#meirah arirai

[kotorswtor]

If it'd entertain you, I'd love to hear about the cooking habits of Ellekai, Revan or anyone else you feel like talking about! What is their favourite thing to eat? And does Ellekai's closeness to Mandalorian culture mean she is the only one at her temple who can eat spicy food? :)

Ellekai (for the benefit of new friends, my SWtOR Jedi sage, a zabrak born to Mandalorian parents) is all about that spice. She grew up with the Jedi Order issuing most of her meals, and didn’t particularly have a natural aptitude for cooking or a huge number of opportunities to practice, but she’s learned to competently prepare a few things, the way she does everything, meticulous research and stubbornness with a side of copious swearing. Most of the dishes she knows how to make are face-meltingly spicy.

In general, Ellekai likes trying new foods. Jedi don’t own stuff, so the thing she most commonly gives or receives as gifts is opportunities to check out cool out-of-the-way restaurants wherever she and her loved ones are stationed. Her go-to ethnic cuisines other than her native one are Kaleesh and Pasaanan.

Legends-lore-wise, Zabraks are obligate carnivores. I’ve speculated that field rations made for Zabraks are pretty much canned cat food. You turn a standard-issue Zabrak ration into a Mandozabrak ration by drowning it in whatever the in-universe equivalent to Lao Gan Ma is.

Meirah, my Revan, barely remembers to eat without help and would probably live on synthesized protein glop full time if she could, with a few exceptions. She told her crew on Taris that she was taking part in the dueling arena because having a supply of ready cash would help them take advantage of any opportunity to get off-world, and that was...about 75% true. The rest was so that she could take Mission out for bubble tea whenever she wanted.

Meirah’s inexplicably-strong emotional response to the plain, hearty food served at the Dantooine Jedi Enclave- she nearly burst into tears when someone handed her a proper cup of tea- was a good indication that her post-Battle of Sernpidal conditioning was starting to fail.

I don’t think she ever becomes an especially discerning eater or enthusiastic, independent cook. Carth, who learned to feed himself and his crew during long shifts in the Telos Defense Force and subsequently on military leave, is much more competent in the kitchen, and she learns the fundamentals by sous-cheffing for him.

[kotorswtor]

Could you please elaborate in how you see Revan and Malak's relationship? I'm super curious now. (I always had the biggest issue characterising Malak bc there isn't really much to work with apart from the inferiority complex. I basically ended up reading them as people who had hugely overlapping sense of humor and were passionate about similar stuff, therefore became friends. It worked bc back then Revan genuinely cared about people's feelings and Malak was ambitious but not yet ruthlessly.)

You’re right, characterizing Malak is tough. The KotOR comics have some great moments, but if you’re going on the game alone, the version of Malak you meet is so far into Chaotic Stupid territory that things like orderly troop withdrawals no longer make sense to him.

I think of pre-Jedi-Civil-War Revan and Malak as people who were drawn together by their common commitment to a cause, who stuck together because their work consumed them to the point that they had little time or energy to maintain social contacts outside of each other and because they had complementary strengths that made for a very effective working relationship. Revan handled long-range planning, strategy, and logistics, Malak was gifted in shorter-term tactical considerations, and leading and managing their sentient followers and contacts.

I think that relationship eventually deteriorated in part because they came to undervalue each others’ skillset; Alek felt he was doing most of the Actual Hard Work and resented taking orders from/being treated like a deployable artillery piece by someone who was such a hopeless goober that they had to completely erase their public identity as a person to be any kind of charismatic or compelling. Asheri, my pre-mindwipe Revan, was frustrated that Alek, for all of his brilliance, didn’t understand either what she was doing or the necessity of it, she had to spoonfeed him every step of the plan like a baby, and he selfishly made everything about him and his perpetually wounded feels.

I think Alek may have related to/wanted to relate to Asheri as a friend, whereas, especially as the Mandalorian Wars dragged on, Asheri slid into a mindset of “I and everyone else will have time for cultivating friends when the Republic and all its people are not in imminent danger of destruction. Meanwhile we all have jobs to do (and I determined what your job is a long time ago).”

One of the main important things that separates Asheri from Meirah is that Meirah had to learn to think of the individual agency of members of the Ebon Hawk crew, and by extension, of sentient beings in general, as morally relevant. To some extent, Meirah’s relationship with Carth was about reevaluating some of Asheri and Alek’s dynamic and trying to do a version of that that wasn’t exploitative and awful on all sides.

(I can’t romanticize pre-Jedi Civil War Revan, because my Pre-Jedi Civil War Revan was Not A Good Person.)

[kotorswtor]

Do you have any specific aesthetic in mind for Revan (Meirah or in general) the way you do for Ellekai? I've been trying to come up with what Revan could have worn as a Knight before the war and I really struggle to balance all the possible influences on their clothing: 1)KOTOR1 robes 2)OT movie robes 3)Samurai/Miko attires 4)the fact that they wore a freaking hoodie under an ornamental armour. You seem really knowledgeable about this sort of thing, so I'd very much appreciate your thoughts.

Whoa, what a cool question! Thanks for asking.

You’re right. There’s a lot to choose from. Tales of the Jedi, the first series to tackle the Old Old Republic time period and one of the first SWEU depictions of Jedi at all happened about 40 years before KotOR, and features a huge diversity of costume designs, some of which are pretty cool, some of which read as really dated (90s Dark Age of Comics ahoy!) or just plain weird 30 out-of-universe years later. I feel like the clothing designs we see in KotOR are mostly trying to reconcile TotJ designs with the technical limitations of graphics in 2003. KotOR II decided that continuity with the then-current prequel trilogy was more important, so we see a major shift in what people are wearing, even though only about three years and change have passed in-universe. So, like you said, you’ve got to do the thing that’s common to making sense of SWEU lore in general: look at all your influences and decide what does or doesn’t go in your own personal Star Wars.

The one consistent thread that runs through how I think about Meirah, both during the events of KotOR and before she disappeared into the construct of Revan is the quote attributed to latter, “Who I am is not important, my message is.” Both when she’s a Jedi firebrand and when she’s a very confused commtech nursing a TBI, she gravitates toward clothes that are so generic and non-descript that they accidentally wrap back around to being distinctive. 

I keep coming back to the prequel-era Jedi Youngling costume as something that reconciles design elements from KotOR and KotOR II and the Sengoku-Daimyo fashions that largely inspired depictions of Jedi. It also would be a lot more practical/usable than the weird mobius-band lapels of the KotOR tunic. Asheri (her pre-Revan name)/post-Dantooine Meirah probably wears an adult-sized version with close-fitting Western-style trousers or hakama as the situation demands, in a soft, drape-y, matte-textured fabric like silk noil. Color-wise, I see her in very desaturated, grayed-down earth tones.

In her posting as a Republic Military contractor aboard the Endar Spire, she probably starts out in a plastron shirt (like the ones we see on Han, Luke, Cassian, and Jyn), trousers, and a mid-thigh to knee-length coat. Republic/Rebellion vermillion-orange and navy creep in as accent colors, and the jacket and trousers are probably in harder-wearing utility fabrics like twill and gabardine, but the texture is still brushed or slightly fuzzy matte, and putty gray-browns are still the dominant colors.  Not gray because “gray Jedi” (there’s a whole other rant on that as a concept), gray because it’s indistinct and tends to recede into the background. Both are as different as they could possibly be from the Revan who dresses in the carapace and colors of a venomous wasp.

I think of Meirah as someone whom you’d forget in seconds if you saw her in a crowd…until an emergency breaks out and she needs to start moving. So both her civilian and Jedi costumes would probably emphasize movement- they’d lie close to the body at rest and snap and flare dramatically when it’s time to run or fight.

I got here in part because of my own “metaphysics of Revan,” which may be different from yours or anyone else’s. To me, Revan is a nom-de-guerre and an assumed identity that’s deliberately distinct from the person who carries it and deployed strategically. Sort of like a classic superhero, but not with quite the same rationale. That lets them have a certain elemental purity of ideology and purpose that you couldn’t get from Revan being an ordinary person, with a person’s personality and history that don’t easily conform to a single, simple, narrative.

If you think of Revan as someone’s “natural” personality, it would make a lot of sense from a costuming perspective to blend elements of the Darth Revan ensemble (the miles of pleated drapery, the rust/bronze/black color scheme, the armored elements) into your character’s pre-Jedi-Civil-War aesthetic, and into their KotOR-era gear to foreshadow the reveal.

[kotorswtor]

Please tell me something about Meirah or Ellekai, I've had a serious excellent-OC deficiency lately. It can be anything from whether they sleep on their back to their opinions on the sentiency of the Force, whatever you feel like. I just want to hear you talk about your wonderful babies. Have a great day!

Thank you, Anon, that’s so kind of you! I hope you also have an excellent day.

Random stuff about Meirah: I tend to run on the headcanon that “Revan” has only ever been a professional title, possibly one that can be shared between multiple persons. Before she took up the mask, her name was Asheri Eleor. 

Regarding the nature of the Force, I think by the time she’s Meirah, she’s dialoging with but not totally in agreement with either Kreia’s or Orthodox Jedi beliefs on the personal nature of the Force. She’d tell you that it is sentient, as in it definitely “feels,” and “knows” things, but that how it does that is way more similar to an ocean or a planet than an individual person. 

She believes that the Force tends toward amorality (or at least that its moral priorities are different from conventional personal/societal ones to the point of inscrutibility), especially the further “into” it you get, and that any moral systems or judgments of peoples need to be able to stand apart/without justification from any will or teleological process that the Force might happen to have.

[kotorswtor]

rprambles I see you makin' me roll Meirah in the SWtOR CC, you evil scheming genius

[kotorswtor]

Re: Telos: Oh wow, I didn't know all that about Telos (shame on me, not doing my research)... I like your theory of Revan's plan there very much (and by very much I mean "it hurts but only because it makes sense"). How many of those AgriCorps members ended up wherever Revan had her (the word is escaping me--where Atton & other "interrogators" were?)? Hmm.

It gets worse- the way Meirah would tend to think prior to Sernpidal (and still does to an extent, but is fortunate to have other considerations and voices of reason with whom to argue) is "well, this sucks because we've lost roughly X percentage of Adept-potential Force sensitives to Malak's tantrum. On the other hand, the ones who have survived, because their abilities gave them advanced warning or survival skills that others didn't possess, will be concentrated into one or a few locations and, in their current state, a lot easier to 'recruit.'"