Awesome / Darths & Droids

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

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• The writers gave us the line "Jar Jar, you're a genius," and actually made it credible. See the monumental moment here.
• The point in Phantasmal Malevolence when Maul starts to talk, leading neatly to the reveal of his true allegiance. Up until then the story had, with a few variants, been basically Episode I. And then Maul suddenly turns everything on its head, catching readers off guard.
  • In general, the accomplishment of managing to use nothing but screencaps from the Star Wars movies and crafting an entirely original story with little resemblance to the original, which somehow manages to be even more complex yet comprehensible.
• "I never thought anyone would ever say this, but suddenly Jar Jar is disturbing."
• Sally talking back to the railroading Pete. "I don't care about your stupid stats!"
• Annie beats Pete at his own game.
  Annie: You haven't forgotten the + 1 bonus, right?
  Pete: What bonus?
  Annie: The morale bonus. For watching R2 fly.
  (beat)
  Pete: ... Right.
• "En passant!"
• In the Force Arm Wrestling Contest, Sally's "I lift the entire planet!". And she actually gets away with it on a technicality.
• General Grievous: "Air is for suckers."
  • "I see you have no wings. Let me show you mine."
• Annie goes from drama queen to total badass.
  • Then, Annie, now playing Anakin, talks Pete into blowing up the trade federation ship.
  • Forget all that. Jim managed to construct a massive plan - and ensure that every decision made at every level of this plan's construction was as stupid and self-destructive as it could have been - and it works. Partly due to the fact that Annie is also awesome.
• Awesome plan, indeed.
• "Has that made you angry? I think it's made you angry."
• Politicians have to make the tough decisions.
• Jim roleplaying the scene where Anakin force-strangles Padme. For once, he's perfectly in character, completely serious, with no silly talk about loot or XP. His roleplaying is so superb that Annie actually asks him to stop for a moment, just to tell him how much she loves him for it.
• The Darkest Hour of Episode III comes when Obi-Wan is the only thing standing between the antagonists and victory, not because he's the only player still alive, but because the other players are willing to allow the galactic conquest to happen since they'll be in a position of power when it does.
  R2-D2: For crying out loud, Ben. The rest of us are okay with ruling the Galaxy. What part of that don't you like?
  Obi-Wan: I wrote "Good" on my character sheet and I jolly well meant it! Unlike some people!
• Sally, during her fight with Palpatine, actually starts verbally smacking him around like a badass.
  Palpatine: My job is to look after the people of the republic.
  Sally/Yoda: That doesn't make you a good man.
  
  Palpatine: I'll look after them long after your rebellion is dead.
  Sally: People need their freedom to prosper!
  • She admits that the final quote is from the blurb of The Prince, which is a rather poor summation of Machiavelli's ideas, but the point still stands.
• "I am the legend."
• The whole segment with Pete's special die.
  Die armed
• The last line from Episode III:
  Obi-Wan: I have a good feeling about this.
• We finally see Summon Bigger Fish!
• Sally finally blows up at Pete after 6-8 years of Pete verbally abusing Ben.
• As Pete and Sally flee in the escape pod, the Imperial gunners, unlike in the movie, are smart enough to realize that droids can pilot a ship without giving off life readings and are about to fire...only to discover something's short-circuited their guns.
  Artoo: Oh, yeah, baby.
• Pete Briar Patching Corey into removing Artoo's restraining bolt. What's really awesome is that Pete could successfully argue that the bolt's Mind Control would make Artoo earnestly plead not to have the bolt removed. The GM seems to be fully aware of this.
  Corey: I take it. What happens?
  GM: Pete just earned 50 XP.
• Ben's return. After spending a few sessions MIA, Ben finally returns. With a beard to boot!
• Without missing a beat or trying to convince Corey, Ben manages to persuade him in-character to not only let Sally and Pete go but also pursue the greater plot of the session in a search for his true identity.
• The planet that Vader destroys not being Alderaan, but NABOO. They manage to write the sequence of strips before it, revealing the identity of Vader early (actually surprising people), making Tarkin a good guy opposed to this (again surprising the crap out of everyone reading the strips) and actually making this sequence go from "We knew this was coming" to a very heartwrenching, "He... he didn't?" moment because for the Darths and Droids readers, Naboo is has been a place they've become emotionally attached to. Oh. And JAR JAR WAS ON THE PLANET. Pete says it best.
  Pete: "You. Utter. Frakking. Bastard."
• The GM gets one in episode 778, when his and the players' characters are playing a game within a game: he predicted that Pete's/R2-D2's character would backstab his/Chewbacca's character at the first chance and loot his corpse, so he made sure it would backfire on him by putting a cursed item in his own coin purse.
  Chewbacca: Let's discuss how you're going to pay for my resurrection, shall we?
• The GM gets another one in episode 796 when Pete declares that he's going to hit the back doors he'd installed on the Peace Moon despite not being around there at all. He triggers an alarm doing so and the next episode has him constantly triggering one alarm after another.
• Sally escapes the Clone Troopers with Pete...using knock knock jokes.
• Jim's Awesomeness by Analysis saving the party in episode 822.
  • To put this in perspective, Jim, the Cloudcuckoolander of the group, managed to brace a trash compactor with the very trash it was designed to compress, even though Annie had already pointed out how impractical that would be.
• Han and Chewie returning at the end of the attack on the Peace Moon as Vader and his controlled pilots are lining up their shot on Luke. The pair take out one of Vader's wingmen and break his concentration, causing him to lose control of his other wingman and make it spiral out of control, clipping Vader's fighter and sending it spiralling out of control into space.
  Han: Suddenly, the Millennium Falcon appears behind Vader!
  Chewbacca: All for'ard cannons fire!
• Corey (playing as Luke) decides to hold his ground against the Imperial walkers while everybody else is fleeing for their lives. The GM has previously killed off Player Characters without flinching, so plot armor won’t save him. He not only survives the assault on his own, he kills every last walker in a rampage that shakes the foundations of the base.
  Luke: (over the radio) Come on, you too! Oh, you want some of this?
  (Explosions from Luke's rampage cease)
  Leia: Luke! Are you okay?
  Luke: (over the radio) I killed them. I killed them all.
  Artoo: Noooooo!
  • Even better, while Dak became a Forgotten Fallen Friend in the original, here his death fuels Luke with such rage that he destroys three AT-ATs on his own.
• The revelation that Jim has been Obfuscating Stupidity the entire time (as Han — Qui-Gon, Padme, Saw, and Jyn have no excuse) since he was staying in character and wanted to convincingly roleplay his character as a guy who always comes up with idiotic schemes.
• The fact that Jim/Han was The Mole and had given the Empire information on all Rebel activities, and was the reason they escaped the Peace Moon, and even the droid situation on Hoth. Give this guy a medal! And for bonus points, give Ben a medal too. Not bad for Obfuscating Stupidity!
• Han gives a "Facing the Bullets" One-Liner that Jim immediately turns into a sequence of actions that should result in them escaping without any allies being frozen. "I break my bonds, flip out of the chamber concealed by the rising steam, rip open a hose, and freeze the bad guys!" Without any sort of objection, the GM starts listing the rolls he needs to make. Either (A) Jim came up with that on the fly, and the GM didn't even think to contest it, or (B) they talked about that in advance, and the GM thought it would be awesome. The actual act is negated by a 2 on the second roll, but the fact that the GM would have gone through with it otherwise is still amazing.
• Lando deceives Vader and Boba Fett into thinking that Han has been killed by the carbon freezing procedure, saving Leia and giving him an opportunity to rescue her, Chewie and C-3PO and escape.
• The writers wished to make The Reveal as powerful as it had been back in the theaters — they wanted the readers to feel what those having watched the film had felt, back in 1980, upon witnessing one of the greatest twists in movie history. They succeeded.
  • Immediately after, Vader tells Luke that We Can Rule Together. Luke's response?
    Luke: Heh, I'm perfectly positioned to choose. Between the frying pan and the fire... I choose... fire. You're not the boss of me! MUM!
• A two-parter: Not only has Pete apparently been writing an internally-consistent language for the beep sound-effect program for his phone since Episode I, Ben has actually been paying attention to this and taking detailed notes. This comes in handy near the end of Episode V when Ben is able to tell that R2's beeps don't match what Pete is saying and he realizes that Nute Gunray is still possessing him.
  • And then he tricks Gunray into plugging into the Falcon, which recently had a very powerful anti-virus program installed, freeing Artoo.
• Admiral Piett certainly isn't incompetent in canon, but in this comic he takes it to a whole new level. He routinely mouths of to Vader without consequence because he's too good to kill.
• Cory (Luke) gets a big one in 1261. When the party is captured and about to be dumped into the Sarlacc Pit, Artoo (Pete) launches a Lightsaber towards Lando (an allied NPC) for him to use. After being maimed by a Laser Sword in cloud city, Cory (Luke) has developed a deep fear of such weapons, and correctly surmises that Lando will kill himself while attempting to use it. He immediately overcomes his paranoia, engages in a series of acrobatic stunts that nearly dump him into the pit, grabs the sword himself, and proceeds to kick ass with a weapon he is deeply afraid of.
  • And the best part is, Pete planned on this all along.
• Back in Phantasmal Malevolence and Silence of the Clones: THE ENTIRETY of the webcomic's take on Darth Maul, Jango Fett, Zam Wesell, and Boba Fett is really insanely awesome.
  • Ditto General Grevious, though not to the same extent. The comic generally seems to have a habit of taking the more interesting characters from the movies and making them even more so.
• 1383: While captured by the Ewoks—who in this incarnation are greedy disciples of Nute Gunray—Sally manages not only to trick them into believing that C-3PO is Gunray & into releasing the party, but also to convince them to fight the approaching Imperials to defend capitalism.
  • Even better? Sally, completely on the fly, managed to make up enough capitalist bullshit dogma to convince an army of free marketers. She's going to make a fine activist.
• The rebels gets an offscreen one in episode VI. Remember when Han ordered them to build a fort to protect their (crashed) shuttle? They did that. And then defended the fort so fervently that six platoons of the Empire's finest troops could not breach it, taking a hundred imperial lives for each of their own lost. The huge army that ambushes Han's team at the shield generator? Those are the few who managed to retreat.
• Episode One is being performed as a LIVE STAGE PLAY.
• The Irregulars were able to turn Rogue One into the campaign between Episodes III and IV (that was originally meant to be just a Noodle Incident) without any glaring Plot Holes and only very minor retcons (e.g. Kyle Katarn chopping off his hand being part of his backstory rather than an in-game event). It must have been tremendous amount of work to check all the throw-away jokes and make it consistent with the movie that came out much later.
  • They did have to change a lot (mostly character names) since they were making jokes at the Star Wars Legends continuity, but beyond that, everything fits remarkably well. And yes, they re-read every strip they'd published prior to make sure they kept continuity, when it would have been so much easier to just drop retcons and "misremembered" handwaves in.
• Remember when K-2SO catches a grenade in the movie then casually throws it over his shoulders? This is played completely straight, with the addition that K2 and Bria end up having an entire conversation before he throws it away.
• K-2SO's Heroic Sacrifice is played dead straight with Sally getting one hell of a final action in.
  K-2SO: I'll implement a hardware locks so the troopers can't get them!
  GM: With your hacking skill?
  K-2SO: No. A brute force attack.
  (K-2SO smashes the control panel while going down in a storm of blaster fire.)
• The awesome scene in Rogue One where the two star destroyers crash into the shield gate? That happens here too, except that it was entirely Jim's batshit crazy plan that he made up on the fly. And not in the way that Jim had the idea then left it to admiral Raddus to see it through. Jim actually ordered the bombing run that disabled the star destroyer, then ordered Raddus to ram it into the shieldgate.
• Knowing that Annie is playing one of the enemy troopers, Jim starts trying to shoot hers down, as another PC is a more difficult opponent than masses of Mooks commanded by the GM. The first trooper he shoots down after making that decision... isn't Annie's.
  Finn: You shot my buddy! Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds!
  Poe: Uh oh.
  • And then a couple strips later, when Annie is demanding that the shooter show himself so her character may exact vengeance on Jim's character, the passion and power of her performance was enough to make Jim... decline the confrontation. That's right, Annie made a character so terrifying, it gave one of Jim's characters a sense of self-preservation.
    Finn: Show yourself!
    Poe: I... don't think I will.
• When Annie learns that Pete recently defended a serial stalker in court, she lays into him as if he were an Amoral Attorney. Pete shuts her down in brilliantly by pointing out why our legal system works.
  Annie: How to put this... How in good conscience can you defend people who, realistically, have most likely done such awful things?
  Pete: It's not about that. The state is trying to lock someone in a cage against their will. It has huge resources at its disposal. The defendant has me. The state doesn't get to lock up citizens if it can't establish guilt within the law. I'm there to make sure the rules are followed.
  Annie: Hmmm.
  Pete: That guy was found guilty. After the fact, I'm glad he got put away. But more glad that it was done by the book, and not by abuse of power.
• After several campaigns of Pete getting away with having flaws that hardly ever inconvenience him, he made the mistake of taking "Never Gets A Good Parking Space." The GM has had this come up every single time Rey interacts with a vehicle (it does say "Never" after all), meaning it's already come up more than any of Pete's character's other flaws (except Artoo's droid speak).
• The amazing In-Universe Retcon that kicks in here. The GM sets the scene with Hux and Kylo approaching the Peace Moon.
  GM: [W]hat you destroyed 30 years ago was a defence platform orbiting the forest moon of Endor.
  Jim: That huge thing [destroyed at the end of Episode VI] wasn't the Peace Moon?
  GM: That was no moon. It was a space station. They built the second Peace Moon into an actual moon....
  Pete: What moo- Holy crap!! The forest moon is the Peace Moon!
  • Even better, it wasn't a retcon. It was foreshadowed back in Episode VI when Palpatine arrives at the station and is told that the Peace Moon is nearing completion, and the defense platform is finished.
• In this version of events, Finn is actually a First Order double agent trying to infiltrate the Resistance. Han sees through the guise in less than a day, pointing to both how Finn seemed weirdly curious about the inner workings of the Resistance and that he himself was a 5 times traitor and can spot one a mile away.
• Pete's reasoning for how Chandrila survived being destroyed by the Peace Moon:
  R2-D2: Remember on Takodana we saw the destruction of a planetary system?
  BB-8: Some of us did, but sure.
  R2-D2: Light from that explosion would have taken years to reach Takodana. Ergo, the explosion must have happened years ago. I posit that the system we saw explode was Hosnian, not Chandrila. It was 50 light years from Takodana, so it must have blown up 50 years ago. Furthermore, Hosnian was 50 light years from Endor, where they fired the Peace Moon blast. The beam should have taken 50 years to reach Hosnian. And it did. Propagating backwards in time. The First Order aimed at Chandrila, but didn’t realise Hosnian was in the way, because it isn’t there any more. The beam arrived 50 years ago, when Hosnian was there. It destroyed Nute Gunray’s bases on “Caldota” and “Courtsirius”. i.e. Cardota and Courtsilius in the Hosnian system. Check and mate.
  • And Hux has figured this out too. Which makes this another posthumous Awesome moment for Galen Erso.
    General Hux: Galen Erso has pulled another of his stunts. The Cataclysm Beam doesn’t work as we thought.
    Snoke: Did it not destroy Chandrila?
    General Hux: We’ve decrypted some of his notes. It seems he designed the weapon to impress Imperial officials. They wanted to see a nice explosion. Erso realized if there were a significant time delay, it’d be his head on a platter. Rather than go to the bother of explaining the physics, he thought it would be easier to just make the Beam travel backwards in time. If it takes minus 10 years to reach a target, light from the explosion reaches the viewer 10 years later, just after the button was pressed. Our Beam traveled 50 light years, moving back in time. Fifty years ago, Hosnian was in the direct line of sight to Chandrila. So the Hosnian catastrophe of 50 years ago was caused by, well... us.
• When Corey called out his gaming group for hassling a female gamer, they responded by doxxing him and sending him threats and then hacked Annie's website to replace all her videos with misogynistic rants. As soon as it came to light, Pete immediately left to help Annie fix it by contacting her web host to reset her password, and then collected evidence and made legal requests to the hackers' ISPs in order to file charges against them.
  GM: Remind me never to hack Pete. Except in Shadowrun, of course.
• Kylo Ren vs Finn is excellent just for the sheer demonstration of how one good roll can make a difference. Finn's history of laser swordsmanship consists of one clash with a friend who was trying to make sure he didn't hurt himself with it, which most likely means he is swinging that thing around without modifiers. Kylo is an experienced Force user with much greater laser sword experience, and is rightly handing Finn a Curb-Stomp Battle. Enter the natural 20.
  Kylo: I am a lithe and adroit cat, playing with a feeble mouse. [...]
  (Finn locks laser swords with Kylo)
  Finn: Woof.
• After the GM keeps suspiciously giving benefits to Rey against Kylo, after Sally/Kylo starts complaining, Pete then deduces how it's possible: the modulator cone Rey pulled from the hexagon building several panels before (No Name)'s fateful meeting with Ren, and its time effects are giving her the advantages while also breaking down the Peace Moon II.
• In this strip, Leia overpowers Kylo's finger on the trigger to keep him from firing on the bridge. He one-ups her by reminding her that he has wingmen, and they fire instead.
• In this strip, Jim dupes the GM into making it easier to escape the cell by having DJ use a foil chocolate wrapper to trick the optical lock.
  GM: Curses! Foiled again.

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