#idk if its the quarter life crisis hitting or what but this movie. man. this movie still kills me

[tanis-drawings-2point0]

hi do you ever think about the passage of time and former friendships falling apart yet being rekindled years later and stuff? yeah so ive been thinking abt the world's end lately idk if you've noticed and im, well, crying!

[chamerionwrites]

Alsoooo. if you are still doing character thoughts asks: Draven

How I feel about this character

MY MINOR ROGUE ONE FAVE. It’s a complicated kind of love, because he’s my excuse to explore ugly political subjects in space and I’m not interested unless he genuinely is at least 20% Unmitigated Bastard, but Draven is a fabulous elevator pitch of a character - principled enough to join a doomed little cause, ruthless enough to be its designated hit man - of a sort that you rarely ever get in Star Wars, and I can’t help but love a character who opens up a story that way.

Everyone I ship romantically with this character

Mon Mothma, as discussed here - to make a long story short the best description of this ship is “built-in threesome where the third partner is The Rebellion” and imho that’s narratively sexy.

Also, General Merrick/Blue Leader was extremely charming in his twenty seconds of screentime and Draven is the exact opposite of charming, so somewhere along the way I encountered this and unexpectedly went oh no, now I have headcanons. And then there’s the version where it’s wartime and dealing with their private life is like the 100th priority on everybody’s list so Merrick/Draven/Mothma happens in various combinations and it’s kind of a poorly-discussed hot mess. (My professional opinion about the Rebel Alliance is that almost everyone there is both stressed out and excruciatingly aware of their own mortality, and thus falls into one of several categories: (1) too busy and/or freaked out by their own emotions at the thought of losing people, (2) banging like a screen door in a hurricane, or (3) some bizarre blend of the two.)

Idk if you can call it a ship when it’s divorce, but I’m also very attached to my headcanon that Draven got married young and it was a trainwreck and he had a slightly spectacular quarter-life crisis where he walked out on his marriage and defected from Imperial Intel all in one go, because at least in this particular respect he is the classic cop/soldier/spy trope of Workaholic With Poor Emotional Communication Skills.  

My non-romantic OTP for this character

CASSIAN ANDOR, good god, those two acted an entire John le Carré novel with their eyes in like five minutes of shared screentime (during which - I have to stop and point this out because it boggles my mind that the character dynamic feels so well-developed - Cassian never speaks a line of dialogue directly to Draven) and I am absolutely serious and sincere when I say that I would watch an entire trilogy of movies based on that dynamic alone. Please give me the fraught psychological spy&spymaster dance in space. PLEASE.

My unpopular opinion about this character

Depending on who you’re talking to, it’s either that assassinating Galen Erso is honestly a pretty understandable decision and it was just the way he went about it that was super shady, or that he is not some kind of heart-of-gold-under-the-crusty-exterior archetype but genuinely a bit of a bastard all the way down, albeit one with redeeming qualities. Basically fandom seems to fall into one of two camps on the question of whether Draven is a sympathetic character or a jerkass, and I’m off in my own little corner waving a “Draven is a sympathetic character and a jerkass” flag.

Also, I’m into the popular fanon that there are some surrogate father&son undertones in his and Cassian’s relationship but I’m only on board insofar as we acknowledge that (at least according to offscreen canon) Cassian’s real dad was straightup murdered by the government Draven worked for at the time, and the relationship there can be meaningful and human but some part of it is always going to be deeply fucked up. And quite frankly most of fandom does NOT want to go that hard - not that I entirely blame them, but “it’s far more interesting if you lean into the awful parts” is a hill I’ll die on here (and also, is it really Star Wars without problematic father figures? Jyn has two).

What I wish had happened in canon

Listen, in the ruthless economy of storytelling all minor characters are to some extent cannon fodder; I respect your right to slaughter your cast in a story set during wartime. What I cannot imagine is why you’d choose to do it in such an unimaginative way as the comics writers decided to kill off Draven. Generic Desperate Rearguard Self-Sacrifice is just…that’s not why Draven is there. That’s not what he exists in the story to do. He exists to pose awkward questions about moral compromise and democratic decision-making and the ways war fucks people up even in an indisputably just cause.

Narratively speaking, the FUN thing to do with a character like that is to make him live with his choices. Make this guy live long enough to face the New Republic state-building. Make mister unsanctioned-assassination-for-the-greater-good take part in the attempts to stick the landing from scrappy revolutionaries to the people in power. Make him confront the ways the late Republic already was the Empire in all but name - he would know, if anybody saw the Republic’s nastiest underbelly it was an intel officer - and whether they’re going to replicate the same old patterns (I know DLF doesn’t have the range for this but come ON). Make him confront the people (up to and including himself) that he used as weapons because they were desperate and it was necessary, and maybe he’d make all the same choices over again but what does that do to somebody in the long run, you know? There’s that devastating line from The Spy Who Came In From The Cold: “In our world we pass so quickly out of the register of hate or love–like certain sounds a dog can’t hear. All that’s left in the end is a kind of nausea; you never want to cause suffering again.”

THAT. I want Draven to live long enough to experience that specific, exquisite badfeel.

TL;DR - I don’t object to Draven getting Vader-choked because I have a soft spot for him (I’m a Rogue One fan okay, I love stories that tenderly knife me in the ribs). I object because it’s the most boring possible narrative choice you could make, and particularly given he’s a slightly unusual sort of character for Star Wars it seems a shame to waste him. Give Mon Mothma someone to harmonize with while she’s singing Empty Chairs At Empty Tables, FFS.