#jateka tenau

[thesummerstorms]

Tbh, conversations in Adult!Kad's house must occasionally be interesting to listen to. No one shares the same first language and no one speaks precisely the same Mando'a, so even though they all generally share enough language in common that it's not a huge problem, there are probably topics for which Etta, as their daughter, knows four Mando'a words and five sets of idioms, not even counting aruetii languages. 

 Jateka speaks primarily Mando'a but she's from a colony that willingly embraced Mando tenets but also kept a lot of its original culture, so she has a lot of pronunciation, loan words, slang, and figurative language unique to her homeworld.

Sivvar learned his mother's non-Mandalorian language first and he speaks the Concordian dialect of Mando'a before any other because he was raised there. 

Kad theoretically should have the most Keldabe-standard Mando'a (or at least I always assumed the version Kal spoke was Keldabe standard; maybe it isn't?) but it's been heavily influenced by Grand Army culture, slang, and invention, and while he's grown up around Mando'a as a primary language both his parents learned it as a second, adult language, again adapted by GAR use (and probably Etain's need to translate the best Huttese swears and expressions Kad didn't realize until adulthood Mereel wordsmithed himself). And a lot of his language is still probably Basic because his parents had to acquire a lot of Mando'a as adults while still raising him.

[generalgraceless]

Rebellion and Post-Empire Canon

I’m not sure how much of this I’ve stated explicitly over here and how much has been in vague headcanon or on my personal, so the briefest of bulletpoint run downs of my headcanons. Some of which are of course open to negotiation for specific threads or playing with specific characters:

Imperial Era:

Etain survives Order 66, which plays out rather differently than in canon, and spends a long time in recovery for her physical and emotional wounds.

~18 BBY, Etain takes orphaned Jedi Padawan Tallisibeth “Scout” Enwandung-Esterhazy as a Padawan. Etain begins working with the Altisians to resettle Force-sensitive children and to bring the cure to men formerly under her command.

~17 BBY Darman and Etain adopt Scout as their daughter. 

She and Darman abandon Kyrimorut for a safehouse in a Mandalorian district of Nar Shaddaa shortly after the destruction of the clone anti-aging cure and Mereel’s presumed death in ~17-16 BBY. 

Etain gets roped into the earliest Rebellion movements after initially finding herself in conflict with Sith Inquisitors in 16 BBY.

When Mereel reappears (~16-15 BBY), he shows up at Etain’s safehouse (as she and Dar had originally inherited it from him) and with his return, the clan starts pulling together again.

~15 BBY, Etain follows a Sith Inquisitor’s trail to the Eye of Palpatine where, working in tangent with a Fallanasi, Tisiphone, she rescues the spirit Callista Masana from the depths of the AI core. Callista ends up inhabiting Tisiphone’s body and spends the next year under Etain’s protection as she recovers.

~ 15 BBY Etain and Darman begin working more closely with a Rebellion cell operating along the Bothan Run and expanding during this time into the three principle Huttese hyperspace routes. During this time, Etain begins wearing her black Rebellion armor and more frequently using the aliases Riye Naast and Etta Ardellian.

13 BBY After an overly relaxed vacation to Gatalenta, Etain ends up pregnant and temporarily retreats from her Rebellion work 6 months later.

12 BBY, Etain’s youngest child, a daughter named Koa, is born.

~10 BBY, Etain returns to work as a freelance tracker, intelligence asset, and special forces operative working with the Rebellion. Within the next 3-4 years, she is slowly drawn into the free-standing unit of Captain Izrin Riltka, operating independently or in pairs, and only loosely inside official Rebellion channels. She continues hunting Inquisitors first and foremost.

~7 BBY, Etain is stretched thin, still operating mostly outside official commands, now working to help develop a Mandalorian resistance network that provides resources to those undermining the Imperial occupation, tracking down dangerous Imperial agents, and moving refugees through a chain of resettlement and protection efforts stretching across Hutt space and through the Llanic Run

~ 0 BBY, Etain and Darman’s granddaughter, Etta Tenau, is born to their (rather young) son Kad. The baby is Force-sensitive. Etain is only 38.

Post Empire:

Etain spends several years in the clean up effort mopping up  the Imperial remnant, goes for a time to help rebuild on Mandalore, but ultimately returns to Nar Shaddaa.

She and Darman spend a few years in semi-retirement, splitting their time between their homes on Nar Shaddaa and Gatalenta with their youngest daughter and their very young granddaughter.

Said daughter, Koa, ends up attending an aruetii university and earning dual degrees in music and science. 

Etain’s son Kad ends up meeting and marrying a Concordian man named Sivvar. He is eventually drawn into politics by his best friend and the mother of his child, Jateka Tenau, while his husband prefers a quieter life as husband/father/artist. The two split time between Manda’yaim and Nar Shaddaa.

Koa migrates to a peripheral Mandalorian, works her way into political leadership, and eventually becomes the colony’s leader, a noteable Mandalorian reformist, and an ally of Mand’alor Sabine Wren.

Etain takes time to reconnect both with her Jedi roots, training with what remains of the Altisian faction alongside Callista Masana, and her adopted Mandalorian heritage. She and Darman pay respects to the New Mandalorian, and make a tour of Mandalorian systems and colonies. Ultimately they find their own district on Nar Shaddaa suits them best.

In ~ 30 BBY, Etain accepts work from a Rebel-turned-New-Republic-Official as a favor to an old friend. Gradually, she and her family piece together their independent sources of intelligence to realize the First Order

~ 26 BBY, Etain is drawn by old allegiances into an “outside contractor” role for the Resistance at the age of 66

30 BBY Etain is officially drawn in as Special Operations staff for the Resistance on the strength of her Rebellion credentials, although her familial/political allegiances and status as an active Jedi remain a half-secret.

[thesummerstorms]

To be honest, recently I’ve been worrying a little about the way I currently have the plotlines written for both Etain’s daughter Koa and Kad’s daughter Etta’s births. I am pro-choice (and if you aren’t, just go ahead and unfollow me now; I don’t care to hear from you) and both plotlines concern unplanned pregnancies. 

While I 100% percent believe in supporting pregnant people in whatever choice is the right one for them, whether that means continuing or ending a pregnancy, both of the women are fictional, under my control, and are written into the context of a series that’s chalk full of misogyny and for a readership that likely experiences a high amount of anti-choice rhetoric, and I don’t want to reinforce that, even unintentionally.

Part of my problem is just the necessities of plot. The same conditions that lead Etain to very seriously consider having an abortion and that make it reasonable Jateka, Etta’s mother, might want to consider one (although I don’t spend much time on this) are also the reasons why I felt it was necessary to write the pregnancies as unplanned in the first place.

In Etain’s case, her problem isn’t that she doesn’t want another child with Darman. She wants one very badly, and they’ve both had that longing for years. Yet, at the same time, she’s too afraid and her situation too bad for me to see her consciously choosing to get pregnant.

On one level, an emotional level, she still hasn’t dealt fully with the trauma surrounding her first pregnancy and Kal Skirata’s removal of her agency. She still believes she deserved that and even if she could bring herself to face her emotions about it, she doesn’t want to “inflict” it on Darman. Yet that is a trauma, and it does lead to some embedded fear and stress, even if she doesn’t want to identify it.

Her family is  also already potentially  in a somewhat precarious situation as far as access to resources (estranged from Kal Skirata, they don’t have access to the trillion credit slush fund, stable work), security (both she and Darman have earned deathmarks from the Empire and are actively working with some of the early Rebel networks; Etain has also fought Inquisitors first hand and can’t stop them from coming after her two existing children), and support networks (unlike when Kad was little, they aren’t in a place with regular, daily access to other adult family members who they can fall back on when they’re having trouble dealing with physical or emotional traumas, and they already have one dependent child).

Yes, Etain’s planning when she got pregnant with Kad was extremely shoddy, or perhaps non-existent, but she was a naive  nineteen year old at that point, as opposed to a twenty seven year old who’s been raising two children in a war zone for a little less than a decade. She was also severely punished for her impulsive decision to conceive Kad, both physically and emotionally, and she hasn’t forgotten that experience. A second pregnancy would inevitably end up more considered.

With all of this it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me that Darman and Etain would end up choosing to conceive another child during the war. Etain, at the very least, is too terrified. Thus I chose to wrote Koa as the consequence of some sort of space!birth control failure rather than a planned child.

As for Jateka, I wanted to more or less have a situation where you could love someone but not be in love with them, and that you could raise a child well with someone who wasn’t your romantic partner. I wanted to have some aromantic representation. And I also strongly wanted to refute the idea that just because you’re accidently having a child with someone, the best thing for the child is to rush to marry them, whether or not it’s the best emotional thing for both parents.

So the setup I came up with is Jateka and Kad as being young and a little stupid, best friends who also have fun fucking despite the lack of a romantic bond, who end up in an accidental pregnancy because they were young and got a little careless. I wrote Jateka as wanting the baby as soon as she figured out she was pregnant, because even though she doesn’t want marriage, she finds she wants a child. Kad, a little overwhelmed and acting on Bad Advice ™ , proposes, and she turns him down, pointing out that they aren’t in love- but that doesn’t mean they can’t be good parents together. And Kad wants the baby too, even if it isn’t a traditional relationship, and it works out because they communicate and make it work. But it isn’t ever a situation where the two of them would have sat down and planned to have the baby, because then that last point is lost.

And yet.

Both Jateka and Etain choose to keep their unplanned pregnancies. Again, people in real life make this decision and it deserves as much support as any other decision. People who are pregnant deserve to make the right choice for themselves and their families.

But in most fictional setting when unplanned pregnancy is brought up, if abortion is ever even is considered as an option, it’s “proved” to be the wrong option, and everyone involved ends up relieved when the child is born and then it’s babies happily ever after. The narrative may or may not (likely will) condemn them for considering ending the pregnancy, but the choice that’s ultimately “right” or makes the characters “good” is choosing to give birth. Or else someone has an abortion and their partner is angry because they wanted the child, or someone has an abortion and then they regret it and find out they wanted the baby after all. As much as Jateka and Etain’s specific contexts make sense to me, it doesn’t remove them from the larger meta context.

Nor does it remove the fact that the series I’m writing into does not provide much of any text that could be seen as supporting abortion rights, or really reproductive rights at all. Etain is immediately torn to shreds by the narrative and the fandom for her first choice to conceive, and then systematically stripped of any agency in her own pregnancy, down to the right to name her own child. Notably, no one ever brings up abortion in this discussion either. Not that Etain wants that during this stage; it’s clear she doesn’t. But it’s never even considered as a possibility, even one she can dismiss as something she wants. The assumption is that she will bear the child and Kal will control both her fate and her son’s and that this is “correct”.

You also have the fact that almost immediately after conceiving Etain begins addressing Kad, then an unnamed zygote and sensing his future destiny and importance. While it’s interesting from the perspective of the Force, it’s… troubling in the context of reproductive rights, particularly writing as a North American who’s seeing the rise of so-called “heartbeat bills” and anti-choicers crying that “life begins at conception” and thus anyone who has an abortion is a “murderer”. The text itself never makes that connection… but it still exists, and still has the effect of privileging what is at that point cells with the potential to become a person with a destiny even as the narrative strips the mother of control of her own fate.

Even when I write Etain and Darman both as pro-choice and serious discussing abortion as a possibility, having open conversation about what’s best for them and their existing children, and have Darman offer support for whatever Etain chooses, this is still the context I am writing into.  

And so I almost feel a little uncomfortable not writing a situation where someone chooses not to continue a pregnancy and it’s the right decision and no one pushes back against them and they don’t regret it.

I could choose to  rewrite things so that Kad and Jateka choose, despite their lack of romantic connection, to have a child together. But that still doesn’t give positive representation.

I also could write Etain as having an abortion earlier during the war- because as much as she wants a child, the timing isn’t right, and she and Dar are sad about that but it’s the right choice- and then let them choose to have Koa later on afterwards. And I’ve considered doing that.

But it doesn’t address the strong contextual reasons a planned pregnancy would be so unlikely during the Galactic Civil War (by the time the war ends, Etain would be in her early forties, and unlikely to be in good physical position to have a baby, if she even still wanted one when her youngest son would be in his twenties) or why they might change their minds the second time when the situation only seems to get worse further into the war.

Ultimately, I’m not sure what to do with my unease, except to acknowledge its roots and write very carefully, to purposefully show as much open and supporting conversation as possible while still wondering if I can come up with a better solution that doesn’t rely on yet another character with magically failing space birth control.

But it still doesn’t sit quite right.

[thesummerstorms]

The day Darman and Etain wake up after babysitting their granddaughter overnight, only to discover that Etta has woken up early and to “redecorate” by painting everything in the sitting room that would hold still long enough, including the strill.

Sivvar is mortified, and Kad and Jateka are embarrassed and apologetic, but they also can’t stop laughing.

[thesummerstorms]

Etta Tenau has a black-and-chocolate-brown colored strill named Drasha that’s actually older than her aunt, but still thinks it’s a pup.

Given strill life-spans,it might actually still be a pup.

It’s one of Mird’s descendants, so it’s wickedly smart and pretty well bonded to the family. It bonded with Etta when she was still an infant. Jateka, Etta’s mother, was beyond exasperated, as was Kad’s eventual husband, Sivvar, but Kad is delighted because he remembers, hazily, Mird’s visits during his own childhood, and this is exactly what he was hoping for.

He will never confess to that aloud, lest his husband or best friend strangle him.

Somehow Drasha always finds its way into Etta and Sivvar’s paints. Koa thinks this is hilarious, even more so once Drasha accidentally painted a NEw Republic diplomat green with its tail.

It thinks it’s more dignified than it is.

It’s very good at scouting and guarding, less so in outright attacking, which suits Etta perfectly well. Given its origin, it’s remarkably well adapted to work with Force-users, not that Etta would ever admit that to anyone but her family. It also comes at a disadvantage when whatever flavor of hostile Force-user shows up, because Drasha is so used to obeying Etta’s Force-suggestions and relying on Etta’s senses.

Drasha is mostly of even temperament, but it’s very eager that everyone, including Etta, know that it’s the boss. Mird and Ordo are both unamused.

[thesummerstorms]

 I’ve spent all night thinking about OCs and thinking about Kad’s eventual family? I have very specific headcanons for the woman he has a child with and his eventual husband.

His best friend/friend with benefits (as teenagers)/ the accidental mother of his child (but not ever his romantic partner) is Jateka Tenau. 

Jateka grew up off of Mandalore proper, on a peripheral Mandalorian settlement on the edge of the Mandalorian sector (I’m thinking about Jakelia or Shogun, but I might make up a planet) that occasionally puzzles Mando’ade from Mandalore with its distinct dialect and its customs. 

There’s a lot of variety across the planet, but the fortress town Jateka grew up in has a lot of pre-Mandalorian architecture, and Mandalorian tenets were more or less absorbed and entwined with the local customs. Notably, Jateka’s home culture traces descent and names through the maternal rather than the paternal line.

Jateka met Kad when they were both ~15, shortly after she moved from her homeworld to (somewhere? I want to say Keldabe, but it would be Imperial-occupied) to accept apprenticeship to a cousin.

Jateka is heterosexual, but aromantic, with no desire to enter or maintain romantic relationships. While she does love Kad, in her own way and as her best friend, she has no desire to enter any kind of exclusive or romantic partnership with him, and is delighted for him when he does marry. The three of them coparent very efficiently though, and Jateka is accepted as family by most of the Skiratas. 

Her mother and father are also gradually drawn in, and know about the clan’s Force-sensitives, considering their grandaughter is one.

Jateka is a weapons smith, primarily making, beskar pieces such as knives and swords, but also deals in custom blasters and sells rare parts, pieces, and modifications on the side. (Clan Skirata occasionally finds this useful.)

She was the one to suggest naming her daughter in honor of Kad’s mother, per her own culture’s custom for first-born daughters.

Jateka has Etta when she and Kad are both somewhere between 20 and 22 (I haven’t decided precisely yet. I’m also not sure whether or not she has a second, younger child with someone else who Kad and his family occasionally keep an eye on)

Meanwhile, his eventual husband is named Sivvar (or possibly Sivar/Sivaar- debating spellings).

Sivvar’s mother lived a substantial portion of her life in Concord Dawn, and his first languages are the Concordian dialect of Mando’a and the language of his mother’s homeworld, with Huttese coming in second and Basic third. He was raised in a mix of Concordian beliefs and those of the world his mother was born on before choosing to immigrate to Concord Dawn.

Sivvar was raised by a single mother, and spent most of his childhood migrating from place to place with her as she looked for contracts that would allow her to keep him by her side and hid from the Empire (who she had pissed off resisting the Imperial occupation in the Mandalore sector when he was four or five.)

After his mother’s death he ended up drifting for some time until he ended up on Ordo. He found temporary work in one of the settlements there and found himself drawn further into this pocket of Mandalorian culture, which was both similar and vastly different to the versions of the tenets he had grown up with. The watershed moment was when he finally managed to purchase full beskar’gam, marking his conscious choice to identify as Mandalorian.

He did migrate back to Concord Dawn for a few years in attempt to return to his roots, but was forced offworld by the Imperials. He met Kad Skirata by accident when both were laying low on the frontier world of Cheravh. 

Sivvar is an artist who specializes in working with paint and clay, including in formats that don’t fit the traditional conception of Mando culture as they’re fragile or not immediately pragmatic.

Kad and Sivvar marry when Etta (Kad’s daughter) is around four years old, but they don’t go for their first date until after Sivvar earn’s Kad’s trust by helping protect Etta by hiding her Force-abilities from Imperial scouts and then fighting in her defense.

Kad likes to joke that if they hadn’t been dating/eventually married, Etain would have adopted Sivvar into the clan as her own son. He’s actually probably right; they get on famously.

Sivvar has a very grounded, level personality, and the best person to talk sense into Kad at any given time. Occasionally, he has to talk sense into Kad and Jateka both.

Sivvar loves Etta, and adopts her as his own when he marries her father. He also, fittingly, tells dad jokes.