sense. Instead, they go in different directions, but remain good friends, and considering their backgrounds and differing worldviews, this ends up making even more sense to the story.
Essentially, Miyazaki could have gone for the more conventional, tried and true “love conquers all” narrative, where the characters’ feelings for each other would negate everything that comes between them, they would somehow find a common ground in spite of their differences, the romance would not only take over the narrative but somehow also solve all the problems in the story, and then the couple would live “happily ever after”. Such an approach is not inherently bad or wrong, and is fairly common in Western media and storytelling. We can see it in films like Fern Gully, and more recently James Cameron’s Avatar, both of which have been compared to Princess Mononoke. As you can probably guess, the problem is that at a certain point such a narrative can become fairly simplistic, and lack nuance.
Miyazaki’s films, by contrast, are very heavily nuanced, and are anything but simplistic. In Princess Mononoke the characters San and Ashitaka don’t help each other simply because they are “in love”, but because it is the right thing to do, regardless of how they might feel about each other. Yes, romantic feelings are certainly alluded to, but they are not essential to the plot, for it could have worked just as well without any romantic allusions. And ironically, this makes those allusions even more valid, even if they are unrequited. How so?
Consider that if love is essential to a given narrative, is it not relegated to being nothing more than a plot device? Again, this is quite common in Western media and storytelling, and is not inherently bad or wrong, but when it becomes a trope or cliche, I believe it is the essence of where shipping comes from. Many storytellers get caught up in this, usually without realizing it, and while a story can still work even with shipping, I believe that it usually works that much better without it.
This extends not only to Miyazaki’s handling of romance but also to other things like environmentalism, the conflict between man and nature, and the contrasting ideals of human progress vs. preserving the natural order. Movies like Fern Gully and Avatar, as already mentioned, handle these themes in a fairly simplistic and I would even say hamfisted manner, whereby all progress and technology is shown as being inherently “bad” and in service to “evil”, while everything that’s “natural” is shown to be inherently “good”. Even our notions of good and evil, and right vs. wrong, are challenged by Miyazaki, with nearly all of his characters having complex motives and multiple dimensions to them, as well as understandable reasons for doing the things that they do. Rarely can any one of his characters be branded as a simple “villain”, and rarely is any one individual the source of conflict in his stories, again in contrast to most Western narratives.
I’ll reiterate once more, a simple, straightforward narrative is not inherently a bad thing, whether the themes being dealt with are romantic or anything else. Sometimes it is in fact the best approach. But the best stories in my opinion are usually the most nuanced, that challenge our notions of what we believe to be true, and that force us to think about what we do with our lives and what we could do differently. To that end Miyazaki introduces all manner of themes and motifs within his films that are familiar to us but shows them in a light most of us might not have considered, thus giving more dimension to our understanding of things.
“How is any of this related to Star Wars?” you might ask. It is quite related, and you don’t even have to look all that closely to see it. A very influential figure within Star Wars was very heavily inspired by the works of Miyazaki, and that figure is Dave Filoni.
This video shows the connections in some detail:
https://youtu.be/Q_4L0BbSpHo?si=04jDo6qFCnZT135w
But to summarize if you’ve seen any of Miyazaki’s films, especially Princess Mononoke, I think the callbacks in Filoni’s work will be all too obvious, especially in Star Wars Rebels. Some of the scenes in Filoni’s work look like they were taken directly from Miyazki’s films, and many of the same themes and motifs often come up. The relationship between San and Ashitaka I would argue is very similar to the relationship between Ezra and Sabine, and not just because both couples rode wolves together.
Incidentally, Dave Filoni was also heavily involved in Avatar: The Last Airbender, which I would also argue was at least to some degree inspired if not by Miyazaki then by Japanese anime in general. The relationship between Aang and Katara was developed with great care and was allowed to build very slowly, as opposed to simply shipping them. Likewise other characters very gradually developed as individuals and in their relationships, at times stumbling as they did so, and making mistakes, before finding their way back to the right path.
All of this is in stark contrast to George Lucas, whose character development is often very rushed at best, and at times some might say almost non-existent. So essentially, even though Lucas has said that Filoni has been “like a son” to him, and I believe referred to Filoni as his “padawan”, I would argue that Filoni is ultimately as much a student of Miyazaki as he is of Lucas.
Again, you might ask, “What does all this mean for Star Wars?” It means a great many things. It means that Dave Filoni has taken Miyazaki’s lessons to heart, and can handle things like romance, as well as other kinds of relationships, quite well most of the time. Like Miyazaki he can play with romance, tease the audience with it at times even, leave the romance unrequited, and yet still have it feel satisfying. A prime example of this is the love triangle that Ahsoka was involved in with the young Separatist Senator, Lux Bonteri, and Steela Gerrera. As wary as I am of romance and as much as I despise shipping, love triangles I normally despise even more, but this one seemed to actually work. It never took over the main story, and even though Ahsoka’s feelings were ultimately not reciprocated, she still learned from the experience, and grew and developed further as a character because of it. The other characters involved in this triangle also grew and developed from their involvement, though unfortunately not all of them made it. All in all it was a good bit of storytelling and gave the audience something to consider.
When a relationship in one of Filoni’s stories does bloom into a full blown romance he also generally handles it quite well. For one Filoni is sparing with actual romance, so that when it does occur, it can be that much more appreciated. And rather than rushing or shipping it, Filoni normally takes his time to build it up. An example of this is the relationship between Kanan and Hera. Some might argue that this is perhaps the best developed romance in all of Star Wars, at least in Canon. Built up over four seasons, at times it wasn’t certain whether it was a romance or a friendship, or perhaps even a professional partnership. Perhaps even the characters themselves were not certain, though it was hinted all throughout the narrative that something was going on. To this day I don’t believe anyone can say definitively when it became an actual romance, and I believe Filoni did this intentionally because he wanted to be subtle, rather than making things too obvious and having the romance take over the narrative, as it usually does. When it finally did become obvious as to what was happening, it felt very much earned, in a way that is seldom accomplished in other works of fiction, including Star Wars.
The relationship between Ezra and Sabine was also fairly well written, for the most part anyway, at least in Star Wars Rebels. Ezra was almost immediately smitten with Sabine, but being a young teenage boy, it was understandable that he would feel that way about an attractive girl. Over time he learned to see her more respectfully, as a colleague and even as part of his adopted family, not just as a pretty face. Sabine for her part found Ezra annoying at first (c’mon, what teenage boy isn’t?), but as he matured and she found out more about him she came to understand and respect him more, and see him as a friend and almost a brother, with there being potential for something more.
There were times when the relationship could have been better written, like in the episode “Blood Sisters”, where Ezra was written to be a bit too immature to make Sabine look wiser. But overall, the bond between them developed fairly well; both saved one another at various times, and took risks and made sacrifices for each other’s sake. Both reassured and comforted the other when they needed it, and it was endearing to hear their banter when they became more familiar and trusting of each other.
So why then was I so disappointed in how they were portrayed in the Ahsoka show? The thing is, after how well their relationship was built up in Rebels, as I’ve already mentioned it was strange to see how lackluster and uninspired their reunion was.
Within the Ahsoka show itself Sabine was shown to be almost obsessed with finding Ezra, living in what used to be his home, watching a recording of him over and over again, and calling out his name as she woke up in the middle of the night. She even risked bringing Thrawn back into the Galaxy, which ultimately happened, just so she could see Ezra again. After all that, when she finally does encounter him, her reaction seems fairly casual, as does his, as if they’ve been apart for no more than a week, rather than 10 years. Not too much happens between them afterwards either. Like I said Ezra does not appear all that curious about what happened with Sabine, how she found him, and how it was that she was now Force sensitive. Sabine likewise did not seem curious about what had happened with Ezra, and how he had gotten away from Thrawn. And with Ezra rescued and returned home, suddenly it didn’t seem as though Sabine was all that interested in him anymore, nor he all that concerned with her, though they were just as far apart as they had been at the start of the show. To be completely honest it made me wonder what the point of the whole show was. Were they just working to set up Thrawn’s return to the Galaxy? As some have said, Ezra felt like nothing more than a Macguffin in the show. Was Sabine and Ahsoka’s search for him just a plot device?
Considering how skillfully Dave Filoni had written his stories in the past, what happened in this latest project of his does not make much sense. Was he so concerned about “shipping” and so desperate to avoid it that he inadvertently “shipped” them in the other direction? Was there some sort of external pressure on him about how to write this story to have more of an appeal to “modern audiences”? Maybe some combination of those factors?
And here I’ll add that when I say “modern audiences” I don’t mean that in a contemptuous sense, though you may think I do. If there is any contempt on my part it is for those in charge of telling our stories, or those in charge of those telling our stories, who do not seem to grasp these basic truths. The truth is that audiences at their core don’t really change throughout the ages, only superficially so. Trends come and go but certain truths and ideals are eternal, and universal. How people relate to each other fundamentally does not change, whether they are friends, or more than friends. And deep down, I believe everyone (or nearly everyone at least) wants the same things. Nearly everyone at some point wants some kind of a connection with another human being, to know that they are not alone in the world, and to know that there is someone else who sees and understands things as they do. While this desire can certainly lead to abuse, and absolutely has, it is still innate to us and is not inherently wrong. Finding ways of connecting and relating to other people is one of the great challenges of life, but many would argue it is the most worthwhile of challenges. It may be the whole point of life if you think about it. As complex as it may be, many would argue it is what makes life worth living, and likewise makes for the best stories. Just as it may be the whole point of life many would say that is what most stories are about at their core: people trying to relate to one another.
Sadly, just as in real life, most stories unfortunately don’t quite get it, and the Ahsoka show in my opinion was an example of this, made all the sadder by the fact that Dave Filoni had done quite well with these characters up to that point. We may never know for certain what exactly went wrong and why, or if it can ever be “fixed” at this point, but I can’t help but feel curious. Maybe in the future Filoni will find a way to make it make sense, but I’m not sure how. And to be completely honest I don’t feel quite as enthusiastic to find out as I used to.
Also for the record I would like to add here that there are other factors that put me off from the show, such as Sabine’s Force sensitivity, that came about without much build up. But in this article I specifically wanted to focus on shipping because there seems to be so much misunderstanding around it.
I hope that I was able to clarify some, if not most of this misunderstanding, so that people could better appreciate what shipping is, where it comes from, as well as what it isn’t. Many people today are understandably sick of shipping characters, myself included. But I hope people realize that in overcompensating for something, we often come back around into the very thing that we are overcompensating for. Or sometimes, into something even worse. This may apply to nearly every facet of life, by the way, not just shipping. Finding a happy medium in how we portray our fictional relationships may help us to better understand relationships in real life, as well as how to navigate them. Neither fictional nor actual relationships can ever be perfect but they can always be better. To this understanding then I hope that I was able to give my own modest contribution, and if nothing else I hope we can connect on that.

This is my attempt at a re-submission due to some misunderstandings on the first attempt. I now know that there are different definitions of the word “ship”, but for the purposes of this article and to keep things simple I will use the definition of “a relationship that’s rushed and/or forced with no real development.” I hope you can understand as I do not know of any other single word to describe that concept. If you do, perhaps you can tell me. Also, fair warning, this is long form content (some 10 pages), if you like it but can’t read it all at once you can save it and come back to it over a period of time, or you can stop reading whenever you get tired of it and still discuss those parts of it with me that you have read. But keep it civil if you want a civil response.
With that, to qualify the title, no, Ezra and Sabine do NOT absolutely have to be a couple, but if they were to become one, it would NOT be a ship. Ezra and Sabine’s relationship has had years of development. Could they remain as simply friends? Yes, but ironically, it was their “friendship” that felt like more of a ship. It felt like the Ahsoka show, helmed by Dave Filoni, was going out of its way to tell us: “no, they’re not a couple, they’re just friends.”
I believe that Filoni made some very poor writing choices to stress something that didn’t really need to be stressed, such that it almost felt like he was in denial. The line “I love you like a sister” was never in Rebels, Filoni essentially had that retconned in, and like many I was put off by their (largely) emotionless reunion. Even if they were “just friends” I believe there would be a great deal more emotion displayed between two people that hadn’t seen each other in some ten years, especially when one of them was in a precarious situation when they parted. I also believe Ezra would be far more curious about Sabine being Force sensitive, perhaps even offering to help train her when she told him that her training hadn’t gone as well with Ahsoka. He did help to train her with the Darksaber, didn’t he? Why that never came up is another discussion, but for now, let’s focus on shipping.
In case you think I’m desperate to have them as a couple, no I’m not. I’m about the furthest thing from it. Like many millennials and Gen-Z’ers (and perhaps some Gen-Xers and boomers) I DESPISE shipping. Absolutely DESPISE it. With a flaming passion. Perhaps for this reason, and maybe some others, like many millennials and Gen-Z’ers (and perhaps some Gen-Xers and boomers), I’m generally wary of nearly all romance in fiction, and generally avoid it in my own work. The sad reality is that romance is perhaps the most abused genre in all of fiction, all throughout history. It has been so badly abused that many people, including myself for the longest time, have equated romance with shipping, though I’m slowly beginning to see that they are not the same thing, and one does not necessarily have to go with the other.
But sadly, many writers, through time immemorial, have not been able to separate them, going back into ancient times and perhaps even into pre-history, that is before languages were actually written down. Some of what is considered great literature; classics like Romeo and Juliet, are predicated on shipping, though at least the consequences of this “whirlwind romance” are shown to be fairly stark. Star Wars itself is no stranger to shipping, resulting in a very awkward incestuous kiss when Luke was shipped with Leia, then Leia was placed with Han and Lucas made Luke and Leia brother and sister, apparently having forgotten his original ship. Later Lucas essentially shipped Anakin and Padme, resulting in some of the most cringeworthy dialog in the history of film. Many fans of the Prequels even have been somewhat critical of Anakin’s portrayal, particularly in regards to the “romantic” scenes, with many describing them as “creepy”. Some have speculated that this was intentional, though personally I think it was just the result of bad writing on the part of George Lucas, and an impatience on his part for Anakin and Padme to become a couple, hence “shipping”.
One might wonder why this is so prevalent in fiction, and tragically, one does not have to look far. Fiction is merely a reflection of reality, therefore the reason that shipping is so common in our stories is that we fall so easily into it in real life. Indeed, entire cultures may be based around shipping, or at least very heavily wrapped up in it. Throughout history arranged marriages have been the norm, and the idea of marrying for “love” is something relatively new. To be fair, I’ve actually met people in arranged marriages who seemed to be fairly happy, but those same people were very open in telling me that many despise that aspect of their culture, and that it is quite normal for those in an arranged marriage to try to get out.
People might come together for “love” without marrying, but even then it often creates expectations that might turn into a burden. Even when a marriage is voluntary and for “love”, people are often left unsatisfied, such that today in the West the divorce rate is something like 50%. Happy, stable, long term relationships seem to be the exception across cultures and across the breadth and width of time. And yet pursuit of love and some kind of relationship seems to be the highest calling for many people, both in real life and in fiction. And it could be that the accumulated disgust is finally starting to boil over.
To be fair, this may not be the first time in history that the pendulum has shifted. You may recall that in Victorian times attitudes changed drastically, as compared to the previously bawdy Elizabethan times. Looking at a play from Shakespear, if you can understand the language, you’ll see all kinds of vulgar references, as well as what I believe are fairly sappy romances like in the aforementioned Romeo and Juliet, though I can’t say for certain whether Shakespear was actually endorsing that type of attitude towards “love” or presenting it as a cautionary tale, maybe even something to be ridiculed in some of his other plays.
But regardless, Victorians as you may well know had a very conservative attitude towards anything to do with romance, and would often avoid the subject in many places, or tread very carefully around it, as if walking on eggshells. It’s not that people stopped being romantic, in fiction or real life, but it was treated as something very serious and even dangerous, with many urges repressed or even suppressed entirely. This had all kinds of effects on society, both positive and negative. On the positive side, it reinforced the ideal of people being committed to their partners, and of marriage as a sacred institution rather than a “casual hookup” as was more common in Elizabethan times. Likewise it reinforced ideals of modesty and chastity, which may be coming back into vogue, though under different names. But just as there were positive aspects to these attitudes, so were there negative ones.
Just because the urges I described were repressed did not mean that they disappeared. In fact, they often morphed into things that many would consider “unhealthy”. From one statistic that I saw, in Victorian times about one in every 60 houses was a brothel, with the modern rate being closer to one in 6000. Additionally, the rights of women were often repressed, such that they could not fully express themselves and find their own identity, and path in life, as individuals. Just as Elizabethan ideals gave way to Victorian ones, so did the Victorian ideals gradually begin to erode.
Perhaps it began with the Jazz Age of the 1920’s (the “Roaring Twenties”), or with the increased interconnectivity of people traveling to different parts of the world during World War I, not to mention the cynicism that pervaded throughout the West in response to failed old ideals leading to the deadliest war in history up to that point, but many Victorian ideals began to be seen as a joke, and even resented for their “oppression”, which to be fair was not entirely unjustified. But regardless, people gradually, and at times not so gradually, became more and more “liberated” and promiscuous. This culminated in the Sexual Revolution in the late 1960’s, when what had previously been seen as a vice and even a sin was now seen as not only “normal” but as a healthy form of expression, a virtue even. And just as these ideas were embraced in real life, so too were they reflected in our films, TV shows, and other media, often to the consternation of older people and institutions, like the Vatican. The Catholic Church even went so far as to “ban” certain films, that is to declare them immoral for good Catholics to watch. Many of the films that were banned back then, or at least controversial, like The Graduate with Dustin Hoffman, are fairly tame by today’s standards.
It continued through the 70’s, at times warming and at times cooling through the rest of the century, until you could argue it reached a kind of crescendo in the early 21st century with the advent of so-called “dark romance” and the publication of books like Fifty Shades of Grey. (Ironically, many of the themes within this “dark romance” can trace their roots back to the Victorian era, yet another indication that repressing urges without addressing them often doesn’t work out as one might hope.) But as happens all too often, just as something reaches peak popularity is when it begins to go out of style, and that is what we may be experiencing right now. As weird as it may sound, we may actually have come full circle and may be on the cusp of a “New Victorian Age” (complete with “dark romance”, even). Web sites like Porn Hub and OnlyFans, as well as other similar sites, may be the new “brothels”, and what was once openly celebrated may be going underground, to an extent. The effects of this on society have been interesting to say the least, and at times I would even say bizarre.
Whilst many younger people seem content with these changes, many older people are concerned. I’ve seen a number of books, films, and other media receive positive reviews for example based specifically on their lack of romance. Many of these books/films, etc. fall into the “young adult” category, meaning that it is young adults obviously who mostly consume them. At the same time I’ve heard a number of older people, mostly boomers and Gen-Xers, criticize these same books/films for their lack of romance. Even some older millennials seem upset by the changes, as perhaps evidenced by Jennifer Lawrence’s latest film No Hard Feelings (though to be fair that film may be lampooning the older generation’s frustration as well as the younger generation’s frigidity). So just as in the past older people were concerned about the promiscuity of the youth, now it actually appears that many older people are concerned about the youth’s lack of promiscuity.
Who could have seen that coming? But to be fair, the younger generation hasn’t gone completely frigid. As stated earlier, much of the promiscuity has gone “underground”, or online, which many would argue is not very healthy as it might undermine actual relationships, whether they are romantic in nature or simple friendships. And speaking of that, friendships within stories nowadays often aren’t portrayed in a very authentic or compelling manner, perhaps because in ditching romance modern writers haven’t quite yet learned how to replace it with something else. In other words, the “New Victorian Age” may not be an exact repeat of the previous one, but may have its own twists and turns, for better and for worse.
This may all essentially be a manifestation of the Human Condition, in that we just can’t seem to find a happy medium, neither in real life nor in fiction. Thus we keep swinging from one extreme to the other, apparently getting wilder with each swing.
So where does all this leave us? What is it that we really want in our lives, and in our stories? Especially in regards to relationships? I think at some level we all want to see good and healthy relationships between people and/or characters, whether romantic or platonic. I believe at some point we would like to see good examples of both friendship and romance, and I would argue that the best examples of romance have them combined. Even a toxic relationship, if well portrayed or documented, can be instructive and serve as a good example of what to avoid in our lives that we might be happier and relate better to each other. A good relationship, by contrast, can give us something to aspire to and inspire us to not only look for the right kind of person to complement our lives, but to make ourselves worthy of that person. And here I’ll add that I’m perfectly aware that in real life (and thus in fiction) relationships can be very complicated and heavily nuanced, with elements of both “good” and “bad” in them. Just as people change over time so can the relationships between them change, at times getting better and at times worse, sometimes breaking entirely and sometimes growing stronger. Relationships can have just as many layers and dimensions as characters, more even perhaps, and a skilled writer should be able to reflect this complexity. At other times a relationship can be fairly straightforward, simplicity sometimes being the best approach. But regardless, the audience should be able to relate and identify with what they are seeing, such that hopefully they can incorporate the lessons from it in their own lives.
Where can we find good examples of relationships to study? There may be a number of them in the real world, but the trouble with studying real world relationships is that they’re often much more complicated than fictional ones (just as real people are more complicated than fictional characters), and for many of them it is almost impossible to know all the details and nuances because they are often kept private, understandably so, and even if they aren’t it can still be difficult, due to unique circumstances, to see how to relate them to our own lives. Additionally there may be far more disagreement about a real life situation than a fictional one, with many more points of view. To keep things simple, for the purpose of this article I would like to focus on fictional relationships. (And fair warning, there will be some spoilers.)
One of the best places to look, I would argue, would be the films of Hayao Miyazaki. (And this is pretty significant to Star Wars as you will see in a bit.) A film of his that stands out to me the most is Princess Mononoke. Like many of Miyazaki’s films it has elements of romance, and yet subverts them in a way that makes complete sense and feels very genuine, without taking away from any of the accompanying charm. It starts with two young people, San and Ashitaka, and as soon as they encounter each other there is a kind of expectation of romance. This may be inevitable to some degree when you have a man and a woman of about the same age encounter each other in a story, especially if they happen to be adolescents. The expectation may not be inherently bad, and Miyazaki does play with it. Both characters are thrust into dangerous situations, at various points end up saving each other’s lives, and at a certain point I think it is obvious that they have feelings for each other. I was certain that at the end of the film, they would be together, and if things had gone that way, it would make complete sense. Instead, they go in different directions, but remain good friends, and considering their backgrounds and differing worldviews, this ends up making even more sense to the story.
Essentially, Miyazaki could have gone for the more conventional, tried and true “love conquers all” narrative, where the characters’ feelings for each other would negate everything that comes between them, they would somehow find a common ground in spite of their differences, the romance would not only take over the narrative but somehow also solve all the problems in the story, and then the couple would live “happily ever after”. Such an approach is not inherently bad or wrong, and is fairly common in Western media and storytelling. We can see it in films like Fern Gully, and more recently James Cameron’s Avatar, both of which have been compared to Princess Mononoke. As you can probably guess, the problem is that at a certain point such a narrative can become fairly simplistic, and lack nuance.
Miyazaki’s films, by contrast, are very heavily nuanced, and are anything but simplistic. In Princess Mononoke the characters San and Ashitaka don’t help each other simply because they are “in love”, but because it is the right thing to do, regardless of how they might feel about each other. Yes, romantic feelings are certainly alluded to, but they are not essential to the plot, for it could have worked just as well without any romantic allusions. And ironically, this makes those allusions even more valid, even if they are unrequited. How so?
Consider that if love is essential to a given narrative, is it not relegated to being nothing more than a plot device? Again, this is quite common in Western media and storytelling, and is not inherently bad or wrong, but when it becomes a trope or cliche, I believe it is the essence of where shipping comes from. Many storytellers get caught up in this, usually without realizing it, and while a story can still work even with shipping, I believe that it usually works that much better without it.
This extends not only to Miyazaki’s handling of romance but also to other things like environmentalism, the conflict between man and nature, and the contrasting ideals of human progress vs. preserving the natural order. Movies like Fern Gully and Avatar, as already mentioned, handle these themes in a fairly simplistic and I would even say hamfisted manner, whereby all progress and technology is shown as being inherently “bad” and in service to “evil”, while everything that’s “natural” is shown to be inherently “good”. Even our notions of good and evil, and right vs. wrong, are challenged by Miyazaki, with nearly all of his characters having complex motives and multiple dimensions to them, as well as understandable reasons for doing the things that they do. Rarely can any one of his characters be branded as a simple “villain”, and rarely is any one individual the source of conflict in his stories, again in contrast to most Western narratives.
I’ll reiterate once more, a simple, straightforward narrative is not inherently a bad thing, whether the themes being dealt with are romantic or anything else. Sometimes it is in fact the best approach. But the best stories in my opinion are usually the most nuanced, that challenge our notions of what we believe to be true, and that force us to think about what we do with our lives and what we could do differently. To that end Miyazaki introduces all manner of themes and motifs within his films that are familiar to us but shows them in a light most of us might not have considered, thus giving more dimension to our understanding of things.
“How is any of this related to Star Wars?” you might ask. It is quite related, and you don’t even have to look all that closely to see it. A very influential figure within Star Wars was very heavily inspired by the works of Miyazaki, and that figure is Dave Filoni.
This video shows the connections in some detail:
https://youtu.be/Q_4L0BbSpHo?si=04jDo6qFCnZT135w
But to summarize if you’ve seen any of Miyazaki’s films, especially Princess Mononoke, I think the callbacks in Filoni’s work will be all too obvious, especially in Star Wars Rebels. Some of the scenes in Filoni’s work look like they were taken directly from Miyazki’s films, and many of the same themes and motifs often come up. The relationship between San and Ashitaka I would argue is very similar to the relationship between Ezra and Sabine, and not just because both couples rode wolves together.
Incidentally, Dave Filoni was also heavily involved in Avatar: The Last Airbender, which I would also argue was at least to some degree inspired if not by Miyazaki then by Japanese anime in general. The relationship between Aang and Katara was developed with great care and was allowed to build very slowly, as opposed to simply shipping them. Likewise other characters very gradually developed as individuals and in their relationships, at times stumbling as they did so, and making mistakes, before finding their way back to the right path.
All of this is in stark contrast to George Lucas, whose character development is often very rushed at best, and at times some might say almost non-existent. So essentially, even though Lucas has said that Filoni has been “like a son” to him, and I believe referred to Filoni as his “padawan”, I would argue that Filoni is ultimately as much a student of Miyazaki as he is of Lucas.
Again, you might ask, “What does all this mean for Star Wars?” It means a great many things. It means that Dave Filoni has taken Miyazaki’s lessons to heart, and can handle things like romance, as well as other kinds of relationships, quite well most of the time. Like Miyazaki he can play with romance, tease the audience with it at times even, leave the romance unrequited, and yet still have it feel satisfying. A prime example of this is the love triangle that Ahsoka was involved in with the young Separatist Senator, Lux Bonteri, and Steela Gerrera. As wary as I am of romance and as much as I despise shipping, love triangles I normally despise even more, but this one seemed to actually work. It never took over the main story, and even though Ahsoka’s feelings were ultimately not reciprocated, she still learned from the experience, and grew and developed further as a character because of it. The other characters involved in this triangle also grew and developed from their involvement, though unfortunately not all of them made it. All in all it was a good bit of storytelling and gave the audience something to consider.
When a relationship in one of Filoni’s stories does bloom into a full blown romance he also generally handles it quite well. For one Filoni is sparing with actual romance, so that when it does occur, it can be that much more appreciated. And rather than rushing or shipping it, Filoni normally takes his time to build it up. An example of this is the relationship between Kanan and Hera. Some might argue that this is perhaps the best developed romance in all of Star Wars, at least in Canon. Built up over four seasons, at times it wasn’t certain whether it was a romance or a friendship, or perhaps even a professional partnership. Perhaps even the characters themselves were not certain, though it was hinted all throughout the narrative that something was going on. To this day I don’t believe anyone can say definitively when it became an actual romance, and I believe Filoni did this intentionally because he wanted to be subtle, rather than making things too obvious and having the romance take over the narrative, as it usually does. When it finally did become obvious as to what was happening, it felt very much earned, in a way that is seldom accomplished in other works of fiction, including Star Wars.
The relationship between Ezra and Sabine was also fairly well written, for the most part anyway, at least in Star Wars Rebels. Ezra was almost immediately smitten with Sabine, but being a young teenage boy, it was understandable that he would feel that way about an attractive girl. Over time he learned to see her more respectfully, as a colleague and even as part of his adopted family, not just as a pretty face. Sabine for her part found Ezra annoying at first (c’mon, what teenage boy isn’t?), but as he matured and she found out more about him she came to understand and respect him more, and see him as a friend and almost a brother, with there being potential for something more.
There were times when the relationship could have been better written, like in the episode “Blood Sisters”, where Ezra was written to be a bit too immature to make Sabine look wiser. But overall, the bond between them developed fairly well; both saved one another at various times, and took risks and made sacrifices for each other’s sake. Both reassured and comforted the other when they needed it, and it was endearing to hear their banter when they became more familiar and trusting of each other.
So why then was I so disappointed in how they were portrayed in the Ahsoka show? The thing is, after how well their relationship was built up in Rebels, as I’ve already mentioned it was strange to see how lackluster and uninspired their reunion was.
Within the Ahsoka show itself Sabine was shown to be almost obsessed with finding Ezra, living in what used to be his home, watching a recording of him over and over again, and calling out his name as she woke up in the middle of the night. She even risked bringing Thrawn back into the Galaxy, which ultimately happened, just so she could see Ezra again. After all that, when she finally does encounter him, her reaction seems fairly casual, as does his, as if they’ve been apart for no more than a week, rather than 10 years. Not too much happens between them afterwards either. Like I said Ezra does not appear all that curious about what happened with Sabine, how she found him, and how it was that she was now Force sensitive. Sabine likewise did not seem curious about what had happened with Ezra, and how he had gotten away from Thrawn. And with Ezra rescued and returned home, suddenly it didn’t seem as though Sabine was all that interested in him anymore, nor he all that concerned with her, though they were just as far apart as they had been at the start of the show. To be completely honest it made me wonder what the point of the whole show was. Were they just working to set up Thrawn’s return to the Galaxy? As some have said, Ezra felt like nothing more than a Macguffin in the show. Was Sabine and Ahsoka’s search for him just a plot device?
Considering how skillfully Dave Filoni had written his stories in the past, what happened in this latest project of his does not make much sense. Was he so concerned about “shipping” and so desperate to avoid it that he inadvertently “shipped” them in the other direction? Was there some sort of external pressure on him about how to write this story to have more of an appeal to “modern audiences”? Maybe some combination of those factors?
And here I’ll add that when I say “modern audiences” I don’t mean that in a contemptuous sense, though you may think I do. If there is any contempt on my part it is for those in charge of telling our stories, or those in charge of those telling our stories, who do not seem to grasp these basic truths. The truth is that audiences at their core don’t really change throughout the ages, only superficially so. Trends come and go but certain truths and ideals are eternal, and universal. How people relate to each other fundamentally does not change, whether they are friends, or more than friends. And deep down, I believe everyone (or nearly everyone at least) wants the same things. Nearly everyone at some point wants some kind of a connection with another human being, to know that they are not alone in the world, and to know that there is someone else who sees and understands things as they do. While this desire can certainly lead to abuse, and absolutely has, it is still innate to us and is not inherently wrong. Finding ways of connecting and relating to other people is one of the great challenges of life, but many would argue it is the most worthwhile of challenges. It may be the whole point of life if you think about it. As complex as it may be, many would argue it is what makes life worth living, and likewise makes for the best stories. Just as it may be the whole point of life many would say that is what most stories are about at their core: people trying to relate to one another.
Sadly, just as in real life, most stories unfortunately don’t quite get it, and the Ahsoka show in my opinion was an example of this, made all the sadder by the fact that Dave Filoni had done quite well with these characters up to that point. We may never know for certain what exactly went wrong and why, or if it can ever be “fixed” at this point, but I can’t help but feel curious. Maybe in the future Filoni will find a way to make it make sense, but I’m not sure how. And to be completely honest I don’t feel quite as enthusiastic to find out as I used to.
Also for the record I would like to add here that there are other factors that put me off from the show, such as Sabine’s Force sensitivity, that came about without much build up. But in this article I specifically wanted to focus on shipping because there seems to be so much misunderstanding around it.
I hope that I was able to clarify some, if not most of this misunderstanding, so that people could better appreciate what shipping is, where it comes from, as well as what it isn’t. Many people today are understandably sick of shipping characters, myself included. But I hope people realize that in overcompensating for something, we often come back around into the very thing that we are overcompensating for. Or sometimes, into something even worse. This may apply to nearly every facet of life, by the way, not just shipping. Finding a happy medium in how we portray our fictional relationships may help us to better understand relationships in real life, as well as how to navigate them. Neither fictional nor actual relationships can ever be perfect but they can always be better. To this understanding then I hope that I was able to give my own modest contribution, and if nothing else I hope we can connect on that.

Outline of the Article

1. Introduction to Agricultural Activator Adjuvants
   • What are agricultural activator adjuvants?
   • Importance in modern agriculture.
2. Types of Agricultural Activator Adjuvants
   • Surfactants
   • Oils
   • Drift Control Agents
   • Compatibility Agents
3. Role and Benefits of Agricultural Activator Adjuvants
   • Enhancing pesticide efficacy
   • Improving plant uptake
   • Reducing pesticide drift
   • Ensuring compatibility with tank mixtures
4. Market Trends and Growth Drivers
   • Increasing adoption of precision farming techniques
   • Growing demand for sustainable agricultural practices
   • Rise in research and development activities
5. Key Players in the Agricultural Activator Adjuvants Market
   • Analysis of major companies and their market share
   • Overview of their product offerings and strategies
6. Regional Analysis
   • Market landscape in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and other regions
   • Factors influencing market growth in each region
7. Challenges and Restraints
   • Regulatory hurdles and compliance issues
   • Concerns regarding environmental impact
8. Future Outlook and Opportunities
   • Emerging trends and innovations
   • Potential for market expansion
9. Case Studies and Success Stories
   • Real-world applications of agricultural activator adjuvants
   • Impact on crop yield and farm profitability
10. Environmental Sustainability and Safety Considerations
    • Eco-friendly formulations
    • Risk mitigation strategies
11. Consumer Awareness and Education
    • Importance of educating farmers about adjuvant selection and usage
    • Promoting responsible stewardship practices
12. Industry Collaboration and Partnerships
    • Collaborative efforts between manufacturers, farmers, and regulatory bodies
    • Sharing best practices and knowledge exchange
13. Market Forecast and Analysis
    • Predictions for market growth and revenue projections
    • Factors influencing market dynamics in the forecast period
14. Investment Opportunities and Market Entry Strategies
    • Potential for new entrants
    • Investment avenues for existing players
15. Conclusion
    • Recap of key points
    • Summary of market outlook and recommendations for stakeholders

Agriculture, the backbone of our civilization, continually evolves with technology and innovation. One such innovation revolutionizing modern farming practices is the use of agricultural activator adjuvants. These versatile compounds play a crucial role in optimizing the performance of pesticides and other agrochemicals, thereby enhancing crop yield and sustainability.
What are Agricultural Activator Adjuvants?
Agricultural activator adjuvants are additives formulated to improve the efficacy and performance of pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers. They are designed to enhance the biological activity of these agrochemicals by modifying their physical and chemical properties. By facilitating better absorption, spreading, and retention on plant surfaces, adjuvants ensure maximum utilization of active ingredients, leading to improved pest control and crop protection.
Importance in Modern Agriculture
In today's agricultural landscape, where farmers face escalating challenges such as pest resistance, environmental concerns, and stringent regulations, the role of adjuvants becomes increasingly critical. By harnessing the power of adjuvants, farmers can achieve better results with lower pesticide doses, minimize environmental impact, and maximize profitability.
Types of Agricultural Activator Adjuvants
Surfactants
Surfactants are one of the most commonly used adjuvants in agriculture. They reduce the surface tension of spray solutions, allowing for more uniform coverage and penetration of plant surfaces. By breaking down waxy cuticles and enhancing wetting and spreading, surfactants ensure optimal absorption of active ingredients into plant tissues.
Oils
Oil-based adjuvants, such as crop oils and mineral oils, act as carriers for pesticides and improve their adherence to plant surfaces. They help overcome the hydrophobic nature of certain pesticides and enhance their efficacy under adverse environmental conditions. Additionally, oils can reduce evaporation and volatility of volatile herbicides, minimizing off-target drift.
Drift Control Agents
Drift control agents are formulated to reduce the risk of pesticide drift during application. They increase droplet size and density, improving deposition on target surfaces while minimizing airborne drift. By enhancing spray retention and minimizing off-target movement, drift control agents enhance the safety and efficacy of pesticide applications.
Compatibility Agents
Compatibility agents are used to prevent chemical interactions and precipitation when mixing multiple agrochemicals in a tank mixture. They ensure the stability of the spray solution, preventing clogging of nozzles and maintaining the efficacy of individual components. By promoting uniform dispersion and compatibility, these agents optimize the performance of pesticide mixtures.
Role and Benefits of Agricultural Activator Adjuvants
Agricultural activator adjuvants offer a multitude of benefits, making them indispensable tools for modern farmers:
Enhancing Pesticide Efficacy
By improving the solubility, spreading, and absorption of active ingredients, adjuvants enhance the biological activity and efficacy of pesticides. They help overcome barriers such as cuticular waxes and plant surfaces, ensuring optimal uptake and systemic movement within the plant.
Improving Plant Uptake
Adjuvants enhance the penetration and translocation of pesticides within plant tissues, ensuring effective control of pests and diseases. By facilitating rapid absorption and systemic movement, they maximize the bioavailability of active ingredients, leading to superior pest management and crop protection.
Reducing Pesticide Drift
Drift control agents mitigate the risk of pesticide drift during application, minimizing off-target deposition and environmental contamination. By optimizing droplet size and distribution, these adjuvants ensure precise delivery of pesticides to target areas while reducing the potential for environmental impact.
Ensuring Compatibility with Tank Mixtures
Compatibility agents prevent chemical interactions and compatibility issues when mixing multiple pesticides in a tank mixture. They maintain the stability and integrity of the spray solution, preventing precipitation and clogging of spray equipment. By promoting uniform dispersion and compatibility, these adjuvants maximize the efficacy of tank mixtures and minimize the risk of equipment malfunction.
Market Trends and Growth Drivers
The agricultural activator adjuvants market is witnessing steady growth, driven by several key factors:
Increasing Adoption of Precision Farming Techniques
The rise of precision farming technologies, such as GPS-guided equipment and variable rate application systems, is driving the demand for adjuvants. These technologies enable farmers to optimize pesticide applications and maximize crop yield while minimizing input costs and environmental impact.
Growing Demand for Sustainable Agricultural Practices
With increasing consumer awareness and regulatory pressure, there is a growing demand for sustainable agricultural practices. Adjuvants play a crucial role in supporting sustainable farming by improving the efficiency and efficacy of pesticide applications, reducing chemical usage, and minimizing environmental footprint.
Rise in Research and Development Activities
The agricultural adjuvants industry is characterized by ongoing research and development efforts aimed at introducing innovative formulations and technologies. Manufacturers are investing in developing eco-friendly and biodegradable adjuvants with improved performance and safety profiles, driving market growth and differentiation.
Key Players in the Agricultural Activator Adjuvants Market
The agricultural activator adjuvants market is highly competitive, with several key players vying for market share. Some of the leading companies in the industry include:

• Company A: A global leader in agricultural adjuvants, offering a comprehensive portfolio of surfactants, oils, and drift control agents.
• Company B: A pioneer in eco-friendly adjuvant formulations, focusing on sustainability and innovation in agricultural solutions.
• Company C: A renowned supplier of specialty chemicals and adjuvants, catering to the diverse needs of farmers worldwide.
• Company D: A leading provider of compatibility agents and tank mix adjuvants, ensuring optimal performance and efficacy in pesticide applications.

These companies leverage their technological expertise, extensive R&D capabilities, and strategic partnerships to maintain their competitive edge and drive market growth.
Regional Analysis
The agricultural activator adjuvants market exhibits regional variations in terms of market dynamics, regulatory frameworks, and adoption rates.
North America
North America dominates the global adjuvants market, fueled by the presence of large-scale commercial farms and advanced agricultural practices. The region benefits from a favorable regulatory environment and widespread adoption of precision farming technologies, driving market growth and innovation.
Europe
Europe is a key market for agricultural adjuvants, driven by stringent regulations and growing demand for sustainable farming practices. The region prioritizes environmental stewardship and consumer safety, leading to increased adoption of eco-friendly adjuvants and bio-based formulations.
Asia Pacific
Asia Pacific represents a lucrative market for agricultural adjuvants, driven by the expanding agricultural sector and rising demand for high-quality crops. The region is witnessing rapid urbanization and industrialization, leading to increased pressure on agricultural productivity and sustainability.
Other Regions
Other regions, such as Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, offer significant growth opportunities for agricultural adjuvants. These regions are characterized by diverse agricultural landscapes, varying climatic conditions, and evolving regulatory frameworks, presenting unique challenges and opportunities for market players.
Challenges and Restraints
Despite the promising growth prospects, the agricultural activator adjuvants market faces several challenges and restraints:
Regulatory Hurdles and Compliance Issues
The adjuvants industry is subject to stringent regulatory requirements and compliance standards, which vary across different regions and jurisdictions. Manufacturers must navigate complex registration processes, safety assessments, and labeling requirements to ensure regulatory compliance and market access.
Concerns Regarding Environmental Impact
There is growing scrutiny and public concern regarding the environmental impact of agricultural adjuvants. Chemical residues, pesticide drift, and water contamination pose significant risks to environmental health and biodiversity. Manufacturers must prioritize sustainability and develop eco-friendly formulations to address these concerns and meet consumer expectations.
Future Outlook and Opportunities
Despite the challenges, the agricultural activator adjuvants market holds immense potential for growth and innovation:
Emerging Trends and Innovations
The industry is witnessing the emergence of innovative technologies and formulations, such as bio-based adjuvants, nanoemulsions, and smart delivery systems. These advancements aim to improve efficacy, reduce environmental impact, and enhance user safety, driving market growth and differentiation.
Potential for Market Expansion
With increasing global population and food demand, there is a growing need for efficient and sustainable agricultural solutions. Adjuvants play a vital role in supporting modern farming practices, optimizing crop production, and mitigating environmental risks. As farmers seek to maximize yield and profitability, the demand for adjuvants is expected to rise, creating lucrative opportunities for market players.
Conclusion
In conclusion, agricultural activator adjuvants are indispensable tools for modern farming, offering numerous benefits in terms of pesticide efficacy, plant uptake, and environmental sustainability. As the agricultural industry continues to evolve, adjuvants will play a crucial role in optimizing crop protection, enhancing productivity, and ensuring food security for future generations.
FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)

1. What are agricultural activator adjuvants? Agricultural activator adjuvants are additives formulated to enhance the performance and efficacy of pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers by modifying their physical and chemical properties.
2. How do adjuvants improve pesticide efficacy? Adjuvants improve pesticide efficacy by enhancing wetting, spreading, and absorption on plant surfaces, ensuring better penetration and systemic movement within the plant.
3. What types of adjuvants are commonly used in agriculture? Common types of adjuvants include surfactants, oils, drift control agents, and compatibility agents, each designed to address specific challenges in pesticide applications.
4. Why are adjuvants important in modern agriculture? Adjuvants are essential in modern agriculture to optimize pesticide performance, minimize environmental impact, and maximize crop yield and profitability.
5. Are there any environmental concerns associated with adjuvant usage? While adjuvants play a crucial role in crop protection, there are concerns regarding their environmental impact, including chemical residues, pesticide drift, and water contamination. Manufacturers are increasingly focusing on developing eco-friendly formulations to address these concerns and promote sustainable farming practices.

This is my attempt at a re-submission due to some misunderstandings on the first attempt. I now know that there are different definitions of the word “ship”, but for the purposes of this article and to keep things simple I will use the definition of “a relationship that’s rushed and/or forced with no real development.” I hope you can understand as I do not know of any other single word to describe that concept. If you do, perhaps you can tell me. Also, fair warning, this is long form content (some 10 pages), if you like it but can’t read it all at once you can save it and come back to it over a period of time, or you can stop reading whenever you get tired of it and still discuss those parts of it with me that you have read. But keep it civil if you want a civil response.
With that, to qualify the title, no, Ezra and Sabine do NOT absolutely have to be a couple, but if they were to become one, it would NOT be a ship. Ezra and Sabine’s relationship has had years of development. Could they remain as simply friends? Yes, but ironically, it was their “friendship” that felt like more of a ship. It felt like the Ahsoka show, helmed by Dave Filoni, was going out of its way to tell us: “no, they’re not a couple, they’re just friends.”
I believe that Filoni made some very poor writing choices to stress something that didn’t really need to be stressed, such that it almost felt like he was in denial. The line “I love you like a sister” was never in Rebels, Filoni essentially had that retconned in, and like many I was put off by their (largely) emotionless reunion. Even if they were “just friends” I believe there would be a great deal more emotion displayed between two people that hadn’t seen each other in some ten years, especially when one of them was in a precarious situation when they parted. I also believe Ezra would be far more curious about Sabine being Force sensitive, perhaps even offering to help train her when she told him that her training hadn’t gone as well with Ahsoka. He did help to train her with the Darksaber, didn’t he? Why that never came up is another discussion, but for now, let’s focus on shipping.
In case you think I’m desperate to have them as a couple, no I’m not. I’m about the furthest thing from it. Like many millennials and Gen-Z’ers (and perhaps some Gen-Xers and boomers) I DESPISE shipping. Absolutely DESPISE it. With a flaming passion. Perhaps for this reason, and maybe some others, like many millennials and Gen-Z’ers (and perhaps some Gen-Xers and boomers), I’m generally wary of nearly all romance in fiction, and generally avoid it in my own work. The sad reality is that romance is perhaps the most abused genre in all of fiction, all throughout history. It has been so badly abused that many people, including myself for the longest time, have equated romance with shipping, though I’m slowly beginning to see that they are not the same thing, and one does not necessarily have to go with the other.
But sadly, many writers, through time immemorial, have not been able to separate them, going back into ancient times and perhaps even into pre-history, that is before languages were actually written down. Some of what is considered great literature; classics like Romeo and Juliet, are predicated on shipping, though at least the consequences of this “whirlwind romance” are shown to be fairly stark. Star Wars itself is no stranger to shipping, resulting in a very awkward incestuous kiss when Luke was shipped with Leia, then Leia was placed with Han and Lucas made Luke and Leia brother and sister, apparently having forgotten his original ship. Later Lucas essentially shipped Anakin and Padme, resulting in some of the most cringeworthy dialog in the history of film. Many fans of the Prequels even have been somewhat critical of Anakin’s portrayal, particularly in regards to the “romantic” scenes, with many describing them as “creepy”. Some have speculated that this was intentional, though personally I think it was just the result of bad writing on the part of George Lucas, and an impatience on his part for Anakin and Padme to become a couple, hence “shipping”.
One might wonder why this is so prevalent in fiction, and tragically, one does not have to look far. Fiction is merely a reflection of reality, therefore the reason that shipping is so common in our stories is that we fall so easily into it in real life. Indeed, entire cultures may be based around shipping, or at least very heavily wrapped up in it. Throughout history arranged marriages have been the norm, and the idea of marrying for “love” is something relatively new. To be fair, I’ve actually met people in arranged marriages who seemed to be fairly happy, but those same people were very open in telling me that many despise that aspect of their culture, and that it is quite normal for those in an arranged marriage to try to get out.
People might come together for “love” without marrying, but even then it often creates expectations that might turn into a burden. Even when a marriage is voluntary and for “love”, people are often left unsatisfied, such that today in the West the divorce rate is something like 50%. Happy, stable, long term relationships seem to be the exception across cultures and across the breadth and width of time. And yet pursuit of love and some kind of relationship seems to be the highest calling for many people, both in real life and in fiction. And it could be that the accumulated disgust is finally starting to boil over.
To be fair, this may not be the first time in history that the pendulum has shifted. You may recall that in Victorian times attitudes changed drastically, as compared to the previously bawdy Elizabethan times. Looking at a play from Shakespear, if you can understand the language, you’ll see all kinds of vulgar references, as well as what I believe are fairly sappy romances like in the aforementioned Romeo and Juliet, though I can’t say for certain whether Shakespear was actually endorsing that type of attitude towards “love” or presenting it as a cautionary tale, maybe even something to be ridiculed in some of his other plays.
But regardless, Victorians as you may well know had a very conservative attitude towards anything to do with romance, and would often avoid the subject in many places, or tread very carefully around it, as if walking on eggshells. It’s not that people stopped being romantic, in fiction or real life, but it was treated as something very serious and even dangerous, with many urges repressed or even suppressed entirely. This had all kinds of effects on society, both positive and negative. On the positive side, it reinforced the ideal of people being committed to their partners, and of marriage as a sacred institution rather than a “casual hookup” as was more common in Elizabethan times. Likewise it reinforced ideals of modesty and chastity, which may be coming back into vogue, though under different names. But just as there were positive aspects to these attitudes, so were there negative ones.
Just because the urges I described were repressed did not mean that they disappeared. In fact, they often morphed into things that many would consider “unhealthy”. From one statistic that I saw, in Victorian times about one in every 60 houses was a brothel, with the modern rate being closer to one in 6000. Additionally, the rights of women were often repressed, such that they could not fully express themselves and find their own identity, and path in life, as individuals. Just as Elizabethan ideals gave way to Victorian ones, so did the Victorian ideals gradually begin to erode.
Perhaps it began with the Jazz Age of the 1920’s (the “Roaring Twenties”), or with the increased interconnectivity of people traveling to different parts of the world during World War I, not to mention the cynicism that pervaded throughout the West in response to failed old ideals leading to the deadliest war in history up to that point, but many Victorian ideals began to be seen as a joke, and even resented for their “oppression”, which to be fair was not entirely unjustified. But regardless, people gradually, and at times not so gradually, became more and more “liberated” and promiscuous. This culminated in the Sexual Revolution in the late 1960’s, when what had previously been seen as a vice and even a sin was now seen as not only “normal” but as a healthy form of expression, a virtue even. And just as these ideas were embraced in real life, so too were they reflected in our films, TV shows, and other media, often to the consternation of older people and institutions, like the Vatican. The Catholic Church even went so far as to “ban” certain films, that is to declare them immoral for good Catholics to watch. Many of the films that were banned back then, or at least controversial, like The Graduate with Dustin Hoffman, are fairly tame by today’s standards.
It continued through the 70’s, at times warming and at times cooling through the rest of the century, until you could argue it reached a kind of crescendo in the early 21st century with the advent of so-called “dark romance” and the publication of books like Fifty Shades of Grey. (Ironically, many of the themes within this “dark romance” can trace their roots back to the Victorian era, yet another indication that repressing urges without addressing them often doesn’t work out as one might hope.) But as happens all too often, just as something reaches peak popularity is when it begins to go out of style, and that is what we may be experiencing right now. As weird as it may sound, we may actually have come full circle and may be on the cusp of a “New Victorian Age” (complete with “dark romance”, even). Web sites like Porn Hub and OnlyFans, as well as other similar sites, may be the new “brothels”, and what was once openly celebrated may be going underground, to an extent. The effects of this on society have been interesting to say the least, and at times I would even say bizarre.
Whilst many younger people seem content with these changes, many older people are concerned. I’ve seen a number of books, films, and other media receive positive reviews for example based specifically on their lack of romance. Many of these books/films, etc. fall into the “young adult” category, meaning that it is young adults obviously who mostly consume them. At the same time I’ve heard a number of older people, mostly boomers and Gen-Xers, criticize these same books/films for their lack of romance. Even some older millennials seem upset by the changes, as perhaps evidenced by Jennifer Lawrence’s latest film No Hard Feelings (though to be fair that film may be lampooning the older generation’s frustration as well as the younger generation’s frigidity). So just as in the past older people were concerned about the promiscuity of the youth, now it actually appears that many older people are concerned about the youth’s lack of promiscuity.
Who could have seen that coming? But to be fair, the younger generation hasn’t gone completely frigid. As stated earlier, much of the promiscuity has gone “underground”, or online, which many would argue is not very healthy as it might undermine actual relationships, whether they are romantic in nature or simple friendships. And speaking of that, friendships within stories nowadays often aren’t portrayed in a very authentic or compelling manner, perhaps because in ditching romance modern writers haven’t quite yet learned how to replace it with something else. In other words, the “New Victorian Age” may not be an exact repeat of the previous one, but may have its own twists and turns, for better and for worse.
This may all essentially be a manifestation of the Human Condition, in that we just can’t seem to find a happy medium, neither in real life nor in fiction. Thus we keep swinging from one extreme to the other, apparently getting wilder with each swing.
So where does all this leave us? What is it that we really want in our lives, and in our stories? Especially in regards to relationships? I think at some level we all want to see good and healthy relationships between people and/or characters, whether romantic or platonic. I believe at some point we would like to see good examples of both friendship and romance, and I would argue that the best examples of romance have them combined. Even a toxic relationship, if well portrayed or documented, can be instructive and serve as a good example of what to avoid in our lives that we might be happier and relate better to each other. A good relationship, by contrast, can give us something to aspire to and inspire us to not only look for the right kind of person to complement our lives, but to make ourselves worthy of that person. And here I’ll add that I’m perfectly aware that in real life (and thus in fiction) relationships can be very complicated and heavily nuanced, with elements of both “good” and “bad” in them. Just as people change over time so can the relationships between them change, at times getting better and at times worse, sometimes breaking entirely and sometimes growing stronger. Relationships can have just as many layers and dimensions as characters, more even perhaps, and a skilled writer should be able to reflect this complexity. At other times a relationship can be fairly straightforward, simplicity sometimes being the best approach. But regardless, the audience should be able to relate and identify with what they are seeing, such that hopefully they can incorporate the lessons from it in their own lives.
Where can we find good examples of relationships to study? There may be a number of them in the real world, but the trouble with studying real world relationships is that they’re often much more complicated than fictional ones (just as real people are more complicated than fictional characters), and for many of them it is almost impossible to know all the details and nuances because they are often kept private, understandably so, and even if they aren’t it can still be difficult, due to unique circumstances, to see how to relate them to our own lives. Additionally there may be far more disagreement about a real life situation than a fictional one, with many more points of view. To keep things simple, for the purpose of this article I would like to focus on fictional relationships. (And fair warning, there will be some spoilers.)
One of the best places to look, I would argue, would be the films of Hayao Miyazaki. (And this is pretty significant to Star Wars as you will see in a bit.) A film of his that stands out to me the most is Princess Mononoke. Like many of Miyazaki’s films it has elements of romance, and yet subverts them in a way that makes complete sense and feels very genuine, without taking away from any of the accompanying charm. It starts with two young people, San and Ashitaka, and as soon as they encounter each other there is a kind of expectation of romance. This may be inevitable to some degree when you have a man and a woman of about the same age encounter each other in a story, especially if they happen to be adolescents. The expectation may not be inherently bad, and Miyazaki does play with it. Both characters are thrust into dangerous situations, at various points end up saving each other’s lives, and at a certain point I think it is obvious that they have feelings for each other. I was certain that at the end of the film, they would be together, and if things had gone that way, it would make complete sense. Instead, they go in different directions, but remain good friends, and considering their backgrounds and differing worldviews, this ends up making even more sense to the story.
Essentially, Miyazaki could have gone for the more conventional, tried and true “love conquers all” narrative, where the characters’ feelings for each other would negate everything that comes between them, they would somehow find a common ground in spite of their differences, the romance would not only take over the narrative but somehow also solve all the problems in the story, and then the couple would live “happily ever after”. Such an approach is not inherently bad or wrong, and is fairly common in Western media and storytelling. We can see it in films like Fern Gully, and more recently James Cameron’s Avatar, both of which have been compared to Princess Mononoke. As you can probably guess, the problem is that at a certain point such a narrative can become fairly simplistic, and lack nuance.
Miyazaki’s films, by contrast, are very heavily nuanced, and are anything but simplistic. In Princess Mononoke the characters San and Ashitaka don’t help each other simply because they are “in love”, but because it is the right thing to do, regardless of how they might feel about each other. Yes, romantic feelings are certainly alluded to, but they are not essential to the plot, for it could have worked just as well without any romantic allusions. And ironically, this makes those allusions even more valid, even if they are unrequited. How so?
Consider that if love is essential to a given narrative, is it not relegated to being nothing more than a plot device? Again, this is quite common in Western media and storytelling, and is not inherently bad or wrong, but when it becomes a trope or cliche, I believe it is the essence of where shipping comes from. Many storytellers get caught up in this, usually without realizing it, and while a story can still work even with shipping, I believe that it usually works that much better without it.
This extends not only to Miyazaki’s handling of romance but also to other things like environmentalism, the conflict between man and nature, and the contrasting ideals of human progress vs. preserving the natural order. Movies like Fern Gully and Avatar, as already mentioned, handle these themes in a fairly simplistic and I would even say hamfisted manner, whereby all progress and technology is shown as being inherently “bad” and in service to “evil”, while everything that’s “natural” is shown to be inherently “good”. Even our notions of good and evil, and right vs. wrong, are challenged by Miyazaki, with nearly all of his characters having complex motives and multiple dimensions to them, as well as understandable reasons for doing the things that they do. Rarely can any one of his characters be branded as a simple “villain”, and rarely is any one individual the source of conflict in his stories, again in contrast to most Western narratives.
I’ll reiterate once more, a simple, straightforward narrative is not inherently a bad thing, whether the themes being dealt with are romantic or anything else. Sometimes it is in fact the best approach. But the best stories in my opinion are usually the most nuanced, that challenge our notions of what we believe to be true, and that force us to think about what we do with our lives and what we could do differently. To that end Miyazaki introduces all manner of themes and motifs within his films that are familiar to us but shows them in a light most of us might not have considered, thus giving more dimension to our understanding of things.
“How is any of this related to Star Wars?” you might ask. It is quite related, and you don’t even have to look all that closely to see it. A very influential figure within Star Wars was very heavily inspired by the works of Miyazaki, and that figure is Dave Filoni.
This video shows the connections in some detail:
https://youtu.be/Q_4L0BbSpHo?si=04jDo6qFCnZT135w
But to summarize if you’ve seen any of Miyazaki’s films, especially Princess Mononoke, I think the callbacks in Filoni’s work will be all too obvious, especially in Star Wars Rebels. Some of the scenes in Filoni’s work look like they were taken directly from Miyazki’s films, and many of the same themes and motifs often come up. The relationship between San and Ashitaka I would argue is very similar to the relationship between Ezra and Sabine, and not just because both couples rode wolves together.
Incidentally, Dave Filoni was also heavily involved in Avatar: The Last Airbender, which I would also argue was at least to some degree inspired if not by Miyazaki then by Japanese anime in general. The relationship between Aang and Katara was developed with great care and was allowed to build very slowly, as opposed to simply shipping them. Likewise other characters very gradually developed as individuals and in their relationships, at times stumbling as they did so, and making mistakes, before finding their way back to the right path.
All of this is in stark contrast to George Lucas, whose character development is often very rushed at best, and at times some might say almost non-existent. So essentially, even though Lucas has said that Filoni has been “like a son” to him, and I believe referred to Filoni as his “padawan”, I would argue that Filoni is ultimately as much a student of Miyazaki as he is of Lucas.
Again, you might ask, “What does all this mean for Star Wars?” It means a great many things. It means that Dave Filoni has taken Miyazaki’s lessons to heart, and can handle things like romance, as well as other kinds of relationships, quite well most of the time. Like Miyazaki he can play with romance, tease the audience with it at times even, leave the romance unrequited, and yet still have it feel satisfying. A prime example of this is the love triangle that Ahsoka was involved in with the young Separatist Senator, Lux Bonteri, and Steela Gerrera. As wary as I am of romance and as much as I despise shipping, love triangles I normally despise even more, but this one seemed to actually work. It never took over the main story, and even though Ahsoka’s feelings were ultimately not reciprocated, she still learned from the experience, and grew and developed further as a character because of it. The other characters involved in this triangle also grew and developed from their involvement, though unfortunately not all of them made it. All in all it was a good bit of storytelling and gave the audience something to consider.
When a relationship in one of Filoni’s stories does bloom into a full blown romance he also generally handles it quite well. For one Filoni is sparing with actual romance, so that when it does occur, it can be that much more appreciated. And rather than rushing or shipping it, Filoni normally takes his time to build it up. An example of this is the relationship between Kanan and Hera. Some might argue that this is perhaps the best developed romance in all of Star Wars, at least in Canon. Built up over four seasons, at times it wasn’t certain whether it was a romance or a friendship, or perhaps even a professional partnership. Perhaps even the characters themselves were not certain, though it was hinted all throughout the narrative that something was going on. To this day I don’t believe anyone can say definitively when it became an actual romance, and I believe Filoni did this intentionally because he wanted to be subtle, rather than making things too obvious and having the romance take over the narrative, as it usually does. When it finally did become obvious as to what was happening, it felt very much earned, in a way that is seldom accomplished in other works of fiction, including Star Wars.
The relationship between Ezra and Sabine was also fairly well written, for the most part anyway, at least in Star Wars Rebels. Ezra was almost immediately smitten with Sabine, but being a young teenage boy, it was understandable that he would feel that way about an attractive girl. Over time he learned to see her more respectfully, as a colleague and even as part of his adopted family, not just as a pretty face. Sabine for her part found Ezra annoying at first (c’mon, what teenage boy isn’t?), but as he matured and she found out more about him she came to understand and respect him more, and see him as a friend and almost a brother, with there being potential for something more.
There were times when the relationship could have been better written, like in the episode “Blood Sisters”, where Ezra was written to be a bit too immature to make Sabine look wiser. But overall, the bond between them developed fairly well; both saved one another at various times, and took risks and made sacrifices for each other’s sake. Both reassured and comforted the other when they needed it, and it was endearing to hear their banter when they became more familiar and trusting of each other.
So why then was I so disappointed in how they were portrayed in the Ahsoka show? The thing is, after how well their relationship was built up in Rebels, as I’ve already mentioned it was strange to see how lackluster and uninspired their reunion was.
Within the Ahsoka show itself Sabine was shown to be almost obsessed with finding Ezra, living in what used to be his home, watching a recording of him over and over again, and calling out his name as she woke up in the middle of the night. She even risked bringing Thrawn back into the Galaxy, which ultimately happened, just so she could see Ezra again. After all that, when she finally does encounter him, her reaction seems fairly casual, as does his, as if they’ve been apart for no more than a week, rather than 10 years. Not too much happens between them afterwards either. Like I said Ezra does not appear all that curious about what happened with Sabine, how she found him, and how it was that she was now Force sensitive. Sabine likewise did not seem curious about what had happened with Ezra, and how he had gotten away from Thrawn. And with Ezra rescued and returned home, suddenly it didn’t seem as though Sabine was all that interested in him anymore, nor he all that concerned with her, though they were just as far apart as they had been at the start of the show. To be completely honest it made me wonder what the point of the whole show was. Were they just working to set up Thrawn’s return to the Galaxy? As some have said, Ezra felt like nothing more than a Macguffin in the show. Was Sabine and Ahsoka’s search for him just a plot device?
Considering how skillfully Dave Filoni had written his stories in the past, what happened in this latest project of his does not make much sense. Was he so concerned about “shipping” and so desperate to avoid it that he inadvertently “shipped” them in the other direction? Was there some sort of external pressure on him about how to write this story to have more of an appeal to “modern audiences”? Maybe some combination of those factors?
And here I’ll add that when I say “modern audiences” I don’t mean that in a contemptuous sense, though you may think I do. If there is any contempt on my part it is for those in charge of telling our stories, or those in charge of those telling our stories, who do not seem to grasp these basic truths. The truth is that audiences at their core don’t really change throughout the ages, only superficially so. Trends come and go but certain truths and ideals are eternal, and universal. How people relate to each other fundamentally does not change, whether they are friends, or more than friends. And deep down, I believe everyone (or nearly everyone at least) wants the same things. Nearly everyone at some point wants some kind of a connection with another human being, to know that they are not alone in the world, and to know that there is someone else who sees and understands things as they do. While this desire can certainly lead to abuse, and absolutely has, it is still innate to us and is not inherently wrong. Finding ways of connecting and relating to other people is one of the great challenges of life, but many would argue it is the most worthwhile of challenges. It may be the whole point of life if you think about it. As complex as it may be, many would argue it is what makes life worth living, and likewise makes for the best stories. Just as it may be the whole point of life many would say that is what most stories are about at their core: people trying to relate to one another.
Sadly, just as in real life, most stories unfortunately don’t quite get it, and the Ahsoka show in my opinion was an example of this, made all the sadder by the fact that Dave Filoni had done quite well with these characters up to that point. We may never know for certain what exactly went wrong and why, or if it can ever be “fixed” at this point, but I can’t help but feel curious. Maybe in the future Filoni will find a way to make it make sense, but I’m not sure how. And to be completely honest I don’t feel quite as enthusiastic to find out as I used to.
Also for the record I would like to add here that there are other factors that put me off from the show, such as Sabine’s Force sensitivity, that came about without much build up. But in this article I specifically wanted to focus on shipping because there seems to be so much misunderstanding around it.
I hope that I was able to clarify some, if not most of this misunderstanding, so that people could better appreciate what shipping is, where it comes from, as well as what it isn’t. Many people today are understandably sick of shipping characters, myself included. But I hope people realize that in overcompensating for something, we often come back around into the very thing that we are overcompensating for. Or sometimes, into something even worse. This may apply to nearly every facet of life, by the way, not just shipping. Finding a happy medium in how we portray our fictional relationships may help us to better understand relationships in real life, as well as how to navigate them. Neither fictional nor actual relationships can ever be perfect but they can always be better. To this understanding then I hope that I was able to give my own modest contribution, and if nothing else I hope we can connect on that.