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msjokesgf · 3 years ago

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Love Match-Part 1 (Shoto Todoroki x Reader)

Summary: You were hopelessly single. Between working full time and caring for your aging parents, romance was never much of a priority. That is, until your mother suggests seeing a nakodo, a traditional Japanese matchmaker. Curious, you agree, and are matched with none other than Shoto Todoroki, the famous Pro Hero. At first, you think it's a joke, but as you grow closer, you begin to wonder if a marriage between two strangers could really work.

Were you making a mistake? Or had you found your perfect match?

Word Count: 3,845

Ao3 Link | Masterlist

“Attention passengers, the 310 to Tosche Station has been delayed due to unforeseen circumstances. Thank you for your patience and understanding at this time.”

Sometimes living in a superhuman society could be so inconvenient.

You sighed and reached into your coat pocket to pull out your phone. It was the second time this week a villain had disrupted your morning commute. They were certainly getting bolder. You shot your boss a text letting him know you’d be late and then returned your attention to the array of colorful signs overhanging the platform. Sure enough, your train’s status went from “on time” to “delayed.” Hopefully, there wouldn’t be too much collateral damage. They were still cleaning up the aftermath of the last brawl.

“Ooh, who do you think is fighting?”

You turned. Nearby, a group of students stood in a circle with their phones out. Judging by their uniforms, they were middle schoolers.

“I don’t know,” one of the girls said. “Maybe Uravity? I saw her on tv last week. She’s super cute.”

“Maybe. Or what about Endeavor? Isn’t he the Number One Hero?”

“Nah, not anymore. He’s like, old now. But I think he’s still in the top five, at least.”

“Someday I’ll be a top five Hero!” one of the boys announced loudly. “Just wait ‘til I get accepted to the hero course at U.A. Then I’ll really be able to show how strong my Quirk is.”

“Yeah, sure, Kenishi-kun.”

They all laughed lightheartedly before disappearing into the sea of school uniforms and dark business suits. You smiled to yourself. Your school days were long behind you now, but the memory of applying to high school was still as vivid as ever. The thrum of excitement as everyone listed their top schools, the anticipation of hearing back from admissions, and finally, the relief of making your decision. Most of your classmates planned to go to a normal high school and then either enter the workforce or pursue higher education, as you did. However, those with ambitions of becoming a Pro Hero applied to hero courses at elite schools like U.A. and Shinketsu. The few who managed to get in talked about it for weeks afterward.

Despite having a powerful Quirk, you were never drawn to the Pro Hero profession like so many of your peers had been. Instead, you were perfectly content with leading a quiet, normal life. After graduating high school, you decided to study business at one of the local universities and then moved on to the boring office job you worked at now. There wasn’t much to complain about; the pay was good, the people were nice, and, most importantly, the hours weren’t long. But that’s all it was: a job. Something to keep you busy and help provide for your aging parents, one of whom was chronically ill. It wasn’t something you were particularly passionate about.

Another twenty minutes passed before you heard a whistle in the distance and within a few moments, the train thundered onto the track. You braced yourself for the surge of people exiting onto the already packed platform. The morning commute was always the worst. Too many people crammed into a moving tin can like sardines while you tried to avoid eye contact as much as possible. Thankfully the ride itself wasn’t long and there was only one other stop along the way. As you pushed into the car, you managed to secure yourself a spot by the door and settled in for the ride.

When you finally arrived at your office, a relatively nondescript high rise, you were greeted by the sight of your three closest coworkers gathered around one of their computers. As you approached, you could see they were watching a live stream news broadcast about a group of Pro Heroes fighting a gang of Villains. The Heroes had won, and a reporter was interviewing one of them at the scene.

“Ugh, he’s so handsome,” Megumi sighed. “Even his voice sounds dreamy.”

“He’s super strong too. I can’t believe he almost took down the whole group by himself before his backup came,” Tomoko added, crossing her arms over her chest.

Hikaru tilted her head. “Why does he look like he forgot if he left the oven on?”

“What are you guys watching?” you asked, curious to know which Hero they were fawning over.

All three turned at the sound of your voice and said your name in unison.

“We were worried about you! Morioka-san said you would be late, but he didn’t tell us why. Is everything okay?” Megumi asked.

You nodded. “It was my train. A Villain attack delayed it, so I was stuck at the station. Remember, it happened to me earlier this week too.”

“Oh, it must’ve been the one we were just watching. See?”

Tomoko moved her chair away from the desk so you could see the news report better. The camera had cut back to the battle scene, which was littered with large chunks of ice and some scorch marks. Judging by the craters in the road and sidewalk, it must’ve been quite the fight. You were almost disappointed you missed it.

And then you saw who they’d been talking about.

With his distinct half-and-half appearance, he was easily recognizable, even for someone like you who didn’t pay much attention to Pro Heroes or their rankings. Your coworkers had been admiring Shoto Todoroki, the current Number 3 Hero. That explained why there was so much ice around. If you remembered correctly, his Quirk allowed him to generate ice from his right side and fire from his left. Talk about hitting the genetic lottery. It was like he was bred for Hero work.

“How do you think he got that scar?” Hikaru wondered aloud. She was referring to the prominent burn scar on his left side, which reached from his hairline to the top of his cheek. “Did a Villain give it to him?”

“Hmm, I don’t think so. Not that it matters, because I think it only adds to his good looks.” Megumi nudged your shoulder. “Don’t you agree?”

You took another hard look at the man on the screen before you shrugged and said, “Eh, I guess.”

“So picky.” Tomoko teased. “That matchmaker certainly has his work cut out for him.”

You blushed as the conversation turned to your love life, or lack thereof. Sometimes you really regretted telling your coworkers that little bit of your personal life. They managed to bring it up almost every time they saw you. So nosy.

“Ah, right, how’s that going? Did you hear back from them yet?” Hikaru asked.

“No, not yet,” you replied, “But he said it could take a few weeks and I only submitted my profile last month. I’d rather it take a little longer than be paired with someone I don’t like.”

“You just have to trust the process! My cousin’s friend’s sister’s neighbor met her husband through a matchmaking service, and they just celebrated their tenth anniversary,” Megumi added.

“I know. My parents said the same thing when I started all this. But they could be biased since their marriage was arranged,” you said.

Hikaru yawned. “Well, I wouldn’t stress too much about it. If things don’t work out, you can always get a cat.”

You smiled. “Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind.”

The computer screen grabbed your attention again. Shoto was still with the reporter, who seemed slightly exasperated by his short, vague responses. Guys like him don’t need matchmakers, you thought to yourself. He could walk into any bar or club and have his pick of anyone he wanted. Megumi was right; he was a pretty handsome guy and being rich and famous probably helped too.

You noticed the time at the bottom of the screen and excused yourself from Tomoko’s desk. It was time to get to work. There probably wasn’t much to do today, considering how slow things had been this week, but your train was late, and you wanted to make sure all your assignments were done before the weekend. You’d have to check in with Morioka later about that upcoming presentation he mentioned and see if he needed help organizing any future projects. Not to mention the mountain of emails you had to answer and the possibility of a meeting or two. Just standard, corporate things.

As you settled into your chair and typed out your password, you couldn’t help but wonder if Pro Heroes like Shoto ever had to sit and answer emails.

After work, you briefly stopped at the store to pick up a few things for your mother before heading home. She had texted you a small list around lunch time and said she wanted to make dinner that night. You were surprised by her offer, but happily agreed and got the groceries without complaint. If she was cooking, it meant she must’ve had some news to share. Perhaps the matchmaker had been in touch. All the more reason you wanted to get home as soon as possible.

You trudged up the stairs to your family’s apartment, carefully balancing your shopping bag as you dug around in your pocket for the keys. Your fingers and cheeks were numbed by the cold and when you opened the door, the heat that radiated from inside briefly warmed them.

“Kaasan, I’m home,” you called, toeing off your work shoes and switching to your house slippers. “I got the things you wanted.”

“In the kitchen!”

You rounded the corner and saw your father sitting on the couch, watching the news on tv. He waved as you walked past to put the groceries on the kitchen table.

“How was work?” he asked.

“Good. My train was late again, though. Another Villain attack.” You rolled your eyes.

“Yes, I saw on the news earlier. I’m glad you’re okay.”

You started taking the groceries out of the bag when your eyes landed on a plain manila envelope lying on the table. It was addressed to you. Your heart skipped a beat. Could this be…

“We have some news for you.” Your mother appeared next to you and put a steadying hand on your shoulder.

“I knew as soon as you texted about making dinner.” Shakily, you reached for the envelope. “When did this come?”

“Today. The nakodo called earlier and said he found someone who might be a good match for you. That’s his profile. Do you want to look now or wait until after dinner?” she asked.

You glanced over at her. She was giving you a choice, but you could tell by her expression she was dying to know. She and your father probably spent the whole day staring at the damn thing, wondering who the man inside was, what he looked like, what his interests were. This could be your future husband, their future son-in-law. You knew how important this was to them. After all, you were their only child. They had you late in life, following years of heartbreak and infertility. Everything they’d ever done had been in your best interest, and suggesting this matchmaker was no different. You trusted them completely, even if at first you were skeptical.

The tv shut off and your father joined you at the table. All three of you gazed intently at this plain envelope. It had to be done now, just to get it over with. Gingerly, you took it in your hands and began tearing it open. The air was thick with silence as everyone held their breath. Your mother’s grip tightened. You reached inside.

The noise you made was halfway between a gasp and an uncomfortable laugh.

There was no doubt it was him. No one else had such a distinct look. The shaggy hair, half-white, half-red, and intense gaze set in a serious expression could belong only to one person.

Shoto Todoroki.

The name on the profile confirmed it. Todoroki Shoto, age 25, profession: Pro Hero.

“This has to be a mistake,” you blurted out. “It has to be. Why would someone rich and famous like him even need to go to a matchmaker, let alone want to be matched with someone like me?”

“Nonsense!” your mother exclaimed. “He would be lucky to have you. Any man would. Remember, you scoffed at the idea of a matchmaker when we suggested it, but this shows how highly their wisdom and experience are valued. I can hardly wait to meet this young man and his family.”

“Kaasan, I highly doubt that is going to happen—”

She cut you off. “Oh, but it is! In fact, they’ve already requested a meeting. So long as you’re agreeable, we can call the nakodo back to set up a date.”

What? “He wants to meet me?”

“Yes, as soon as possible. The nakodo said his father was particularly insistent,” she replied.

Your mind was racing; it felt like the walls were closing in on you. Her words had barely registered. You could only stare at that picture, completely spellbound. Even his eyes were different colors, one dark gray, the other turquoise blue. You couldn’t deny he was striking. But the intensity of it scared you. When you submitted the profile, you thought you’d have months before anything came of it, and who knows what could’ve happened by then. It was done mostly to appease your parents, but you had to admit you were a little curious as well. Certainly, this scenario never entered your mind.

“So, what do you say?” your father asked gently. “Shall we call him back and set up a meeting?”

You stammered incoherently, still trying to process everything.

“Of course, we’ll set up a meeting,” your mother answered. “There’s no harm in going. If you don’t feel comfortable with him, then we’ll find you someone else.”

Someone else. How could anyone else even come close to his caliber?

“I understand this might seem overwhelming,” your father started. “But believe me, you can trust the nakodo. No one’s going to force you to do anything you don’t want to. The only thing we want is for you to be happy like we are.”

“I know,” you finally breathed out. “It’s just…a lot. And he’s not at all who I was expecting.”

“Maybe that’s for the best. We don’t always make the best decisions when we’re infatuated with someone. That’s why we leave these things up to the matchmaker.” She smiled. “You’ll see.”

Your mother grabbed the grocery bag and headed back into the kitchen. Meanwhile, your father returned to the couch, and you tucked the papers back into the envelope, planning to look them over later in the privacy of your bedroom.

“Don’t be nervous.”

That was impossible.

You and your parents were standing outside the matchmaker’s office, a traditional Japanese-style building you’d been to only once before. It was during the initial consultation, where the matchmaker asked you a series of questions about your ideal partner, personal values, and anything else that could help him narrow down his search. The inside was meant to be a calming atmosphere, spacious and open with tatami mat flooring and sliding screen doors. But you were such a mess of nerves, it did little to help relax you.

“Welcome,” the matchmaker said cheerfully, bowing deeply. “Please, come in. The Todoroki family are already here. They’re anxious to meet you.”

You offered a nervous smile that probably looked more like a grimace and followed him into the main room, your parents trailing close behind. What would he be like in person? you wondered. You’d poured over his profile for hours, trying to piece together what you could about his personality. Was he arrogant? Friendly? Maybe even shy? His picture offered little clues. It looked more like a mug shot than a candid headshot, which the nakodo suggested.

You stepped into the room.

There he was.

Your eyes locked, and he was so intense you had to look away almost immediately. Instead, your gaze was drawn to his parents, who stood on either side of him. His mother looked like a kind woman, with an approachable smile and warm gray eyes. Her long white hair was pulled into a low bun. Then, you looked at his father, a massive muscular man with spiky red hair. He seemed familiar but you couldn’t quite place it.

Until he opened his mouth and in a gruff, booming voice said: “Hello, my name is Enji Todoroki, but you may know me by my professional name, Endeavor.”

That’s when it clicked for you. Yes, you vaguely knew Shoto and Endeavor were related, but not this closely. Now he was your potential father-in-law? Even without the flames, he was scary. A long, jagged scar marred the left side of his face, running from his hairline down to his chin and his cold, blue eyes harshly scrutinized you, like he was judging your every breath. As the former Number 1 Hero, you knew he probably had high expectations for his son’s future wife, and you weren’t entirely sure you could meet them.

“Um, good evening, sir,” you managed, bowing low. “It’s nice to meet you.”

You told them your name, which you were sure they already knew, and introduced your parents as well. They bowed and you carefully watched the other family’s expressions, to try and gauge their thoughts. Shoto was particularly hard to read. He came off as very stoic and detached.

Although maybe he was just as nervous as you were.

His mother also bowed. “And I’m Rei Todoroki. We’ve been so looking forward to meeting you and your family.”

Shoto himself was last to speak up. “Hello,” was all he said. His voice was smooth and clear, very pleasant to listen to. You smiled softly. Perhaps you had the wrong impression. Maybe he was shy.

“Wonderful! Now that everyone’s been introduced, why don’t you all have a seat at the table, and we can discuss the process and get to know each other a bit better. I’ve brewed some tea,” the nakodo said.

Everyone did as he asked but before you took your seat, you helped your father lower himself to the floor. As he had gotten older, it became harder for him to sit at low tables like the one the matchmaker had. Your apartment and furniture were Western style since it was easier for your parents to manage. Your mother was slightly better, as her arthritis mostly manifested in her hands and fingers.

“So, did you two have time to look over the profiles I sent?” he asked.

Endeavor spoke first. “Yes, we did,” he said. “So, tell us, nakodo, why did you choose her? She wasn’t what I was expecting.”

The matchmaker wasn’t phased at all by his bluntness. A true professional, you thought. How many overbearing parents had he dealt with over the years? Probably too many to count.

“Well, I look at many different factors, including intangibles, before I make a decision. Please trust my many years of experience as well as my high success rate.”

Your mother bristled beside you. “And what were you expecting?” she asked.

“Kaasan, please—”

“We weren’t sure what to expect. My husband didn’t mean to offend. As a matter of fact, we were so taken by your daughter’s profile that we read over it all night,” Rei interjected.

You couldn’t help but notice the use of the word “we” and wondered if it included Shoto or just his parents. He had yet to speak and was staring intently into his teacup. Did he even want to be here?

“Oh, I understand. Our daughter couldn’t stop staring at your son’s picture. He’s very handsome,” your mother replied.

You blushed heavily. “Kaasan,” you groaned, “You’re so embarrassing.”

“That’s sweet!” The nakodo turned to Shoto. “Todoroki-san, what were your first impressions?”

He finally looked up at you. “Her face was kind, and when I read over her profile, I could tell we shared similar values.” You swore you saw the faintest blush on his cheeks. “I’m looking forward to getting to know you better.”

Your heart fluttered. “Th-thank you, Todoroki-san. That’s very thoughtful of you to say.”

The nakodo brightened, seemingly pleased by this development. You looked down at your tea, but you could feel his eyes lingering from across the table. Did he really want to get to know you or was he just saying that to be polite? Now that he was here, in front of you, you felt drawn to him. Whatever his reasons for being here, he was clearly ready to trust the matchmaker’s judgement.

“So how long does this usually take?” Endeavor interjected. “My wife and I were married within a month.”

A month?! Your head snapped up. The meeting had only just begun, and you’d barely spoken. How could you possibly agree to marry him in such a short timeframe? Todoroki himself looked mortified then shot his father a glare. It looked like he was about to get up and storm off when Rei touched his arm.

“Now, Shoto, we don’t expect that of you,” she said. “Enji, what did I tell you? Things are different now. Young people like to take their time and get to know each other.”

Your mother perked up. “Oh, it sounds like your marriage was similar to ours. We didn’t waste any time, either. My husband proposed only three months after we met.”

“But I knew I wanted to marry her sooner,” your father said.

That sparked a conversation between the parents about your respective families and the tension dissipated. You silently sighed in relief and glanced over at Todoroki. He looked down at his lap, his face completely neutral, any trace of emotion gone.

The nakodo spoke again. “Why don’t we move to a different room? Let the young people have a moment in private.”

They obliged and soon it was just you and him, alone at the table.

He sighed. “I apologize for all that,” he started. “My old man can be a bit insensitive sometimes. He’s not really good with people.”

“It’s fine,” you assured. “My mother is embarrassing too. She just wants what’s best for me, but she doesn’t always express it well. I hope you weren’t offended.”

“No, not at all. I’m actually surprised how well she handled my dad. Most people find him intimidating,” Todoroki said.

You chuckled. “Yeah, I can see that.”

The corner of his mouth quirked up, but he didn’t speak again. You sat together in silence, but it wasn’t awkward. Instead, it was rather comfortable. His eyes were warm, and you couldn’t help smiling. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad. The man in front of you was far more approachable than his picture had you believe. You wanted to get to know him, the real him. The one the public knew nothing about.

Finally, he broke the silence. “I meant what I said. I do want to get to know you. Did you want to have dinner with me?”

Your smile widened. “Yes, I’d like that, Todoroki-san.”

This is my first time writing for the MHA fandom and I’m really excited to share! Hope you enjoyed it. My inbox is open so if you have any comments or feedback, I’d love to hear it. Even if you just want to chat I’d love to get to know the community.

#bnha #mha #shoto todoroki #shoto todoroki x reader #bnha x reader #mha x reader #cross posted on ao3 #love match fic

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radioactivepeasant · 8 years ago

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Imperial Problem Child-verse. I don't know how much you know or care about the Legends timeline or the deleted scenes from ANH. Both had Luke's "friends" at Tosche Station calling him "Wormie" and generally kind of looking down on him. Either way, they'd have a lot of dirt on Luke that'd make a paparazzo very happy. (And probably end with a visit from Darth Dad.) (2/3)

My first exposure to those characters was the original novelization by Lucas when I was...oh geez, what was I...had to have been about eight years old. Found it in my favorite uncle's stuff, never found out where he got it. So to me, Luke's "friends" have been part of the story from the get go. I was never sure if some were actually his friends and the others were like the mean popular kids who pretended to be friendly so they could make fun of him (that may have been wee little Radio projecting her entire middle school experience onto Luke though) or if he was just one of those kids who picked up a truly bizarre nickname in childhood that no one would ever let go.

But I imagine the space paparazzi shows up in Anchorhead a few weeks after Luke's identity is revealed. The older folk don't want to talk to them. They keep to their own out there, and there's no use digging up the past. The younger ones are only too happy to share a story or two for a few credits. Deak talks about Luke flying Beggar's Canyon and threading the Needle -- which should've probably killed him, but Luke was kinda indestructible so meh -- and Windy shrugs and relates a story about once when he and Deak and Luke got framed for killing a gang leader and had to get help from a weird old hermit in the Jundland Wastes.

But then someone starts poking around the old Lars homestead. Then a story runs about the aunt and uncle that raised the prince and it's almost half conjecture. Then questions start being asked about references found to a "Shmi". And Luke is furious. Never mind Vader (who was already on the way to Tatooine under the guise of dealing with the Hutts because Luke -- and an angry, angry Leia -- convinced him that he was going to help rescue Han whether he wanted to or not), Luke loved his aunt and uncle with all his heart and heaven help anyone who doesn't respect that.

The resulting confrontation leads to a rival publication referring to to other space tabloid as having been "burned by the sunshine prince"

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gloriousgwendolinechristie · 8 years ago

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Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the Definitive Preview

VANITY FAIR – Star Wars devotees who can’t wait for December need look no further. With exclusive access to writer-director Rian Johnson, plus interviews with Mark Hamill, Daisy Ridley, and others, V.F. presents the ultimate sneak peek at The Last Jedi—and Carrie Fisher’s lasting legacy.

I. “We’re Going Back?”

The first trip to Skellig Michael was wondrous: an hour-long boat ride to a craggy, green island off the coast of Ireland’s County Kerry, and then a hike up hundreds of stone steps to a scenic cliff where, a thousand years earlier, medieval Christian monks had paced and prayed. This is where Mark Hamill reprised his role as Luke Skywalker for the first time since 1983, standing opposite Daisy Ridley, whose character, Rey, was the protagonist of The Force Awakens, J. J. Abrams’s resumption of George Lucas’s Star Wars movie saga. The opening sentence of the film’s scrolling-text “crawl,” a hallmark of the series, was “Luke Skywalker has vanished.” Atop Skellig Michael, at the picture’s very end, after an arduous journey by Rey, came the big payoff: a cloaked, solitary figure unhooding himself to reveal an older, bearded Luke, who wordlessly, inscrutably regarded the tremulous Rey as she presented to him the lightsaber he had lost (along with his right hand) in a long-ago duel with Darth Vader, his father turned adversary. It was movie magic: a scene that, though filmed in 2014 and presented in theaters in 2015, is already etched in cinematic history.

The second trip to Skellig Michael? Maybe less of a thrill for an aging Jedi. Contrary to what one might have reasonably expected, that Abrams would have kept rolling in ’14, recording some dialogue between Luke and Rey in order to get a jump on the saga’s next installment—especially given that Skellig Michael is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, with access limited to the summer months, and only when the weather is cooperative—once Hamill and Ridley had nailed their epic staredown, that was a wrap. It fell to Abrams’s successor, Rian Johnson, the director of The Last Jedi, the eighth movie in the saga, which opens this December, to painstakingly re-stage the clifftop scene, with the two actors retaking their places more than a year later.

“When I read the script for Episode VIII, I went, ‘Oh my God, we’re going back?’ Because I said I was never going back,” Hamill told me when I sat down with him recently at his home in Malibu. He wondered, in vain, if they could drop him in by chopper this time, “which is so clueless of me, because there’s no landing pad, and it would mar the beauty of it all,” he said. Hamill is a youthful 65 but a sexagenarian nevertheless; whereas the fit young members of the crew were given 45 minutes to get up to the now iconic Rey-Luke meeting spot—carrying heavy equipment—Hamill was allotted an hour and a half, “and I had to stop every 10, 15 minutes to rest.”

None of this was offered up in the form of complaint. Hamill just happens to be a rambling, expansive talker—in his own way, as endearingly offbeat a character as his friend and on-screen twin sister, Carrie Fisher, who passed away suddenly and tragically last December. Like Fisher, Hamill was put on a diet-and-exercise regimen after he was reconscripted into the Star Wars franchise. (Harrison Ford was under less obligation, having retained his leading-man shape because he never stopped being a leading man.) Over a spartan snack plate of carrot sticks and hummus, the man behind Luke held forth at length on this subject.

“You just cut out all the things you love,” he said. “Something as basic as bread and butter, which I used to start every meal with. Sugar. No more candy bars. No more stops at In-N-Out. It’s really just a general awareness, because in the old days I’d go, ‘Well, I’m not that hungry, but oh, here’s a box of Wheat Thins,’ and you don’t put the Wheat Thins in the same category as Lay’s potato chips, and yet I would sort of idly, absentmindedly eat these things while watching Turner Classic Movies, and ‘Oh, I ate the whole box!’ ”

Hamill had been dieting and training for 50 weeks before he learned, via the Episode VII script he finally received from Abrams, that he would not appear in the movie until its last scene, and in a nonspeaking part at that. On this, too, he has a lot of thoughts. Though he grants that the delayed-gratification reveal of Luke was a narrative masterstroke, he’d have done things differently if he’d had his druthers. Han Solo’s death scene, for example. Why couldn’t Luke have made his first appearance around then? In the finished film, the witnesses to Han’s death, at the hands of his own son, the brooding dark-side convert Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), are his longtime Wookiee co-pilot, Chewbacca, and the upstart Resistance fighters Rey and Finn (John Boyega).

“Now, remember, one of the plots in the earlier films was the telepathic communication between my sister and me,” Hamill said. “So I thought, Carrie will sense that Han is in danger and try to contact me. And she won’t succeed, and, in frustration, she’ll go herself. Then we’re in the situation where all three of us are together, which is one of my favorite things in the original film, when we were on the Death Star. It’s just got a fun dynamic to it. So I thought it would have been more effective, and I still feel this way, though it’s just my opinion, that Leia would make it as far as she can, and, right when she is apprehended, maybe even facing death—Ba-boom! I come in and blow the guy away and the two of us go to where Han is facing off with his son, but we’re too late. The reason that’s important is that we witness his death, which carries enormous personal resonance into the next picture. As it is, Chewie’s there, and how much can you get out of [passable Chewbacca wail] ‘Nyaaarghhh!’ and two people who have known Han for, what, 20 minutes?”

Still, Hamill recognizes that the popular response to The Force Awakens—its stirring ending in particular—was overwhelmingly positive, his misgivings be damned. “As I said to J.J.,” he recalled, “I’ve never been more happy to be wrong.”

Besides, holding back Luke in VII means that Hamill gets a lot more screen time in VIII. And dialogue. This time, at last, Luke Skywalker talks.

II. A Long Way from Tosche Station

Rian Johnson, a sandy-haired, baby-faced 43-year-old Californian heretofore best known among cinéastes for his time-bending 2012 science-fiction film, Looper, is not only the director of Episode VIII but also its sole credited screenwriter. (Episode VII was written by Abrams, Lawrence Kasdan, and Michael Arndt.) Earlier this spring, in a screening room in the Frank G. Wells Building at Walt Disney Studios, in Burbank, California, Johnson described to me the approach he took to writing The Last Jedi, the second film of the Rey-centered trilogy. “J.J. and Larry and Michael set everybody up in a really evocative way in VII and started them on a trajectory. I guess I saw it as the job of this middle chapter to challenge all of those characters—let’s see what happens if we knock the stool out from under them,” he said.

As it is, none of the main characters in The Force Awakens emerged from that picture in what can be described as a triumphal state. John Boyega’s Finn had been gravely wounded in a lightsaber duel with Kylo Ren. In a telephone interview from China, where he was filming Pacific Rim: Uprising, Boyega told me that, as teased in The Last Jedi’s first trailer, his character, Finn, begins the new movie in a “bacta suit,” a sort of regenerative immersion tank that, in the Star Wars galaxy, heals damaged tissue. Adam Driver, alluding both to Finn’s state and the scar seen on his own face in the trailer, told me, “I feel like almost everyone is in that rehabilitation state. You know, I don’t think that patricide is all that it’s cracked up to be. Maybe that’s where Kylo Ren is starting from. His external scar is probably as much an internal one.”

Johnson was surprised at how much leeway he was given to cook up the action.

But Johnson, in drawing up his screenplay, decided to raise the stakes further. “I started by writing the names of each of the characters,” he said, “and thinking, What’s the hardest thing they could be faced with?”

At the top of Johnson’s list: Luke Skywalker. When he was last glimpsed in Lucas’s original trilogy, at the end of 1983’s Return of the Jedi, Luke was basking in victory and familial warmth, reveling with Princess Leia Organa, Han Solo, and their rebel compatriots at a celebratory Ewok dance party. Turning away for a moment from the festivities, he saw smiling apparitions of his two departed Jedi mentors, Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi, along with his late father, Anakin Skywalker, restored to his unscarred, un-Vadered form after redeeming himself in death, sacrificing his own life to save his son’s and slay the evil Emperor Palpatine.

You’d have expected Luke to have shortly thereafter found a nice girl and settled into a contented existence on a tidy planet with good schools and dual sunsets, no more than a couple of parsecs from the Organa-Solos and their little boy, Ben. But no. Leia and Han’s romance didn’t last, and something heavy went down with twin bro. The result: the cloak, the hood, and monastic isolation of the damaged, Leonard-Cohen-at-Mount-Baldy variety.

So what happened to Luke? What we know from The Force Awakens is that he had been running some sort of Jedi academy when “one boy, an apprentice, turned against him, destroyed it all.” These are the words that Han Solo, prior to his death scene, offers to Rey and Finn—the inference being that the boy was Han and Leia’s son, and Luke’s nephew, Ben, the future Kylo Ren. “People that knew him best,” Han says of Luke, “think he went looking for the first Jedi temple.”

That part of Luke’s legend, Johnson confirmed, is accurate. The site of Rey’s Force Awakens encounter with Luke is Ahch-To, the temple’s home planet, which bears a striking resemblance to southwestern coastal Ireland. Though their time on Skellig Michael was brief, the Last Jedi crew returned to the area for additional shooting on the Dingle Peninsula, a ragged spear of land that juts out into the North Atlantic. There, Johnson said, the set builders “duplicated the beehive-shaped huts where the monks lived on Skellig and made a kind of little Jedi village out of them.” Luke, it transpires, has been living in this village among an indigenous race of caretaker creatures whom Johnson is loath to describe in any more detail, except to say that they are “not Ewoks.”

That Luke is so changed a person presented Johnson with rich narrative opportunities. The Last Jedi is to a large extent about the relationship between Luke and Rey, but Johnson cautions against any “one-to-one correlation” between, say, Yoda’s tutelage of young Luke in The Empire Strikes Back and old Luke’s tutelage of Rey. “There’s a training element to it,” he said, “but it’s not exactly what you would expect.” This being the spoiler-averse world of Lucasfilm, the production company behind the Star Wars movies, that’s about as specific as the director is willing to get. (No, he won’t tell you if Luke is related to Rey, or, for that matter, what species the super-villain Supreme Leader Snoke happens to be, or which character the title The Last Jedi refers to.)

But Johnson was happy to talk about Hamill’s performance, which, he said, “shows a very different side of the Luke character.” In the original Star Wars trilogy, Luke was the de facto straight man, playing off Ford’s rascally Han and Fisher’s tart, poised Leia, not to mention the droid comedy tandem of C-3PO and R2-D2. Hamill? He was cast for his sincere mien and Bicentennial-era dreamboat looks—part Peter Cetera, part Osmond brother. He still catches grief, he noted, for one particularly clunky line reading in the first movie, when Luke responds to his Uncle Owen’s order to polish up their newly purchased droids by complaining, “But I was going into Tosche Station to pick up some power converters!” Though his approach to the line was, he swears, deliberate—“I distinctly remember thinking, I’ve got to make this as whiny and juvenile as I can,” he said—Hamill admitted that his greenness as an actor left him with “somewhere to go later, where I wouldn’t make those kinds of choices.”

In his years out of the spotlight, Hamill has flourished as a voice actor, most notably playing the Joker in a series of animated Batman TV shows, films, and video games. He performs the part with a demented brio and an arsenal of evil laughs ranging from Richard Widmark manic to Vincent Price broad—a far cry from the gee-whiz wholesomeness for which he is best remembered.

Oscar Isaac, at 38 the senior member of the core cast’s “new kids” (Driver is 33, and Ridley and Boyega are in their mid-20s), is old enough to remember as a child revering Luke Skywalker. “So to be there, and to watch Mark revisit Luke, particularly in these scenes we were shooting towards the end of the film, was bizarre and jaw-dropping,” he told me. “It’s like when you see an old band re-unite and go on the road, and they don’t quite hit those high notes anymore—though in this situation it’s completely the opposite. It’s the fulfillment of where your imagination would take you when you imagine where Luke would go, or what he’s become.”

III. Significant New Figures

On the Disney campus, I sat in on a postproduction meeting in which Johnson was reviewing some scenes from The Last Jedi. Teams from Industrial Light & Magic, Lucasfilm’s visual-effects division, were videoconferencing in from London, San Francisco, and Vancouver. On a big screen, Poe Dameron, Isaac’s heroic X-wing fighter pilot, was back in action, coaching a gunner named Paige, a new character played by a Vietnamese actress named Veronica Ngo. Another scene featured General Hux, the nefarious First Order commander played with spittle-flecked relish by Domhnall Gleeson.

Johnson loved what he was seeing but noted the presence of some “schmutz”—smudges around the edges—on the starcraft window that Hux was looking out of. “I don’t know, does the First Order not keep its windows clean?” he asked. “Did you guys play it that way before?”

He raised the question more deferentially than critically (and Ben Morris, the movie’s London-based VFX supervisor, said it would be no problem to de-schmutzify the pane). Until The Last Jedi, Johnson had never overseen a picture with a budget above $30 million. But the director betrayed no sign of being overwhelmed. He is a gifted filmmaker whose previous movies, especially Brick (his 2005 debut) and Looper, are visually distinctive and intricately plotted, the assured work of a cinema-drunk U.S.C. film-school grad who, in preparation for Episode VIII, steeped himself in World War II movies like Henry King’s Twelve O’Clock High and “funky 60s samurai stuff” like Kihachi Okamoto’s Kill! and Hideo Gosha’s Three Outlaw Samurai.

The anointment of Johnson as Episode VIII’s overseer is emblematic of the direction in which Kathleen Kennedy has taken Lucasfilm since she assumed the presidency of the company, in 2012, the same year that George Lucas, who had personally recruited her to take his place, sold the company to Disney. Though she reached out to Abrams, a proven wrangler of blockbuster series (Mission: Impossible, Star Trek), to initiate the current Star Wars trilogy, Kennedy has since picked filmmakers whose résumés are less important than whether or not she is a fan of their work.

Kennedy cut her teeth as a Steven Spielberg protégée—in the early 80s, when she was not yet out of her 20s, he entrusted her with producing E.T.—and now she, too, is keen on giving relative unknowns their big chance. Johnson was someone she’d had her eye on for years, she told me, admiring “how deliberate he is in his storytelling and the way he moves the camera.” The final film of the trilogy, due in 2019 and for the moment assigned the simple working title Episode IX, will be directed by Colin Trevorrow, who did not yet have the big-budget feature Jurassic World under his belt when he crossed Kennedy’s radar; he came to her attention via his first feature, the 2012 indie comedy Safety Not Guaranteed, and a recommendation from her friend Brad Bird, the Pixar auteur.

Part of what makes Lucasfilm’s new system work is that Kennedy has set up a formidable support structure for her filmmakers. Upon her arrival, she put together a story department at Lucasfilm’s San Francisco headquarters, overseen by Kiri Hart, a development executive and former screenwriter she has long worked with. The story group, which numbers 11 people, maintains the narrative continuity and integrity of all the Star Wars properties that exist across various platforms: animation, video games, novels, comic books, and, most important, movies. “The whole team reads each draft of the screenplay as it evolves,” Hart explained to me, “and we try, as much as we can, to smooth out anything that isn’t connecting.”

What the story group does not do, Hart said, is impose plot-point mandates on the filmmakers. Johnson told me he was surprised at how much leeway he was given to cook up the action of Episode VIII from scratch. “The pre-set was Episode VII, and that was kind of it,” he said. If anything, Johnson wanted more give-and-take with the Lucasfilm team, so he moved up to San Francisco for about six weeks during his writing process, taking an office two doors down from Hart’s and meeting with the full group twice a week.

Among Johnson’s inventions for The Last Jedi are three significant new figures: a “shady character” of unclear allegiances, played by Benicio Del Toro, who goes unnamed in the film but is called DJ by the filmmakers (“You’ll see—there’s a reason why we call him DJ,” Johnson said); a prominent officer in the Resistance named Vice Admiral Holdo, played by Laura Dern; and a maintenance worker for the Resistance named Rose Tico, who is played by a young actress named Kelly Marie Tran (and who is the sister of Paige, the character I witnessed in the scene with Poe Dameron). Tran’s is the largest new part, and her plotline involves a mission behind enemy lines with Boyega’s Finn, the stormtrooper turned Resistance warrior.

Rose and Finn’s adventure takes them to, among other places, another Johnson innovation: a glittering casino city called Canto Bight, “a Star Wars Monte Carlo–type environment, a little James Bond–ish, a little To Catch a Thief,” the director said. “It was an interesting challenge, portraying luxury and wealth in this universe.” So much of the Star Wars aesthetic is rooted in sandy desolation and scrapyard blight; it appealed to Johnson to carve out a corner of the galaxy that is the complete opposite. “I was thinking, O.K., let’s go ultra-glamour. Let’s create a playground, basically, for rich assholes,” he said.

Canto Bight is also where viewers will get their multi-species fix of gnarled aliens and other grotesque creatures, a comic-relief staple of Star Wars movies since Luke Skywalker first met Han Solo amid the cankerous and snouty inhabitants of the Mos Eisley cantina. The Last Jedi is dark enough as it is, so Johnson has made a point of infusing the movie with levity. “I didn’t want this to be a dirge, a heavy-osity movie,” he said. “So one thing I’ve tried really hard to do is keep the humor in there, to maintain the feeling, amid all the heavy operatic moments, that you’re on a fun ride.”

IV. Sister Carrie

Daisy Ridley has her own tale to tell of Skellig Michael. Part of the reason she looks so convincingly weary at the conclusion of Episode VII is, she said, “that I had just vomited. I had adrenal exhaustion, and I was very, very sick.”

The second time up the cliff, she was in good health and pleased to be re-united with Hamill. But the overall making of Episode VIII proved more psychologically fraught. “When I was doing Episode VII, I was kind of being washed along in a torrent of excitement and unexpectedness,” she said. “When we came around to do the next one, it was a bit more scary, because I knew the expectations, and I understood more what Star Wars means to people. It felt like more of a responsibility.”

The conflation of real-life and character narratives is not lost on Hamill.

Fortunately for Ridley, she had become acquainted with a woman who knew a thing or two about such issues. There was no human being on earth better equipped to shepherd Ridley through what she was experiencing, as both the star of a movie franchise and a feminist model to young girls, than Carrie Fisher. “Carrie lived her life the way she wanted to, never apologizing for anything, which is something I’m still learning,” Ridley said. “ ‘Embarrassed’ is the wrong word, but there were times through it all when I felt like I was … shrinking. And she told me never to shrink away from it—that it should be enjoyed.”

This is a common refrain among the new generation of Star Wars actors: that Fisher was the one who taught them how to deal. Boyega recalled that when there was a backlash against his appearance in the first Force Awakens teaser trailer, released in November 2014—the sight of a black man in stormtrooper armor drew ire from racists and doctrinaire Star Wars traditionalists—Fisher counseled him not to take it to heart. “I remember—and forgive me, I’m going to drop the f-bomb, but that’s just Carrie—she said, ‘Ah, boohoo, who fuckin’ cares? You just do you,’ ” he said. “Words like that give you strength. I bore witness in a million ways to her sharing her wisdom with Daisy too.”

Fisher had a bigger role to play in The Last Jedi—General Leia Organa logs significantly more screen time in Episode VIII than she did in VII. Isaac, who filmed several scenes with Fisher, said that, like Hamill, she delivered a rich performance, giving her all as an actor, rather than treating Leia’s part as an exercise in feel-good sentimentalism. “We did this scene where Carrie has to slap me,” he said. “I think we did 27 takes in all, and Carrie leaned into it every time, man. She loved hitting me. Rian found such a wonderful way of working with her, and I think she really relished it.”

For his part, Johnson quickly formed a deep bond with Fisher as a fellow writer, spending long hours with her at the eccentric compound she shared with her mother, Debbie Reynolds, in the Coldwater Canyon section of Beverly Hills. “After I had a draft, I would sit down with her when I was working on re-writing,” he said. “Sitting with her on her bed, in her insane bedroom with all this crazy modern art around us, TCM on the TV, a constant stream of Coca-Cola, and Gary the dog slobbering at her feet.” (For visuals on this characteristic state of affairs chez Fisher, I highly recommend Alexis Bloom and Fisher Stevens’s HBO documentary, Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds.)

Fisher completed her part in Episode VIII late last summer, when principal photography on the film wrapped. “She was having a blast,” said Kennedy. “The minute she finished, she grabbed me and said, ‘I’d better be at the forefront of IX!’ Because Harrison was front and center on VII, and Mark is front and center on VIII. She thought IX would be her movie. And it would have been.”

When I was conducting the interviews for this story, the Star Wars family was still mourning Fisher’s unexpected death, which occurred on December 27, 2016, four days after she suffered a heart attack on a flight home to Los Angeles from London, and just a day before Reynolds suffered a fatal stroke. (The Star Wars “family” includes family in the literal sense: Fisher’s daughter, the actress Billie Lourd, appears as a Resistance lieutenant in both The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi.) Fisher had celebrated her 60th birthday just two months earlier.

“Out of everyone, Carrie was the one I really became friends with and expected to have in my life for years and years,” said Johnson. “I last saw her in November, at the birthday party that she threw at her house. In a way, it was the perfect final, encapsulating image of Carrie—receiving all her friends in the bedroom, with Debbie holding court in the living room.”

Fisher’s death doesn’t change anything about The Last Jedi except make it more poignant: the film farewell of both the actress and the character. But it does change Episode IX, for which, as Fisher hoped, a central role for Leia had been planned. Kennedy, Trevorrow, and the Lucasfilm team have been compelled to swing from grieving into pragmatic mode, working out how to reconceive the next film in the saga, which is scheduled to start shooting in January.

One option that is not on the table is to reanimate Fisher’s Leia via C.G.I., as was briefly done in Rogue One, last year’s stand-alone, non-trilogy Star Wars film, created when she was alive. More extensively in that film, Grand Moff Tarkin, a character played by the late Peter Cushing in the first Star Wars movie, was brought back to life using C.G.I. jiggery-pokery and motion-capture technology that involved the use of an actor who physically resembles Cushing. Plus, Lucasfilm had the Cushing family’s consent. However, said Kennedy, “we don’t have any intention of beginning a trend of re-creating actors who are gone.”

V. A Disturbance in the Force

Mark Hamill, for all of his agreeable loquaciousness, winced when I brought up Fisher’s death.

“I can’t say that phrase, what you just said: Carrie’s name and then the d-word,” he said. “Because I think of her in the present tense. Maybe it’s a form of denial, but she’s so vibrant in my mind, and so vital a part of the family, that I can’t imagine it without her. It’s just so untimely, and I’m so angry.”

Their 40-year relationship truly was sibling-like, Hamill said, rife with affection and squabbles, though their earliest time together mirrored, to some degree, Luke and Leia’s uncertain early dynamic in the movies. In The Empire Strikes Back, the film before the film in which they learn that they are twins, Leia plants a big smackeroo squarely on Luke’s lips—not far off, Hamill said, from their reality as young co-stars. Working on the first Star Wars movie, “we were really attracted to each other. We got to the point where we were having our make-out sessions—and then we pulled back,” Hamill said. “A great way to cool any amorous feelings is laughter, and Carrie had this sort of Auntie Mame desire to find humor in everything. We also realized that, if we did this, everything would fundamentally change. It’s the When Harry Met Sally plot—can we still be friends after intimacy? Wisely, we avoided that.” (Hamill has been married to his wife, Marilou, since 1978.)

Ridley says, “Carrie lived her life the way she wanted to, never apologizing.”

Working together on the new trilogy gave Hamill and Fisher a chance to rekindle their benignly rancorous brother-sister dynamic. Both were staying in London, commuting distance from Pinewood Studios, where most of the non-location scenes of Star Wars movies are filmed. They held a competition to see who could get to a million Twitter followers first. (Hamill won; “I told Carrie, ‘Part of your problem is you write in these impenetrable emojis.’ Her tweets looked like rebus puzzles.”)

And, being the ages they were, they discussed mortality. “We got to talking about one of our favorite scenes in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which is when Tom and Huck go to their own funeral, and they’re up in the balcony, hearing their own eulogies,” Hamill said. “So then I said, ‘Look, if I go first, just promise me you’ll heckle my funeral.’ And she went, ‘Absolutely, if you’ll do the same for me.’ ”

The constant conflation of the Star Wars cast’s real-life and character narratives is not lost on Hamill, who inadvertently caused a kerfuffle last year during an appearance at the Oxford Union Society, when he described Daisy Ridley as “roughly my daughter’s age, and that’s how I relate to her.” As he knows from experience, sometimes the conflation is quite valid. Losing Fisher really has been like losing a sister.

Which speaks to the emotional resonance that has powered the saga from the start. “When you look at the stories themselves, they’re about personal tragedies and losses and triumphs,” Hamill said. “It’s all part and parcel of the same thing.”

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'Star Wars' Exclusive Sneak Peek: Hasbro's Deluxe Luke Skywalker-Landspeeder Set

Luke’s landspeeder mounts on a clear stand to simulate that sweet hover action. (Credit: Hasbro)

Luke Skywalker is all set to head down to Tosche Station for a rendezvous with Biggs, Windy, Deak, and Fixer in this exclusive first look at the latest addition to Hasbro’s premium Black Series line. The young moisture farmer can cruise the dunes of the twin-sunned planet in his X-34 landspeeder.

Recreate one of the saga’s most famous deleted scenes: Luke watching the opening space battle unfold above Tatooine. (Credit: Hasbro)

A major upgrade over the old-school Luke/landspeeder combo, this insanely detailed, highly articulated 6-inch figure is fully accessorized for his Tatooine routine — macrobinoculars, lightsaber hilt, and slugthrower rifle, as well as floppy hat and goggles worn by Mark Hamill in scenes that George Lucas ultimately excised from Star Wars: A New Hope. Heck, all that’s missing is a womp rat.

Luke (Mark Hamill) wearing his floppy hat in Star Wars deleted scene. (Credit: Lucasfilm)

The $59.99 set, which will arrive in stores this fall, will be among several new Hasbro toys on display at Star Wars Celebration. The fan-focused event runs Thursday through Sunday in Orlando and will include reveals of action figures and vehicles.

One of those will be the 6-inch Black Series version of Rey and her speeder from the opening moments of The Force Awakens.

Rey is ready to tackle a tough day of scavenging on Jakku; this $59.99 set will also be available in the fall. (Credit: Hasbro)

(Credit: Hasbro)

As we previously showed you, there will also be deluxe 6-inch incarnations of figures based on Kenner’s original Star Wars toys from 1978 in vintage packaging, which will be released in conjunction with next month’s 40th anniversary of A New Hope, as well as Luke in his X-wing gear (below), which will be exclusively available at the convention.

The exclusive 6-inch Celebration figure includes blaster and lightsaber and comes backed by a reproduction of Kenner’s artwork. (Credit: Hasbro)

(Credit: Hasbro)

Check back with Yahoo Movies for the latest news from Star Wars Celebration.