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sabxism · 4 years ago

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Never Have I Ever

Pairing: Poe Dameron x Reader

Word count: 2k

Warnings: none besides Rose and Finn being conspiratorial little shits

Summary: You've always been too nervous to tell Poe how you feel. A night out after the end of the war may change that.

It feels surreal, to put it simply. It’s over. It’s finally over. For years, you’ve known nothing but chaos and panic and uncertainty. But now, you can leave all of it in the past. Palpatine’s gone. The war’s over.

Leaping from your x-wing, you spot Poe across the tarmac. He locks eyes with you, breaking into a huge, beaming grin. You sprint towards him, sporting an equally bright expression. He holds out his arms, and you leap into them. He spins around as you bury your face in his neck, laughing. He sets you down, placing his hands on your upper arms.

“We did it,” he breathes, and you nod in disbelief.

“We did it,” you repeat, still smiling. You’re about to compliment a particular barrel roll he’d pulled off earlier when Finn comes barreling over, wrapping him in a bear hug. You smile, walking away to grab some water and allow Poe some time with his friend.

He watches your retreating form with a faint smile, content with the universe for the first time in years. Finn looks at him with a knowing expression and nudges him with his elbow. Poe snaps his head around, cheeks flushed.

“You should tell her,” he says, and Poe’s eyes widen.

“No way,” he replies, carding a hand through his hair. “What if I fuck everything up?” Finn rolls his eyes.

“Poe, I love you, but you’re the most oblivious man I’ve ever met.” This earns him a shocked expression from the older man, and he laughs. “Trust me. Just tell her.” Poe opens his mouth to object, but loses what he was going to say as Rey walks up and wraps him and Finn in a hug.

You watch as the three embrace, smiling. You’re so proud of Poe your chest could burst. He’d handled that last battle with the grace and strategy you’ve seen in him time and time again. You hear footsteps headed your way and glance up, to find Rose standing next to you.

“Hey,” she says quietly, and you scooch to the left a bit to give her space to sit, patting the bench next to you. “It’s crazy, huh?”

“Yeah,” is all you can manage, but you can tell that she understands the magnitude of emotions contained in your reply. No words could encapsulate the feeling of joy and relief flowing through you.

“I heard Poe did some pretty amazing flying out there.”

You grin, nodding. “He really did. Per the usual, of course.” Smiling, she takes in the look of admiration on your face.

“You like him.” Not a question, just a statement. An observation. You look at her slowly and nod.

“I do,” you say, taking a sip of water from the canteen in your hand.

“He likes you, I think. From what Finn’s told me.” You splutter, choking on your drink.

“What?” you exclaim, face turning red as a tomato as you cough. She laughs loudly, and you shoot her a death glare. “If you’re pulling my leg I swear-”

“I’m not, I promise.”

Narrowing your eyes, you swallow another mouthful of water. “What exactly has Finn told you?”

“He’s caught Poe staring at you too many times to count, that damn idiot never shuts up about you, and once Rey saw him fiddling with his mom’s ring behind his back while talking to you,” she lists, ticking off the instances on her fingers.

“That doesn’t mean he likes me,” you point out, and Rose sighs. Ignoring her, you continue. “He could’ve just been spacing out, we’re friends, so he’s bound to talk about me, and he just has a thing about not being able to sit still. Those are just...normal Poe things.”

“What are?”

You whip your head around, to see him standing right behind you. Of course.

“Nothing,” you reply calmly, glowering at Rose as she tries to contain her laughter. “Just talking about that maneuver you did earlier. Very impressive.” He grins, clapping you on the shoulder.

“Thanks,” he laughs. “Anyways, we’re headed out to celebrate-” he gestures to Finn, Rey, and his squadron. “-would you guys wanna come?”

Rose nods excitedly, and you do the same. “Sounds awesome.”

The music in the bar pounds in your ears. Normally, you hate crowded, public settings like this - they stress you out. However, you decide to make a special exception for tonight. After all, you just saved the fucking galaxy.

Poe, expectedly, makes a beeline for the bar with Jess. They order several rounds of shots and bring the drinks back to the table the rest of you are sitting at. He slides into his spot next to you, his thigh brushing against yours.

“Ok,” he says loudly, so your group can hear him over the clamor of the establishment. “Never have I ever - pretty simple,” he adds when Rey shoots him a look of confusion. “We’ll go around the table. Someone will say something. If you’ve done what they say, you take a shot. Snap, you go first.”

“Ok, uh, never have I ever gone on a supply run hungover,” he replies, grinning. Poe groans, taking a shot. You gasp as Finn does, too.

“No!” you say, aghast.

“It was one time!” he shouts in defense of himself, and Rey chuckles.

“He threw up within the hour,” Rose says, and you snicker. Finn kicks the mechanic under the table.

“Alright, settle down,” Jess says, clearing her throat. She shoots a pointed glance at Karé. “Never have I ever flirted with a superior officer to get a different assignment.” The woman sighs, pouring liquor into her mouth. Blushing, you do the same. Poe gapes at you.

“You’re kidding me.”

“It wasn’t here,” you admit. “Navy stuff.” Snap laughs as he recalls the event you’re talking about. “I was about to get assigned janitorial duty for the seventh week in a row, so I insinuated some very...” you pause, grinning. “inappropriate things to my commander. He put me on guard duty on the bridge instead.”

A strange feeling flares in Poe’s chest as you and the others laugh about how flustered the officer had gotten, and his knuckles turn white as he clenches the table. You discreetly nudge his leg with your knee.

“You okay?” you ask quietly, and any jealousy he’s feeling melts away as he takes in the concern in your eyes.

“Yeah,” he nods. You smile.

“Cool.”

“Okay, okay,” Karé laughs, shooting a death glare at Jess. “Rose. Your turn.” She smiles conspiratorily at Finn, who nods at her, before glancing at you briefly. You send a befuddled look towards Rey, who simply shakes her head, shrugging.

You have a bad feeling about this.

“Never have I ever…” she trails off, scratching her chin animatedly. “Had a crush on a close friend.”

Your stomach drops. Rose giggles as she feels you tense up beside her.

“Fuck you,” you say, throwing back a shot. A barrage of gasps sounds from your friends. “Oh, grow up,” you laugh, and Finn chuckles. You glare at him, and he raises his hands in surrender. Slowly, Poe leans forward, grabs a shot, and knocks it back. You barely constrain your shock.

“Oh my gods WHO?” Karé squeals, clapping her hands together.

“That’s not part of the game,” Poe quips, offering her a smug expression. She turns hopefully to you, and you laugh.

“No way,” you say, shaking your head. She sticks her bottom lip out in a pout, before letting her mouth fall open.

“Is it someone here?” she asks breathlessly. You clear your throat, face heating.

“I’m gonna go get some fresh air,” you murmur, slipping out of the booth. Karé and Jess boo loudly at your excuse, but you just flip them off as you head outside.

A light breeze tangles its fingers in your hair and tugs at your shirt, small ripples moving along the fabric. You take a seat on a nearby bench, bringing your legs up and crossing them over each other. Fiddling with a loose thread on your sleeve, you glance upwards. The sky above is littered with small pinpricks of light, twinkling back at you.

A creaking noise sounds to your right, and you look back, to see the door to the bar open. You watch as Poe walks through it, puffing his top lip out and shoving his hands in his pockets. He glances in your direction. You offer him a small wave, which he returns, making his way over to where you sit.

“May I?” he asks, and you nod, turning your gaze upwards once more. He does the same, laying an arm across the back of the bench.

“I wonder how many of those we’ve flown by,” he wonders aloud, motioning to the countless stars and planets above you.

“Probably lots. We really went all over, huh?” He smiles, nodding. You stand, walking to the gate in front of the bar and leaning on it. Poe follows suit, bracing his forearms behind him as he leans back.

“Look, it’s stupid of me to ask, and you don’t have to answer, but...who was it?” You turn your head toward him, puzzled. He nods to the bar. “The game. That last question.” You scoot closer to him, leaning your head on his shoulder. The familiar gesture makes him smile.

“Eh, you don’t wanna know,” you say, and he chuckles.

“Oh, but I do.” You laugh. There’s a moment of silence (not uncomfortable - it never is with Poe) as you figure out how to word your next statement.

“It’s a bit complicated,” you admit, and he turns his head to look down at you.

“Oh?”

“I really like this person, but I also love how close I am with them right now. I’m worried that if they know, that…” you trail off, worried that voicing your concerns will bring them to fruition.

“That everything will change,” Poe finishes quietly. You swallow nervously. “That you could lose them, and you don’t know-” he takes a deep breath “-you don’t know what you would do if that happened.” You turn to face him as he leans up to stand straight, heart pounding in your chest so loud you swear he can hear it. His eyes flit down to your lips momentarily, and your breath hitches.

“Poe,” you say, barely above a whisper. His eyes lock onto yours, and you bite the inside of your cheek.

You open your mouth to continue, but your words die in your throat as he takes your face in his hands. Your whole body goes rigid, and he notices, starting to pull away. Panicking, you place your hands over his, silently reassuring him that it’s ok. He smiles softly, and your cheeks warm.

“Can I kiss you?” he murmurs, and you nod, heart racing. He brings his mouth down to yours tentatively, nose brushing against yours. You smile against his lips, bringing a hand up and burying it in his curls. He fits his hands to your waist, thumb gently brushing over your side. His lips taste like the tequila you’d both taken shots of in the bar, and it’s sweet on your tongue, reminding you of the nectar from the sapflowers back home on Naboo.

The two of you break apart, hot breaths mingling in the small space between you.

“You have no idea,” he murmurs, smile as bright as a thousand suns, “how long I’ve wanted to do that.” His grin widens as you grow flustered, mouth twisting into a small smile.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner,” you say, eyebrows furrowing together. “I didn’t want to mess everything up, and there just wasn’t a good-”

“Hey,” he says gently, taking your hand. “It’s ok, you have nothing to be sorry for.” You smile.

“I really like you,” you say, and he laughs warmly, bringing a hand to your cheek.

“I really like you, too,” he responds, and you lean into the touch. “We should probably head back in, or they’re gonna think we abandoned ship.”

“Sounds like a plan,” you say.

Nobody says anything if they notice how you and Poe hold hands for the rest of the night, sitting closer than you usually do, talking only to each other.

It seems natural, if anything. Like it’s always been that way. Like it’s how it should be.

taglists (open):

permanent: @staarshines

#poe dameron #poe dameron fic #poe dameron x reader #poe dameron / reader #poe dameron fluff #poe dameron angst #star wars #star wars fic #star wars fluff #star wars angst #poe dameron fanfic #poe dameron fanfiction #poe dameron x you #poe dameron / you #fluff

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bedlamsbard · 4 years ago

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I got a couple of different asks about Luke and Ahsoka in other side AU 10, so I guess I will just make it a regular post after all so I can answer all of them at once.

@slecnaztemnot:

Okay i just read your latest other side chapter and I wanted to ask about Ahsoka and Luke dynamics. I wonder what exactly where their heretics disagreemts about the jedi doctrine? while i can guess some of the stuff like attachements i guess i mostly see ahsoka as nonjedi and therefore someone who should not be attached to doctrine about attachements (haha) so i am wondering how you see her. i would actually love your take on how their first meetings went. continued in next ask, 1/2

1/2 continuation since most people write them as Ashoka immediately spilling the beans about the whole Vader situation to Luke and yours Ahsoka didn't. So I am curious what do you think Ahsoka feels about it. I got of course lot of it from the fic itself so i am mostly asking about how did you base your interpretation, if that makes sense and what led you to the narrative choices to portray their relationship in such way.

@comentter:

I'm most interested in what Luke and Ahsoka know about each other. Luke doesn't know much about Ahsoka obviously, but does he have any idea why she seems to hate him? He must be desperate lol. And how much does Ahsoka know about what happened on the DS2? And how much does Kanan know about these events? What was Hera able to tell him and what else did Luke and Ahsoka tell him? I always figure that everyone but Luke and a few people he told (like Leia) think the Emperor and Vader from the DS2 explosion.

I now have this image in my head of Ahsoka spending time with Rex and her laughing as Rex does something like tell a joke or a specific gesture. Then Luke walks by, does the exact same thing and Ahsoka is like "Of course, you'd do this stupid thing, you idiot!" :D

I think shortly before I started writing this sequence I had seen some cute art of Luke and Ahsoka hugging, which is a pretty common art trope and which has never sat quite right with me. I also have the tendency to want to do the opposite of common fanon, which I can’t leave out either. I also wanted to logic out what the hell was going on with Ahsoka’s charaterization in her Mando episode on a Watsonian level rather than a Doylist one (which I did a few weeks ago), even if other side takes place well before Mando and doesn’t intersect with it in any meaningful way.

When it came to the Luke and Ahsoka relationship (or lack thereof), it came down to three questions for me:

Who knows what?

What do they know?

When do they know it?

I made the decision early on in the chapter to leave Leia out of this relationship entirely, since the new canon seems to at this point in time (within a year of RotJ) be keeping it relatively quiet that she and Luke are siblings, and it’s not something that Hera would have a reason to know. (Note also that this entire sequence is told from Hera’s POV, which plays into the “who knows what when” angle.)

As per Rebels S4 (not the epilogue, because Mando’s thrown that out the window), Ahsoka knows (or has good reason to believe) the following:

Anakin Skywalker is Darth Vader, Sith Lord

Darth Vader was directly or indirectly responsible for the genocide of the Jedi Order and the deaths of any Jedi who survived the Purge (”you and your Inquisitors saw to that”)

Padme Amidala is dead

Obi-Wan Kenobi is dead (Obi-Wan was not dead, but she has no way to know this)

no Darksider can return to the Light side

At the end of RotJ (not taking into account anything that happened in the comics or ancillary novels, which I’m not up to date on), Luke knows (or has good reason to believe) the following:

Darth Vader is Anakin Skywalker

everyone Anakin ever knew is dead, mostly because of him

Vader returned to being Anakin Skywalker at the end of his life

(Leia presumably also knows all of this, perhaps with a few more details based on things her parents might have told her, but her feelings about Darth Vader are: Bad, Do Not Want, to be glib about it.)

Now, there’s one other factor here, which is Rex. Rex knew Anakin and knew Ahsoka and was in the Rebel Alliance -- we know that he was on Yavin IV prior to Luke’s arrival and we know that he fought in the Battle of Endor. (And turns up in a couple of scattered art panels from the comics.) If we want to take his brief appearance in Galaxy of Adventures with Han Solo’s strike force as canon, then he may have also known Han and probably Luke -- certainly his ears would have pricked up at the name “Skywalker.” (Okay, there’s one other factor, which is R2-D2, but Artoo never tells anyone anything despite knowing...everything. Or most things, anyway.) Rex doesn’t seem to know that Anakin became Darth Vader (I believe there’s an interview somewhere where Dave or Pablo or someone says that a meeting between Rex and Vader would be “awkward,” but there’s no canonical reason to believe that he knew about the Anakin/Vader connection), but he probably found out at some point that the 501st was the battalion involved in the assault on the Jedi Temple. He also, as of Rebels S3-4, assumes that Vader killed Ahsoka -- presumably Ezra would have told him as much as he could. (And Ezra does know that Vader is Anakin, so he may have told Rex that as well.) Rex also knows that Anakin Skywalker was having an affair with Padme Amidala, but presumably didn’t know about (a) the marriage or (b) the pregnancy, because how would he know?

Then we come to Ahsoka’s return and unfortunately the current canon gives us no time point for when it actually happened: presumably Ahsoka did not or could not return to the greater galaxy at the point she “left”, during the fight on Malachor (3 BBY), because as of Rebels S3-4 everyone still believes she’s dead. Maybe she’s still stuck on Malachor without a way to get off, who knows; maybe after S4 Ezra grabbed her into the World Between Worlds she decided to stay on Malachor until she ~caught up with the main timeline, which...you then have to believe that Ahsoka is going to deliberately remove herself from the war, which I can get to, but is not something I’m totally comfortable with. Or she pops out in the timeline at the same time that Ezra returns to the main timeline and is able to more or less immediately return to the main timeline narrative, plus or minus a few weeks. (There are, after all, still a couple of Advanced TIE fighters parked in the Sith temple, even if they were potentially damaged in the temple collapse. Ahsoka could have repaired them or used the comms systems to call for a pick-up -- this is, btw, what happens in Crown.) We don’t know when the S2 finale scene/S4 WBW scene of Ahsoka walking back into the temple actually takes place in the timeline; it doesn’t have to be at the exact same time as the rest of the S2 finale sequence (since obvs Vader dragging himself out, Maul flying off, and the Rebels crew looking sad doesn’t all take place at the exact same time).

Other side AU is deliberately vague about when Ahsoka returns from the World Between Worlds/Malachor/to the Rebel Alliance; it’s not stated in the story, but I made the assumption that she came back shortly after the (non-epilogue) end of the Rebels finale, but was still deeply messed up from her Malachor revelations. (Also, like, Sidious, I guess, but she was probably so messed up about Anakin/Vader that Sidious being around barely registered.) Since she never seems to have held a formal position in the Rebel Alliance, I assumed that after she returned and let everyone know she was still alive, she then immediately took off to try and figure out what the hell happened with Anakin at the end of the Clone Wars, since she saw him like a week before he snapped and at the time he seemed fine.

The problem is that almost everyone involved is dead.

Now, at this point (shortly before Scarif and ANH), a few people are still alive who then die shortly, but whom Ahsoka may have no reason to believe were involved. Bail Organa, for example, is still around, but aside from him being Padme’s friend Ahsoka doesn’t have a reason to know that Bail was there when Padme died -- and since they were in contact for the nineteen years preceding there’s no reason for her to assume now that he was keeping something for her. Back in the comics (before I stopped reading them), Vader did some digging to figure out what was going on with Padme and his child; Ahsoka probably would have done the same digging (without having to torture anyone), but without necessarily knowing that Padme was pregnant. Knowing the date of Padme’s death (same as the Republic, essentially), she may have had a previous assumption that Padme was assassinated on Palpatine’s orders, but knowing that Vader is Anakin probably moves that assumption closer to the truth, that Anakin was somehow involved in Padme’s death one way or another. Sooner or later Ahsoka will turn up the fact that Padme was pregnant, come to the obvious conclusion that Anakin was the father, and possibly find out the same thing that Vader does in the comics -- that the child was born before Padme died. (But also probably not that Padme was carrying twins, but even if she found that out, it wouldn’t make a difference.)

While Ahsoka is doing her digging (and there really isn’t much information out there to find), the events of Rogue One and ANH happen, and Ahsoka comes back to the Rebel Alliance to find out which of her friends are still alive. (Maybe Rex is with her at this point, who knows.)

Everyone in the Rebel Alliance is talking about some young hotshot named Luke Skywalker.

Luke Skywalker who has a very familiar lightsaber, who claims his father was Anakin Skywalker, and who had some kind of relationship with Obi-Wan Kenobi, who turned up on the Death Star, fought Darth Vader, and died.

Ahsoka has just spent the past few months trying to figure out what happened with Anakin, and as best she can reassemble the facts it mostly comes down to “Anakin did something dumb for Padme, that something dumb was ‘turn to the Dark Side and kill literally everyone,’ and then Padme died, the Republic was overturned, and the Jedi Order was wiped out.” Ahsoka presumably walks into a room, hears the name Luke Skywalker -- maybe sees him -- and is all at once face to face with the living evidence of just how badly Anakin fucked up.

This is just too much for Ahsoka to deal with at the moment, so she takes off again, and spends the next five years brushing in and out of the Rebel Alliance doing odd missions that can really only be done by a trained Force-user. Rex, who seems to have a more stable position in the Alliance, is always going to side with Ahsoka over anyone else; if she tells him not to tell Luke that she knew Anakin, he won’t. (And for that matter, he may have somewhat fraught feelings about Luke himself.) She may have the odd interaction with Luke -- who has heard that there’s another Jedi in the Alliance and wants to be friends/get real training -- but Ahsoka just does not want any part of this. It’s irrational! She knows it’s irrational! But this is the living evidence of Anakin’s failure, Anakin who last she saw him TRIED TO KILL HER, who was at least partially responsible for the deaths of everyone she ever knew. (And honestly, finding out that Vader topped it all off by killing Obi-Wan is not going to help.)

Ahsoka may also be feeling a certain amount of survivor’s guilt: if Ezra had not pulled her out of the Malachor temple at that exact moment, she came pretty close to bringing the temple down on both herself and Vader, and may have succeeded in killing him. She did not do so, and who knows how many people died because of that in the years between Malachor and Yavin? (Just because Tarkin was the one who gave the order doesn’t mean that Ahsoka may at least partially blame Alderaan’s destruction on Vader, if she knew he was on the Death Star then.) She knows he killed Obi-Wan.

The Yoda lineage is very good at going “yikes, I am going off to live alone and beat myself up over my failure for years” and Ahsoka is very much an example of that lineage.

She and Luke have a relationship of “Hi, I’m Luke Skywalker, do you want to talk?” and “I have to leave immediately,” maybe with the odd “please stop using that lightsaber grip it is physically painful for me to watch, do it like this instead, okay, bye.” Luke probably told all of two other people about what happened with Vader on the Death Star, Leia and Han; he has no reason to tell anyone else about it because it won’t matter to them. Why would he tell Ahsoka, whom he has no relationship with? He doesn’t know that Ahsoka knew Anakin Skywalker and would only know if one of four people told him: Ahsoka herself (no), Rex (no), R2-D2 (maybe), or Admiral Ackbar (would never have occurred to Luke to ask, might have occurred to Ackbar to say). (We also don’t know that Mon Mothma knew Ahsoka very well, or at all, for that matter; they never interacted in TCW.)

As for her swinging harder into overt Jedi-ness by Mando after her blatant “I am no Jedi” of Rebels, it reads to me as a response to the Anakin/Vader revelation (especially the attachment thing). She had made certain assumptions in the TCW period (see her saving Rex in the TCW finale) and prior to Rebels; Kanan’s method of Jediness was something she could accept in the time period and in those circumstances; the Anakin/Vader revelation shattered all of that, followed immediately as it was by Kanan apparently going full Jedi self-sacrifice despite his attachments. (Her reaction to Ezra being a trauma response about two very different circumstances.) All of a sudden what she thought might have been mutable based on the circumstances became something that had to be adhered to in case of dangerous results, which she had just had brought home to her in extremely bad circumstances.

I made a crack somewhere about Mando’s central tension being between “being Mandalorian” and “being doing Mandalorianness”; I think in the post-OT period with Ahsoka and Luke we’re seeing something similar with “being Jedi” and “being doing Jediness.” Even if Ahsoka isn’t actively claiming the title Jedi anymore (because what does that accomplish in most contexts?), she’s leaning far more into the tenets of the Jedi Order -- which Luke doesn’t know and doesn’t know he doesn’t know.

Thus the doctrinal dispute.

Ahsoka grew up in the Jedi Order. That’s what she knows, that’s how she knows how to be a Jedi; for her being a Jedi is being part of the Jedi Order, whether or not the actions associated with performing Jediness are being actively practiced. Luke doesn’t have that context. For Luke, being a Jedi is...being doing Jediness. (This is super awkward phrasing.) Performing the actions of a Jedi. Luke has a few holocrons, but I’m guessing that a lot of what is on those holocrons makes the assumption that whoever is opening with them has the context of being a part of the Jedi Order and doesn’t explain really basic stuff about the Order or what that means. Luke’s Jedi Order is not going to be the Republic Jedi Order made anew; it’s going to be something that has a resemblance to it and is based on a similar view of the Force, even arguably its heir, but is just not going to be the same thing. It can’t be. Luke doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.

Kanan, of course, is coming into all of this from a similar context as Ahsoka: he grew up in the Jedi Order, it’s what he knows, it’s who he is. Except Kanan never walked away from the Order, so while Ahsoka had been disconnected from her Jediness at the time of the Purge, he never lost his -- part of Ahsoka’s tension from TCW S7-Rebels was “I can’t be a Jedi because the Order is gone” and Kanan’s was “can I be a Jedi without the Jedi Order?” (Ezra is a whole ‘nother thing but is somewhat outside the scope of this.) The Jedi Order never factors in Luke’s Jediness at all. (There’s some lineage doctrinal dispute here as well -- the Yoda lineage seems to be very closely connected to the Order as the font of Jediness, the Windu-Billaba lineage somewhat less so. The Yoda lineage is like...the hardcore conservatives of the Jedi Order, though, and are probably not typical.)

Poor Kanan came back from the dead, after a week in another universe (which had its own problems; he’s been trying to very gently convince his counterpart that even after being an Inquisitor for months he can still be a Jedi), into Luke trying to build a new Jedi Order from scratch, Ahsoka firmly believing it couldn’t and shouldn’t be done and not wanting to be in the same room as Luke at all (not to mention that she really did not believe that they should have gone for “hey, let’s send Hera Syndulla to another universe” as even being an option), and both of them having essentially incompatible notions of being a Jedi at each other -- this is probably the most time Luke and Ahsoka ever spent in each other’s presence. They’ve probably never articulated their problems at each other, just assumed that the other knew them. And Kanan has his own “how to be a Jedi” approach, which is from a very different than either Ahsoka or Luke because despite originating from the same context as Ahsoka, he had a very different path to get to his present position.

As for what Kanan knows -- uh, pretty much only what Hera knew, and Hera knew very little? She was friendly with Luke and Leia, but didn’t have much interaction with them -- she states that she had a tendency to avoid Luke because even if she would never say it to Luke’s face, she silently believes that if any Jedi should have been in the Rebel Alliance, it should have been Kanan and Ezra and not this relative newcomer. If the Death Star 2 news about Vader and Palps was never common knowledge, then Hera wouldn’t have known it. Kanan’s in a position of having to play catch-up, but also having a completely different priority (finding Ezra). He sat through this meeting where after they’d finished grilling him on “you were in ANOTHER UNIVERSE and also you CAME BACK FROM THE DEAD?” they politely sniped at each other with a bunch of context he didn’t have and flat out decided that wow, he did not want to deal with this at all, whatsoever.

(This is also not stated in the story, but Luke and Ahsoka also disagreed about whether Jacen should be trained or not: Luke said, yeah, of course, when he’s a little older! and Ahsoka said nope, he’ll be fine, it will go away. Hera was just very “...I will deal with this later” about it since it wasn’t an urgent issue.)

#also thanks to reena-jenkins and isweedan for talking this out with me #other side au tag

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shakingthestars · 5 years ago

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The problematic conclusion of the Rise of Skywalker – a “whitewashing” of the Skywalker legacy ?

Art by kasiopea-star-wars

Nearly two months after The Rise of Skywalker came to theaters, I have finally found a way to express my throughts about the conclusion of this galactic journey. As a new Skywalker trilogy was announced years ago, I remember not feeling thrilled by the idea of a sequel, asking myself what would be the added-value to the story for an arc that started and ended with Anakin Skywalker. Yet I remember feeling pleasantly surprised by how promising The Force Awakens (TFA) was in introducing the characters, playing on their dynamics and setting up the family dramas : a stormtrooper taken away from his family ; a scavenger waiting for the return of her parents ; an heir rejecting his birth name ; a family desintegrated by a repeating tragedy. The Last Jedi (TLJ) felt refreshing by bringing the family drama to a higher level, deepening the heroine/antagonist dynamic and paving the way for a refined sight of the Jedi philosophy. As much The Rise of Skywalker (TROS) has its entertaining moments as a standalone, I couldn’t help feeling growingly unconfortable about this movie as a conclusion of the Skywalker story.

Why Return of the Jedi (ROTJ) originally felt like a satisfying conclusion of the Skywalker story…

Among the several reasons why TROS fails to deliver a satisfying conclusion to this 42 years old arc, the very last act of the franchise stands out as strangely dissonant with the rest of the entire story. Let’s have a look back at the original ending set up by Return of the Jedi (ROTJ). Far from being my favorite Star Wars movie because of the Jabba the Hutt sequence, ROTJ never failed to get me emotional by the way it beautifully concluded the Skywalker arc. Beyond the joyful atmosphere around the galaxy and the celebration of the victory on Endor, the last sequence sets up a powerfully emotional ending because it’s all about healing the wounds through reconciliation : reconciliation of a man with himself, reconciliation of a father with his son but also reconciliation of a fallen Jedi with the old friends he once betrayed. Thus, as sad as Anakin Skywalker’s death may be, the outcome of his tragic life is counterbalanced by what we get to experience on screen with the characters, from his funeral scene to the appearance of the Force Ghosts. Everything is synchronized in a way that enables the viewer to feel that the hero of the OT, Luke Skywalker, has now completed his journey to find himself, can let the past behind him and move on to build a brighter future surrounded by his « family ». At that point, this conclusion left me as the viewer with the satisfying feeling that the Skywalker arc is complete, bringing me back to my initial question : what was their story worth to continue for ?

…that left the Skywalkers with an unresolved family business

Yet, when we meet the Skywalkers again 30 years later, it appears that the family has completely imploded : a fallen son enrolled in the ennemy camp, the parents separated, the uncle exiled on a planet far far away. TFA introduces the viewer to a family tragedy that repeated itself with a kid targeted by a master puppet for his “mighty blood” in order to follow his grandfather’s footsteps. We learn from the canon novel Bloodline as well as TFA make it clear that neither Leia nor Han ever forgave Vader and very much feared that their only son would take after him: “We’ve done everything we could have done. There’s too much Vader in him”. As impressive as his sacrifice might have been for a 1983 viewer, Vader’s redemption was the result of a sudden turn for the sake of one person, an action that neither Leia nor the Galaxy got to witness, making Anakin only an unsung hero of the victory against the Empire. His sacrifice didn’t enable any reconciliation of his daughter with the dark side of his legacy, paving the way for the tragedy to repeat with his own grandson. As unsettling as Luke’s characterization may have been in TLJ, the attempt to kill his own nephew in his sleep suggest that he probably wasn’t as reconciled with his father’s legacy as he thought. In other words, the wound healing through reconciliation set up in ROTJ was uncomplete and left door open for the tragedy to repeat, which leads to consider the importance of Ben in the sequel trilogy of a family arc that has been told over 42 years in 9 episodes :

- A son who witnessed his slave mother dying in his arms

- A mother who died in childbirth from a broken heart

- Husbands and wives who losed their respective partners

- Parents who lose their daughter

- Kids who got separated from their parents

- A nephew who witnessed his adoptive parents getting killed

- Fathers who died sacrifying for their sons

- An uncle who died apologizing to his nephew

- A son who lose his mother after she sacrificed for him

"As I once fell, so falls the last Skywalker”

Named after Ben – “You’re my only hope” – Kenobi, Ben Solo represented the hope that at least a Skywalker could finally make it through darkness. He was not just the only descendant of the Skywalker family. He was also the bearer of all the abuse, pain and tragedies that this family has been through since his grandfather himself was targeted by their sworn ennemy: Palpatine. Thus, he is the recipient of all the wounds that didn’t heal properly within the family, making his manipulation by Palpatine, his feeling of rejection by his parents and the murder attempt by his uncle all the more tragic. The fact that Ben – and the Galaxy – was kept ignorant of the family connection with Vader certainly didn’t help, making him from early age an ideal target for the revenge of Palpatine: “I have been every voice you have ever heard inside your head”. People may argue that the outcome is okay since there will be no Skywalker descendant for the tragedy to repeat one day and that Rey will ensure that their legacy lives on by carry on the name. That Rey deserves to be part of the Skywalker legacy through her personal achievements is unquestionable. However, she is not the bearer of the tragedy that has plagued the Skywalker family for the viewers to witness over 9 episodes. Although her backstory is heartbreaking to say the least, TROS doesn’t let the viewers time to feel the depth of her own tragedy adding to the fact that we didn’t get to relate to the tragedy of the Palpatine family over long-run. Even if Rey shoudn’t be reduced to her bloodline (which was the risk of making her a Palpatine through), didn’t Palpatine achieve what he wanted in the end ? People may argue he lose since his own granddaughter will carry on the Skywalker name as a Jedi. However, if his personal revenge against the Skywalkers was to end their bloodline, then he definitely got what he wanted after being the cause of most of their tragedies:

- He predicted Padme’s death, which he brought Anakin to provoke

- He wanted Anakin’s death, which happened through his sacrifice for Luke

- He wanted Han’s death, which he brough Kylo to provoke

- He wanted Luke’s death, which indirectly happened through his sacrifice

- He wanted Leia’s death, which happened through her sacrifice for Ben

- He wanted Ben’s death, which happened through his sacrifice for Rey

The problematic execution of Ben Solo’s redemption

From the moment TFA had Ben Solo aka Kylo Ren commit a parricide, the question of his redemption was at the heart of his character arc. Beyond the passionate discussion about whether or not he should have lived given his dark actions, it’s the way he was treated in the last act that doesn’t feel right put in the bigger context of the story. It is legitimate that Rey was the one person to ultimately take down Palpatine, all the more so that she is revealed to be a Palpatine descendant. Yet, the role in which Ben Solo was relegated during the final battle on Exegol doesn’t feel right within the framework of the entire arc. The Skywalker descendant – as bearer of the family tragedy – got to stand barely 5 seconds against the abuser of his family, only for his body to be used as a mean to resurrect Palpatines, grandfather and granddaughter. Worse : the entire set up for the Force dyad in the ST was made useful for that sole purpose : draining the Force energy of the Skywalker to death so that the Palpatines could live on. Even if the last Skywalker was meant to die anyway, why giving him the same redemption as his grandfather, knowing that this redemption path only reconciled one person – Luke – with the dark side of the Skywalker legacy? Why having him sacrifice for the sake of only one person instead of putting him in front of a dilemma that would have required to overcome the evil voices once and for all for the greater good of the Galaxy? Why having no witness of his ultimate inner struggle instead of letting the Galaxy finally know what was behind the darkness of both Skywalkers grandfather and grandson ? I am aware that this is easy to critisize directing choices once the movie is out but based on all what was demonstrated above I believe that the Skywalker family would have deserved that their only descendant had a more active part in overcoming their abuser once and for all by overcoming the darkness he planted in them. In my ideal scenario, Rey would have taken down Palpatine all alone in her badass way all alone but there would have been an ultimate twist. The remaining fleet would have been programmed by Palpatine to execute the last order, from a signal sent from a dark artifact on Exegol for all the Galaxy to witness in horror. The only way for someone to desactivate it would have required to overcome his/her darkest struggles within, which would have been a meaningful way to confront Ben with his family tragedy, the dark legacy of his grandfather and his own dark actions. I would have loved the idea that the evil voices put him in front of a dilemma and that his grandfather finally helped him to take the right decision based on his own fateful experience: choosing between saving a loved one from her death state or saving planets from destruction for the greater good. There were several meaningful scenes that could have foreshadowed this kind of scenario. Instead, TROS gave us the same redemption as ROTJ :

- A short-term redemption path

- A sacrifice for the sake of one person

- No witness of the good action other than said person

Yet, disappearing to never be seen, mourned or mentioned ever again...

A whitewashing of the Skywalker legacy

The ending scene of the Skywalker franchise takes place on Tatooine with Rey burrying the Skywalker lightsabers in the sand as a funeral, which is meant to enable her – and the viewer – to move on peacefully. According to Lucasfilm VFX supervisor Roger Guyett and screenwriter Chris Terrio, no Force ghost of Ben was created because “when you see Luke and Leia there, it’s about the Skywalker legacy”. For a movie that was supposed to tie all 9 movies together, the Prequel Trilogy (PT) doesn’t seem to exist as if the Skywalker story began with the Original Trilogy (OT). We get to see Cloud City and Endor after the final victory but no shot of Coruscant & Naboo. The family tragedy begun with the separation of the twin but the grooming of their father and the death of their mother doesn’t seem to be part of the traged. The Skywalker lightsaber is primarily presented as Luke’s lightsaber as if he was its original owner. What is canonly established through is that the Skywalker story began with a slave boy named Anakin Skywalker who was believed by the Jedi to be the Chosen One, which made him the target of a Sith named Palpatine, which led to a long-run family drama in the middle of a never-ending battle between the dark side and the light side. Given the importance of his fall to the story and how it fed the family drama beyond his death, his absence in the sequel trilogy is surprising, aside from a very discreet line to Rey : “Bring Balance as I did”. Shouldn’t Anakin have guided his fallen grandson too instead of helping only the granddaughter of his sworn ennemy ? More problematic is the way the family drama is resolved with the ending of TROS. While the family was split at the beginning of the ST, TROS doesn’t care to show the healing of the family wounds, except for the memory scene between Solo father and son. The reason why this scene is the most powerfully emotional moment of the movie in my mind is precisely for its ability to symbolize the reconciliation of a man with himself and a son with his father. Yet, the ending scene is only about reuniting the all in the white Holy Skywalkers who have never “sinned”, giving the unconfortable impression that the Skywalker descendant was disposable because he wasn’t worthy to have any place in the Skywalker legacy contrary to the heroine. After all, the original script of Duel of the Fates by Colin Trevorrow had Luke telling his nephew “You are no Skywalker”, as if the Skywalker legacy wasn’t made of both darkness and light and Luke himself didn’t contribute to this with his own mistakes. Although TROS is more subtle in its approach, the difference in the handling between Anakin Skywalker and Ben Solo’s redemption after their death is telling: kept a guarded secret by the person he saved; not even mourned by the only person he bonded with; not even shown alongside his family. Dead or alive, his treatment on screen left me as a viewer with the unconfortable feeling that the Skywalker family as a whole wasn’t reconciled with the dark side of their legacy. Which brings me once again to the same question: what was their story worth to continue for?

Excerpt of the canon novel Bloodline

The purification of the heroine

Let’s talk now about how Rey ends her heroine’s journey compared to where she began. That journey was announced by Maz Kanata already in TFA: “The belonging (family) you seek is not behind you (birth family), it is ahead (found future)”. She was introduced as desperate to find a place to belong because of her feeling of loneliness, which never incapacitated her ability to be a strong independant woman who knows how to handle herself. Yet, her heroine journey alone on Tatooine where she takes the Skywalker name looking at the Binary Sunset under the watchful eye of the Skywalker Twins as Force Ghosts. Some may argue that she will be okay since she found a family in them and her Resistance friends, which is true to some degree but uncomplete through. However, the ending looks out of place with a key character missing in this scene, whether he was supposed to be dead or alive: Ben. Although it was important to show in TROS that Rey was well surrounded by a supportive entourage (as a constrast to Ben before his fall), the ST established that the deepest emotional connection she had was with Kylo Ren/Rey. I wouldn’t allow myself to judge those who find Reylo abusive and/or questionable because of his actions but I personally don’t think that the outcome of TROS is a feminist as it was meant to appear by having the heroine as a strong independant woman free from any romantic involvement . The ST makes it clear all along that although Rey obviously suffers from abandonment issue, she is more than capable of handling herself, know by herself what is right or not and decide conciously what (who) she wants for herself. Some people may disaprove the very idea of “Reylo” for valid reason but claiming that the kiss came out of nowhere doesn’t make sense when one look closely at their interactions all along the ST. TLJ shows that the hand touch she initiated is the decisive moment where she gets to see what the viewer finally get to see only at the end of TROS : the true face of Ben Solo, without the mask named Kylo Ren behind which he hid himself. From this moment on, my understanding is that Rey perfectly knew how to dissociate the person from his persona, thus her disenchantment in the Throne Room while confronted to his unwillingness to let go of his dark persona. With Rey shutting the door of the Millenium Falcon to his face, TROS could have made their dynamic an unrequited villainous crush afterwards. Although this is what it looks on the surface, the visual subtext tells a different story, which is a huge reason that makes their interactions so compelling to analyze. On Pasaana, Rey is shown staring longingly at little kids, sadly confessing that she has no family (despite living with the Resistance and her friends for a while) and being in deep thought at that moment. Barely 2 seconds after enter her dyad to renew his hand proposal. Of course, different interpretations can be made about this scene. I would argue that the chain of events in a matter ofminutes is meant to convey a specific message if one accept the idea that the hand proposal is metaphorically a marriage proposal. The ST sets the record straight through that despite her attraction to him Rey always rejected Kylo Ren and his entitled behavior while making heart eyes to Ben Solo and the selfless person she knew he was deep inside through their bond. The core of their unresolved business in TROS is all about him being desperate to know why she wanted to take his hand while being frustrated by her refusal to acknowledge it and her being desperate to hide the reason why she didn’t take it while being frustrated by his refusal to acknowledge who he really is. Both lied to themselves and each other out of fear of being rejected and disentchanted again. Thus, the tension rising until a confession that changed everything : “I wanted to take your hand, Ben’s hand”. Rey chose consciously to kiss Ben only once she was sure that the mask had definitely dropped and he had renounced to be someone else than who he really is. Although Kylo Ren was chasing Rey, she was always the one who set the rules and initiated willingly any further step in their relationship and only when she felt he was his true self with her. This teaches an important lesson – especially to teenage boys – that you don’t earn the feelings of someone (no matter what feelings he/she has for you) by hiding yourself behind a virile persona and/or showing off toxic behaviors in order to impress said person. In other words, the love triangle was always between Rey, Kylo Ren and Ben Solo from a female gaze perspective: it’s Ben who was presented as “object” of desire all along. Yet, the choice that Rey willingly makes – and the desire that goes along with it – is taken away from her as if it was decided at her place that Ben Solo was never the right partner for her anyway. After three movie setting up that the heart of her emotional journey was with him, the fact that he is totally erased from screen after – and despite – their love scene looks like a puritan attempt to purify the heroine from the sin she has committed. Worse, she ends her journey where she began: on a desolated sand planet, sliding innocently the dunes, wearing the same all white costume and an adopted child under parental watch. In a nutshell: pretty much like Luke at the beginning of his hero’s journey.

Rian Johnson: “ The hand touch is the closest thing we’ll get to a sex scene in Star Wars”

Luke Skywalker (deleted line): “You’ve opened yourself to the dark side for a pair of pretty eyes”

Tatooine: an iconic place...of desolation

Although Tatooine may appear as a logical choice for the ending scene, the intention to recreate the atmosphere of the iconic scene from ANH falls flat in the context of TROS but also in the context of the whole franchise. According to Chris Terrio, the point was to fix the original sin of the franchise, which was the separation of the Twins by tying the lightsabers together like newborns. Did it make sense through to burry them on Tatooine ? Based on the Prequels, the Skywalker/ Palpatine arc has its roots on Naboo, when a Queen was forced to flee in order to meet the Senate representative of her home planet on Coruscant but met a slave boy from Tatooine on her way. Naboo may have been a less iconic choice for fanservice but in regard to the heartbeat of the Skywalker story, this is where Anakin and Padme’s love story blossomed, where Padme planned to give birth to their babies, where she is now resting forever: “Ani I wanna have our baby back home on Naboo”. Wasn’t the original sin that these kids were separated from their parents and all of them never got reunited ? Yet, Padme’s babies - and her husband by extension - were metaphorically burried on the very planet where Luke was never supposed to end up had the family tragedy not happened, where his father grew up as a slave, where his grandmother had a painful death, where his adoptive parents were murdered, where his sister was enslaved, where his brother in law was imprisoned, where he himself never wanted to return. Yet this is also this place that was chosen to end Rey’s heroine journey. She ends up being the spiritual heir of the Twins, especially the Jedi that Leia would have become by her brother’s side had she not chosen romantic attachment over that path. In general, the ending sends the message that romantic love and children only cause destruction while preventing parents from achieving their ambitions. Padme and Anakin’s love created destruction through the immiment birth of the Twins ; Han and Leia’s love created destruction through Ben’s upbringing, only to have their sacrifice rewarded with his death and his sidelining of the legacy. Terrible message for teenagers that no matter the selfless acts you do, you still deserve to be forgotten or even replaced with someone more worthy if you lose yourself following the wrong way because you were a problem from the start. On a sidenote, DLF probably failed to get people invested in the new characters, precisely because most of the characters and their interactions turned out to feel superficial, interchangeable and disposable on the long run. Jahnnah was introduced to Lando in the very end for no particular reason, except maybe baiting the fans with future added-materials about a potential father/daughter dynamic. Finn and Rose kissed in TLJ? Let’s have her sidelined, Finn friendly tapping her shoulder, telling her to stay away and choosing the company of someone else in the next film. Zorii asked Poe to come with her? Let’s have her refusing to be with him, barely hours after their conversation. Rey and Ben kissed before he died? Let’s have her flying out of Exegol with fanfare, happily reuniting with her friends and paying tribute to the Twins without showing an once of interest in the fate of her dyad. In general, the movie leaves the feeling that there is no deep sense of belonging for anybody and that they all are pretty alone despite forming a big "family" of friends on the surface. The ending feels even more out of place knowing that Rey’s journey was never meant to parallel Luke’s, who only wanted to become a Jedi like his father and ultimately became one. It was never the motivator of Rey’s journey to fight for a higher cause by becoming a Rebel or a Jedi in to follow the footsteps of a loved one and/or a mentor. Yes, she accomplished great things and it is absolutely right to enable her to fulfill any ambition she wishes to accomplish in the future. However, it is not because she had simple human needs too that they were unimportant and meant to diminish her character. Let’s go back again to this Pasaana scene where we are reminded of the core of her heroine’s journey: “The belonging you seek is not behind you, it is ahead”. Of course, that could be interpreted in retrospect as a foreshadowing that she will take a new generation of Jedi as Rey Skywalker continuing the legacy of Luke. But again, the directing choices suggest otherwise: why showing her staring at 1-2 years old babies instead of 9-10 years old kids? Why suggesting that she may not have a family at that point but that she will have this possibility at the end of her journey? More important: why suggesting through the hand proposal that Ben Solo is the one through with she is meant to have a family ? Although her thoughts ain’t explicit, the chain of events suggests an underlying desire: marriage proposal, forming a family, having babies. Yet, Ben and Rey finally coming together resulted in a kiss of death and her ending like a virginal nun metaphorically burrying the kids she’ll never have with him. Terrible message for girls from a female gaze perspective that no matter how heroic she was and all the harships she went through, she is not allowed to get the belonging she chose willingly (contrary to most male heroes). Terrible message in general that the wants openly expressed by women never really come true in Star Wars: Padme never got her babies back home on Naboo; Leia never got her son back home alive; Rey never got the home she really wished for with Ben. Even if Ben was meant to die like Jack Dawson from Titanic (given the few parallels used by TROS), his total absence after his death feels incredibly wrong, especially given how the only person whom with he bonded emotionally appears indifferent on screen to his fate. This closure on Tatooine without him rubs the viewer from witnessing the definitive healing of the family wounds but also from the feeling that the heroine can move on peacefully with her life: fulfilling her goals, being surrounded with her friends and why not raising a family until she’ll be ultimately reunited with Skywalkers in death. Thus, a tragic ending like Titanic where you are aware as a viewer that Jack and Rose technically can’t be reunited in the afterlife feels strangely more uplifting than the ending of TROS where it’s technically possible that Ben and Rey get reunited someday. What is shown on screen is what remains enshrined in the mind of the viewer. An ending scene on Naboo with Ben (alive or dead) would have given a different vibe, reuniting metaphorically all Skywalkers (except Shmi Skywalker-Lars) in the same tombstone and symbolizing the family reconciliation: a husband with his wife; parents with their twins; a nephew with his uncle; a son with his mother ; a father living in his son’s heart since his death. Beyond that, what more meaningful message for Rey Palpatine than choosing the Skywalkers on the very planet where her own grandfather came from like Padme and began tormenting the Galaxy and her family ? Alas, the conclusion of the franchise shows the heroine ending her journey alone on a desert planet, her birth family dead, her found family decimated, without her lover and her friends to be seen, surrounded by robots and ghosts…but with a cool name as consolation prize!

#the rise of skywalker #star wars #rey #kyloren #ben solo #reylo #adamdriver #daisyridley

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wutroows · 5 years ago

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taking him home (general hux x reader)

pairing: general hux x reader (romantic) a/n: threepio is your best friend in this, i don’t make the rules. also thinking of an alternative ending where hux stays behind and dies as he did in the movies but i know that just causes pain and suffering and this fandom has had way too much of that so i probably won’t do it unless people really want it. this has almost 3.5k words too so that’s pretty cool, hux is one of my favorite characters and it ruined me when he died so i hope you enjoy this, i really loved writing it

“chewie..?”

rey’s voice is shaky as she stares up at ren’s star destroyer, which now took over the sky of kijimi. you stand next to finn, who had been visibly tense ever since ren’s destroyer was mentioned moments before. you look between him and poe, and then back at C-3PO, who now had no memory of any of you. the thought did twinge a bit. you really did like threepio, and now, you had to have him relearn everything he’d been through.

“what about him?” finn asks, without missing a beat. “he’s on ren’s ship,” rey says, “he’s alive.” she turns back to look at the group, a now hopeful smile appearing across her lips. “what? how?” you hear poe say, “he’s alive! he must’ve been on a different transport.” you look between the group of people standing before you, all suddenly looking incredibly happy. “we gotta go get him.” finn concludes, “your friend’s on that sky trash?” zorii says, “guess he is!” poe shrugs. threepio suddenly becomes alive again, his eyes lighting up that familiar golden glow. “might i introduce myself. i am C-3PO, human-cyborg relations, and you are?”

“okay, that’s gonna be a problem.”

“threepio, move your metal ass, we’re almost there!” poe pushes past the protocol droid, who sounds offended when he speaks, “how dare you! we’ve only just met!” you roll your eyes and pat the droid on his shoulder, “i promise i’ll give you a nice story-time, later, threepio.”

“poe!” you hear zorii say. she holds up something you can’t quite recognize from where you stand next to rey and finn, "go help your friend.” she sounds determined, and he shakes his head. “zorii, i don’t think i can take this.” he tries to deny it, pushing her hands away, but she refuses. you hear the roar of a ship from behind you, and as you peek around the corner, you tug at finn’s sleeve, “we need to leave, now.” you tell poe, and you turn and follow after rey.

poe steps up beside you and you look over at him, “are you nervous?” he asks you after a minute, trying to keep up with rey, who has been setting the pace as you walk towards ochi’s ship, you shrug. “a little. i just want to get chewie out of here and then leave.” you tell him. you knew full well hux would be here.

you hadn’t told anyone who the spy was. he was the one who told you palpatine was alive, and you relayed that information back to the resistance yourself each time. hux had gifted you a tie fighter to fly back and forth between your rendezvous point and the resistance base. you’d inspected it in and out, making sure the tie hadn’t been tracking your location. he’d promised you multiple times, he’d taken out a few things to make the tie as rogue as it could be, but your comms still worked, so sometimes for entertainment you’d listen to different frequencies and see what you found. hux was the only member of the first order you could say that you liked. he’d given you a first order officer uniform, making sure you wouldn’t be recognized at all by anyone. you could only hope he wouldn’t be involved. you knew he would pull something stupid to get you out of here if he had to.

“i get it.” poe’s voice cuts you out of your thoughts and the door to ochi’s ship opens, and the group piles in. you silently thanked zorii for the medallion, as you were given the okay to enter ren’s destroyer. “whoever this chewie person is, this is madness!” 3PO says, and you look over at him. you missed his nagging, even if he wasn’t shut off for a while, you knew he’d never be the same again.

the ship lands in hangar 12, and as soon as the door opens stormtroopers begin to walk up the ramp. finn shoots his blaster and poe follows suit, shooting the two down. the four of you turn back to back, shooting at every stormtrooper that comes in sight. you were definitely known about now. “you three, stay there!” rey says, and you hear threepio say, “happily!”

“threepio!” you call out his name as you start to turn away, jogging backwards. his head turns upwards as he hears you call his name, “yes, mistress y/n?” you roll your eyes, he would always be the same droid when it came to never dropping formalities, “stay safe, please!” you say firmly, and with that, you turn to your friends.

“which way?”

“uh, no idea, follow me!”

***

your eyes watch a squadron of stormtroopers pass. their armor is loud, clanking with each step they take. finn peaks his head out after they’re gone, and finally steps out of his hiding space. he turns and moves his hand, letting everyone else know it was okay to come out. the four of you hold your blasters and check down every single hallway, making sure no more members of the first order were in the area. finn leads you down a hallway, and you jump as two stormtroopers, clad in their signature armor, with their blasters pointed at your heads.

“drop your weapons!” one of them says, and rey steps forwards, waving her hand, “it’s okay that we’re here.” you and poe give each other a look, but turn your attention back to rey and the troopers in front of you. the two of them lower their blasters, “it’s okay that you’re here,” the one who spoke originally says, “it’s good.”

“you’re relieved that we’re here.”

“thank goodness you’re here.”

“welcome guys.”

“did she do that to us?” you hear poe say and you elbow him in the side, earning a small “ow” before rey speaks again. “we’re looking for a prisoner and his belongings.”

***

you shot the last camera that was in the hallway, “they said chewie’s this way.” finn says, and as he enters a passcode to get the door to unlock, rey turns around, walking in a different direction. “rey, come on.” finn says from behind you and she turns around, “the dagger is on this ship. we need it.” she says and a confused look appears on poe’s face, “rey, why?” you ask her and she looks into your eyes, “ a feeling. i’ll meet you back at the hangar.”

“rey, you can’t just-” finn says, but he’s too late, as she’s already gone down a different hallway. rey did a lot of things based off of intuition and feelings. hopefully she was right about needing that dagger, but if you had it, threepio wouldn’t have needed to get his memory wiped. you sighed audibly and poe gave you a pat on your shoulder, “chewie.” poe says as finn had took a few steps as if he were wanting to go after her. he nods, and the three of you go down the door that had just opened.

ren’s destroyer was practically a maze, but the door to chewie’s cell was easy to find as the troopers rey had mind-tricked had given you exact directions to get there. the door to his cell slid open and you heard his roars as soon as it did. “of course we came for you. chewie.” poe sits his hands on the wookiee’s shoulders for a moment and you gave him a quick hug.

you were incredibly close to the wookiee. after han’s passing, he needed someone to lean on. he lost luke, recently as well, and now the only person he had left was leia. when the lightning shot out of rey’s fingertips, you thought that he was in there, and you broke down in front of poe. you couldn’t help it. you’d lost too much already. you had been close to han, and luke had told you that he liked you the one time that he met you, saying that he knew you would do great things. you could only wish he was there to see them.

“yeah, rey’s here, she’s gonna get the dagger.” finn’s voice drags you back to reality, and you uncuff chewie’s paws. the three of you help him stand up.

now it was time to make your way back to the ship.

***

“wrong way!”

“well, there’s not really a right way, is there?” poe retorts and he peeks his head around the door, shooting one of the stormtroopers. you slide out of the door and shoot the remaining ones, sliding one of their blasters back to the currently weaponless chewbacca, who takes out the troopers approaching you from behind. “thanks chewie!” you laugh breathlessly and he roars in response. you missed him.

the four of you continue making your way down the hallway, jumping over stormtroopers and shooting at any of them who cross your path. “we close?” poe asks, “straight ahead!”

poe runs into the crossroads of a few hallways, and a blaster shot collides with his arm. “poe!” finn screams, and he slides on his knees, “are you okay?”

footsteps, and a lot of them. you back up next to them, chewie following suit.

“nope.”

***

handcuffs are uncomfortable.

you notice that as you’re manhandled by a group of stormtroopers. they confinscate your blaster and before you know it you’re being dragged down a hallway. your eyes landed on hux, and you silently pleaded with him to let you go. he made eye contact with you before quickly looking away, and you grit your teeth. he’d do something, you knew that. well, not exactly. you were just hoping incredibly hard that he would.

you’re standing between poe and chewbacca, and you bit on the inside of your lip. hux was standing right there. he was about to watch you be executed. at least you’d die with your friends. “actually, i’d like to do this myself.” hux’s accented voice speaks out, and you feel your heart leap out of your chest. was he really going to save you? you hear a trooper hand him their blaster and you let out a sigh.

“what were you gonna tell rey before?” you roll your eyes hearing poe’s words. the person he was talking to was finn, who had said he wanted to tell rey something while the group was sinking in quicksand on pasaana. he’d brushed it off multiple times and you couldn’t help but wonder what he was talking about. “you still on that?” finn replies. “oh, i’m sorry, is this a bad time?” he says back sarcastically. chewbacca grunts next to you and you mumble out, “i agree. they sound like a married couple.” you whisper to him.

“yeah, sort of is a bad time, poe.”

“well, 'cause later doesn't really look like an option. if you're gonna let something off your chest, maybe now's not the worst time to...”

the two of them start bickering, and you begin wondering what hux was doing behind you. was he contemplating killing you himself? at much as you hated to admit it, maybe he was. he hadn’t done anything except hold the blaster.

one. two. three. four.

your eyes shut and you prepare for impact, thinking you’ll see the bodies of your friends fall forwards and that he saved you for last. you don’t.

“i’m the spy.” hux says, and you smile widely. he pulled through. you had your doubts, but you know that deep down, hux had morals.

“what?!”

“you?!”

“y/n!” finn and poe say at the same time, and you look at them. “i promised him i’d tell no one who he was.” he gives you a look of gratitude, “i can at least do that, right?”

“we don’t have much time.” hux says, looking across the four of you.

“i knew it!” poe exclaims. if your hands weren’t cuffed, you’d be facepalming. “no, you did not.” finn says and you roll your eyes. you were the only person in the resistance who knew who the spy was. hux said he’d only make face to face deals, and since then, you’d met up with him a lot of times.

hux comes forwards and uncuffs you first, and you look up at him happily.

as much as you hate to admit it, he was incredibly pretty. his eyes were a bright blue and his hair a fiery red. he looked focused as he unlocked the handcuffs, and they fall to the floor with a clang. you massage your wrists and he looks at you. “thank you.” he doesn’t say anything, but he gives you a nod. he moves on to the wookiee standing next to you.

after all four of you are uncuffed, he leads you through the destroyer and back to the hangar. you see threepio, bb8 and the new droid rey found on ochi’s ship coming from the hallway. “bb8, come on!”

“i’ll shut down the impeders. you’ve got seconds.” you clench your jaw and furrow your brow. he had seconds. you knew no one would believe his story that the four of you just escaped. you hated the first order, but they weren’t all dumb. “hux.” you utter. you turn to him and look him straight in the eyes. “there she is, she’s a survivor.” you assume poe’s talking about rey, but your eyes remain firmly on the general standing in front of you.

“blast me in the arm, quick.”

finn looks confused, “or they’ll know.”

“no!” you exclaim, “they’ll know either way. you can’t stay here. you need to come with us, now. you’ll die if you stay here.” you tell him. he looks over at you, and you know that he realizes that. he’d die if he stays there. he shakes his head, and you become desperate.

your hands reach out to his face, and you cup his jawline. the tip of your nose is touching his and for once you don’t care if your friends see. you really liked him. “i can’t.” he says. his voice is shaky and his eyes are looking anywhere but your face. “please.” you beg him. you feel your eyes begin to fill with tears. you’d really gotten attached to him.

you remembered the first time you met him.

“it’s you?” you say as you hop down from your x-wing and onto the landing platform. his hands are behind his back and he’s looking straight at you. you take your helmet off and hold it underneath your arm. “really? i was expecting a stormtrooper, not a general.” you laugh slightly. you see him roll his eyes, but he beckons you to a more secretive part of the platform. “i chose this spot for a reason.” you nod, following after him.

“you shouldn’t take an x-wing here.”

“well it’s not like we have tie fighters lying around.” you tell him and he makes a mental note to himself. he couldn’t get kylo ren to lose if you were dead. he pulls out a few pieces of paper and he hands them to you. your hands move to open them, but his sharp voice stops you. “not here.”

“riiiight. sorry.” you apologize, chuckling softly.

“i’ll be on my way then. stay safe, general.” you mock salute, and with that, you’re turned back towards your x-wing and you’re flying away. he keeps his eyes on your ship until he can’t anymore.

“listen to me, hux.” you say to him, “come with us. come with me.” your words hit him hard, and he hates it. he knew he likes you. he remembered the exact moment he realized it.

“you really think i’ll wear this?”

hux holds in his hands an officer uniform. you look up at him and shake your head. “you need to. if i’m caught with you in that outfit you wear now,” you look down at your uniform. it’s bright orange and covered in rebel alliance symbols, “you’ll be captured and taken prisoner, tortured for information by ren.” he tells you and you inhale deeply, but you take the uniform from him and throw it into the x-wing. “fine, but i’m only wearing it here to ease your nerves.” you say sarcastically, nudging him with your elbow.

he rolls his eyes, but he feels his cheeks warm.

“please.” he finally looks into your eyes, and he notices the fact that you’re crying. hux looks confused, “we need to go, y/n!” poe’s voice says from behind you. “shut up, poe!” your voice is coarse, and the rest of the group looks shocked from your words. you’d never once yelled at any of them. “please, i’m begging you. you’ll die if you stay here and you know that.”

“i..” he starts. your forehead leans against his own and your eyes are closed.

you were in love with him.

he sent you different coordinates.

the spot you met him in was usually the same, but now it was some planet out in the outer rim. the first order was active there, but your officer’s uniform would easily let you slip past stormtroopers. you land your x-wing where your meeting spot was, and there he stood.

he’s with a tie fighter.

you stare at him, eyes wide. “did you get that for me?” you ask him, hopping down from your x-wing. he nods. he looks cute. his hair isn’t perfect, some strands falling out of place and resting on his forehead. his eyes are still that same beautiful blue you find yourself staring at way too often. “is this because you care about me? how cute.” you gush playfully, and you see his jaw clench.

“thank you, hux.” you laugh, “just.. don’t mention it.”

you’re shocked. of course you are. you swore he was a ruthless man, with no empathy or care for others, but this clearly proved otherwise. he managed to get you an x-wing just to fly to your rendevous point and back. “everything the first order would use to track you has been removed.” he reassures you after noticing you opened your mouth.

“did you remove it yourself?”

he adjusts the lapel of his jacket, and he nods. he looks flustered, and it looked adorable. “i couldn’t risk anyone else doing it. i learned how to for this.” his voice is quiet, and his eyes and looking down towards his feet.

“thank you, really.”

he doesn’t reply, but he didn’t need to. the blush on his cheeks said everything for you.

he hates seeing you cry for someone like him. “hux, listen to me. okay? just listen.” you mumble out, “i’ve liked you for a long time.” you admit to him, quiet enough to where no one else but the two of you could hear. you see his face flush, and the blush on his cheeks spreads to the tips of his ears and nose. you feel yourself melt at that. he was so beautiful without even trying.

at this point, the two of you are on your knees on the floor and you’re desperately holding onto him. you couldn’t give up that easily and just let him run off to his death you knew was coming. you didn’t even realize that you sunk to your knees and took him with you until you felt the cold of the floor through your pants and on your legs.

“a really long time, ever since you gave me that stupid tie fighter to make sure i didn’t die trying to get to you. i was so shocked that you cared so much about some rebel, i was supposed to be someone you hated, but instead you took care of me and.. you didn’t want me dying. i knew that, you don’t have to tell me.” he opens his mouth to respond, but you put your finger over his lips. “i’m not done.”

“i just.. i don’t want you dying here. i could save you. i could take you home..” you sniffle, and your thumbs are running over his cheeks. “y/n..” he says your name, and you look into his eyes. “please, let me save you, armitage.”

something in him changes as you say his name.

“okay. okay, i’ll go.”

a smile appears across your lips, and you couldn’t help yourself. one of your hands travel to the back of his head, and you lean forwards. his eyes stay open for as long as they could, but as soon as your lips press against his, they’re closed. he melts into your touch, and you stand up off the floor, taking him with you.

he never wants to let you go.

“come on, let’s go.”

he nods.

your fingers entwine with his.

you’re taking him home.

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boonki · 4 years ago

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something there, something more

a little continuation of a fever prompt, the first part here and the second part by @sonderwalker here! from this prompt list

Cheers to our pining boys stuck together in the snow

______

The email he had been anxiously awaiting for dings his phone, and in the early morning light of his room, only a single lamp to illuminate the intimate space, he rolls over in bed to fumble it from the nightstand, blinking at the bright screen.

To the University of Washington community,

For the safety of our students and staff, classes have been cancelled for the day due to the snow conditions and road closures. Please wait for updates from your teachers on how best to proceed with assignments and exams. Updates on future cancellations will be issued nightly no later than 7 pm. Best,

President Palpatine

The same giddy relief that once met him as a college student still worms its way into his heart as a professor, an unexpected day off, no plans ahead of him, just hours and hours of free time. Except, he supposes, a quick email out to his students to continue their essays as normal and wait for the update on Friday’s class. He isn’t sad about losing the day’s lesson plan, it had mostly been a filler class.

He hums lazily, a sleepy grin pulling his lips back.

For the first time in weeks, he clicks the lock button and rolls over, stuffing his face into his pillow, and falls back asleep.

___

Hours later, the sun already cresting in the sky, hidden behind layers and layers of clouds shedding snow, he pads around his kitchen, pulling ingredients out of his fridge and pantry: carrots, chicken, celery, chicken broth, some garlic, an onion, and some noodles.

When he was younger, his mom had always whipped together chicken noodle soup on the colder days, and when she passed away when he was a teenager, he kept the tradition alive. In the silent, airy space of the kitchen, he feels closer to her cutting up the ingredients and carefully dropping them into the pot, can feel her gentle hand guiding him. The ache of her death has long since passed, but Obi-wan can’t help but wish she were here with him, oiling the stove for the chicken and passing him the garlic to press.

Somehow, in the many, many years since her death, the habit of cooking for two hasn’t left him; every time he makes this recipe, he ends up with days worth of leftovers.

The wood floor is cold beneath his bare feet; he didn’t think to put warm clothing on before coming downstairs, head still foggy from sleeping past noon. He knows his hair is sticking out in every direction, and that he could probably use a quick beard trim, but there isn’t anyone to judge him here. No pets, no roommates, just him and his big empty house.

The smell of the soup bubbles up at him: rich and inviting. He takes a spoon and sips on the broth, using his teeth to grab a very hot carrot that mashes easily in his mouth, a good sign that he can turn the heat down to let it simmer while he gets ready for the day. Some small part of him knows his destination, but the majority of him is still in denial. He has so much soup to share, though. Why let it go to waste? Besides, it’ll be a quick drop off so he can come home and finish the blanket he’s knitting, maybe read a few chapters of his library books. There’s something about an expected day off that makes the mundane feel enthralling.

He pads back upstairs, lost in thought as he goes through the motions of pulling a sturdy wool sweater over his head, brushing his teeth, combing his hair back, ignoring the shoddy state of his beard. Anakin had looked so horrible the other day, all pale skin and hollowed out eyes, his voice catching on itself, and god, his cough. Worry pangs Obi-wan’s heart, did Anakin have anyone to take care of him? Make sure he doesn’t die of a fever? He can’t go out in this weather to get take-out, and there’s no way he would be cooking with the state he’s in.

In the back of his head, Obi-wan knows there are very large excuses he’s making for the car crash of the truth: he wants to go see Anakin.

When he gets back downstairs, the soup is perfect. His mom would be proud.

___

Snow cakes the road ahead of him, and what should have been a ten minute drive turns into a forty minute one. Obi-wan thinks he has at least six different knots in his back and neck from sitting so close to the steering wheel the entire time, peering intently through the fast-paced windshield wipers as if the effort of looking harder would have any effect on his ability to see in front of him. When he finally pulls up in front of Anakin’s apartment building and finds a neat little spot to back his car into, he lets out a deep breath and slumps into his seat. Maybe this was not as good of an idea as he had hoped it would be.

He hadn’t even texted. Should he text Anakin? Is showing up at his door, soup in hand, too much? Too forward? Obi-wan is already anxious about pushing the bounds of their relationship too far; what if Anakin thought he was trying to groom him, thought he was a creepy old man with nothing better to do?

Obi-wan hits his head against the steering wheel.

The weird thing is, he doesn’t mind how inappropriate their relationship had become. Obi-wan had liked coming to his building, liked texting him about casual plans. He just worries his enthusiasm is one-sided.

It’s been so long since he’s had anything resembling a relationship, so he feels brand new to it again; it’s like riding a bike: the skill will never leave you, but if you take a ten year gap, you might need to wobble a bit before you glide. Obi-wan is wobbling.

Because he does have a crush, doesn’t he? Isn’t that why he’s here, sitting in his cooling car with homemade soup, outside of some boy’s apartment building? Why else would he go to such measures- especially on his day off? God, he feels so juvenile.

He hits his head on the steering wheel again.

The cold is starting to seep through the seams of the car, so he takes a deep breath, grabs his soup, and steps out into the snow. It crunches underneath his boots, leaving a trail of footprints all the way to the door of the building, which swings open easily for Obi-wan.

He fishes his phone out of his pocket. Anakin had texted which one he lived in, but it had felt too… like too much, last time he came. He hadn’t wanted to intrude on Anakin’s personal space.

#344.

The elevator ride is both too short and too fast, his anxiety rising with each floor. What if Anakin didn’t like chicken noodle soup? He definitely should’ve texted. But the doors glide open and the wide expanse of the hall looms in front of him, stretching for what seems like forever in both directions. The floorplan seems to be circular; a little guide that reads “301-322 left, 323-344 right” with arrows points him in the right direction, so he sets off to the right, each step waking up a new butterfly in his stomach.

When he reaches 344, he stares at the door for a moment, considering the fact that Anakin is on the other side of the thin wall, completely unaware of Obi-wan. Something yanks at him to turn back, but Obi-wan would feel even more pathetic if he went home with a full bowl of soup, and Anakin does probably need it, so. Here goes nothing.

The bell ding-dongs from the interior, the sound muffled. Obi-wan hears nothing, and then slow footsteps and a lock being unlatched.

Anakin is wearing his sweater.

“Obi-w- Professor Kenobi, hey,” Anakin rasps out, eyes wide open, clearly startled, and sounding a bit better than he had a few days ago, but not by much. His bangs are held back by a little clip, shooting a tuft of hair straight into the air. “Sorry if I missed your text, I’ve been asleep-”

“Ah,” Obi-wan shuffles in place, embarrassed. “I didn’t text, which I realize now that I should have, but-”

“No,” Anakin cuts in, “that’s okay.”

They stand there in awkward silence before Anakin points at the bowl Obi-wan is clutching to his chest.

“You brought soup?”

Obi-wan looks down to the container like he’s never seen it before, cheeks burning like lava. “Yes! I, well, you see my mother and I always made soup when it snowed, and I always make extra, so I thought you’d, well,” he chances a peek at Anakin, whose features are slackened in a soft smile, “I thought you could use some given that you’re sick and it’s snowing.”

“Have you eaten yet?” Anakin asks, ignoring his bumbling explanation.

“No,” he thinks back, “I didn’t get the chance.”

Anakin drags his door open and steps back, gesturing for Obi-wan to come inside. “Let’s share, then.”

Obi-wan balks at the open door, because he knows once he crosses that threshold there is no going back between them. He’d have officially been in Anakin’s apartment, sharing homemade soup with Anakin, taking care of him while he’s sick. The intimacy of seeing how someone lives, to see all the details of their existence on display, who they are when no one else is around… that sort of intimacy frightens Obi-wan.

“I don’t want to be an imposition,” he starts, only to get cut off by a particularly nasty sneeze from Anakin. “Bless you.”

“You’re not, so come on.” Anakin reaches forward and tugs on his arm, and really, Obi-wan has no choice.

While he had never actively imagined Anakin’s living space, he had always assumed it would be something akin to a sparse bachelor pad, dirty and meant for college students who couldn’t afford any better. But this is a pleasant surprise: a black rug and couch sits neatly against the wall of a tidy and cozy living room, branching off to a kitchen and a door Obi-wan assumes is Anakin’s bedroom. There are a few mirrors behind the couch, and a few (fake?) plants spotted around the room, even a candle on the coffee table.

Anakin leads him into the kitchen and Obi-wan sees now this is where the mess lies; computer parts, nuts, bolts, tools, and loose wires scatter the counter, leaving little room for anything else save the sink and a hand towel. He stands there and waits for Anakin to clear a space for the bowl, muttering about how he didn’t know company would be over otherwise he would’ve picked up a little.

Obi-wan doesn’t know if he even wants to ask what Anakin is making.

The bowl is transferred into the microwave, cooking for a few minutes on low to properly reheat, and Obi-wan sets out to find some spoons so he’s not left in awkward, still silence.

“Sorry there’s no table, I never really have anyone over and it takes up so much space, so,” Anakin is blushing, either embarrassed to have someone over or still running a fever. Maybe a bit of both. “Oh, here, in that drawer,” he motions to Obi-wan, crowding into his space to pull open the drawer. Obi-wan stiffens at their proximity; he can feel the heat pouring off of Anakin, and he grips the spoons like his life depends on it.

They perch by the counter, listening to the hum of the microwave.

“What are you doing during winter break?” Anakin asks him, breaking the quiet.

Obi-wan breaths in, thinking of his answer. “I’m not sure, probably just relax. Maybe work on my library books, plan for winter quarter.”

Anakin scoffs, and it turns into a full blown hacking spree. When he’s done, he winces. “Sorry, your plans are so sad my whole body freaked out.”

He snorts. “My plans aren’t sad. What are you doing, then?”

“Well, now that I’ve graduated, I suppose I should be looking for a job, so probably that.” Anakin stares up at the soup rotating in the microwave in contemplation.

Something small and sad tugs at Obi-wan’s heart. He had forgotten that Anakin wouldn’t be around anymore. No more impromptu office visits.

“But,” Anakin continues, “it would be nice to have help with my resume and interviewing.” He glances at Obi-wan out of the corner of his eyes.

The microwave beeps: the soup is finished reheating.

“Of course, I’d be happy to help.” Obi-wan says, warmth flooding his tone. He’s grateful that Anakin still wants him in his life, still wants his help.

Anakin sniffles and splits the soup into two bowls, handing one to Obi-wan, who is still holding both their spoons.

“You wanna watch something? We can sit on the couch.” Anakin says, and motions for Obi-wan to follow. Obi-wan tentatively settles into the couch, which is surprisingly cushy, as Anakin flips open Netflix and pulls up The Great British Baking Show.

“Is this okay? It’s kind of addictive.” Anakin looks suddenly self-conscious about his choice in television, grabbing a set of glasses from his coffee table. They are way too big for him and nearly slide down his nose in seconds. Obi-wan might combust.

“I didn’t know you wore glasses.”

Anakin shifts. “Only to see long distances, I mostly just use them for watching things.”

Obi-wan nods at that, and throws a hand up in the air towards the TV screen. “This is fine, I like cooking shows.”

“They’re definitely my guilty pleasure, I’ve always wished I was better at cooking.” Anakin blows on the soup on his spoon, eyes glued to the TV.

The hosts introduce the challenge, and Obi-wan looks down at his soup, stirring it all absentmindedly. “I can teach you, if you want. My mom passed a lot onto me before she, well.” Obi-wan smiles at him. “I’d like to think I’m a pretty good cook.”

Anakin pushes his glasses back on his face. “If the soup is anything to go by, I believe you.”

He chuckles, shifting his attention back to the TV. Helping Anakin find a job, teaching him how to cook- they’re both just trying to find excuses to stay in each other’s lives. It’d be endearing if it weren’t so sad.

The episode drags out, a winner is named and someone gets sent home, and Anakin and Obi-wan are long finished with their soup, the bowls having been discarded onto the coffee table a while ago. When the credits roll, neither of them get up, and the next episode autoplays. Obi-wan hopes he isn’t overstaying his visit, but Anakin seems comfortable and relaxed. Anakin offers him a blanket, and Obi-wan drapes it over his lower body, slouching further into the couch.

Over the next few hour long episodes, they seem to inch closer, fully lounging now. Jokes are made, laughter is shared, and Obi-wan keeps handing him tissues, grateful that he isn’t wiping his snot on the sweater’s sleeve.

He still can’t believe he’s sitting here on Anakin’s couch, watching a cooking show, while Anakin sits next to him wearing one of his sweaters.

Maybe he is the one with a delirious fever?

The fourth episode draws to a close, and Obi-wan spares a glance at one of the windows, where the afternoon had faded into evening. “I still don’t think she should have won, did you see the state of her frosting?” He stands up and stretches, sighing in relief when a few of his bones pop, laughing when Anakin’s do the same. “I should probably get going, though, it’s getting dark.”

But when the pair make it to the window, they are greeted by glistening white, snow almost completely covering the cars parked outside. There’s no way he can drive home in this, and they both know it. The air seems to thicken between them.

“Hey, you can crash on the couch and drive home once the snowplow has been through?” Anakin, though standing right next to him, seems miles away, his tone small and unsure.

“Surely not, you’ve already let me stay long as it is. I’ll…” he trails off, thinking.

“What, walk home?” Anakin supplies, shaking his head. “Absolutely not, you can stay. I don’t mind,” he places a hand on Obi-wan’s arm, “really.”

“You’re right, I don’t have much of a choice.” Obi-wan laughs under his breath. Still, if he did have the choice, he’d want to stay. Not that he’d ever admit that to Anakin.

Anakin takes the few steps back to the couch, grabbing a blanket and wrapping it around himself like a cape. “Well, should we finish the season then?”

_____

It’s midnight by the time the pair are too tired to stay awake, drifting off into separate spaces.

“Can I borrow something to sleep in?” Obi-wan asks Anakin, who is standing in the doorway to his room. From what Obi-wan can see, it looks a lot like the living room, all blacks and soft fabrics.

Anakin’s eyes widen. “Uh, yes. Hold on.” He disappears into his room and comes back with a blue flannel pajama set. “Here, the bathroom is just across the kitchen.”

Obi-wan takes the little pile of clothing from him with a soft thanks and retreats to the bathroom to change. The pants are entirely too long on him, and the shirt hangs on him, clearly meant for someone who has a little broader shoulders. But the set smells like Anakin, and Obi-wan wants to breathe it in forever.

When he comes out, Anakin bites back a smile, holding his lower lip between his teeth. He doesn’t say anything though, and Obi-wan is both disappointed and relieved.

“So there’s a bunch of blankets on the couch for you, let me know if you need anything else.” He says, backing into his room.

Obi-wan clears his throat. “Of course. Goodnight, Anakin.”

Anakin dips his head and closes his door. “Goodnight.”

In the dark of the living room, Obi-wan shakes the blankets out so they lay flat over the couch, and slips his legs under them to get comfortable, laying on back to stare at the ceiling.

What a day.

If someone had told him this was what his snow day would’ve looked like, he would’ve laughed in their face. Just under two weeks ago, they had been huddled together in his office, working on Anakin’s paper like normal. And now, he’s spending the night at Anakin’s apartment. And while Anakin technically isn’t a student anymore, and certainly not his student any more by a long shot, there’s still a sticky and uncomfortable unease sitting in his gut; he doesn’t know how old Anakin is, but Obi-wan is surely much older than him. Plus, he doesn’t know if there’s a power play at hand, what if Anakin just thinks he’s being a creepy old man and feels obligated to let him stay?

But he thinks about the way Anakin’s flashed with happiness when Obi-wan laughed at one of his jokes during the show, the way they inched towards each other, Anakin’s face when Obi-wan came out of the bathroom in his pajamas.

Needless to say, Obi-wan doesn’t get much sleep. Instead, he thinks about the fact that Anakin is also lying down, just a thin apartment wall in between them, and watches the large snowflakes drift down in silent waves outside.

Obi-wan wonders if Anakin is sleeping in his sweater. He hopes he is.

#obikin #fever prompt #boonki writes #someday theyll quit pining and actually get together #someday

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randomeditscreates · 4 years ago

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The Force Awakens Breakdown

So I know no one gives a shit about my opinions on movies and my last post about the sequel trilogy [ST] But honestly I want to continue talking about these crap movies. So now that we got that through, lets start.

1) Jar Jar Abrams start this movie by basically ripping off the concept of the OT [Original Trilogy] The First Order [The empire] has taken over with a dark side user [Kylo Ren in this one, and Darth Vader in the OT] with a more powerful dark side user in the background pulling all the strings [Snoke and Creamy Sheeve respectfully] With an opposing side that happening to be small in numbers, [The Rebels and The Resistance(What they're resisting, no fucking clue, but it sounds nice)]

2) Rey Palpatine (I refuse to use the other name) is the protagonist of this story, and just so happens to live in a desert planet, you know like Luke. And happens to be the most laziest character Jar Jar and Kathleen Kennedy ever created. She's kind, and friendly and her only flaw is that she doesn't have any family. She's a scavenger, yet has so much proficient in the force, you would think she's been training for decades. She has great skill in flying ships and fixing them, that you would think, it would at least be a throwaway line. But nope, she has no reasoning for knowing how to fly or fix ships and the only reasoning we really have is that, Jar Jar wanted it, so he put it in. And throughout this movie and following ones, she picks up skills like their pokemon cards because fuck hard work. Now Rey pisses me off, not just because of her lazy character, but because during all the movies, nothing ever fucking happens to her, she doesn't get hurt to an extreme degree like Finn, She doesn't go through a huge revelation, all that happens is that Rey loses Han (someone she barely knows) then she magically beat Kylo,( who if you don't remember has years even decades over Rey in training) and then decides to find Luke. And that leads to the third problem...

3) The movie is too full. for being a movie that is 2 hours and 16 minutes, yes I fucking looked it up, this movie seems to drag on and not develop any of their concepts. Because while I fucking agree that Rian Johnson left fucking nothing for Jar Jar to work with, at least his story had some character development, and yes it dumb and breaks the world but I'll take what I can get. All the main characters in this movie all ends up the same as they start off with. Rey is a happy and kind character with no past, turns to Rey is a happy and kind character with no past and force abilities. Kylo Ren is tangled up Christmas lights drenched in yogurt and acid, and turns into a tangled up Christmas lights drenched in yogurt and acid, who ends up Killing his father. But if you remember is haunted by that death by TLJ [The Last Jedi] Poe Dameron is a self assured Spit-fired Pilot and ends up a Spit-fired self assured Pilot who's Not dead. Even the characters who do get develop, Finn and, oh my god, it's only Finn, get's completely rewritten in TLJ and gets the story arc redone just terribly. We can't even talk about Han, Leia or even Maz, because Han doesn't change and then dies, Leia doesn't get enough screen time to show anything about this character, and Maz is supposed to Yoda in a yellow and female clothing, and they do shit with that too because it leads to this..

4) Maz Kanata and holy fuck, she's literally the reason Han is dead. Maz yells very loudly to the entire cantina that Han Solo is here, which leads for the First Order to be notified. She somehow has Luke's lightsaber [It doesn't get explained, not even in the later movies] and somehow Rey is drawn to it, and leads to Maz giving advice, but you know the shitty type because it ends with Rey running away in the forest for her to get caught by Kylo. She tells Finn that he shouldn't leave, and that it turns makes him severely injured. And if you don't remember she does the same to Han, and he ends up dead. And her cantina gets fucking destroyed after being their for centuries, yet she couldn't give a fuck. and it shows the true issue, Jar Jar and Kathleen Kennedy in extent doesn't give a fuck about characters and just wants to to get from point A to point B with a lot of flashing lights.

5) Han Solo: Character Assassination. A character who developed into a man who was ready to risk it all for the rebellion. A character we loved in the OT is now broken down into his New Hope person all over again. Who apparently has scammed everyone in the galaxy? Um, Jar Jar, I know it might seem strange to you, but a smuggler needs people who trust him to get jobs and therefore receive income. But I guess I shouldn't expect much from the same man that think a Smuggler would want to be easily known or recognized. Also Leia and him are either broken up or divorced and that makes me feel really happy to know a couple that I loved are no longer together and one of this dead. Because Han Solo is just there for fan service and to shoot his gun, because that's what he's here for to go pew pew. Oh and to die, that what all the OT fans wanted, One of the main three characters killed by their own child.

6) Subtle doesn't exist in this movie, everything is given the delicacy of a hammer. We find out that Kylo or Ben, (I really don't fucking give a shit) is the son of Han solo, by Snoke just saying, the droid is in the possession of your father Han Solo, like no shit I assumed that when you mentioned the Millennium Falcon. Who would you think I thought Kylo was the son of, Chewbacca? Finn's story arc is the only one that makes you think, and brings a new aspect to the movies, and to the Stormtroopers. I just fucking wish we could do the same for the others Stormtroopers, because the other are killed with no regards that most of them, as Finn states were sold into this at a young age. Good job Resistance for killing all these people who was forced into this with no regards. How does a series that came like a decade before you (Star Wars: The Clones War Series) manage to develop the concepts that stormtroopers or clones are not mindless drones better than you. (The Rookie episode in the first season helps flesh out all the clones and they only have 25 minutes per episode, get you're shit together Lucas Films) And these are only the examples I could think of, off the top of my head.

7) Rey is a great example of Sexism, but instead it goes the other way around then usual. All the male characters are laughed at and or ridiculed, but all the females are perfect and don't need to change. One of the last scene is a great example of this, Kylo Ren, the one with years of training and two powerful masters who trained him, gets beat by Rey, someone who has no skill with a lightsaber and didn't even know she could use the force until Jar Jar decided to pull it out his ass. Even Finn who has at least close quarters fighting skills under his belt couldn't beat Kylo, and has to be saved by Rey. Now I will admit to being a feminist but Kathleen version completely differs from mine. Because while I believe both men and women are both capable of reaching the same level of skill, Kathleen think women should be able to do incredible things without working for it. And it clear by her stupid "The Force is female" Like shut the fuck up, the force was never given a gender, why the fuck are you doing it now? I also found out that most of the Crew in Lucas Film, happens to be female. and it's clear who's doing that. Again I am a feminist but I hate when people just have diversity for the sake of diversity instead of the person's capabilities. It's very vindictive of the Feminist movement, The Black Lives Movement and LGBT+ agenda as well, as we're trying to make people see them as just like everyone else which they fucking are (I will not stand for any form of bigotry and if you don't like something simply because of someone's race, gender or sexuality, you are shit human being) , they just so happen to not be a straight white man. And that they have the same struggles as everyone else. Also we already had strong female characters in the series without the big emphasis on the fact that they have a vagina. As from the basis, Star Wars was never about gender and because of this we got fully developed character we could relate to.

Now Dishonorable Mentions

A) This movie is fucking 2 hours and 16 minutes long, yet it feel so unfinished

B) Jar Jar Abrams deep seated love for mystery boxes and how it get more screen time then the actual Character it involves (Rey)

C) The movie could've been great, they're was definitely potential but it was dwarfed by mystery boxes and Visuals

D) Rey is not a Mary Sue in this Movie, she becomes one by the end of TLJ but she's not yet. So I guess it one positive.

E) Jar Jar inability for world Building, and doesn't even fucking tries to explain how the First Order even began to rise.

F) Poe Fucking Dameron, and the amount of time that is dedicated to him. I love him but come on, just make it someone like Han, as it could bring up the relationship between him and his son, which could then bring more emphasis when we reveal their relationship. But no lets bring up a character who we all assume is dead until about the end. And then does absolutely fucking nothing.

G) And Lastly when we see Han die, we don't get a scene of any of the characters we give a fuck about and who knows Han mourn his death, instead we just have two characters who had about 15 minutes of screen time with Han, and Chewbacca. And it doesn't get better because Rian Johnson decides in the second movie that we don't need a scene of Luke mourning over the man who fought side by side with him and is his Sister's husband. No Instead we get a scene of him drinking tit milk.

So that's it, well for now, I'll make another post for this if I have any more issues. But that it for now. I would also like to make it damn clear now, as I'll probably continue this, that me tearing apart a movie is based soley on the technical aspects of it. And that if you enjoyed this movie, you are entitled to it, but you cannot defend this movie's writing , because as I hoped I made clear, the writing is very much shit.

#star wars #rey star wars #rey palpatine #finn star wars #poe dameron #luke skywalker #critique

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b-else-writes · 4 years ago

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the tiger shark and the sun

New chapter posted for my Star Wars/Avatar the Last Airbender-RebelCaptain fusion AU! Feat: prison break hijinks, unlikely team-ups, and Jyn and Han trying not to kill each other. And a bonus Enfys chapter!

Read on AO3 | read from start

Pairings: Jyn/Cassian, minor Han/Leia and Baze/Chirrut, random minor background pairings

Rating: T

Summary: Star Wars/Avatar the Last Airbender fusion AU. The Fire Nation, under Fire Lord Palpatine and Lord Vader, has been at War with the world for the last twenty years. When Jyn Erso lands on his doorstep the day Cassian, last southern waterbender, is assigned to protect the Avatar, she seems just another obstacle in ending the War. An obstacle he would willingly remove. For exiled firebender Jyn, the Avatar is her last way home - and to her hostaged father, never mind her own conscience. But as their paths keep crossing, and the Avatar needs all help in saving the world, Jyn and Cassian find they are more alike than they ever thought possible.

Snippet under the cut!

Han was listening with half an ear as Erso poured out tea. It was a quiet night at the Western Air City. Both Luke and Leia looked sweaty from another day of Erso yelling at them to punch harder and produce more fire, worse than his old sergeant as a cadet. After that, Chirrut had put them through the paces of more earthbending training. Han absently moved a strand of hair stuck to Leia’s sweaty neck. She grunted in response and continued to lie on her stomach, face on Artoo’s belly. Han grinned to himself. He would admit he loved watching her when she was bending four elements like some kind of wrathful Spirit, but grouchy Leia was funny to bother.

“It’s nothing on Bodhi’s tea,” Erso was saying, smiling – wonders would never cease! – “But I tried my best. He also had a really bad tea joke.”

“Let’s hear it,” Chirrut, Baze, and Luke said at the same, then laughed. Han rolled his eyes behind his cup. It was some kind of black tea boiled in water and milk. Not bad. Nothing on Bodhi’s though. Han sighed to himself, hoping their resident soft-hearted anxious wreck was alright. The only people less inoffensively adorable than Bodhi Rook are probably babies. Erso refused to speak on the subject.

“*Well… I can’t remember the start,” Erso continued to her audience, “But the punchline was ‘leaf me alone, I’m bushed.’*”

“I don’t think that’d be funny even with the punchline,” Han said, as the three stooges cackled to themselves. Enfys looked up from the dusty papers she was reading, documents she’d rescued from Hynestia’s ruins, to roll her eyes at him. Pleasant enough – for a traitor. Erso’s face fell as she saw Cassian was distracted by maps and papers in front of him. Taking pity, Han spoke up, “Whatcha got there, Cassian?”

“A lot,” he said absently.

“Do tell me more,” Han said. When Cassian didn’t respond, Han reached over and poured the tea onto Cassian’s lap. Cassian nearly yelped. Kay leant over, trying to lick it. Cursing, Cassian waterbent the tea off and flung it at Han’s face, who ducked it with grace. Well, graceful for him.

“Remind me again why we’re friends,” Cassian muttered.

“I’ve got charm,” Han shrugged. Chewie snickered to himself behind him.

Feigning deafness, Cassian turned to the group. “Bunch of things. There are other battles going on and we’re trying to pull troops for the battle directly against Palpatine. Plenty of people didn’t come for the Day of Black Sun. For them -”

“The most important battles are for their homes,” Enfys finished. Cassian nodded, pointing towards marked out locations across the Earth Kingdom.

"Sullust, Troithe, Mindor, Naboo, Cato Nemoidia - there's guerilla warfare going on over the Earth Kingdom. It’s good for us in some ways. Once the Fire Lord falls, those who don’t surrender to Mon Mothma are going to dig in and become warlords if we don’t get rid of them first.”

“Joy,” Baze said under his breath. Cassian continued, “Then we’re decoding breakdowns on the Death Star from Jyn’s scroll. And we’ve started ascertaining who survived the Invasion. And if those missing were imprisoned instead of dead.”

“Anyone we know?”

Cassian’s face grew haggard, exposing the premature wrinkles. He looked less like the technically decorated war hero after the Siege of the North, and more mortal. “The death toll is…not good. But we have confirmation Lando was imprisoned.”

“No!” Luke and Leia cried, at the same time Han said, “Lando…Lando made it out?”

Suddenly Erso’s tea tasted of bile. Han set the cup down shakily. His sword lay in his lap. Its presence felt foolish. Who was he trying to kid, playing General? Lando had done most of the leading. Lando had stayed behind and paid the price for having real responsibilities. Had risked his neck to save him from Jabba. Lando and him went way back – there was a corner of the Falcon he still couldn’t quite look at after some activities back during the coaxium heist when Enfys was twelve – and now.

Leia squeezed his hand, kissing him gently. “We’ll get him out, Han,” she said fiercely. Han kissed her back, drinking in her big bright eyes, wishing he had all the power in the world like she did, and he could bust Lando straight out –

Now, hang on a second there.

Chewie gave a nervous warble at his expression. Han told him shut up, I always have great ideas.

“Hey, Erso,” he said, as the morose group finished dinner and began to head off to bed, “Can I talk to you?”

She frowned at him suspiciously. Han raised his hands, walking off towards the edge of the atrium. She and Chewie followed after. Han stopped near the edge, staring down at the thick layer of clouds. He envied Enfys, being able to fly. Erso folded her arms expectantly. “Where would they have been imprisoned?”

“It’s better that you don’t know,” Erso said, “Knowing will make it worse.”

She turned to go. Han scowled. “Listen, Erso. He’s my friend. I owe my life to him.”

“It’s not good, Solo.”

Gritting his teeth, “Please.”

Erso paused. Her shoulders tightened. Then, “If I tell you, you’d better not do anything stupid.”

“Me? Stupid?” Erso turned and glared at him. Sobering, Han nodded, the lie easy. Erso studied him, glancing over at Chewie, who only growled.

Edging away, she continued, “There’s a story. I’ve only heard rumours. It’s called Fortress Inquisitorius. Highest security prison in the Fire Nation. They say it’s a tower in a boiling lake, on the volcano of Nur. Its run by elite benders, the Inquisitors, and Imperial Intelligence.”

“Volcano of Nur?”

“Volcano coming out of the sea. It’s only stories. People taken by the Inquisitors don’t come back. But that’s my guess for a high-level war prisoner.”

Han nodded. Erso gave him another sharp look before stalking away. “You are so paranoid!” Han called after her. She made a rude hand gesture.

Sneaking out was easier said than done. He, Luke, and Cassian all shared a large room, with Chewie sleeping on the floor. Luke had passed out immediately, but Cassian, stupid magic waterbender, had stayed up reading his papers and writing messages past midnight. Once he was certain Cassian was asleep, Han packed lightly. His sword, some picks, a dagger, food, and his personal map. He tiptoed past Cassian’s mattress. He’d explained to Chewie that there was no way he could smuggle a bear along. The bear had been instructed to warn the group if Han didn’t return in five days. Chewie had given him a big hug before that.

Han regretted leaving him behind already. Being on his own was weird. Carefully, carefully…

“Going somewhere?”

Erso dropped out of the shadows of the atrium. There was no point pretending. “It’s none of your business, Erso. I have to make this right,” Han snapped. What would Erso understand –

Okay, stupid. Erso probably understood perfectly. But this was Lando. Erso had never met him in her life. She wouldn’t get the history. Han didn’t particularly want to hurt her, but he rested his hand on his sword-hilt. She raised her hands, pausing.

He started towards the war balloon. Erso followed. “What are you doing?”

She raised a challenging brow. “I’m going with you.”

“I have to -”

“Die alone?” Erso’s eyes were hard. Was Erso, his former friend, worried about him? Han swallowed uncomfortably. “You’re going to a prison of elite benders. What exactly is your plan? Wave your sword around like a big boy?”

“Erso,” Han said warningly. She gripped the war balloon’s basket.

“Keep at this and I’ll scream my fucking head off and wake everyone up.”

Han swore. “Fine. Get in the damn balloon.”

Erso leapt fluidly over the side, landing in a crouch. With a few quick punches of her odd, rainbow flame, the balloon rose. Soon, they had left Hynestia far behind.

Han had a bad feeling about this.

keep reading

#rebelcaptain #rogue one #star wars #jyn x cassian #jyn erso #cassian andor #zutara #atla #au: atla #my fic

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writingstruggles · 5 years ago

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Ben Solo/Kylo Ren: a character analysis

OK, first things first: THIS ISN’T A STAN OR ANTI POST. This is a character study, and if you can’t handle this character getting impartial concrit, just don’t read. If, however, you don’t agree with some of the points I’m going to make and want to have a healthy discussion about it, then I’m all ears. I don’t think my opinion is the only valid one, so feel free to try and change my mind.

And second things second: I tried so hard to love the sequel trilogy, but when it became clear after TROS that the studio had no plan other than making money, it became very difficult. I’m aware that the main problem for all the characters is the lack of general planing in this whole mess of trilogy, so keep this always in mind while reading this post: the first problem of this character was that the studio didn’t even know what to do with him.

1. Does Ben Solo becoming Kylo Ren make sense?

I checked the comics to get his background better. He had a happy childhood traveling a lot with Han and Leia, but when she discovered about the First Order, she sent him to train with Luke while Han and Chewie ran undercover missions for her. This is important: up to this point, he had a good relationship with his family, even if he was already being pulled by the dark side of the Force. It was during his adolescence that he started to be really seduced by Snoke, hearing the voice he thought belonged to Darth Vader. After the Luke incident, he did explode the cabin and thought he had killed his uncle, but he was not the one who killed all the other students and destroyed the temple: that was Snoke’s thing. He did kill some of his fellow Jedi apprentices later on, though. So, his turning points were Luke’s treason and Snoke’s coordinated abduction. And I would like to point out: the Sith training involves torture and brainwashing, so the first wrong impression I would like to correct about this character is that he was not simply a dick and revolted teen who ran away to join a cult.

BUT, there are some huge problems here. The first one is that when you watch the movies, you don’t learn anything about that aside from Luke’s part. In the way he’s presented in TFA, he’s Leia and Han’s son who betrayed his family, destroyed his uncles’ dream and joined the dark side for no reason. OF COURSE half of the audience wouldn’t like him. That wouldn’t be a problem if they just wanted him to be a villain like Darth Vader was, but it’s very clear that there was a plan (at least for one director) to make him a supposedly redeemable character. And how can we sympathize with his character like that? Even after we get to know what Luke almost did, the next question is simple: ok, so why he didn’t go back to Han and Leia?

And here is the second huge problem: we learned that after Ben leaves Yavin IV, Luke vanished, and Han and Leia broke up and went back to smuggling/leading a rebellion. And I can’t stress this enough, this doesn’t make any sense. The sequel trilogy killed Luke, Han, and Leia’s characters. These three characters that we have known for years would never, ever, had abandoned Ben Solo. Leia F*cking Organa and Han shot-first Solo would have brought their son back or die trying. Luke Skywalker is not a coward, he wouldn’t go into hiding and abandoned his only sister to clean up his mess during another war, let alone close himself to the Force, knowing full well he wouldn’t be able to feel if she was in danger. Just remember Han risking his life to save Luke in Hoth; or Leia leaving the rebellion to rescue Han from Jabba; or Luke straight-up disobeying ghost Obi-Wan and ghost Yoda to save Han and Leia, even if that costed the war. They were older and different, for sure, but we are talking about the quintessential things, the things that make these beloved characters themselves.

(THIS ^^. This right here is the spirit of Star Wars)

So no, in the way it was done in the movies, Ben Solo becoming Kylo Ren doesn’t make sense to the audience, and that’s a huge problem. A friend of mine suggested once that instead of being a rip-off of ANH, TFA should have been a movie about the beginning of the First Order (because after we defeat the Empire on episode VI, episode VII starting with ANOTHER all-powerful evil government already dominating the galaxy and exploding planets just throws away all the previous movies’ efforts) and about how Ben Solo becomes Kylo Ren. Just imagine if Rey, Finn and Poe had interacted with Ben Solo before he becomes evil: the stakes would have been so much higher, and it could have been well done. It would have made this character more human and likable.

2. Kylo Ren’s motivations: what does he want?

If the OT was about hope, I think we can agree that the ST’s themes are legacy and belonging. Having their protagonists, Rey and Ben/Kylo representing two apposite sides of those things was one of the best ideas for the new saga. Rey looks for belonging in the past she doesn’t know, while Kylo wants to abandon Ben Solo’s past and find his place in his future as Kylo Ren.

In that sense, his character arc was somehow solid. In TFA, it’s clear he’s still struggling with the dark side and feels the temptation of the light: he loses control easily, and he’s not doing anything unless Snoke orders him to. Ok, but why? Why is he clinging to Darth Vader’s ideals and staying in the sith path? Basically because he thinks it’s too late, and he has no other options. Which brings us back to the problem with Han and Leia: his parents didn’t go after him, they chose to go back to their old lives – of course he would think there’s no going back for him now. “But he is an adult man and could make his own decisions.” It’s a fair point, but again: sith training corrupts you and even if he had escaped, the only thing that would happen would be Snoke finding him again. It’s kinda like leaving an addiction: you supposedly can do it by yourself, but it is so much easier if you have help. Not a simple promise or offer, but actual, constant, and present help. I can not stress this enough, but I insist that one of the main problems with the sequel trilogy was not explaining in a satisfactory way HOW and WHY he turned to the dark side and stayed there.

3. Han Solo

Okay, I will admit: maybe my opinion on this specific topic is biased, because Han Solo is my favorite SW character. You may call me out as a fangirl if you don’t agree, but my point is: making Kylo Ren kill Han Solo was a bad idea. They basically killed the character for half of the audience, with zero chance of redemption.

It’s because it’s fratricide. Unless your father is Satan, the Emperor, or someone as equally villainous, fratricide is just that bad. It’s not easy to redeem a character who commits murder, but one that kills his own father? Who happens to be one of the good guys? And one of the most iconic and beloved characters in the franchise? There were other options to give Kylo Ren a tipping point, a conflicted moment that didn’t involve killing Han Solo. But they did, and he killed him. And now he’s no longer a villain we can sympathize with: now we think he’s a monster.

4. His interactions with Rey in TLJ

(I’m not wearing shipper goggles for this. I don’t even own shipper goggles when we are talking about Star Wars.)

Kylo Ren is conflicted after killing Han Solo, (and I will make a small pause here to reinforce how good Adam Driver’s acting was. He’s the only responsible for all the likable parts of Kylo Ren, especially in this movie). Kylo is once again unstable and Snoke is displeased with him, and for a moment we think he finally turned completely to the dark side, until he pauses before shooting Leia’s ship.

The force bond was the most interesting part of the movie. I don’t agree that he used it to manipulate Rey: if anything, he was completely harsh and blunt and kind of a dick to her, but he didn’t lie. He told her things how he saw it, with so much conviction that she started to see his side of the story. And since she was probably the first person in years that actually listened to him, his decision of murdering Snoke and inviting her to join the dark side makes very much sense.

We are talking about motivations and his are simple: let the past die, forge a new path. When he kills Snoke and no longer has a master, he only has one option: to become the master. That’s why he takes over the FO, and wants Rey to be his apprentice. Does the character suffer from sith-tunnel-vision? Definitely. But it makes sense. His decision-making is not overly complicated: he feels alone, and he wants a purpose: he decides that the solution for both is Rey joining him in the dark side. When she refuses, he still has one purpose: the FO.

This is, however, the point where he turns his back to the light completely: on Crait, he orders the FO to explode the Rebel Base and kill everyone, knowing full well his mother was in there. He orders them to exploded the Falcon out of the sky, once again knowing that Chewie and Rey are on board. When facing Luke, he repeats that he will kill Rey and the rebels. His transition from conflicted sith apprentice to the new villain of the franchise was actually well done.

And exactly because of that, the next topic pisses me off so much.

5. The continuity problem between episodes VIII and IX

Introducing Palpatine here was bad for so many reasons: backtracking Rey’s arc, making us think about Palps’ sex life, insisting on beating a literal dead horse when there were new things to explore, etc etc. And it was also bad for Kylo Ren’ arc. As I said before, the way they finished episode VIII, everything pointed to Kylo becoming the final evil Rey would have to face, and that would have been awesome. We didn’t need Palps, or ANOTHER all-powerful evil army ready to conquer the galaxy with exploding-planets-tech (seriously, is Alderaan a joke to you, Disn*y?).

But, in the third movie, they went back and decided they didn’t want Kylo Ren to be the ultimate villain anymore. They wanted him to be redeemed. And that’s not bad per se, but an actual redemption arc needs to be planned, and I think we can all agree, there was no planning in the sequels. And again, FRATRICIDE. So they introduced an old, more powerful evil to make Kylo Ren less evil and less of a threat in comparison. And evil so definitive, and with such a bullshit connection to Rey, that it makes Kylo reconsider his previous promises of killing the last jedi and going back to the plan of making her turn.

And so, his character spends the movie going after Rey, to tell her the bullshit truth about her parents, to convince her to join him. At least his arc is still somehow solid, because once he’s decided on his path, he doesn’t lose control like in the previous movies, and his body language is more firm and lethal. Which, honestly, thanks Adam Driver, he knew the character way better than the director at this point.

He finally comes back to the light when Leia dies. Although it was rushed, I agree that, at that point, it was literally the only thing that could have made him turn. Rey reminding him that he wouldn’t be alone if he hadn’t chosen the dark side helped, too. It was clear that the moment with Han Solo was supposed to be with Leia, but I’m really glad Harrison Ford agreed to come back to fill in the role for his old friend.

6. Ben Solo

Okay, there’s so much to unpack here. When Ben Solo finally comes out to play, it’s very good. We can finally see some things that explain Kylo Ren better – it’s so obvious how awkward he was in his own body trying to be an evil sith lord when he is clearly a natural disaster. He still suffers from tunnel vision, but at least now it’s Skywalker-do-or-die tunnel vision. It’s like a weight was lifted from his shoulders, and the way his actions scream Han Solo makes me, once again, wish the first movie had been about him, and not the whole “find a map/ Star Killer base was ANOTHER ridiculous idea / I know R2’s alignment is chaotic bastard but COME ON”.

Star Wars has a notorious story with pulling Force powers out of nowhere, and I’m not going to pretend to be an expert in SW lore, so I won’t complain about the dyad thing (and the weird stuff with the light sabers). I honestly liked the concept. There’s a lot I have to say about the final battle against Palpatine, but I think it would fit better in a future character study about Rey (God, that’s going to be another long ass post). I just want to add that after Luke insisted on her taking both light sabers to Exegol, and after all the crazy stuff Ben did to get to her, they should have, you know, actually fought side by side against 85% dead Palpatine? Aren’t these two idiots supposed to be stronger than that?? I’m not complaining about Rey bringing him down “alone” since she is the protagonist yada yada, I just wished that Ben had done something, instead of being thrown into a hole.

(Palps did that out of spite because of his grandfather? I bet he did.)

I won’t say I didn’t cry hearing the voices of the past jedi talking to Rey, because I definitely did. If anything, it was great to see so many beloved actors getting a chance to honor such iconic characters. But are you freaking shitting on us? Where were ANY of those assholes when Luke, Leia and Ben needed them, like, ten years ago?? “Well, force ghosts should not be used as ex machinas, and they don’t see the future” Tell that to episodes IV, V and VI. Anakin, Obi Wan and Yoda can show up for Vader weird funeral/party with ewoks but they can’t send a jedi signal for the Skywalkers to warn them about Sith bullshit about to happen? “They were probably ahead in the world the comes next and they didn’t have a way to come back, they just talked to Rey because Exegol is a Force nexus and-” And so is Ach-To. And so is Yavin IV. And so is Dagoba (Yes, Snoke sent Ben there for training). Look, I have no problems with Force Ghosts, I love them bastards. I’m just so freaking mad with the lack of coherence in this trilogy. If they did not talk to the Skywalkers – and I’m sure at least Luke and Ben asked Obi Wan/Anakin to show themselves A LOT – they should not have talked to Rey. It was a crowd please moment, for sure, but it was another gigantic middle finger to Ben Solo (before he becomes Kylo Ren).

And then Rey died, and Ben brings her back. I know how many funny jokes are going around in the fandom about how resurrecting Qui-Gon or Padme would have saved the galaxy so much trouble, but again, I’m okay with that. It was previously established that since they were a dyad, they had this living Force between them (although it was rushed in the final like everything else). And it does make sense Ben doing that: he had just come back to the light, and his parents were both dead. Han and Leia were gone because of him, the last time he saw Chewie was as his captor, and before that, he got shot by him, etc, you get the idea. He had nothing else, only this: the chance to make it right by a person that genuinely cared for him. Exchanging his life for Rey’s was nothing: he knew that his family would be waiting for him in the world that comes after.

So, did I like the Bendemption? It. Was. Not. A. Redemption. It was the right choice, and it made things right between him and Rey, because she forgave him for everything. But that’s it. He did not face the consequence of any of his previous actions. “But he died for her!” And we just established that it was not a difficult choice, considering that he had literally no reasons to stay alive if Rey was dead. If you want to see an actual redemption arc, go watch Avatar the Legend of Aang.

And finally, the kiss and the death. Okay, I know I’m digging my own grave by addressing that, but my mama raised no coward. Here it goes: it was fan service, pure and simple. It’s there to make part of the fanbase happy. Good for you, reylos, but to us, not shippers, it came out of nowhere. And I’m not questioning if they had feelings for each other or not: I’m talking about pacing and characterization. I’m not 100% convinced that Rey, as a character, as she was presented to us so far, would have done that. It felt out of place, and it broke the immersion of the scene. I was emotionally invested on what was going on, I was happy to see Ben smiling at her and everything, but then suddenly they were sucking faces and the “FAN SERVICE” alarm was so loud in my mind that I immediately lost interest. If they wanted that in the movie so much, there was probably a better way to do that.

It makes sense that Ben had to die to bring Rey back: one life for another and everything. I still think that, story-wise, it would have been better if none of them had died a ridiculous death, and Ben had faced the consequences of his actions as Kylo Ren, but okay, moving on. The main problem here is what happens after he dies: nothing. Absolute-effing-nothing. He dies, he disappears – which, again, I won’t question because Leia was involved and Skywalkers do whatever they want with the Force and I’m no expert – but that’s it. Rey, the same Rey that had just jumped his bones fifteen seconds earlier, doesn’t even mourn him. She doesn’t cry, she doesn’t do anything for him in the end, she just goes to Tattooine because it makes sense to the Skywalker saga to end where it started. She sees more of those Force Ghosts who never appear when they freaking should and that’s it.

Why is it bad? Well, first, like it or not, Ben Solo/Kylo Ren was one of the main characters and he deserved an actual final. Finn and Poe too, but those are long posts for another day. And second, it makes the fan-service in that kiss scene more evident. You can’t have the girl kiss him and in the next scene act like it didn’t matter at all. “Ok, then it was a thank-you kiss and there were no real feelings of loved involved”. But that makes it worse, it would be even more completely out of character for Rey – who avoids physical contact with people on the regular – to just kiss someone as a thank-you. Do you see how the math does not compute? If she had feelings for him, and therefore kissed him, she should have mourned him. If anything, she should at least miss her other part of the dyad thing. And if she didn’t mourn him because she didn’t have actual feelings, then she should not have kissed him. A little consistency, it’s all I’m asking.

7. Conclusions (aka tl;dr)

He was a somehow consistent character, but the lack of plot for the sequels was a huge problem. If the trilogy had been about Ben Solo becomes Kylo Ren – Kylo Ren kills Snoke and becomes the real villain – Rey faces Kylo Ren and she either saves him or kills him, it would have been so much better than the mess the studio did.

His story in the comics is so much more complex than what it is shown in the movies, but what they did to Han, Leia and Luke was a crime.

It was clear that one director had a vision to give him a redemption, and the other to make him the ultimate villain.

Adam Driver did what he could to make this character solid and somehow likable, let’s thank him for that.

There was no reason to bring Palps back,

Rey’s actions in the final are contradictory,

He should have stayed alive to face the consequences of his actions,

and the studio is charged guilt for getting our hopes up just to crush them with their lack of interest in doing something descent for the fans.

But again, that’s just my analysis of this character. Feel free to disagree with me, I would love to see what other people think about Ben Solo/Kylo Ren.

#character study #ben solo #kylo ren #star wars the sequel trilogy #adam driver #bendemption #star wars #long post #I got mad halfway and you can tell #rey #han solo #I blame the studio #mostly

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disneydreamlights · 5 years ago

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Until We Meet Again

AO3 | FFN

Summary: Stuck in the World Between Worlds, Ahsoka pulls her master in for one last conversation.

A/N: *drops this here and flees quietly* Anakin and Ahsoka deserve so much better.

Anyways first foray into writing for Star Wars, so that’s always fun.

She shouldn’t be here. That was the consistent thought that ran through Ahsoka’s head as she wandered the World Between Worlds. She’d told Ezra that messing with the past any more than necessary was a bad idea, and being in this place just kept the temptation there. With the knowledge she had now, she could change so much of the past, even when she knew it was wrong to harbor that desire. Yet despite Ezra making it out through back to Lothal, she couldn’t find the portal back to Malachor.

“What would’ve surprised people was how kind he was. He cared deeply about his friends. He looked out for them until the end.”

That was her voice echoing out into the endless abyss of empty space surrounding her. It was what she’d said to Ezra when she had first told him about her master. She winced at the realization, not wanting to think about Anakin. She still had a bit more until she came to terms with that.

“He is like no other Jedi. Passionate, impulsive, but I trust him with my life!”

“You’re reckless little one. You never would have made it as Obi-Wan’s Padawan, but you might make it as mine.”

“Fighter crashed, I saved the day, you’re welcome.”

“You taught me well. I can handle anything.”

It was all just snippets of conversations between them. Swirling around in the Force with no source. For a moment, Ahsoka felt like she was going to be overwhelmed by the memories of them. They had to be coming from somewhere. Because she had to make them stop.

Her answer came from one of the portals. Something about it almost felt as though it was calling to her.

“Anakin, good luck.”

“But because of you I did survive.”

“I knew you’d come looking for me.” “I never doubted you for a second.”

“I can’t let you die Ahsoka.”

Each memory that played out as she got closer to the portal was like a stab to the heart. She tried to ignore them, unable to face how much had changed. How the master who would sacrifice the world to keep her safe was the same person who had tried to kill her just hours earlier. She stopped in front of the portal and looked through it, determined to see what the Force wanted her to see, and ignore the voices from her past.

It was a moment she could never forget, the moment she had turned away from the path of the Jedi. She watched in silence as her younger, hurt counterpart continued down the steps away from the temple, and away from Anakin. Knowing what he had become, knowing this would be one of the final times she would see him, it was her biggest regret. She could have done more if she’d stayed in the temple.

For a brief moment, Ahsoka contemplated running through the portal and stopping her younger counterpart from leaving, but she quickly dismissed the idea before it could settle in her head. Even if she had succeeded in convincing herself to return, there was no guarantee it would fix the timeline. There was a chance it could make it worse. “Remember what you told Ezra,” she mumbled under her breath, “You can’t change the timeline.”

She took a deep breath to try to keep herself calm, and continued to watch the portal. She watched as Anakin turned away once her montrals disappeared below the horizon. After a moment, almost as though for him it was sinking in that the young Ahsoka wouldn’t come back, Anakin started for the temple. She remembered how he’d said he’d understood why she’d left, but the way he looked so deflated told her that even if he understood wanting to leave the order, he was still far more hurt than she could’ve imagined. “Anakin.” He heard her as he passed by the portal and looked at her. Before he could respond, she reached through and pulled Anakin into the portal.

Anakin stumbled through, having been pulled into the strange world. Ahsoka managed the same, and for a moment, they stood opposite of each other, staring. She couldn’t believe herself. Why had she done that? She hadn’t even thought about it, just reacted. For a moment, they both just looked at each other. Anakin trying to figure out where he was and what was going on, and Ahsoka still attempting to process just what she had done.

Anakin gathered his bearings first as he looked at her as though he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “Ahsoka?”

“Anakin.” Her voice came out as hardly more than a whisper as she nodded.

Seeing the wide grin on his face hurt far more than she could ever say. “You grew up.” Anakin, this Anakin, was practically throwing his pride for her into the Force, so unlike the Vader she had just faced moments ago. It just didn’t make sense how in less than a year from this he’d fall so far.

“It has been a while.” Ahsoka couldn’t fight off the small smile on her face.

“How long?”

“Twenty years.” She looked away, unable to bring herself to see how he reacted.

“You...twenty…” Anakin took a moment to gather his thoughts. “Is the war finally over? Did we win? How’s Pad–”

“Anakin.” The pain in her voice was more than enough to shut him up. He waited for her to answer. “Please, don’t ask me. I can’t...It could change the past.” If he knew anything she knew, things could get better, or they could be so much worse. This was Anakin, and the knowledge that he caused so much tragedy could either drive him right over that edge he was evidently a lot closer to then she’d ever imagined, or it could cause him to go marching into the Senate right now, lightsaber at the ready to stab Palpatine in the chest and be done with it. Ahsoka wouldn’t chance it.

He didn’t respond right away. “No details then. Just...I need to know.. I need to know if everything is worth it.”

“It’s not.” Ahsoka could offer that much. “The war changed the galaxy forever.” She couldn’t help the bitterness that seeped into her tone. It took away almost all of her closest friends. Even after everything, it would never be worth it.

Anakin hugged her. Whether it was an attempt to soothe her pain or stop his own Ahsoka wasn’t sure, nor did she care. She hugged him back, relieved for just a moment to have him back. “I miss you, Skyguy.” Almost as though he knew what happened to him, Anakin hugged her tighter the moment she told him, hoping he could give her slightly more support.

Anakin pulled away from the hug first, unable to look at her. “I die in the war, don’t I?” She didn’t respond. How could she respond? “Ahsoka.”

“At the end.” She knows that had to be when he fell. Darth Vader showed his face only a few months after the Clone Wars ended, and the Clone Wars ended the night the Jedi fell. It was technically true; while his body lived based on the cold reception she had received it was very obvious the Sith was not her master. Not anymore. “I wasn’t there when it happened.” She didn’t elaborate why, he didn’t need her to.

“Guess that just means you’ll have to avenge me, doesn’t it?” He let out a laugh, but it was clear that it was more for her sake that he was joking around about his own death than him finding anything to laugh at. “Well, the younger you will anyways. This you I’m sure has already done it with how well I trained you.”

“I’m working on it. Not all of us have prophecy given powers to beat Sith Lords you know.” The moment the words left her mouth, she winced. Anakin’s joy fell silent.

“Dooku’s master?”

“Dooku’s replacement.”

They fell quiet again, neither of them really knowing what to say to each other with the reveal. For Anakin, it was the proof that the war meant nothing in the long term for him if the Sith not only lived, but killed him. “Do you know how he did it?”

Ahsoka shook her head. “I don’t, but knowing you? Padmé and Obi-Wan were probably in trouble and you rushed right in to protect them.” Given that Padmé’s funeral had been broadcast for everybody to see and nobody had heard from Obi-Wan since the Clone Wars ended, it was her current working theory. They died and Anakin fell after losing everybody he had left besides her.

“Senator Amidala, why would I–” At the pointed look Ahsoka gave him, Anakin fell silent. She knew about the two of them back when she was still his Padawan after all. “Alright, maybe that theory isn’t so unreasonable after all.”

“It’s completely reasonable.” She nudged him lightly, and he laughed, unable to deny it. “Come on Skyguy, you and I both know she’s your girlfriend.”

“Wife, Snips. We’ve been married for two years now.” Anakin smirked. They were married the entire time she was his Padawan? If it wasn’t for the rules against attachments, and how Anakin probably kept it secret so he could remain her master, Ahsoka would’ve been hurt by the fact that he never told her. And then it seemed to sink in what he said, because the lightened atmosphere between the two once more darkened. “You said I probably went down trying to save Obi-Wan and Padmé...was I at least successful.”

“Anakin, I c…” Ahsoka let her denial fall silent as she noticed the look of desperation in his face. “You don’t. I saw her funeral on the HoloNet, and nobody’s seen Obi-Wan since.” She didn’t tell him about how Padmé had died pregnant. It would only hurt him more.

Not that the news of Padmé’s death didn’t hurt him enough. Anakin crumped, leaning into her as though he’d gotten older by twenty years just from that statement alone. This had to be a hard day, between losing his Padawan and learning that the two of them would die. “Tell me, what happened? Maybe I can save her, stop us both from--”

“I don’t know.” Ahsoka cut him off before he could keep going. “I wasn’t there, I just knew you were both gone. That it was just Rex and I left.”

That brought a slight smile to Anakin’s face. “At least you had Rex with you. If nothing else, somebody was able to keep watching your back.”

“He’s never let me down before.” Ahsoka smiled back. “Just like you didn’t either.” It wasn’t the full truth, but Anakin hadn’t fallen to the dark side yet. This Anakin had done his best, had never failed her.

Even with the bond between them no longer present, Ahsoka could feel Anakin’s relief in the Force. That she hadn’t chosen to abandon him because he’d failed her. “Why did you leave then?”

“I needed to find myself, after everything.” Ahsoka put a hand on Anakin’s shoulder. “She needs to work that out too. I promise you, this isn’t the last time we meet.”

Despite feeling nothing but regret at how their last conversations had gone, Ahsoka knew telling him that was the right choice just by how much more at peace he seemed. She too felt more centered than she had since she’d learned the identity of the man behind the mask. “I shouldn’t keep you here any longer. I have a Sith Lord to hunt, and you shouldn’t waste anymore time with Padmé than you already have.”

“Haha, very funny.” The way the smile reached his eyes told Ahsoka he did, in fact, appreciate the fact that he would tease her like this. “But I suppose you’re right, it has been a while since I’ve been on Coruscant, and my lovely wife did manage to save you from whatever punishment the Senate may have been forced to enact.”

Anakin stopped teasing a moment later as he reached into his pocket and pulled out her Padawan beads. “I was going to hold onto them, in case you ever decided to rejoin the Order, but I can tell, even with the lightsabers, you’re not a Jedi.” She looked at him in surprise, but Anakin continued. “I can imagine given that, when I…” He stayed quiet for a moment. “When everything happens, I doubt you managed to have anything of mine. I know they’re probably a reminder of the pain you’ve gone through, but they’re also a symbol for every moment we spent together, training. You should have something to remember me by.”

Ahsoka was silent for a moment. He was right, in that the beads were mostly a reminder of everything she had left behind, but they were also her tie to Anakin, and she knew he wasn’t offering them to her lightly. “Thank you, Master.”

Anakin dropped the beads into her hand, and she wrapped them around the hilt of one of her lightsabers. He went to turn around, but stopped for a moment, instead choosing to give her one last hug. “I’m proud of you.”

She returned the hug briefly before pulling away. “I know.”

With a wave and a stay safe, Anakin left to return to Coruscant in his time, and Ahsoka turned around to see Morai, sitting on the arch of the portal behind her. “So, that one leads back to where I need to go?” The bird nodded, perching herself on Ahsoka’s shoulder. “Then let’s go.” With one last glance around her, Ahsoka exited the World Between Worlds to return to the Sith temple on Malachor.

She needed to get out of there as soon as possible, after all, she had a promise to keep.

#Star Wars #Anakin Skywalker #Ahsoka Tano #Anakin #Ahsoka #Heather Writes

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pastillafraize · 5 years ago

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Let’s Write Cody’s Redemption Arc

It’s been, what, two months since Season 7 of the Clone Wars came out? It showed more of the details of Order 66 from the clones’ perspective, showed Rex and some other clones getting their chips removed, how Ahsoka and the defected clones reacted to the Order now that no one was being mind-controlled. However, other Clones that were more than just red-shirt clones, Cody most prominently, were still subject to Order 66. Thus, “Cody stans” (of which I thought I was the only one but I suppose not) were heartbroken all over again when Cody didn’t hesitate to give the order to blast his general off a cliff after having fought alongside him for years prior. So I’ve been thinking about how exactly Cody would react if he were faced with the reality that he was being used by Palpatine both during the Republic as well as the Empire. I decided to explore exactly how that would work if not only for myself, then for the .002% of the Star Wars fandom whomst happen to care about Cody and his relationships. I’ve outlined a point-by-point timeline, detailing exactly how I feel this might play out, starting from the point of defection.

The reason that Cody couldn’t canonly separate from the Empire is in part because it would be pretty gratuitous to have yet another well known clone have his inhibitor chip removed so that he is no longer affected by Order 66. On the other hand, that would give a lot of freedom to write an actual redemption arc from the perspective of a clone that has to actively question his place as a trooper under the Empire and even the Republic to an extent. This way he can exercise agency rather than just having the chip (or lack thereof) do it for him.

I believe that it would be too easy for Cody to ultimately become a rebel--he’d have to be prematurely killed off before it even got to that point. This would continue with the pattern of Cody and Rex being foils to each other. Where Rex defects immediately and we don’t really get to see the process of his questioning his role during the Clone Wars, Cody’s journey can be shown in greater detail without it having a satisfying or even definitive conclusion. (I’m saying his ending shouldn’t be open-ended, he should just straight up die.) If it were left ambiguous whether or not he developed a rebel’s ideology, he never joined the rebels anyway so it ruins the illusion.

For the actual meat of the story and the aforementioned process of defection, Cody would need to go from a top rung (relatively) under the Empire to the bottom. It could mirror the fall of the jedi, specifically Obi-Wan’s fall from grace as a well-respected jedi master to an old hermit living in hiding in the middle of a sandy desert. Likewise, Cody was the first and only clone Commander for years of his life and respected by most clones and jedi alike. Then Order 66 comes and he tries to murder one of his closest companions. He then continues to show his unquestioning loyalty to the blatantly evil Empire and is of the highest rank in the new stormtrooper army.

However, he was not well respected by those under his command the same way that he was during the Republic. He grew to be a bit of a racist once the Empire started enlisting (or kidnapping and grooming) humanoids that were not clones to serve in the stormtrooper army, believing that they were inferior and abusing and overworking them when they didn’t meet his unrealistic expectations. He also lost a lot of his aforementioned friends and didn’t make any new ones due to his abusive behavior. He presumably lived the rest of his life, bitterly serving the Empire, so that’s one way that his quality of life declined. However, he was still pretty high up on the Empire’s social ladder so a real fall from grace would be what actually kicks off his redemption arc.

Somehow he’d have to first cut ties with the Empire, and the only way that would make any sense would be to be forcibly cut from his high-ranking position so that he is suddenly a nobody out on the streets. But as someone who served as a commanding officer longer than anyone else, that would require Darth Vader to somehow no longer have a use for him or maybe even look upon him with malice and see him as detrimental to his power. It’s possible since those under Cody eventually garnered an extremely negative opinion on him, they might band together to sabotage his position by convincing Vader that he is secretly planning a rebellion of his own. If that were the case, Vader would obviously have him executed, forcing him to escape with nothing but his life, cutting him off from the Empire and his title forever. This would diminish his status and place him on the lowest rung of society under the Empire. It would force him into hiding from any of his former cohorts, superiors, and subordinates. It would turn him into a street rat, resigned to one of the farthest corners of the galaxy where the Empire would never find out of his mortality status.

Only at this point when Cody has nothing left to lose and is probably rummaging through dumpsters to get by would he finally have the chance to stop and contemplate the Empire’s oppression and conquest alongside his own role in all of it. After being forced into hiding from the Empire, he’s an open target. He was already a war hero under the Republic and only grew more brutal and discriminatory under the Empire, causing his name to be more feared among the common folk should he ever be recognized by one of them, let alone the way that clones as a whole must be feared during the Empire’s reign. If he is exposed and vulnerable, he could have been targeted on the street once people realize he is a clone. His health would definitely be on the decline after being detached from the Empire.

(x) (x)

At this point it would be good to for once introduce a completely original character in this story arc that is based in nothing other than pure fanservice. They could be another human being, but they don’t have to be. If I had my pick, I’d steal from Alan Dean Foster’s Episode IX pitch and use (what I believe are called) Alesians whomst may or may not have tentacles for limbs. At this time, the focus would have to be taken away from Cody and put into focusing on the world building and characterization of this new character whomst I will dub as “Ynox” because that’s a valid space-sounding name, I’m sure. Could Ynox parallel Cody in some way? Maybe she’s a Zuko type where she comes from a rich family who held some less-than-flattering ideals (they were Separatists) and now she has some defecting of her own on her hero’s journey. For some reason along with the tentacles, I would imagine the Alesians to also possess limbs and abs buff enough to rival those of a wookie, the only difference being the sheer visibility of the contours on each tentacle from their rippling muscles due to their sleek skin and lack of furry overcoats.

Anyways, Ynox is going to be Cody’s lancer and they’ll traverse the galaxy together for a little while until Cody is inevitably fridged for her benefit. Probably she’ll find him in some alleyway getting beat for being a clone. Seeing this helpless stranger, she fights off these non-force-sensitive goons, using her sheer muscle to disarm them of any weapons. She chases them off and gets Cody to safety and somewhere where he can get medical attention and not receive any further mistreatment. Ynox could be a character with a certain set of morals. She and her family were Separatists in part because they hate the Jedi Order and what they stand for. From their perspective, jedi intervene in societies and situations that are not their business and wield lethal weapons as well as eagerness to use them that are thinly veiled beneath the flowery language of being diplomatic monks. Because of that, Ynox may be wary of any clones by association, although she does not know about Cody’s own legacy. Although she may dislike clones as a knee-jerk reaction, Cody hasn’t given her any reasons not to help him.

The shared character motivational part is where I draw a blank. I want these two characters to start travelling together, all the while realizing that the things that they used to believe are relics of an old, flawed system. But they need immediate needs to get from Point A to Point B if the overarching plot is to be accomplished. Otherwise it’s just characters going through the motions with no personal investment. There is a want vs. need dichotomy that still needs figuring out because of this. One of the wants they need to want is to find anyone that Cody knew that fought for the Republic. Obviously the first person he will always have on his mind will be Rex, but since Rex has wiped himself off the map as well, they probably both assume each other dead. The only one that still has political power would be Senator Organa. They’d look for him first since he’s the only one that’s not in hiding.

Something that I’ve neglected to note but happens earlier on in the narrative is that not only does Cody get ungraciously excommunicated from the Empire, but he also gets a concussion in the process. This is what knocks out of him the hatred of all non-clones as troopers as well as his immediate and unexplained desire to murder all jedi. And as Cody continues on his travels to find people connected to his past, a lot of his past memories will come to light as well. Maybe he remembers Kenobi and how close they grew when they fought alongside each other with the 212th Battalion. Does he regret killing him? It doesn’t matter either way because just like all his other old friends, he believes he is now dead... until someone tips him and Ynox off that Kenobi may still be alive! This could spur him on to try and find where he is. On the way they have wacky adventures and Cody’s relationships from the Clone Wars as well as the entirety of Ynox’s backstory (turns out Organa is attuned to the fact that her family were notorious Separatists) are fleshed out. Some of the adventures will matter to the overarching plot with recurring both original and preexisting characters while some will be pure filler. I’m thinking it could have a sort of Orange is the New Black or Handmaid’s Tale setup where a present conflict is being shown with an interwoven flashback subplot, and they are thematically linked somehow.

They’ll try to hide Cody if they believe that him being recognized as a clone will put them in any sort of danger. They meetup with Organa eventually and try to negotiate with him. Ynox is already on tense terms with him, having been on the other side of the political spectrum. They try to hide Cody from him since he would definitely recognize him for who he is. Maybe Cody gets found out and they are forced to make a daring escape and move on to the next planet for more leads on anyone else’s whereabouts. Their tracking of Kenobi could finally pay off when it leads them to Tatooine. However little do they know they’ve been tracked the entire time by a bounty hunter sent by Vader. They’d been attacked by them multiple times but never realized they were the same person who’d had it out for them to begin with. But none of that matters once they get to Tatooine and let their guard down.

It may have been easy to find the planet on which Obi-Wan now lives, but it’s much harder to find his exact location when the planet is covered in nothing but sand for miles and all the houses that are spread a ranch’s worth apart from one another look exactly the same. At this point, Cody must make peace with the fact that he may never find the closure or meaning that he’s been looking for and that he can’t be chasing his own tail, trying to find Obi-Wan or anyone else when that endeavor could be entirely fruitless. He decides he’ll stop and make a life for himself separate from both the Republic and the Empire. And just as he decides that the assassin strikes. Cody is killed before he can find Obi-Wan, before Obi-Wan strolls into town just a few hours later and meets Ynox. Neither of them recognize each other and neither of them know each other’s relationship to Cody.

What a long stream of consciousness! It was far more specific than I initially intended it to be but because some things were more specific, it raised more questions with rather vague or nonexistent answers. Maybe this is less of a redemption arc and more or a complete mess. However I hope it might get anyone who stuck around to read it thinking about what types of character arcs defected clones might go through. Season 7 of the Clone Wars gave us a little more insight to Rex’s character development, but I wanted to see more of a de-radicalization process. Perhaps this whole thing should have been about Rex instead. But people seemed so upset over Cody’s betrayal (even though at this point it’s the only direction that makes sense), so I thought that it couldn’t hurt to fantasize.

#star wars #clone wars #commander cody #star wars the clone wars #codywan

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sheikah · 5 years ago

Note

Have you seen Rise of Skywalker yet? Im looking forward to your opinions!

I did! Thanks for your interest haha. I just wanna quickly preface this by saying that I know that SW is very polarizing and that the fandom can be very toxic, people are passionate about their opinions, etc. I don’t want to step on any toes with my opinions. I don’t often post in depth or candidly about SW because I have friends from all parts of the fandom and I’d hate to hurt someone’s feelings. But these are my opinions! (Under a cut :D)

I loved the movie. At first I wasn’t sure, but I saw it a second time with a friend and I loved it. Does it have plot holes, inconsistencies, and issues? Absolutely. It does. It’s far from perfect and I absolutely understand why so many people have such intensely negative reactions to it.

But if I’m being 100% honest I just wasn’t one of those people. Yes, it was rushed. But that made it interesting from start to finish. I almost always step out to use the restroom during a movie in theaters. I think it’s a mental thing–I’m constantly thinking of how I DON’T want to step out to pee, so I always have to haha. But I didn’t even think about it once during this movie! I just had that much fun watching it.

I can acknowledge that it had a lot of weaknesses, though, and I’ll talk about that first. I think most of the issues were a result of the film being the end of a trilogy that was helmed by two different people. It felt confused to me at points because I could see where JJ was trying to stick to what he clearly wanted to explore post-TFA while also trying to pick up where Rian Johnson left off post-TLJ. It’s like they had different visions and JJ was trying to include aspects of both in TROS. In a lot of ways, that didn’t work. I don’t want to go into too many nitpicky details but I can sum up my one big gripe by saying I think Finn was done wrong.

I think this movie had a lot of big character moments for Rey, Ben, and Poe, but I don’t feel like Finn got his due. I also think that from a shipping standpoint he was treated really unfairly. I genuinely felt while watching TFA that JJ was trying to lay the groundwork for canon Finnrey. In TLJ, Johnson went in a different direction with Finnrose and Reylo. So the problem, to me, is that in TROS JJ tried to follow up with Johnson’s Reylo groundwork while still including nuggets of Finnrey. Watching the film, it seems abundantly clear to me that Finn was harboring feelings for Rey that were unrequited. His devotion to her felt one-sided and the almost-love-confession in the sinking sand seemed to confirm that for me. I realize at some fan panel JJ apparently said that what Finn was really going to confess was that he was Force-sensitive, not that he loved Rey. But any viewer watching the movie without that knowledge would not get that from it imo, so the average viewer is left thinking the writing left Finn in unrequited love with Rey. And the writing completely brushed the Finnrose relationship to the side. I’m a Finnrey shipper so I didn’t really love Finnrose to begin with. But since Johnson started it, I honestly don’t know why JJ didn’t just continue it if he was going to continue Reylo. It seems better than spending time establishing Finn’s continued feelings for Rey only to leave him alone, especially since TLJ ended with Finnrose: it should have been easy enough to pick up their relationship and carry it forward. I know unrequited love exists, and exploring it in fiction can be poignant. But in this case it just didn’t track to me, and felt like a slap in the face to Finn’s character and anyone who was shipping Finnrey, Finnrose, or even Finnpoe. There seemed to be no reason to write Finn’s actions toward Rey the way they did if they weren’t going to put them together. Finn wasn’t together with anyone in the end. And in the same vein, shoehorning in a past romance for Poe with Keri Russell’s character just felt like a cheap way to make sure Finnpoe wasn’t going to happen. Idk. But these were the only aspects I really didn’t like.

I loved the many displays of Rey’s incredible power. I loved seeing Rey use the Force to heal, just like we saw Baby Yoda do in that week’s episode of The Mandalorian. I thought the scene where she accidentally used Force lightning was chilling and interesting foreshadowing for Rey Palpatine, even though I don’t really love that she’s a Palpatine. That being said, as a scorned Dany fan, I really enjoyed the message that who you are by blood should not define you. GoT ultimately ended with the message that your family and your family’s legacy are inescapable, grim realities. TROS had a much more hopeful message. This is also an important message to me personally because I have a lot of baggage with my father and his side of the family. It’s something I’ve struggled with. I never want to be like him. That aspect of Rey’s inner conflict was really beautiful to me and I think Daisy portrayed her struggle with darkness very well. I also thought her vision of dark!Rey was terrifying and really well done. The scene of her looking in the mirror at herself under Ahch-To in TLJ was probably my favorite scene of that movie so I liked seeing JJ utilize similar imagery there.

I loved seeing the trio together on a mission. The chemistry between Daisy, John, and Oscar is excellent and the comedy and wholesomeness between them is what made the movie so fun and memorable imo. I would have been happy with an OT3 for their characters, but c’est la vie haha.I loved the fan service. What can I say? I’m a fan: I like to be serviced lol. I know it was cheesy to some people, but Force Ghost!Luke lifting his X-Wing out of the water for Rey made me tear up. It was a nice callback to the moment with Luke and Yoda on Dagobah. Speaking of callbacks, I also loved the final shot with the binary sunset on Tatooine. I’ll admit I don’t really get why Rey has BB-8, or why she’s alone, or why she would choose to live in a place that even Luke wanted desperately to leave… but the visual and musical parallel to ANH got me right in the feels in the best way.

I loved seeing Ian McDiarmid return as Palpatine, who was as delightfully evil as ever. I don’t really understand how or why Palpatine had to come back, and I am not satisfied with the explanation for Snoke. But the Emperor is a classic and an iconic character I love. Having him as the ultimate baddy was satisfying in its own way. I also thought everything abot Exegol and the Sith fortress was terrifying and visually stunning. Even the sound effects of the lightning, and the way that blended with ominous music, was really interesting to me. I loved almost every sequence that took place on Exegol.

Lastly, (and this is the part I have been nervous to post about haha) I liked Ben Solo. I am not a Reylo shipper. That’s not something I talk about really because I have a ton of Reylo friends and I really treasure those people. The last thing I want to do is hurt their feelings or make them feel unwelcome on my blog. But In TFA and TLJ I didn’t really see that many redeeming qualities in Kylo Ren, and I certainly don’t ship him with Rey. I liked the character as a villain from the first moment I heard Adam Driver’s epic voice and saw Kylo Ren freeze Poe’s blaster bolt in stasis using the Force. I thought he was cool and I loved the crazy sound effects and unstable appearance of his unique lightsaber. But I just didn’t really romanticize him at all. I also thought TLJ ended on a pretty definitively negative note for the character. He told his men in no uncertain terms to blow the Falcon out of the sky with Rey in it. And I didn’t think killing Han and trying to kill Luke was something he was going to come back from. I didn’t really want “Bendemption.”

I say all this because I think this is one of the reasons why TROS impressed me so much. When it actually happened, I was happy that Kylo was redeemed as Ben. The scene with Han reminded me that above all, this is Han and Leia’s son. No matter how much of a villain I thought Kylo Ren was, I didn’t want Han and Leia both to die and for their son to die in disgrace without ever having made amends for the things he’d done. I couldn’t love Han and Leia the way I do without hoping for some semblance of peace for their family. And when he took off the Kylo Ren getup and dressed more like a regular guy, when he adopted some of Han’s personality, when he stormed into Palpatine’s lair on Exegol blaster blazing, and most of all when he wielded a Jedi’s lightsaber alongside Rey, I loved it. I really, truly loved it. And for someone who went into the movie theater expecting to hate that aspect of the story, I think that speaks volumes. They won me over. They made me like Ben Solo. I don’t really think it’s a great social message for the real world in 2019 to forgive him despite all he’s done. But if I divorce it from real-world implications and just treat it like Star Wars, I’m actually glad it happened the way it did. Leia deserved to have her death mean something. She gave the last of her strength to reach out to her son. Not to Kylo Ren, but to Ben Solo. She and the audience both deserved to see Ben Solo before the end. And for him to make the ultimate sacrifice for Rey was, to me, the best possible way he could go out. I found it to be a very compelling end. His death made me surprisingly sad, but it was a noble death.

Anyway, like I said above, I know the movie has a lot of issues. I haven’t even addressed a fraction of the things I could say about this movie–both good and bad. But ultimately I boil it down to how a movie makes me feel. This one left a strong emotional impact on me and I was happy to watch it a second time. I laughed, I cried, I reflected on why I’ve loved Star Wars for my entire life. So I have to say I liked it. Sorry for the giant answer haha :P

#answered #i realize i am in the tumblr minority with this opinion lol #please don't hate me guys

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loopy777 · 5 years ago

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A larger question that needs two asks to cover. One of the biggest criticisms against the star wars sequel trilogy, is that all the OT main characters died complete failures after having all their work undone. Luke was the shining hope for new jedi, but had his academy killed, gave up, and essentially just became a bitter Yoda, then after returning to the man he used to be, he dies. Han saw his son become evil, abandoned his wife and became a smuggler again, and died failing to redeem him.

Leia worked so, so hard to make the new republic happen, only for it to die ridiculously easy. Essentially, there's an argument to be made that all their work was undone and they all died miserable failures. What's your thoughts on the subject?

Well, my take on this comes my philosophy on sequels in general. Unless it’s something with enough entries to really play with things, sequels need to maintain or escalate the story stakes. James Bond and Marvel movies, for example, can sometimes go big and sometimes go smaller scale, because they’re essentially episodes in a television series or chapters in a massive book.

Star Wars, on the other hand, is all epic all the time. Its movies are always events- and when they aren’t, the titles of the movies themselves tell us that they’re small skippable little things. Episodes 1-6 are about the greatest threat ever to the galaxy and Jedi; a sequel trilogy can’t follow that with a story about mopping up and just doing the stuff implied by the ending of Episode 6. But Episode 6 was meant to be the finale to the saga, so there’s no remaining threats or plots on the same level as Palpatine, the Empire, and the Sith.

I thought the sequels, at least TFA and TLJ, had an interesting way around that by being about the concept of sequels themselves. In order to create the proper stakes, the heroes were indeed turned into failures- and the heroes are directly reacting to that! Leia reacts by digging in trying to keep fighting. Han reacts by going back to just surviving. Luke reacts by giving up and trying to die. They hate the sequels turning them into failures as much as the audience.

And then TFA brings them back into things by having them become aware of the new heroes and the cycle of stories. What so many people took as Han’s moments of “Wow, I think Rey might be my daughter,” I took as “Huh, another wide-eyed prodigy from a desert planet who’s dragging me into an epic adventure.” I took Luke’s reaction to Rey offering him the lightsaber as him realizing that the story is starting over again and trying to draw him back in. Even Kylo Ren is actively trying to fit into the Darth Vader role and is frustrated that he’s just a cheap copy.

(I could have done without the repetition being so explicit with the return of X-Wings, TIE Fighters, a jungle base for the Rebels, another desert planet, Bigger Death Star, etc. The themes could have been there with new visuals that merely homage the old stuff. But I think the choice to recycle so much was a direct ploy to ease people back into Star Wars after the reactions to the prequels, so hoping for a lot of new stuff in TFA was probably always futile.)

And then TLJ directly follows this up by making the concept of a repeating story one of the major themes, explicitly! I considered it solid validation of my interpretation of TFA! (Now I honestly have no idea what was intended with TFA, because I think Rise Of Skywalker is completely disconnected from it. If ROS indeed represents the original intentions of J.J. Abrams, then TFA must have been heavily pulled off track, to its benefit, by Lawrence Kasdan.)

Han’s death, to me, was a mix of triumph and failure. On the one hand, he finds the strength to give himself over to The Story, to let go of survival and offer everything up for the chance to save his son. I think he knows that it’s not going to work, but he understands that it’s a step that has to be taken, and so he makes the attempt and lets his life be claimed.

This is the problem facing the young cast in TLJ. They trust too much in The Story, in heroes and last stands and destiny and redemption and sacrifice and a righteous cause. Luke, on the other hand, sees how all of that accomplishes nothing in the long run; he sees The Story at work and knows that a Happy Ending depends on where the storyteller stops, that continuance inevitably brings back the darkness. He realizes that the storyline of the prequels was forced on him in a repeat, despite his victory in Episode 6, and wants no part in an endless cycle of dumb movies about space wizards killing people.

It’s Leia who seems, in TLJ, to see the possibility for a path of balance. She’s still part of The Story, still values the things that the younger generation does, but she also sees that those things won’t bring victory by themselves. They need to be smart about how they participate in The Story. Strategic with when they invoke The Story and when they should shy away from it. The failures of the younger cast eventually teach them this, as well. Rey uses the Millennium Falcon to bait the First Order at the end of the movie, pulling TIE Fighters into a reenactment of Return Of The Jedi to save her friends, but she no longer thinks she can force the redemption of Vader onto Kylo. Poe and Finn learn lessons about how the true value of Heroic Stands isn’t taking out bad guys, but changing the direction of The Story.

And Luke finds the path of balance as well, finding that The Story can be turned against the darkness. Where Finn and Poe learn when not to invoke the Heroic Stand, he rediscovers the moment when both a Hero and a Last Stand is the greatest weapon to employ against the enemy, and so steps back into his role in a way that will let the younger generation learn and continue to grow. That he does so in the single greatest feat of the Force in the entire saga makes it especially triumphant.

Kylo Ren, meanwhile, has likewise become frustrated with the nature of sequels, but instead of finding a balance between new and old, he casts away everything old (”Let the past die. Kill it if you have to. It's the only way to become who you were meant to be.“) and seeks only something new- and in doing so is defeated by the protagonists who have weaponized The Story against him. Because a franchise like Star Wars can’t go fully New as there’s too much valuable IP to mine.

This is why I had such high hopes for ROS. Luke had already turned the tide of The Story, and the next cast had been set up to find an Ending that would prevent The Story from happening again. Literally all the next movie had to do was deliver on what was already set up with some plot mechanics.

And that’s why Rise Of Skywalker is so bad, to me. After two sequels dealing, on a meta level, with the concept of sequels themselves, ROS just copies tropes from the classic trilogy without adding anything, without finding new meaning in anything. Rey learns that her father is Darth Vader (metaphorically), and struggles with the same themes Luke did, eventually coming to the same conclusions. She confronts Palpatine just like Luke did, with the aid of a darksider she helped pull back to the light, and makes the conflict into just another clash of Jedi vs Sith, doing nothing to guarantee that another sequel down the line won’t bring that enemy back for a nostalgia cash-in.

Even Leia becomes a failure, throwing a Redemption trope at her son with no meaning behind it, turning him away from the darkness but without any insight into how he became Anakin Skywalker Redux, how she and Han and Luke had previously failed. She did nothing to prevent it from happening again in another generation; she just solved this one problem and then died, tidying up her subplot but having no lasting impact.

All of this confirms that Han, Luke, and Leia are merely failures, as you describe, as ROS shows that they’ve left nothing behind that will continue. Where TLJ introduced the idea that they had to fail in order to gain greater understanding of The Story, so that they could teach its mastery to the next set of protagonists and end things with merely one Sequel Trilogy,

And thus ROS confirms that failure is inevitable; Rey, Finn, and Poe will fail again the next time Disney needs to exploit nostalgia, because they never mastered The Story. The full cast tried to confront the nature of Sequels, saw the conundrum that they can have no impact while Disney sees more money to be made from Star Wars...

And they all give up, surrendering to cliche. Han, Luke, and Leia repeat their acts from previous movies, or the acts of their predecessors from the prequels, and cash their checks and walk away. I don’t mean the actors; I truly mean that ROS turns Han, Luke, and Leia into Space Opera jobbers.

So yes, they all died as miserable failures.

But, dangit, until ROS, I thought there was going to be a greater, beautiful point to it.

And there’s no fixing it now. This isn’t a story that can be retconned or ignored. ROS’s abandonment of the themes of the previous two sequels stands as a glaring Statement Of Intent from Disney: there is no meaning in these movies, just the exploitation of a thing we once loved.

And that’s going to take a lot come back from.

#thekingofwinterblog

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redroverrider · 5 years ago

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My thoughts on Star Wars Episode IX. Posted this on my Insta and realized I never posted it here

Ok, I know people are going to disagree no matter what I say so there’s no use lying about it, so I’ll tell you how I honestly feel about it.

Also, THERE ARE SPOILERS in this review

There’s really no easy way to put it, because I both loved it and didn’t like it at the same time. There were parts that I really liked, parts that I didn’t like at all, and parts that I have very mixed feelings over.

Least favorite things:

Rey and Poe’s interactions between the two of them. I was excited to see how they would be portrayed as friends and how the writers would have them relate to each other, but they didn’t seem to have that much chemistry together.

I know I’m in the minority on this, but the interactions between Rey, Finn, and Poe all together didn’t feel very convincing or entertaining. Individually, I thought Finn and Rey and Finn and Poe were great. But as a trio, they just seemed really off. And I was really excited to see how they would be as trio together for the first time.

Hux being the spy made no sense at all to me, and the idea of why there needed to be a spy within the First Order didn’t make much sense either. (I’m going to cover this specific gripe more in depth in another post.)

I was expecting Kaydel Ko Connix (Billie Lourd) to be given a bit more of a role in this movie, particularly since Lourd’s mother Carrie Fisher has passed away and because she was shown to be on board with Poe’s mutiny in The Last Jedi. I thought this movie would have been a great opportunity to flesh out her character more, but it seemed like all she did was pop up now and then to deliver a line or two.

Finn’s connection with Rose just seemed completely forgotten about. Like, the two of them spend more than half of the last movie together, and in the next film they barely say 5 sentences to each other? And we’re not really even given a reason why they pretty much just stopped interacting with each other either.

The very ending of the movie didn’t seem like a very proper conclusion to the Skywalker Saga. I might express my feeling on this in another post as well.

Favorite things:

Pretty much every actor did an amazing job at their role.

Kylo/Ben’s conversation with Han Solo was an incredible scene. Seeing how Ben’s changed, given everything he’s been through since he last saw him, and now he knows that his light side is unavoidable, that there is definitely good in him, and how he must accept that. It was so heartbreaking and so heartwarming at the same time, and I loved watching every second of it. (Especially when he calls Han Solo “dad”? Ugh. Tears.)

The lightsaber duel between Rey and Kylo on the remains of the second Death Star was incredible. Probably not my favorite out of the whole series, but its definitely up there.

There interactions between Finn and Rey and between Finn and Poe were really nice to see

The way that Rey hears the voice of all the past Jedi was great.

The space battle at the end was incredible

I was getting doubtful if it would happen as the movie went on, but Wedge Antilles’ cameo near the end was super satisfying to see.

Ben Solo literally running to fight alongside Rey, and then coming back to hold her? Yes, yes, yes.

Mixed Opinions

The Knights of Ren. It was cool to see them finally, and seeing the turn against Ben and fight him before he got to Rey was great, but I felt that there was so much more they could have done, and at one or two points they didn’t seem super necessary in their scenes. It’s almost like, at those points, they could have just been replaced by some kind of Special Ops Stormtrooper squad. (Kinda like the Death Troopers in Rogue One and Rebels)

Rey being the granddaughter of Palpatine. On one hand, it did make sense, and on the other hand, at the same time, it didn’t. Like part of me feels “Wow. This is so interesting and intriguing and it explains so much” and the other part of me feels like “This seems like an idea they threw in on the last day of writing the script just to see what would happen.” (The idea of Finn being Force-sensitive feels a little like this too, but maybe that’s a discussion for a different day.)

The Reylo kiss. Yes, they went there. And yes, I am forever grateful that it happened. Reylo is canon, everybody! We won. But Ben dies giving his life force to Rey? Not sure how I feel about that. Seeing someone sacrifice their life to make sure their loved one can live? That’s amazing. But at the same time…why? Like why did Ben Solo dying have to be the ending that was written? He’s finally been redeemed, and now that means he has to die? And we’ll never see anything else Ben and Rey get to do together, with their bond and their power? Like I said, very mixed feelings *sigh*

So where do we go from here? (Or, what do us Reylo shippers do now?) Do we accept that Ben is dead and that’s the final note on Reylo? Do we get angry at J.J. Abrams & co. for killing him? Do we realize that this is fiction and we can therefore interpret, view, and enjoy it in any way that we like?

Well I don’t know exactly how to feel about this. But I do know that I am still a huge Reylo shipper and I probably always will be. It’s my number 1 OTP. So I will still be posting Reylo stuff and being on here with you guys as often as I can for as long as I can.

For the people that have decided not to continue now that Ben is dead, that’s your decision, so I won’t try and talk you out of it. If you change your mind, great, and if not, thats perfectly fine too. Just know that I will miss you and we do hope you come back sometime.

This goes without saying, but all of these are only my personal opinion and I’m not saying anyone is wrong for thinking otherwise. If you want to disagree or debate, please do so respectfully and I’ll try and do the same.

Happy New Year, my friends. May you all have a great year, and may we continue to have fun here together. :)

#episode 9 #episodeix #episode ix spoilers #star wars #the rise of skywalker #reylo #kylo ren #rey #ben solo #bendemption

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zaraevee · 5 years ago

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Just saw Rise of Skywalker!

I’m normally pretty bad with spoilers but I managed to keep away from them for this movie and only saw the trailers. Before I continue, you need to know, according to my friends I am “easily entertained” by movies, because I am so optimistic and don’t raise my expectations too high, so I am often happily surprised. I loved this movie. So if you were not a fan, feel free to skip this post. May the force be with you.

(Can someone PLEASE tell me how to do under the cut/read more on mobile Tumblr I can’t figure it out!)

I have a tendency to be long winded so i’m writing bullet points instead of paragraphs. You’re welcome.

-I have always been a fan of Ben Solo. I waited for him for nearly five years and I am so incredibly happy that he finally became who he was meant to be and walked into the light. I especially enjoyed the moment when Rey healed him and he saw Han Solo again. That was such a sweet scene and such a strong parallel. His fight against Palpatine alongside Rey, especially the lightsaber swap made me very excited.

- I also really liked the detail that his scar disappeared and his eyes took on a much softer look after he became Ben Solo again.

- His death scene was very emotional and to me it symbolized how much he had changed as a person. Going into this, I was worried he would be killed in anger and cold blood. I am very very glad he went out by his own selfless choice, a sort of way to atone for all the things he did as Kylo Ren.

- I have never been a true Reylo shipper but I have always enjoyed watching their relationship, a mix of familial and romantic, develop. So the paralleled saving each other and the kiss made me very happy and for a moment, I could actually see them together in the future. Of course, that didn’t last but I was happy with the closure.

- Also him fading away like a jedi, along with his mother, was a great way to finally give him peace.

- On another note: I was so happy with how much Carrie Fisher was in this movie and how well her scenes flowed with it. I knew they had used old footage and I was worried it would be choppy and only expected her to have a small part, only one small scene with Rey, But was really amazed and happy with how integral she was to the plot and happy with how they sent off Leia, peacefully. I’m so happy they gave Carrie such a great last role.

On lighter notes:

- What they did with C3P0 was cool and sad and I did not expect him to be restored, but i’m really glad he was. Especially with his reference to R2’s unreliable memory banks, I should have seen it coming. It made me realize again how important to the series C3P0 is. He is probably the oldest alive character in the series and he has been in every main movie.

- I adore Poe Dameron and I love the leading role he had in this and how much his character has developed. I never expected to get his backstory from befor he joined the resistance but i’m glad we did. He turned out to have a more colorful past than I expected. Also he was very attractive in the outfits he wore in this movie.

- Finn meeting another former storm trooper was amazing and I’m really glad they did that.

- Also, I have always been a FinnRey fan. I have always thought Finn’s affections for Rey were obvious, but I just read that apparently when he was sinking in the quicksand, accordint to J.J., that is not what Finn was going to tell Rey. J.J. Abrams apparently said he was going to tell Rey he was force sensitive but I don’t quite understand or agree with that... I totally accept that he is force sensitive! There have been hints in all three movies. But I don’t know why he would tell Rey that right before he thought he was going to die. What would he have gained? It doesn’t quite make sense to me. I would be interested in finding out how other script writers of the movie saw that scene. J.J. did say he left it open for interpretation though, so each viewer is allowed to see it whichever way they want. Any way you see that scene, I am glad they never had him tell her what he was going to say, as Finn knew what Rey was going through and he respected her too much to put another thing on her mind.

- One thing I wish they would have done would be having all the ghosts of all the past Jedi stand behind Rey when she got up and faced Palpatine. That would have been really cool. But I understand it probably wasn’t doable.

-The only other thing that confused me a little was General Hux being the spy. It felt like it came a little out of left field and I am not quite sure what his motives were. He said he just didn’t want to Kylo to win but it was not elaborated on. Maybe in the previous movies, there were hints he was not entirely on board with what Kylo was doing, but I never picked up on them before. I was delighted by the twist, I would just appreciate a more in depth explanation.

Speaking of twists,

- Personally, I loved the twist that Rey is a Palpatine. I don’t think many, if anyone, predicted that. It was an amazing parallel to the original trilogy, as Luke was also the son of a Sith Lord and just like him, Rey overcame her bloodties and chose the light side.

-The Skywalkers being her chosen family made me extremely happy and that last scene where she visited Luke’s childhood home on Jakku, embraced the name Skywalker and mirrored Luke’s iconic shot with the twin suns, when the whole adventure all began was the perfect ending.

This is Star Wars, and a movie made by people. There will be mistakes, nothing in the world is perfect.

And especially evidenced by the original movie and its behind the scenes development, Star Wars has never been without fault. 😅

There are so many other amazing and fun things I wish I had the words to talk about, but I’ll probably need a while to think about the movie and I’ll probably need to go see it again.

I know a lot of people didn’t like this movie. I know some people were mad about how characters died or how it ended. I know for a fact, that many people set their expectations too high, and that was their fault. Not the fault of the people who worked so incredibly hard on this movie.

I didn’t let a few things change how I felt about it. I never let the negatives take over my view of a movie because when you let small things grow like that, it takes away the fun and awe of the experience.

Let yourself see things with a childlike optemism and openmindedness and you will be a lot happier with the results. 😊

Hi! If you read this thing the whole way through, thank you for listening to me and my opinions! I hope you enjoyed the movie as much as I did. If you have anything to add or comments or would like to start a discussion with me, feel free to comment on this post! I would love to hear from you! But let’s keep this post FRIENDLY AND RESPECTFUL please! Thank you very much. May the force be with you!

- Zara Evee 💕

#rise of skywalker #rise of skywaker spoilers #star wars #tros spoilers #reylo fandom #rey skywalker #rey palpatine #kylo ren #kylo redemption #poe dameron #finnrey #finn star wars #c3p0 #han solo #luke skywalker

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