#//But also the complete self-indulgence of what we were robbed of in canon that I so desperately crave. >-<< /div>
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kingspuppet · 2 years ago
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I just think some of the Thieves should be really close friends....yeah friends...with Goro. >.> Friends that commit the cardinal sin of public hand holding...
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azrielrose · 4 years ago
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overly long Chilling Adventures of Sabrina Pt 1-4 Spoilers below the cut:
Stream of consciousness time.   I liked this show, though it wandered a bit...too many cheerleading/singing scenes, thanks Glee, I guess.  Loved the aesthetic, some of the clothes I’ll remember forever.  Lilith was obviously a fav, freakin Michelle Gomez.  It was hard to watch her character fade a bit in 3 and into 4, so I was savagely glad she got her vengeance, AND all the power.  A lot of people are upset she ate Adam, but I feel it was in character, rather than let Lucifer raise her son the way you know he would’ve.  She’s understandable, she’s not Good.
Nick, I always liked him best for Sabrina, I was obviously excited in the most evil ways when they gave him SPN Sam’s storyline, sacrificing himself and getting stuck with/tortured by the devil...they even also heavily implied that he was raped by lucifer.  After, he suffers PTSD, abusing alcohol and drugs, becoming oversexed, self harming.  Sabrina’s kind of a dick about it, but I thought that was somewhat understandable.  She’s just a teen after all, it’s not weird for kids to wish the person in their lives with mental illness would just (suck it up/act normal) bounce back and not understand when they can’t.  But then the show validates her pov rather than correcting it.  She literally tells him off for making his ‘melodrama’ her problem, or something.  And that’s what seemingly snaps him out of it--we don’t see ptsd from him again.  That’s pretty fucked up.  I mean, if you’re going to write canonical rape/torture trauma for a character, you should have to follow it through at least somewhat responsibly, rather then send a message that a ptsd response is somehow self-indulgent and can be handled with will power or some shit.  (We SPN fans were blessed to have Jarpad, who protected this aspect of Sam’s trauma as best he could, sometimes with no help from the writers.)
As for Sabrina M, I thought it was stupid that she’s blinded to that clay kid’s true intentions.  She knew who and what he was the entire time she competed with him and was as vicious as she had to be to win.  If her Morningstar side was her ambitious, power hungry side who fought so hard to be Queen of Hell, where did it all go?  All the sudden she’s a starry eyed kid who believes in insta romance because he says the right words.  She already knew he’d lie and betray her in a second for the Crown.  That makes no sense.  Why did she need to be with him or anyone, to the point where she gets married at 16?  Where did all the early seasons Girl Power energy go?  
Funny, though, that they just pretended Lucifer wasn’t trying to make her his incest/child bride the season before.  S2 he was like ‘uh call me father but only in private’ and now he’s all ‘my daughter that I care so much for’.  Did they get a lot of shit over that, and decide to just pretend it away?  It’s a shame, because they had that storyline where she was Lucifer’s Sword, and merging witches and humans make more powerful witches and they just..........dropped it.  For this Morningstar Nuclear Family Plus Caliban the Husband shit.  That red wedding dress was killer tho omg.
Ugh.  Anything else that matters?  Zelda and Mambo were robbed for no reason, that was crap.  I love Zelda.  I LOVE Hilda.  I was so happy when they did the au ep with Hilda and Zelda from sitcom StTW, complete with puppet Salem.
Oh, and that ending, w the actual F?  He killed himself to be with her?  People are reacting like, wow, writers legit had a mentally ill teen character kill himself because he thought life wasn’t worth living without his gf, and posed it as a Happy Ending.  But it’s worse, because by then they were pretending he shook his mental illness off, or Love Cured It or some shit.  So, Romantic Love cures mental illness, but only as long as the SO is alive.  Yikes.
Also they stole the Void scene from that time Squidward went too far in the future.  That’s all I could see.  I guess it’s not terrible the show hasn’t been renewed.  Great characters, but the storylines didn’t know where to go anymore.
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mothmansmilkman · 6 years ago
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Big ol Information Sheet About My JJBA Part 5 OC That I Love (AKA I know im the only one who cares about this but i gotta put my self-indulgent shit SOMEWHERE)
TW for weapons, child abuse and endangerment, and other canon-typical Jojo stuff 
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Name: Rio (last name unknown)
Stand: White Room
Age: Unknown, but assumed to be 14 (celebrates the day she was discovered after her attempted murder like a birthday)
Height: 5′2″
Favorite Food: Cherry pastries
Favorite Movie: The Little Mermaid
Favorite Band: Nirvana
BACKSTORY
Rio doesn't remember much about her childhood, but she remembers living in a house with a loving mother and father.
Her life was changed one night when she was 4 years old. As her mother layed her in her bed, she told Rio that no matter what she heard downstairs to not scream or go down there.
A terrified Rio heard the sounds of her parents being murdered hours later. As the perpetrator was searching the house, he discovered Rio huddled in her bed. But, instead of killing her along with the rest of her family, he decided to kidnap her.
For years, Rio was kept a slave in that person's house. Only hearing of the outside world through TV, radio, and overhearing conversations between houseguests, she had begun to have fantasies of what the world outside the house must be like.
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She would find out on the day she was murdered. In the middle of the night, her kidnapper took Rio to an alley armed with a Stand Arrow. Since a Stand Arrow leaves no visible wound after the act, he assumed that Rio would die and whoever found her body would assume she was a runaway that died from malnutrition or something.
However, Rio awoke hours after having the arrow stabbed into her abdomen. But strangely, the alley she remembered being in had changed into a pink castle. With the small bits of knowledge she had, she just thought to herself "I must be dead. So this must be what heaven looks like..." and went back to sleep. 
Now Here’s Where We Get Self-Insert-y!
I’d like to imagine if Rio would end up in any of the canon Vento Aureo groups, she would be in La Squadra because 
1. I want to see these dudes dealing with a literal child
2. There’s a line in the song White Room “She was kindness in the hard crowd” and I like when the musical references tie in to the character’s personality. 
At the time of Rio being discovered, I personally headcanon that La Squadra wasn’t fully formed, and the only members being there were Risotto, Sorbet, Gelato, Formaggio, Proscuitto, and Melone. (Illuso, Pesci, and Ghiacchio would be the more recent members) (Sorry if all this is wrong, i havent actually read the manga ;_;)
Anyway, one of the members would be concerned about a pink castle being where a pink castle would not usually be. And they would be more concerned when no one else on the street even payed attention to it, as if it wasn’t there. But, as if the Stand knew someone was there, a door appeared on the castle’s wall. Hesitantly, they opened the door, ready for a battle. 
...instead, they saw a disheveled, malnourished, young girl curled up on the dirty ground. When she opened her eyes and stared up at him, she finally spoke. 
“God? ...how long have I been dead?”
Eventually, the gangster would take Rio to their home and ask for her story. The original plan was to let the child take a bath, have a meal, and then take her to an orphanage. However, certain details made the gangster feel more pity, like how Rio didn’t know enough about her past to remember her own last name or birthday. But, as soon as she described her “death” via a gold arrow, the assassin realized something bigger. 
If someone had access to a Stand Arrow, there was a chance they were part of Passione. It would be dangerous to leave Rio alone. This would eventually (after explaining the situation to Risotto), lead to Rio becoming a resident of the La Squadra safehouse. 
Life With La Squadra
Rio would be hesitant at first to ask La Squadra for anything. Not just because they’re intimidating criminals, but because she was already grateful for everything they had done for her. They saved her life, but also bought her clothes and things a kid would need. They also figured out that she was probably 10 years old. Her only request upon being given permission to live in the safehouse was that she would be taught how to read. 
As time passed, the walls, both mental and physical (White Room’s fault for the physical ones), between Rio and the other members began to fall. She had begun to view every member as a father figure, even referring to them as “Papa [name]”. 
Learning to read also showed the members that Rio was intelligent along with being kind. She had developed a habit of checking out books from the city’s library and copying the text by hand into a notebook as she read it, giving her a copy of her own. While she enjoyed children’s books, she enjoyed non-fiction even more, because it gave her more information about the outside world. 
The other members would actually be happy to take Rio out in public when they weren’t on missions. (Especially Formaggio because hed act like she was his real daughter to try and look like a dilf) It would always be entertaining to go from having an intelligent conversation with a booksmart 10 year old to watching them get excited over ice cream or a big teddy bear. 
Rio’s favorite things to collect would be stuffed animals and warm blankets. Also books, but she copies hers from the library, so she feels no reason to want to buy any. 
Despite being happy and calm most of the time, Rio still has trauma from her past. Certain triggers will suddenly end up with White Room suddenly appearing around Rio, with the memory in question being displayed on the walls for all of the members near her to see. When White Room fades, Rio has usually started crying, and needs a few minutes before she can speak again. 
When Rio eventually started copying medical textbooks, she asked (because no one hid the fact that La Squadra killed people) if they could bring a corpse back so she could dissect a body herself. Sorbet and Gelato would be the only ones to say yes, and actually follow through. 
Rio eventually learns about Christmas. On her first December 25th with the gang, she gives everyone a knife painted in their favorite color. 
Since I headcanon Pesci and Ghiacchio as the youngest of the La Squadra boys, Rio would call them her Big Brothers. 
White Room
The whole time she’s with La Squadra, Rio has been training White Room. Eventually, she learned her stand has 3 abilities:
1. It can create a room.
2. It can manipulate the room. The size, the color, etc. She can even display her own thoughts onto the walls. 
3. If she understands something completely, she can create a copy of it that only exists inside the room. 
Rio realizes she can use her stand for killing was when she was 11. A stranger trying to rob her while she was running an errand alone brought up a fight-or-flight reaction, leading to White Room crushing the attacker as if they were inside a trash compactor. 
When Rio learns that she can copy items that she understands, the first thing she asks is to learn how a gun works. The rest of La Squadra had known she would end up as part of Passione someday, because honestly they couldn’t see her having anywhere else to go, but they were wary of letting her join THEIR part of Passione since there was a very high likelihood of death. However, Rio quickly learned the ins and outs of weapons. She proved herself to be worthy as a member of La Squadra when she completed a mission, killing a man by slitting his throat with a knife created by White Room. At 11 and a half years old (possibly because no one really knows how old she is), she became the youngest official member of Passione at the time (and possibly youngest ever). 
Rio prefers to work with her father figures on missions rather than work alone. Her strategy is to secure the perimeter of the area with White Room, so the target can’t escape and no one else can enter. Then, she waits with a sniper rifle. She wants to have her papas and brothers backs, and act as support in their battles. It makes her feel like she’s returning the support they always gave her. 
How Rio Would End Up In The Events of Vento Aureo
Rio would be 12 years old when Sorbet and Gelato die. As the picture frames were being opened, she would recognize a body part as something she saw in a medical book. 
The realization that it was her Papa Sorbet’s body would click in her mind, but she’d refuse to believe it. As the members of the team place the frames in order, they all start to regret letting Rio be in the same room. 
She later gets the news of Gelato’s death. 
Rio openly weeps at the funeral. This was the first time her heart ever truly felt broken, since she wasn’t old enough when her real parents died to really remember them. It takes Rio a while to start acting like her old self again. Like the rest of La Squadra, she never forgives the Boss for this. Despite feeling anger when Risotto told the gang to just “Forget about Sorbet and Gelato”, she understood that any act of revenge that wasn’t thoroughly planned out would make her or worse, more of her papas and brothers to suffer the same fate. 
AU Where Bucci Gang and La Squadra Team Up Because That’s What I Wish Would’ve Happened (Also i just dont want to write Rio dying like they do in canon)
Seriously tho if Giorno or maybe buccellati would've gone on the shopping trip this au probably wouldve happened
Rio would be 14 at the time Giorno happened and the events of Vento Aureo took place. 
Rio would love having people closer to her age around. I imagine she'd become friends with Narancia and Fugo (because Narancia can have fun and can give her the childhood fun she never had, and Fugo because finally someone with brain cells). I imagine she’d see one of their study sessions one day and just join. 
Tbh Trish and Rio need each other. They need other girls in their lives.
Rio is okay with Mista, but likes Sex Pistols more. Buccellati wishes it wasnt too late for him to adopt her
If the boat scene would still happen in this AU, I think Rio would go with Fugo. It's not that she's scared of fighting the Boss, it's because La Squadra doesn't know if they can handle her dying at such a young age. They tell Fugo that if he's leaving, to take Rio with him in order to track down any possible living relatives (or anyone who could possibly know Rio's true identity)
Before they leave, Rio tells the group to find her again when they come back. She had faith that with their numbers and combined abilities, the 2 gangs could take down whatever was in their path. Sadly, when Giorno reaches out after the events of VA, only a few survived.
Rio would, of course, end up joining Passione again like in Purple Haze Feedback. This last image is a design of an older Rio (maybe age 16-18)
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shadowsong26fic · 7 years ago
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Let’s Go Steal A Crossover: Part 1
No real plot here, this is mostly the background/backstory details.
Note/Disclaimer: this particular outline features an OC of mine and as a result is fairly self-indulgent. Because what else are crack outlines for?
That out of the way, here we go!
For the Leverage crew:
This is more or less in a S3 sort of environment--they may or may not be chasing Space Damien Moreau, but in terms of their team dynamic, etc., that’s where they are.
(Let’s be real, though, they are TOTALLY chasing Space Damien Moreau.)
(Who is, as in Leverage canon, very much a power-behind-the-throne kind of guy.)
(I.e., he is not a Moff or an Admiral or a planetary ruler or a sector governor or anything like that.)
(He just happens to have quite a few of them in his pocket.)
(He’s not affiliated with Black Sun or any of the Hutts or any other established syndicate, either. He’s his own thing.)
Nate--
He’s from a fairly prosperous Mid Rim world, went to a Core World university (probably either Coruscant or Alderaan).
The Clone Wars started right around when he graduated, if I’m parsing the timelines and ages right.
So, granted I’m making this up on the fly based on things I half-remembered, but while there are non-clone non-Jedi military officers, they’re mostly High Command types.
However, Nate does not have the background, experience, or connections for that kind of work.
He spends the War working for his home sector/planet's senator, as an investigator/learning about security/etc.
(How he manages to pull this off, despite his father’s legit Shady Past, is probably a Story in and of itself.)
Postwar, he goes into the private sector, working for an insurance company.
(Where he meets Sterling.)
(And Maggie.)
(And Sophie.)
Incidentally, while he doesn’t have the inside information to really disbelieve the late-stage propaganda, he’s a little Perturbed by exactly how quick and bloody the end of the war and the transition to the Empire was.
Something Is Not Right here, but he’s not sure exactly what, and is not yet so disillusioned to do anything about that doubt. But it remains, in the back of his mind, to resurface when everything falls apart.
This is, however, a large part of why he leaves public service.
From here, Nate’s backstory is more or less the same as in canon.
(I did toy with having Sam dead of Inquisitors instead for a while, but that would not translate right and, more importantly, is too mean to Maggie.)
(I love Maggie, have I mentioned that?)
Sophie--
What can one say about Space Sophie Devereaux.
...about as much as one can say about the canon version, honestly.
She’s Kuati, that much everyone knows for sure.
Whether she’s actually of the minor nobility is up for some debate.
(Yes, there was an equivalent of the King George Job)
She was in her early/mid-teens when the Clone War happened. Kuat itself seems to have been mostly untouched, but under heavy military guard because of the valuable shipyards.
She left Kuat three or four years postwar, and began creating her various aliases and legend.
(And occasionally working as an actress, of course.)
...yep, that’s pretty much what I have here.
Hardison--
Also pretty similar to his canon backstory, except that he’s slightly younger--probably closer to Jyn Erso’s age/two or three years older than the Skytwins.
Like Nate, he’s from the Mid Rim, but he’s from a planet that was heavily contested during the War.
(i.e., it ended up pretty bombed to hell)
(his parents died towards the end of the war, which is how he ended up with Nana)
His particular brand of invention/cleverness is particularly useful in a slowly-recovering warzone, though.
Parker--
Parker is actually from Coruscant.
The underlevels.
One of the kids who consistently slipped through the cracks, under both the Republic and the Empire.
Until Archie Leach found her.
And then unleashed her on the Galaxy.
And now, the fun part--Eliot!
Eliot is, in fact, a clone.
He was part of the so-called Last Batch; born (decanted?) about six months before the end of the war, so he never saw action during that conflict.
There were whispers, among the older cadets--the ones who were mature enough to hear echoes of a voice in their heads, who knew at least bits and pieces what the adult clones had done and why.
(The whispers are carefully, carefully encouraged by some of the adults who were able to fight through the compulsion. Not well enough, or fast enough, to save their Jedi, but damned if they wouldn’t protect their little brothers. Who will grow up to be men, not weapons. Which means that most of the Last Batch and varying proportions of the older cadets had their chips removed before leaving Kamino.)
(....and now I’m going to have to do something completely unrelated with the Last Batch and their relationships with their various older brothers at some point, aren’t they.)
Eliot, like most of his generation, goes into the Stormtrooper corps when he’s mature enough.
He stays in for a while--a good couple of years. He’s separated from his brothers, for the most part, but a few are with him. One by one, they die or desert--he covers for the ones who get away.
He’s the last. He bonded with a few of the non-clone troopers, and it isn’t until there’s no one in his unit he feels like he needs to stay for that he leaves.
(He promises himself, when he leaves that armor behind, that he’s not going to find himself in that situation again. He has only himself to look after now, and he is damn sure going to stay that way.)
He starts wandering, working as a bounty hunter/assassin for hire.
(He does have one brief, slightly surreal encounter with Boba Fett.)
(Who is Not Thrilled that one of the millions of men with his face is trying to do his job.)
Occasionally, he’s even hired by the Empire.
(Any jobs he does for them, he of course does from safely behind a mask.)
He spends some time on Mandalore, carefully connecting with his roots and finding plenty of work in that planet’s increasing unrest.
(There is a Story to tell here, I’m sure, possibly one involving Bo-Katan and/or Korkie Kryze...)
And, of course, he spends about six months working for Space Damien Moreau.
He occasionally, in his travels, has come across his brothers--ranging decommissioned Clone Wars vets, to older cadets, to others of the Last Batch.
He tends not to seek them out, though, and to avoid interacting when he can.
There’s too much baggage, positive and negative, with all his brothers of every generation.
Besides. He promised himself he wouldn’t put down roots with a unit or a team again.
Miscellania--
Their first job together runs much as in canon, and they settle in as a team and loosely follow the same overall storyline as in canon.
Nate knows damn well that Eliot is a clone, though he didn’t until they met in person.
(While he didn’t work directly with the GAR and never met any Jedi, he did meet several clone soldiers. It’s a hard face to forget, when you’ve seen it several times over the course of three years.)
Sophie figures it out, too--she met several soldiers assigned to guard the shipyards.
Their marks generally don’t figure it out, actually.
Not a lot is known about the Last Batch.
I mean, sure, if any of these industry/corporate titans actually thought things through, they’d remember that the clones were in production up through the very end of the war, so obviously something must have been done to the ones who were too young for combat at that point.
But, honestly, even if some part of you is aware/acknowledges that there are younger clones running around, are you really going to expect one to wander through your door pretending to be a chef/caterer or a pro baseball player or a country music star or an IT tech or...
(Parker and Hardison figure it out when one of their marks actually does identify Eliot as a clone.)
(They don’t particularly care, except Hardison remembers/learns about the rapid aging factor and starts using his downtime to try and find a fix for that.)
(When he’s not playing Space WoW, anyway.)
(Or helping Nate with whatever sketchy and underhanded Long-Term Scheme he’s got in mind right now.)
(They’re not on the black box yet, of course, but probably right now most of Hardison’s not-active-job time is spent on tracking Moreau.)
(He and Parker have probably been tossing ideas back and forth about robbing Kamino to try and find a fix, though...)
(Or at least the Last Batch’s records.)
(But that is a plot for another fic. And possibly one of the things they end up doing during the six-month break between S4 and S5.)
The Skytwins’ Team:
Here’s where the super self-indulgent part comes in.
So, this is technically an offshoot of an offshoot of Masks!Verse, which is a very near-canon AU (what I call an In Spite of a Nail AU) where Lavinia exists. Essentially, in Masks!Verse, nothing we see onscreen during the OT happens any differently, but there’s some Interesting Stuff happening elsewhere that sets up a different post-ROTJ timeline. Nothing at all changes until three years after ROTS, when Lavinia is born, and after that only things she’s Directly Involved In change, and most of that is internal Imperial power plays, at least through ROTJ.
(TFA more or less happens because I like it, but the road there is a little bit different and the canon I was operating from is locked there. I.e., due to what Lavinia and her daughter in this timeline end up doing, things go much more AU starting with the opening sequence of TLJ.)
Masks!verse, incidentally, is technically Lavinia’s core timeline, in that it’s the first one I created of the three base timelines I have for her (Masks, Precipice, and PT-generation), but that’s a whole separate conversation. It does probably explain why Masks!Verse has like a million variants/offshoots, though...
Anyway. Digression aside, this crossover actually draws from a Masks!Verse offshoot that I call the Lavinia Organa AU.
(You can probably guess where this is going.)
(It’s very much an Exactly What It Says On The Tin type thing.)
(And, honestly, could do with its own outline for the rewrite of ANH alone...)
But the Cliff Notes version:
When Lavinia is born/announced, Breha goes to Bail and says “we managed to successfully rescue/kidnap one Sith Lord’s baby daughter, we should rescue this one, too.”
They had never really decided on only having one kid, after all. Just at least one, and they wanted a daughter.
(It just ended up not happening in canon because of the need for secrecy/not wanting to complicate things and put Leia at risk.)
(I saw a meta post the other day that points out that Bail was clearly ready to take both Skytwins, but then Yoda said to separate them.)
(This may or may not have come up in primary Masks!Verse, incidentally, but there, they decided it was too risky and they had to focus on protecting the daughter they already had.)
(It’s arguable how much kidnapping was technically involved in adopting Leia. But they do just straight-up kidnap Lavinia. They also fudge some records and release carefully-timed photos and do not make any in-person appearances with her so they can claim she’s three months younger than she actually is.)
How do they pull this off? ...IDK, magic? Handwave for now, it is out of the scope of this project.
Leia and Lavinia grow up pretty close.
(Not that they never fight--they bicker constantly, especially in the years before Leia starts taking a more active role in the Rebellion and a more official role in Alderaan’s government.)
(Lavinia, at thirteen, isn’t really allowed to do much at that point, but she backs Leia in everything and helps a lot with the background research/legwork.)
A couple notable details: Bail and Breha decided pretty early on that they wanted to tell each of their daughters a shell of their bioparents’ stories, leaving out the key details but sticking more or less to the truth as best they could without putting their girls at risk.
So, Leia knows basically what she was told in canon--that her birth mother was a close friend of her parents, they didn’t know her birth father well, and both her bioparents died at the end of the Clone War.
That’s enough for her. She knows who her real parents are, and doesn’t especially care about her bioparents at this point. She has other things to worry about/deal with.
Lavinia is told that her birth mother died shortly after she was born, and her birth father was Not A Good Person and lost custody of her.
So, the thing about Lavinia--it’s less prominent in this AU because she had a functional childhood and parents who treated her like a person and not a spy/asset, but she’s very...the way she puts it in Precipice!Verse is that she doesn’t like walking into a room unprepared. And this shell of a story about her birth parents feels like the kind of thing that could bite her actual parents and her sister (and her) in the ass in a major way.
So, very quietly, around the time Leia starts working as an active Rebel agent, she starts digging into it, trying to identify her bioparents.
She doesn’t find any stories around her official age that match what her parents told her, and she doesn’t think they would lie.
But, she reasons, they might have skewed things or lied about her age to protect her from her biofather.
And then she learns Emperor Palpatine had a daughter, who died, who’s approximately the right age.
When she asks her parents about this, they don’t lie. They confirm it for her
(They would have done the same for Leia, if she had done the legwork and asked them point-blank, but like I said it’s not something she particularly cares about at this point.)
Lavinia then asks if she can tell Leia--they’ve actually been getting closer since Leia suddenly developed all these Adult Responsibilities, and the events of the Princess Leia novel happened.
This pretty much cements their relationship. While they still bicker a fair amount--they’re both pretty strong personalities, and not always compatible ones; Leia being a Soldier and Lavinia being a Spy, plus they’re teenage sisters who are fairly close in age--but they are Ride Or Die Full Stop from this point out.
By the time ANH actually rolls around, they’re both active Rebel agents--Lavinia works mostly with Intelligence and to a point with supply/other support forces, because she’s good at reading people and mapping interpersonal networks and figuring out who to approach, while Leia does more or less what she does in canon.
Again, the actually rewrite of ANH would be its own outline, so the important bits (with minimal detail in case I do end up doing this one properly at some point):
Lavinia and Leia are both on the Tantive.
Lavinia takes a shuttle/tender ship/something and separates, hoping to act as an additional decoy, that Vader will assume that the big ship is the Obvious Decoy and focus on her instead so Leia can get the plans to Kenobi safely.
Vader, of course, has the resources to track both of them so this doesn’t work.
Lavinia ends up tagging along on the Falcon and ending up on the Death Star with the others.
Everyone, including Obi-Wan, actually makes it off the station alive.
Lavinia was running around in the air vents for a while, and left behind a blood sample. On impulse, Vader runs it--he wants to identify all of Obi-Wan’s co-conspirators as quickly as possible and while there are no clear shots of her face on the surveillance footage he has, this is an available resource he can use.
Obi-Wan tells Luke and Leia who they are to each other (though sticks to the Certain Point Of View story about their biodad for the time being).
They have a moment of “...well, that explains a lot” and just accept it and move on.
So, at this point, there are some Key Secrets going on:
One, that Luke and Leia are the twin children, biologically, of Anakin Skywalker and Padme Naberrie Amidala.
People who know this: Obi-Wan, Luke, Leia, and Lavinia (they tell each other pretty much everything of this level of importance.)
Two, that Anakin Skywalker is now Darth Vader.
People who know this: Obi-Wan, Vader, Palpatine.
Three, that Lavinia Organa is Palpatine’s biological daughter.
People who know this: Lavinia, Leia, Vader, Mon Mothma (who they told in a “so this might be a Thing and we want to make sure Someone in High Command is prepared JUST IN CASE).
(They probably tell Luke before too much longer, but they do not share this detail with Obi-Wan.)
Right, so. Those are the Most Important Details for the purposes of understanding Let’s Go Steal A Crossover, I think.
Anyway, I’m drawing from this AU for two reasons:
(Or, three, if we include the fact that I Like It And I Can.)
First, it’s an easy way to get the Skytwins’ team connected/integrated with a minimum of Drama.
Second, because it’s kind of where the whole crossover concept came from. I was babbling at my very patient roommate about the Lavinia Organa AU (specifically about potential ESB/Cloud City plot points), and realized “lol, I could make a religion Leverage team out of this.”
“....WAIT I COULD MAKE A LEVERAGE TEAM OUT OF THIS!”
Here’s how it works:
Hitter: Leia. Who is a tiny ball of rage a lot of the time, and takes after both her bioparents in a large degree. She is definitely, definitely their combat specialist, even if she hasn’t really played that role in her previous work.
Hacker: Han. He’s the one who’s good at improvising tech, etc.
Grifter: Lando. Quick, act shocked.
Thief: Luke. Very different style from Parker, of course, but still.
Mastermind: Lavinia. Who, while not in any way going to use it as he did, inherited her biological father’s aptitude for strategy and manipulation.
The dynamic isn’t 100% the same, of course. For example, Lavinia may be the strategist, but Leia is more the team lead in the field. But it still lines up really great and then I started poking at the Leverage backstories above after the initial concept occurred to me and here we are.
Miscellania:
This crossover takes place in a vague “timelines mean nothing” sort of state. As I said before, the Leverage team is more or less in S3. We’ll say the Skytwins team is somewhere around ESB, though obviously the background leading them there is going to be Very Different.
The actual plot is going to start with The Two Live Crew Job In SPACE and go from there.
(Possibly getting more complicated, as we throw in Sterling and/or Vader and/or Obi-Wan and/or the Ghost crew.)
(In that last case, the Ghost crew never split up/Kanan never died/Ezra never went on a road trip with Thrawn and a bunch of space whales.)
And...that should cover it! Sometime this week (I’m hoping before Solo comes out), I’ll put up Part Two, which will cover the Actual Plot.
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anditjustmadeherkind · 8 years ago
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Normal has always been the watchword: character growth, resistance to change, and 'Veronica Mars'.
Comment to author of meta on the following link:
http://cadhla.livejournal.com/969717.html
Normal has always been the watchword: character growth, resistance to change, and 'Veronica Mars'.Today's essay contains references to and spoilers for all of season one of 'Veronica Mars', as well as the first part of season two, focusing primarily on 'Normal Is the Watchword' and 'Driver's Ed'. There are no spoilers for unaired episodes of 'Veronica Mars', or spoiler-based speculation on where the series is going, although there is some thematic speculation relating to and tied into the way Rob Thomas tends to treat character growth and resistance to change. 1. Are you content with where this story ends? / There was a time when all of us were friends. You can call the end of the first season of 'Veronica Mars' a lot of things -- shocking, satisfying, jarring, unfair, visceral, too much, not enough -- but you can't really call it a happy ending. Veronica got what she thought she always wanted; she uncovered Lilly's killer, and saw to it that justice would be done, her father's name would be cleared, and her life could return to something resembling what it was before -- in short, to a state she could call 'normal'. We see Veronica's isolation throughout the season, along with her association of the loss of everything from her life-with-Lilly to the solving of Lilly's murder. Find out who killed Lilly Kane, and her father can have his position in the community back. People will stop blaming her for backing him. Possibly, the mystery of why Duncan left her will finally be resolved. In short, finding out who killed Lilly will actually restore Lilly: find her killer, and Lilly comes home. This isn't an uncommon sort of reaction in someone grieving deeply for a loved one, especially not when that loved one died under unusual or extreme circumstances. 'Lazarus, come forth' becomes a very tempting phrase. If you find the hit and run driver who killed your son, everything will be repaired. If you find the flaw in the fabric of the world that allowed this impossible thing to happen, God may take it back. A great number of public service organizations have been founded on the irrational, unspoken belief that if something can be rendered impossible, it will somehow be retroactively repaired; it will be taken back. The first season of 'Veronica Mars' is, in a way, a year-long attempt on Veronica's part to get Lilly Kane back where she belongs, and thus get herself back where she belongs. Prove that it shouldn't have happened, and perhaps the universe will finally repair itself. There are two major issues with this plan. First, and most glaringly, the dead don't come back just because you say the magic words and unmake the accident. (Not unless you're in a Stephen King novel, and sometimes, dead is better.) So the subconcious 'I can fix everything that has been broken' that was very likely a motivator is something that can never, unfortunately, play out. Second, and more insidiously, the reason that they say 'you can't go home again' is that it's true, because things change and are changed by the forces that act upon them. Through the very act of trying to fix what has been broken, Veronica has changed. Before Lilly's death, the loss of her mother, the loss of Duncan, and the effective loss of her innocence, Veronica was a very different person -- something pointed out not only by the living, but by Lilly herself, both through flashbacks and through dream sequences. Veronica becomes more Lilly-like through her actions, but always lacks both the thoughtlessness and the willingness to play with the hearts of the people around her that Lilly displayed. If anything, Veronica has managed to become a synthesis of the two, taking on many of the best -- and worst -- aspects of both personalities. Can you see the reasonably meek, demure Veronica Mars who played lily-maid to Lilly Kane pulling off some of the setups our current Veronica has gone for? Before she was forced to learn to be Lilly, such actions simply weren't taken. (Please note that I am not canonizing Veronica, who has, as I noted above, also taken on many of the negative aspects of both personalities -- while she lacks Lilly's thoughtlessness, she does have a strong degree of 'I matter, because I am doing right, and you do not, because you're in my way' self-righteousness that can arguably be attributed either to the influence of our dear Miss Kane, or to her own natural inclinations, inherited from her father. In this world, after all, nature tends to trump nurture. Veronica is flawed, yes, but that is not the topic we are addressing today.) So Veronica's 'home', symbolized in the form of Lilly Kane, is gone forever, and cannot be reclaimed, no matter how much she might wish that it were otherwise; furthermore, Veronica herself has been so transformed by her time away from home that, even were she to somehow go back, she would be unable to stay. Consider, if you would, the case of one Miss Dorothy Gale, a little Kansas girl who -- when she was swept away from home by a force of nature as sudden and unexpected as the death of a beloved friend -- wanted nothing more than to go back, to go home again. And, if we leave her after a single story, she achieves what she claims to want; she gets back to Kansas. If, however, we return for the later books in the series, we find that Dorothy has been so transformed by her time in Oz, by what she's seen and done and been forced to do, that Kansas can't contain her anymore. Eventually, after several attempts to normalcy, she gives up, and returns to Oz forever. Veronica, like Dorothy, has been to see the Wizard, and has been transformed by the things she's seen, done, and caused to happen. She can go back to Kansas if she likes, embrace the monochrome as much as she wants, but the only chance she had at getting her normal life and a normal ending wasn't a chance at all; it was closing the book after the first story, and that's not so much 'the end' as 'I refuse to let the rest of the tale unfold'. For Veronica, the state of 'normal' has changed. She just doesn't know it yet. 2. Come and be normal with me. For Veronica, in a pre-Lilly's-death world, normal was at least partially defined by a certain level of playing the follower. She followed Lilly with devotion, and while she wasn't slavishly devoted to her desires (she refused the velvet dress, after all, until it became a symbolic part of her transformation into a more Lilly-like role), she was more inclined to take the easy road, and obey. She followed Duncan with all the passivity of a stereotypical teenage girl indulging in her first love. (I am aware that not all teenage girls are sheep just because they have boyfriends, having been a deeply stubborn teenager; Veronica, however, seemed to believe that being in love with Duncan meant being a character out of a stereotypical YA romance novel, all doves and flowers and flowing draperies.) She followed orders from the adults around her, and had very little reason to exercise a moral code, even though she clearly had one. She was, in short, exactly the sort of girl who hangs with the popular crowd in every high school, but is forgotten ten minutes after graduation, because they were just hangers-on. It thus makes sense that a return to normalcy would involve a return to a more passive role, at least for someone whose standards for 'normal' were originally set the way Veronica's were. Her trading Logan for Duncan isn't just a matter of 'one of them is being batshit crazy and the other one is actively wooing me'; it's trading the active for the passive. How did Logan win her? By punching a man, by racing to her defense in forum after forum, by actively attempting to keep her from harm, and by initiating acts of physical affection. How did Duncan win her? Through passivity. He comes to the coffee shop, he presents himself as harmless, he gives her gifts, and he slowly nudges the world around to where their actual reunion is an anti-climax. By picking Duncan, Veronica picked both a return to the past, and a return to the passive. Life with Logan may not be any better or any worse, but it would be undeniably active, and finding Lilly's killer means that she has the right to turn her back on the future, at least in her own eyes, at least for now. Duncan's relatively heartless-seeming exchange of Meg for Veronica can be directly rooted into this same syndrome. Meg was, after all, in many ways his substitute for pre-Lilly's death (shortened from here on out as 'pre-LD', because I'm lazy) Veronica: she was popular, pretty, not from one of the better-to-do families in town, on the pep squad, and reasonably willing to be a follower instead of a leader. Her evident devotion to Duncan was enough to allow her to fill the Veronica role to at least enough of an extent to make it worth trying. When Veronica seemed to be returning to 'his' Veronica, however, the urge to return to a more peaceful time made her seem like the more appropriate choice, and so he fled back to her, looking for a girl that no longer existed. His discomfort with this exchange becomes evident fairly quickly, as Veronica is rather clearly playing a part that she's no longer any good at, but too much has been disrupted in his life; too many pieces have been knocked out, and won't be coming back, no matter what he does. Giving up Veronica, even after the disturbing changes that have been made in her by the past year, would be too much like giving up on Lilly completely. Let me note that I am not questioning whether Duncan and Veronica love each other, or whether they did love each other at one time: it is quite possible to love someone based entirely on a person that they no longer are. I don't think that Duncan has changed all that much; really, I think the emotional stasis that he's forced himself into is a great deal of the problem. Duncan is a constant state of 'is', with no option for change, because he won't allow it. Duncan is in love with Veronica. Never mind that she's become a stranger; he knows that he is in love with her, and he can't let that be false, because to allow it to be false would be to admit that he's different now, and that's the last thing he wants to do. So he remains in love with someone he can't fully comprehend, and things just keep getting worse between them. Veronica, meanwhile, is someone who is in love with Duncan Kane, and moreover, can see fairly clearly that he really hasn't changed. Ergo, since she's back to normal, back to her pre-LD life, and she hasn't changed, she must still be in love with Duncan. It's not negotiable. Logan is also suffering from this urge to return to the norm, although to lesser degree than the others. Veronica is, after all, a Lilly cognate by the end of season one, and while I do feel that Logan, having witnessed this change with clearer eyes than either Duncan or Veronica herself, is genuinely in love with who Veronica is, the fact that she doesn't know that person means that their relationship is fairly doomed, and that much of Logan's attraction, at least initially, is very likely founded on her similarities to Lilly. Unlike the others involved in this little circuit, however, he's more aware of it, and thus has more of a shot at still loving Veronica once she's found out who she is...and once he learns that fact for himself. 3. Once you become a Queen Bee, you can't go back to being a worker. Oddly, it's the character of Jackie that throws the changes in Veronica into the sharpest, and most undeniable, light. Jackie is, after all, arrogant, bitchy, pushy, and utterly convinced that she's going to get her own way in all things. She's an alpha female, very much like Lilly was, and it's only the undeniable affection felt towards Lilly by most of the cast that saved her from being as unlikable a character as many have found Jackie. (Well, that, and the fact that we really see Lilly only at her best, through flashbacks. We never actually see Lilly being as heartless as her position in the local social structure would have sometimes -- often, even -- forced her to be.) Given Veronica's pre-LD position in the social structure, she should have welcomed Jackie with open arms, and gladly changed positions to follow her. That is, after all, what she's claiming to want. Only she doesn't do it. While protesting that she's just another drone in the great hive of Neptune High, Veronica sets herself up to face off against Jackie as only another Queen Bee would dare to do, questioning her choices, undermining her embryonic authority within the circle that, under natural circumstances, she would eventually come to rule. Veronica is, in short, resenting a new Queen coming to town -- not just because Jackie would be taking Lilly's place in the social structure, but because Veronica, on some level, has lost the ability to follow. The changes she has made in herself run too deeply, and her rejection of Jackie shows that her vaunted normalcy is really just a veneer slapped over the surface of the 'true' Veronica. Veronica's apparent selfishness is also supported by this contradiction. In her pre-LD life, she would have had Lilly to check and balance her -- basically, to tell her 'no' and set firm limitations. With Lilly gone, all those limitations were lifted in a way that didn't seem all that bad; they had been lifted by Lilly, in leaving, and because they had been lifted, she could do what was required to get Lilly back. Solving the mystery would, in some way, return the limitations, because it was going to make everything exactly the way that it used to be. Only it didn't quite work out that way; Lilly didn't return, and the only person actually setting limits on her -- Keith -- is someone whose limits she spent the last year learning to ignore. Duncan doesn't expect Veronica to need limits, because he always associated with her in tandem with Lilly, who limited her naturally. Wallace and Mac have never been in a position to put those limits down. The two characters most likely to act as a functional limiting factor on Veronica, given the social constraints that already exist, are Weevil and Logan. Weevil because he's outside the social hierarchy, and has no qualms about questioning her actions or blind acceptance of 'the way things are'; Logan because, despite his own dependence on the past, he has previously lived with and been in a position to place some limitations upon a full-blown Lilly. Even in her Queen Bee state, Veronica's selfishness and tendency to demand her own way has nothing on the behaviours we've seen from and heard attributed to the late, lamented Lilly Kane. People have questioned the reasons for including Jackie, a character who didn't really seem to have a role, in the cast. I say that her role was a very simple one. Just as Meg represented Veronica's original, innocent state, Jackie represented the darker parts of being Lilly, and of following a Lilly. Veronica, for all her protests of normalcy, can't be fully devoted to either of them. She can neither become Meg, nor embrace Jackie. The world has moved on, and the only people trying to pretend that it hasn't are Veronica, and Duncan. They're the ones trying to freeze themselves in time and space, and are thus, inevitably, the ones that are going to fail. 4. Where do we go from here? The lie of normalcy -- the illusion the normal is the ideal, and is something that can be achieved just by trying hard enough -- is one that, like all lies in the world of Neptune, is inevitably doomed to failure. We can see the cracks forming well before we hit the climactic events of 'Driver's Ed'; they're present every time someone reminds Veronica that for the past year, she wasn't normal, and every time we see her trying to force herself back into a role that she has, quite frankly, outgrown. For the moment, however, it remains a necessary role, because lies only die in Neptune when you prove that they're not the truth. If Veronica walked away from 'normal' right here and right now, before proving to herself that it no longer worked, she'd never get over it, just like Duncan couldn't get over her without getting her back, and no one could get over Lilly without closure. Right here and now, Veronica is in an abusive relationship, and the name of her partner is 'The Status Quo'. But just like the death of a loved one can deify them and make them impossible to move beyond, the way she lost her original, normal state has been romanticized to such a degree that the only way to say 'y'know, maybe it's better off gone' is to get back together, play through the emotional abuse, and finally come to the breakup on her own terms. The breakup is coming. It's coming fast, and it's coming hard, because Veronica is starting to understand the limits of her chosen place in society. It's not going to take that much more to make her realize that while she doesn't have to be Lilly, the Veronica she's pretending to be died, quietly, in her sleep, at some point over the last year. And really, that's for the best.
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