Nameless Part Twelve - Apostate Page 2/10 I'm sorry, the only way to visually show Barriss successfully making an ideological transmission towards the future Grand Inquisitor was to make them gaze at each other like two sad wet seals. Text is taken from the TCW episode, ‘The Wrong Jedi’. The comic is also available here on AO3.

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Anakin skywalker, Darth Vader, Obi wan Kenobi, Cody.

Overall Headcanons

Back on my Star Wars bullshit, so heres some overall hcs about some of the characters I love, enjoy. Ft some x reader elements. Can yall tell which character ive been most obsessed with lately?

 Let me know if you guys are interested in more like this, as it’s a good way to get the writing juices flowing.

 Mild nsfw stuff under the cut, but it’s nothing wild.

Anakin Skywalker

-          Anger issues, but would never yell at you as it reminds him of his time as a slave

-          Gets nightmares about his time as a slave and his fears.

-          Wears black because it sets him away from the other jedi. They made him feel as if he didn’t belong, so he was gonna go his own way.

-          When he first joined the jedi he had a really hard time drinking or just using water in general since it was so sparce on Tatooine. Nowadays he enjoys to take long showers and baths.

-          Cant eat too strong tasting foods.

-          Has a real hard time talking about his emotions. Because of this, if he falls in love hed rather go around nursing a crush than actually confess.

-          He falls in love super easily, and gets kinda blinded by it.

-          Touch starved as hell, literally melts into your hands if you cradle his face in your palms.

-          Loves kissing, could spend hours with his lips on yours or just kissing you all over.

-          Oral fixation. Goes hand in hand with him loving to kiss so much. Watch out for your fingers.

-          Has a strong gag reflex, but doesn’t let it stop him.

-          This man is verse leaning towards submissive and you can’t convince me otherwise. Those anger issues make me think he just wants someone to love him and take care of him.

-          Loves you wearing his clothes or wearing your clothes.

Darth Vader (I know he’s also Anakin but whateves)

-          Still has real bad anger issues, but in a more subdued and controlled manner if that makes sense. Still won’t yell at you.

-          Very self-conscious about his body, and is scared of touching anything he cares about because he doesn’t want to accidentally destroy it.

-          Still has horrible nightmares but these are mainly about the purging of the jedi.

-          He secretly listens to recordings from before the fall of the jedi and the republic when he is feeling extra down.

-          Mourns how he can’t kiss anymore. Tries to breathe as quietly as possible when you cuddle because he thinks the noise disturbs you.

-          Secretly still sensitive so it would help you if affirm that you love him.

-          More touch starved than ever, wants you to touch what little accessed skin he has, all the time.

-          Doesn’t talk much anymore. This scares other people as he’s just a large silent scary shadow.

-          I don’t think he has much of a sex drive after becoming Darth Vader, mainly because I think his own body is too damaged, though he would be able to use his hands.

-          Though I think he would like to sit on his knees in front of you with his head in your lap, having you caress him.

Obi wan Kenobi

-          Insomniac to the fullest. He uses the force to keep going.

-          Loves tea more than anything, has a collection of teas from different planets he’s been too in his time as a jedi.

-          Touch starved, as I think all jedi are at this point.

-          Has nightmares and lasting trauma from the many things he went through even before he became a jedi knight like melida/daan and bandomeer.

-          Quite protective of those he cares about, though he doesn’t express it much with words.

-          Doesn’t cry much, so when he does, he just needs someone to hold him as he gets it out.

-          He sneaks out of the temple to eat at Dex´s diner all the time. He brings along Anakin, Ashoka and later multiple clones.

-          Isn’t as uptight as people think. He will bend or break rules regularly, he just isn’t caught.

-          I think he both tops or bottoms, whatever the mood is that day, though I see him as the type of person to refer to it as “lovemaking”.

-          Has had multiple partners in the past, a few being Quinlan, I believe they were casual and just did it to relieve stress and etc, Santine or even Siri Tachi.

-          He is quite confident with a partner, even if he isn’t sure what he’s doing.

-          Likes making his partner feel good, holds you close and maybe even clings on quite desperately at times.

-          A big cuddler, just wants to lay for hours and half sleep with you in his arms.

-          Would keep your relationship a secret for obvious reasons, but would be willing to leave the jedi for you If you got very serious and truly loved eachother.

Cody

-          Tries to keep serious at all times, but can be quite goofy and lovey-dovey behind closed doors.

-          Very protective over his fellow clones and the jedi he is assigned.

-          Used to follow orders as closely as possible, but after joining the 212th, has started to follow in Obi wans footsteps and bend rules to fit the situation.

-          Secretly struggles a lot with being a clone and not being seen as a living sentient being by most people.

-          Has issues with his self-esteem, please tell him he’s good enough.

-          Has very little knowledge about kids, the outside world of sex ed, as I don’t believe the kamonians thought it was something clones needed to know.

-          Sterile, as I believe most clones aren’t able to have children.

-          Likes to cuddle and be held close, hold him as tight as you can against your chest. Will listen to your heartbeat and fall asleep to it.

-          Likes it when his partner caresses his scar or holds his face in their palms. Please pepper kisses all over his voice.

-          I think he’s fine with whatever in the bedroom, but it will be kinda awkward or goofy the first couple of times as he figures out how it works.

-          Likes to go slow and take his time, take you in and really show you how much he loves you.

-          Doesn’t keep your relationship a huge secret, as in his squad and some jedi know but not the council or the republic as you could be forced to split up.

See I see all these questions about when is Leia going to tell… the only plot points I can see drawing out Leia’s truth involve Palpatine. Maybe Tarkin. She slips when she’s mad, and the biggest spot I see her slipping, probably in front of a few people, almost certainly including Anakin, is when Palpatine goes down. There’s no way that doesn’t include him attacking Leia, and Anakin defending her. But a fight with Palpatine, including Leia with a lightsaber (as we have hints she’ll be getting), and we know the man likes to talk while he fights. There’s too many factors working against her at that moment. Other possible witnesses include but are not limited to Padmé, Bail, Shmi, Obi-wan, Mace, Yoda, the Jedi Council, the Courascant guard, the entire Executive building, etc., but will most likely be limited to only a couple of people on that list based on author trends on the topic. Before that day, though, I’m going to guess Leia keeps the majority of her secrets to herself. After, I suspect her truth will probably only be known to the Skywalkers’ and maybe a couple members of the Jedi Council, if Obi-wan gets on the Council again. What the after looks like is still a complete mystery. I can see anything from a complete dissolution of the Republic into a new government where the Jedi serve a new purpose, to the Republic limping along towards something better, and the Jedi completely changed by the upheaval. The Skywalker’s I really couldn’t tell you at all. There’s a million different options. All of this being a long way to ask if we should expect a relatively happy ending? Like do you consider this a fix it?

Gonna be honest, I literally have never thought someone would ask me "Did you come into this fandom to write an 800k Star Wars political time travel But-Worse," and I'm caught somewhere between stunned and hysterical laughter.

Guys, it's tagged fix-it. It has been since Like Fire. It has been on every chapter I've made a post for on here.

I'm...honestly a little concerned if we've gotten this far in the story and you don't think it's moving in a "towards happiness" direction. Like, there's supposed to be ups and downs. Lots of tension. There's a war on. There's grief. The premise is sad, Leia's family died again.

But, um. Shmi is alive. Anakin is more stable. Obi-Wan is doing okay all things considered. Leia is making friends, even if she is surprised by it. Padmé is becoming a better politician. The clones' rights are an active issue that is being addressed. There is help for refugees. The Order is trying to be proactive.

And, of course, Palpatine is going to lose. Like, that is the whole of Leia's plan. Palpatine loses. For her, this story is not over until we've reached that end game.

So, uh. Yeah. It's a fix it. Was...was that in question???

So I've been thinking about those posts that have gone around protesting the fandom inclination to not like villain redemption arcs because of the puritanical values that go along with believing people don't deserve the "rewards" that come with redemption arcs, usually: love, acceptance, understanding, etc. and the idea that no person deserves to be denied the basic things every human being should be granted.

And, of course, applying that to Anakin.

Because as someone who does not truly LIKE Anakin, I'm usually the first person to not be inclined to forgive Anakin post-child murder, post-genocide, post-betrayal. I'm generally the first one to believe Anakin can't get better once he's chosen to do his worst. I've called him a rabid bear that just needs to be put down for his own sake and everyone else's. There isn't a cure at this point, he can't be saved or redeemed.

Even Luke doesn't really REDEEM Anakin, Anakin's still only doing what he does to save someone he likes. Great, he throws down a regime to save a family member, where have we seen him do that before? Oh right, when he threw down democracy to save his wife and instigated the beginning of the Empire. He didn't destroy the Empire because he wanted to make amends. He didn't kill Palpatine to save the galaxy he'd helped destroy. He didn't do any of it because it was just generally the right thing to do or because he recognized just how much pain he'd caused and was seeking to do better as a person overall. He does it to save ONE PERSON, and we can pretty solidly say, he wouldn't have done it for ANYONE ELSE, probably up to and including Leia.

Which makes me believe that had Anakin miraculously survived killing Palpatine, he wouldn't necessarily be a better person. He wouldn't truly work to make any kind of amends to the galaxy he'd brought so much pain to.

And what kind of amends could he even DO at this point that would make any kind of difference? He's committed like 167 genocides at this point, oppressed an entire galaxy, killed billions of children on a whim, destroyed whole planets. What can he POSSIBLY do to make any real amends for that? What could possibly make up for that in any meaningful way? He can't undo the Jedi genocide and quite honestly no one should ever let him near a Force sensitive person, especially a child, again. He can't undo the three decades of oppression, he can't undo the fact that the Republic that existed has been basically burnt to ash and needs to be rebuilt from scratch and, again, quite honestly, no one should ever let him near politics ever again.

The best thing Anakin Skywalker can do for the galaxy at this point if he manages to survive is just disappear from it. Whether he dies or just walks away and spends the rest of his life meditating on everything he's done wrong and leaving the galaxy he's brought so much pain to well enough alone, I don't care. Luke can go visit him if he wants to, I guess, but no one else should have to deal with him.

I think that's where my biggest grievance lies in any kind of "Vader Lives" AUs, or "Vader changes sides inexplicably post-genocide" AUs. Because generally, now EVERYONE ELSE IN THE GALAXY has to deal with him like he HASN'T committed genocide. Like he HASN'T murdered mountains of children for the sake of selfishness. As if he isn't someone who would happily do so again if it came down to it as we see in ROTJ when he happily brings down another government to save one person. If saving Luke in that moment had required another genocide instead of just killing Palpatine, we all know he'd have done it. He absolutely would've murdered any number of children to save HIS child. Because he hasn't truly changed and his motivations for saving Luke are almost exactly the same as the motivations he had for saving Padme, it's just that the requirements shifted and the galaxy got very lucky that saving Luke ALSO meant taking out the Emperor and Anakin himself.

Why should the galaxy at large be obligated to share it with someone who would have happily killed them all not so long ago, just because Anakin MIGHT one day learn to be a better person? Why are they obligated to just live the rest of their lives hoping he doesn't decide to go ahead and commit his 168th genocide if Luke stubs his toe on the wrong planet? Why is their fear acceptable in favor of Anakin getting a chance to be good?

Once he's decided double genocide is acceptable? Once he spends DECADES oppressing everyone he can find because misery loves company? I don't really see a way out for him that isn't vastly unfair for everyone else.

GAMES I PLAYED OF THE YEAR 2023, #2

(Previously: #1)

Razzies Award Runner-Up For Most Baffling Game Of 2023: Star Wars Jedi: Survivor (Respawn Entertainment)

(I know, I thought the colon was after Star Wars, too)

I didn’t know where Respawn would go after Fallen Order. I mean, obviously, they had to make more of it, they made a pretty damn competent video game. Fallen Order has a certain panache for combat, the feeling of being one dude against an army never being more clear than the fourth time I get domed by a Stormtrooper with a rocket launcher because I was too busy parrying the melee guy he’s gonna murder in the backblast to remember to force push it away in time. Playing on Jedi Master actually made me feel the same way that Dark Souls did, a feat so rare in the space now that we’ve expanded the universe of Soulslike beyond all comprehension that it was actually delightful to eat shit to some of those bosses.

Mostly.

But the ending of that game gave me so much joy that I couldn’t really fathom a second entry, at first. Sure, the expansion of the post-Order 66 era of Star Wars is continuing under the new leadership, but it’s a fairly small era (17 years, just about, thanks to the whole “Luke and Leia born after Order 66” thing). How much room do they have to play here, really? And what could really be told now, beyond the continued adventures of Cal Kestis and BD-1? 

Well…

They came up with something. It was an idea they had, all right. But maybe it should have stayed on the drawing board. 

Okay, if we’re gonna talk about this, I have to get this off my chest first. I’m a Star Wars dweeb.My favorite Star Wars movie is the Last Jedi, because of how it muddies the waters and says ‘hey, the Jedi were an anachronism in their own time, and the world has moved on’ and ‘the lines of war are not so clean in the modern era’ and ‘fuck, that shot of the hyperdrive crash was so sick’. My favorite Star Wars game is Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords (Obsidian Entertainment)! I’m not like other girls! 

And I have strong opinions about the Post-Revenge timeline, or more specifically, how many Jedi survive Order 66. For me, this comes down to a thing I find really interesting in media, and how the world works: How people find direction when they aren’t given any way to go. 

Post-Revenge, the Empire is ascendant, having just won the fake war and successfully crushed every element of dissent in the galaxy under a swift military expansion that has given the evil man in power, George Bush Jr With A Skin Condition, unlimited power to rule the galaxy with an iron fist. The world is different now than under the Republic, and everywhere you turn, the Empire looms. What do you do to meaningfully oppose something you disagree with that is omnipresent and powerful beyond reckoning, besides oppose it and die trying to do anything at all?

Ultimately,There’s a lot of hay to be made here, but we’ll keep it simple so this doesn’t go crazy. The Jedi who survive Order 66 issue is pretty cut and dry, if you’re a movie purist: Yoda says that Luke will become the last Jedi in the galaxy when he dies in RotJ. It’s pretty simple! No more Jedi! Last of his kind, etc etc etc. But it’s been 30 years since that movie aired, and we’re a few hundred pieces of Star Wars media away from where it started, Legends canon or no. Some of them are even primary canon now, like Ahsoka Tahno, the erstwhile apprentice of Anakin Skywalker.

But how many Jedi are alive just in Fallen Order? And how many more make it to Jedi Survivor?

We have Cal Kestis, our ginger protagonist, a padawan who survived Order 66 with his Master’s lightsaber and hid for a decade to grow up, get found out and run around the galaxy fucking up. There’s Cere, the new master he finds along the way. There’s Trilla, the fallen apprentice of Cere, now Second Sister. There’s Ninth Sister, the big hulking one who you fight all of twice and survives the game. There’s a one-note fallen Master on Dathomir, who turns up out of nowhere and gets chumped. And there’s Merrin, the Dathomiri Nightsister who practices Magick (the k is important) using the Force, so she counts. And Vader comes in for a splashy send-off to the game in a brutally scary no-win fight and escape sequence in which you are carefully reminded why that guy is the scariest motherfucker in the galaxy. That makes 7. 

A bit more than the Last Jedi, eh?

Ultimately, this is a victim of the fact that they’re making a video game. You can fight stormtroopers with cortosis shock batons all day, but if you’re playing a Jedi game, you want to cross sabers with another Jedi/Sith. It’s just the order of the day. It makes sense! The Jedi fights in Fallen Order are good! I dismissed the one-note Master but he actually had a good fight in a Dathomiri temple that felt good to go back to every time i got fucking dumpstered.

It makes things more fun to have a Jedi thrown into this time of lawlessness and oppression, where the strong are taking the chance to crush the weak with the Empire’s tacit blessing; raiders on the Outer Rim are bleeding the territories dry, often at the Empire’s behest. Throwing the tattered Jedi remnants into that world makes sense instinctively with the world they’ve made, and with the influences Star Wars draws on.

The average person knows by now that Star Wars is drawing equally from Westerns that influenced George Lucas, but also the samurai movies coming out of Japan that influenced those Westerns. A world of fallen morals and people barely surviving gets so much more textured when the Last Good Samurai enters the equation. Putting someone with an unflinching moral code in a bad position and telling them not to blink is fun storytelling! Watching them contort themselves into knots to survive it is so fun! We love that shit! Hell, I love that shit, as much as I’m complaining about it!

So, in Jedi Survivor, we have Cal, Cere returns, Ninth Sister finally dies, Merrin returns with gusto (great expanded role for her here, though it baffles me that she’s straight), the High Republic fallen Jedi Dagan Gera (more on him later, but he dies), Eno Cordova (was dead in the last game, but turns out he wasn’t, but then he dies again, so okay), and Bode Akuna, the final deuteragonist-to-antagonist of the game. And Darth Vader again, in a what feels like obligatory role where he fights Cere to a draw. So…7, again. But…

The Hidden Path debuts here (OKAY, LOOK, the Hidden Path debuts in Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Disney+ show. But I fucking hope you didn’t watch that. I did. And I regret every minute of it I spent watching it), an underground railroad for Jedi. It’s basically not referred to beyond that Cere and Eno are running a cell of it and that there are other cells, but it DOES mean that there are enough other Jedi who survived that they are actively forming whisper networks to get Jedi out of bad places and into the dilapidated ruins they were meant to be living in (it’s their native environment). 

So we have 7 + (1±X, where X is the number of other Jedi in the galaxy, minus already-named characters) Jedi in Jedi Survivor. So basically, Palpatine is a fucking rube who didn’t even get his perfect felling blow right, I guess? So…not great, but fine. It’s…acceptable. The number even goes down significantly more in this one, because 5 of those original 7 in Fallen survive, but only 4 survive in Jedi Survivor! It’s a miracle, we killed 1 net Jedi! Maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on Palpatine, they’re clearly a fucking pain to make die for real.

Anyway. This is all besides how I feel about the actual plot of Jedi Survivor. 

Yeah.

The plot…is kind of stupid. Cal Kestis is working with Saw Gerrera, the Partisans (faction of the Resistance, not yet the Rebellion, natch) figure who went on to use a weird tentacle monster to brainfuck Riz Ahmed in Rogue One and then died when they fired the first Death Star test shot at him. He’s stealing info, and his op goes bad and all his boys get murdered besides newfound buddy Bode Akuna, a jetpacking charming rogue with two pistols and a lot of chest. Cal goes and gets into some hijinks with his old buddy who used to fly his ship until everyone parted under mysterious circumstances a few years ago (after the end of Fallen Order, when they swore to find as many potential Jedi as they could together). 

This is where the High Republic intrudes. Ancient ruins on the planet they’re on point towards a long-forgotten Jedi presence on this planet, with hints leading to another planet hidden in a nearby nebula that is considered unnavigable and a death trap. They learn that that planet was an abandoned Jedi temple in the High Republic, where Dagan Gera fought for a Jedi temple on a fount of Force power to be built until it was mysteriously raided by an unknown force that somehow also got to the lost planet. Cal wakes up Dagan Gera, who literally turns evil in front of you and runs off to complete his centuries-old evil plot to…go back to that planet and just live there?

A lot of this story is about the toll being A Survivor takes on you. Cal watches a bunch of really good buddies he totally knows a lot about die in the tutorial level on Coruscant, and he’s still got all his old hangups about surviving his master, being a Jedi in a galaxy ruled by the Sith, yadda yadda. He’s lost his drive to fight the Empire, having summarily abandoned working for Saw Gerrera in the interest of just taking a break, and into his lap falls the ultimate leave forever button in the form of this lost planet. He sees it and he can’t help but think “hey, I did my part, I sacrificed a lot for the cause, and I’m done”. 

Bode Akuna agrees on this! He’s a tough guy and he’s got a tough daughter and a dead wife and he just doesn’t want to deal with any of this anymore. He wants to bring his daughter home and create a life with her away from all this Empire shit. It gets where it wants to pretty quick here: This planet Cal found is the ultimate chance to just say No to everything and give it all up. Just live a clean, simple life away from it all, forever.

It’s an interesting thing, sort of. Fallen Order is a game so concerned with survival, that Jedi Survivor basically has to be about finding any meaning at all in a galaxy ruled by evil. It feels like it’s actually got something to say here…but it doesn’t, really. 

The turning point of the game is roughly ¾ of the way through, when Dagan Gera is defeated and you claim the mcguffin that will help you fly to Treasure Planet. But before that happens, you meet Cere and Eno and learn about the Hidden Path, the selflessness of the non-Jedi who are fighting to help them survive. And Cal, he’s a Jedi through and through, for better or worse. So he says to Bode, hey, we’re going to turn this planet into a safe haven for the Hidden Path, and we’ll bring everyone we can here to create a stronghold against the Empire.

This is when Bode (every time I think about his name, i think about (INSERT PHOTO OF BODE.JPG HERE) reveals that he is a former deep cover infiltrator Jedi who was undercover when Order 66 started, who avoided every bit of the Empire that chased him with stealth and subterfuge, until an Imperial Security Bureau he worked with outed him and he became their pet Jedi to do evil missions with. So he’s compromised every moral he has to survive, and will do anything to take his daughter back from the ISB and flee this hellish galaxy with her, so that she can be raised safe.

He’s the Jedi Survivor, not you (I literally said out loud to myself OH, HE’S THE JEDI SURVIVOR as he had his big heel turn speech).

This is when Bode kills Eno Cordova, takes the mcguffin, and flies there with his daughter after you have a big temper tantrum about it and unlock the power of the dark side for yourself a little bit. So you go hunt him down after some double mcguffin reacharound bullshit to get there, and you tell his daughter some nice platitudes and Merrin takes her out of the room so you can put him down like a dog.

The end of the game is him burning on a pyre while you, Merrin and his daughter watch. 

Ultimately, it was a game that at least had some kind of a semblance of a full story ready from beginning to end. It had plenty of things to do (the collectible quotient was WAY higher this time, to its detriment) and the newly added stances, a crossguard lightsaber that is straight up just Kylo Ren and a blaster-and-saber stance that i spent 100% of the game playing once acquired, were great fun to play around with.

I just don’t think it was very good, is all. I don’t know what in god’s name the third Star Wars will be, but I know it will be fought with lightsabers and blasters. 

(sorry. Sorry. I’m trying to delete it)

Do you have a favorite character (or characters, if you feel like listing multiple) of all time from any media (books, anime, manga, tv series, movies, etc)?

Hmm this is difficult to say, since my favorite character of all time kind of rotates depending on which media I'm actively hyperfixating on.

Currently? Shen Jiu (SVSSS) due to the hyperfixation strength but I have no idea if I'll say the same thing a year from now.

In the past, I'd say my Ultimate Blorbo has to be Anakin Skywalker (Star Wars), but specifically my own version which is canon + years of original development. I ended up making Sith Inquisitor!Anakin in the SWTOR MMORPG, which became a secondary favorite version because I ended up enjoying the Old Republic era of Star Wars more than the movies, because more Jedi and Sith Lore.

I'm just getting into Genshin right now, so I'm having substantial Zhongli brain rot along with my Shen Jiu brain rot, even though I'm not all the way through the game yet so I don't really post Genshin on main (I only post when I know all the Lore of things because I am a perfectionist asdkljgfdf). My other big fandom that I still consider myself part of even though it's not currently my hyperfixation is Tolkien, but I honestly don't have one specific character from that that I would say I consider my favorite, since really the favorite rotates around a lot.

Barriss Day fanart collages

As I can no longer access/post on my original Tumblr account (under Polgarawolf), due to a dead computer during home rennovations and issues with the internet that resulted in losing the email attached to the account (and the apparent inability of Tumblr to do anything to help me), I have made a new account, Polgarawolf1. I'm the same person, though, and I'm still a big SW fan, though I generally lean more towards the old EU than the new DISNEY!SW version of SW canon. I tend to have elaborate headcanons for the things that I write or otherwise create in fandoms like this but I'm also an AU girl at heart, so I can and sometimes do entertain multiple possible headcanons for certain characters. I'm hoping to get something written for BarrissDay before the deadline, but that might or might not happen, due to real life issues. I'm not a techy person, so I hope that the person (or people) who has (or have) organized BarrissDay and the Barriss Offee Appreciation blog will know how to find this, based on the BarrissDay tag!

Please be aware that my version of Barriss Offee is based largely on the original version of the character, as she appears in cut scenes, etc., from AotC and RotS (and therefore has very little to do with Filoni's Star Wars: The Clone Wars nonsense, except for what I've modified to fit with my headcanon version of Barriss. Apologies, though, for the one image of Barriss with her hair loose/uncovered - it's how they drew her for the cover art of one of the MedStar books, during an unexpected attack, and unfortunately I'm just not artistically talented enough to believably alter it to try to cover her head/hair!), and as she was originally written in EU books such as The Approaching Storm and the MedStar duology. My Barriss is closer in age to Anakin Skywalker than Ahsoka Tano and is most emphatically not a terrorist who willingly helped bomb one of the hangars in the Coruscanti Jedi Temple, just in case anyone is wondering!

In any case, the collages are behind the cut! There are some just for Barriss, some for Barriss and Luminara as Padawan and Master, and a few based specifically on the MedStar books, with Barriss and Kornell "Uli" Divini (I have filled in for him as best I can, since there aren't any good images of him online. For those who are unfamiliar with the character, Uli is from Tatooine, attended Coruscant Medical, did his internship at "Big Zoo" or Galactic Polysapient Medical Center on Alderaan, and is something of a wonderkid, as he's already a fully qualified surgeon when either still eighteen or just nineteen, during the events of MedStar II: Jedi Healer, and is maybe barely 20 when the Clone Wars ends. Uli has something of a baby face but is extremely good at sabacc, which the various Healers - Jedi and otherwise - and surgeons and nurses of Republic Mobile Surgical Unit 7 often play with their friends during downtime. Uli's mother, renowned mudopterist Elana  Divini, is known for collecting "Alderaanian flare-wings" and one of his first meetings with Barriss happens when she's out doing a lightsaber kata and accidentally injures herself while he's in the swamps of Drongar looking at the local insects, sees her, and helps deal with her injury), who were at the very least written as good friends with the potential for more (if not for Order 66, etc.).

Apologies in advance for repetitiveness - I figured more would be better, even if it meant that I basically had to keep using the same scant handful of official images for Barriss from the films over and over, plus a few from the various animated shows. I'm aware that hex signs are a form of Pennsylvania Dutch folk art, but I've had it in my head for years (since long before Star Wars: The Clone Wars was made) that Mirialan art and particularly their folk art involve very similar motifs and also often the use of colorful stained glass and tiles, which is why I've used several of them here along with images meant to evoke stained glass artwork. No disrespect is meant to anyone and if anything bothers anyone, please let me know about it and why, so I can try to fix it or offer an alternative!

Ahsoka and Teen Rebellion

Here’s a really interesting fact about good ol Papa George Lucas. He’s a hippie-a scion of 50′s hot rod culture specifically- who loves teen rebellion.  No Seriously.

“My father thought I was going to turn into a beatnik….I’ve always had a basic dislike of authority figures, a fear and resentment of grown ups.”

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/politics-behind-original-star-wars/ Before SW, George directed American Graffiti: an early 60′s teen comedy that celebrates-and critiques-greasers, street racing, underage drinking, pranks, and rock n roll.

During that movie, a teenager, played by Ron Howard, tells his teacher to kiss a duck…without consequences.

Also, George let’s another teenager-played by Richard Dreyfuss, to vandalize an occupied cop car without consequences.

ANH is about a bunch of college hippies sticking it to the man…in space.

During Jedi, Obi tells Luke he has no choice but to kill Vader, to resolve conflict with violence. Rather than obey Obi, Luke disobeys him, chooses to save Vader with peace and love and succeeds!

So what does any of this have to do with good ol snips?

To begin with, GEORGE assigned Ahsoka to Anakin.

“[With Ahsoka] I wanted to develop a character who would help Anakin settle down. He's a wild child after [Attack of the Clones]. He and Obi Wan don't get along. So we wanted to look at how Anakin and Ahsoka become friends, partners, a team. When you become a parent or you become a teacher you have to become more respnsible. I wanted to force Anakin into that role of responsibility, into that juxtaposition. I have a couple of daughters so I have experience with that situation. I said instead of a guy let's make her a girl. Teenage girls are just as hard to deal with as teenage boys are.”

https://gizmodo.com/george-lucas-spills-all-about-clone-wars-at-skywalker-r-5033398

 If we interpret  Snips’ story through the context of George’s perspective, something becomes clear. I don’t think a single Star Wars character, save for Hayden’s version of Anakin, embodies George’s  love of teen rebellion-and his resentment of grown ups as well as Ahsoka.

Ahsoka is hotheaded, impulsive and of course defiant. She hates being treated like a kid, fears punishment, and constantly butts heads with the adults in her life. She constantly trash talks adult authority figures-Anakin, Grievous, Hondo, Tarkin, Palpatine, Obi wan, Vizla etc.

During Malevolence, Ahsoka saves Plo by defying the council. During cloak of Darkness, Snips saves Luminara by defying her. During heroes on both sides, she agrees to break the law with Padme for the sake of peace. During that same episode, one could say she metaphorically sneaks out of her home-the republic-and meets a boy in the process-Lux. She saves the citadel mission by defying Anakin. During the Padawan lost arc, she kills an aggressive father figure. During the youngling arc, Ahsoka straight up tells the kids “sometimes doing the right thing means bending the rules”. All of this subtext climaxes during her big arc in season 5. In this arc, she runs away from and defies a system of adult authority that wants to “unfairly” punish her. During this arc, Ahsoka defies Anakin when he tells her to come back. And the arc ends with her individuating from her primary caregiver-Anakin.

In my opinion, this rebellious subtext gives Ahsoka’s heroic feats a truly awe inspiring quality. As a kid, watching her made you feel like even the world’s biggest “brat”-an unruly child-could step up to the plate and deliver.

Unfortunately, all of this subtext only works when you are a teenager. Growing up means realizing that your actions have consequences and that all the rules teens stereotypically hate exist to keep people safe. Therefore, impulsive hotheaded, “rebels” like Ahsoka, or Korra, or KLK’s Ryuko Matoi, or LWA’s Akko, simply don’t fly in the real world.

as it was.

Summary: Following Padmé back to Naboo in Episode III, he steps into fatherhood but finds he’s found difficulty in connecting to the Force. Word Count: 5.2k A/N: Inspired by that One Sky Post here on tumblr. iykyk, but other than that, inspired by harry’s song of the same title. to better understand how i see ani, here’s his spotify playlist. The length of it is because I’m an aspiring author so I’m trying to challenge myself to longer pieces. This is my first fanfic for SW, so please be nice ;-; I am still learning what’s canon, what’s been scrapped to Legends, etc.... sorry for this long a/n.

  Have you seen the light from the sky fade? Not the sunlight, no, this is different. It’s the life within the sky, seeing it crumble and decay fast in a moment like the planet collapsing from a nearby supernova. This loss was steady within Skywalker, and truly appropriate his eyes should share the vibrancy of the sky.      Unfortunately within the heart of the Jedi, he was starting to crumble more with the loss of his mother. How could her torture and death occur under the rule of the Republic? He felt shame with killing the whole village out of his anger, inner turmoil causing him to fall apart some nights. Padmé and Obi-Wan were the only ones left, but only she knew the horrors he had already committed.      Gloved mechanized fingers curled around the saber as he sat within the living space of the apartment Padmé and he had gotten on Naboo near the lake how she wanted. Thumb brushes along the metal body of the weapon, and he almost felt the shame creeping in again. That night plagued him, but after confiding in Palpatine of what he had done, he was only reassured that “anyone with love for their mother would have done the same.”      Somehow, that didn’t bring comfort to Anakin anymore than a swift scolding from Obi-Wan would have done. Well, it would have been more than a swift scolding, that was sure. Still, Padmé and he hadn’t told the full details of Tatooine and the Tusken Raiders. How could you tell your Master that you had killed a whole village out of rage from the loss of your mother? Especially after Anakin had told Obi-Wan about the haunting dreams, dismissing them as dreams that would go away. But they didn’t go away, they became reality.      Blue eyes fell down to the softly lit flooring from the city surrounding them, but this night, Padmé didn’t come out to save Anakin from the guilt growing in his mind.      If Obi-Wan had just listened to him, maybe Shmi would be alive and well. Then he wouldn’t have slaughtered the villagers, and he wouldn’t feel this weight. He wouldn’t feel the constant suffocation of his sin. The Clone Wars had at least given him a distraction from the loss while he also trained Ahsoka. Only to lose her with Order 66… possibly. He had essentially trained her for this, to survive.      With the offer on Mustafar from his wife, his senses had come back. All that mattered was Padmé and the twins. That was all.      Could things ever go back to normal? He couldn’t see that happening.      After all, the Empire still rose up, Obi-Wan barely had enough time to send the message to Jedis across the galaxy that the Order and Republic had fallen. It was even dangerous that they had returned to Naboo as well considering that Palpatine was from the planet. Still, Anakin couldn’t forget the resistance when he was nine, and how determined his wife was to protect her people and planet.      Softening, he stood up to get to the patio to overlook the lake. Fingers brushed the ivy grown around the pillars as he moved to the railing to see the aquatic creatures below. If he had grown up here, he would haven’t left the planet. He meant that even years later.      Still, his thoughts drifted, and he could only hope that Obi-Wan was still alive. He was intelligent, and Anakin was sure that he was able to go into hiding. Even though he wanted to stay close to his Master, he knew it would only endanger them more… However… If he hadn’t aided in the fall of Windu, maybe the Order would still be alive.      Heavy sigh escaped his lips as he moved to lean his lower back against the railing, looking into the home through the open doors. Moving in, he opted to check on the twins as diving into fatherhood had been getting him through everything. Granted, he was an excellent father so far, learning how to aid them when Padmé was busy with leading the Rebels. In time, he was sure they would win again and true peace would return to the galaxy.      Walking silently through the corridors of the palace, they had been allowed to stay in as Padmé still held her Senator status, he got to the door of the nursery that wasn’t too far from where he had been. He knew Padmé wanted this room specifically for the twins, and he wasn’t going to deny her that dream. He slowly opened the door as he moved inside, R2 waking from the creaking of the door.      The droid assessed for a moment what was happening before realizing it was Anakin before making a few beeps of reassurance that the twins were safe. Giving a small smile, he moved to the cribs still, voice soft,” I still want to check on them, R2. I can’t help it.” The droid only returned a few beeps in response before returning to his idle mode.      Leia made a small noise as she had woken with her father’s voice, and he gently scooped her out to hold to his chest. “Hi, princess.” Softened eyes watched her sleepy expression as she snuggled against his robes, nestling in his hold. Gods, she was so cute. He moved to peek at Luke one more time before opting to sit in the chair. Settling, he melted into the cushioned back as he gently adjusted Leia on himself as he got more comfortable.      Leia wasted no time getting herself comfortable against her father’s chest, head resting along his collarbone. A softened smile soon came to his lips as he watched her squirm a moment before settling fully against him. A hand gently rested on her back as he looked out the large windows to the darkened sky over the lake. Shimmering stars reflected in his ocean eyes as he scanned the horizon for any danger. Hopefully Naboo would always be safe from the Imperial terror.      Hope was different from reality, though. He knew that eventually the war would pour into the neutral planets as well as ones that supported the Republic. The only thing he could do was hope that Obi-Wan and Ahsoka were safe, and that he could hope his connection to the Force would grow stronger.      It had been weakened from that day, his mind falling into a constant hole of self-doubt and self-hatred. This time, it didn’t propel him to be Palpatine’s right hand man, no… it led to isolation.      Padmé had caught on that something was troubling her husband — after all, years of knowing him led her to know his mannerisms when he was mentally troubled. She saw him a few times try to use the force to pick up some fruit, but it seemed like a large task for him to do. She wasn’t Force-sensitive herself at the level Anakin was, but she knew that he was at a youngling-level again. That in itself was worrisome to her. She knew she had to find Obi-Wan and bring him to Naboo, even if it would cause the Empire to find them. Her husband needed his brother back.      She had been searching, looking to all the known locations that Obi-Wan or even Ahsoka could have hidden. If she was going to find Obi-Wan, she might as well find Anakin’s padawan. Anything that could help him become the fierce warrior he had been in the Clone Wars. She wanted her husband back for himself and the Republic. If he truly was the Chosen One, he needed help in any way possible.      As the sun had risen upon the ecologically rich planet, Padmé wandered to the nursery, soft to see Ani holding Leia close as he was asleep with her now. He was unbothered by the sun beating down on him, used to getting sleep wherever possible from the Wars. She came over in a simple dress even in Naboo standards, gently kissing his head in greeting. “Wake up, Ani.” It took a few seconds before he made a start up sound, head lifting. He blinked the world into view, hearing the noises of the wildlife before his gaze focused on Padmé in front of him. He made a soft noise, reaching out to her with his right hand. Mechanized whirring softly filled the space as he held her hand gently.      She could only smile softly, it was good to see him slow down finally. It was good to see him so soft. This was the Anakin she knew. Not the rage filled, paranoid man on Mustafar desperate to prove his power. That was something they still had to discuss, but for now, she wanted to hold onto this.      Her hands gently brush through his dark brown hair, noting how long it had already gotten from the time they’ve been in hiding. “Good morning,” she smiled softly, leaning down to kiss his head. “Breakfast is ready, and we have a visitor today.”      “We do?” Sleep made his head groggy, looking up at her with furrowed brows.      “Yes, but it’s a surprise. Come. We need to eat first, and the babies need food too.”      Leia started to wake then, making a soft whine at hunger in her belly as Anakin only smiled a little,” she seems to be ready for food already.”      “I’ll feed them first before I join,” she kissed his head again, letting him stand after passing Leia to her. He checked on Luke, who was still asleep despite the sun, before heading to their room to get dressed.      Padmé watched, grinning,” you should wear your robes. I found someone to help you train more.”      He looked back to her then as he paused in the doorway. “Train?” His brows raised and slightly scrunched as a hint of a smile came to his lips,” tired of using a blaster on me?”      “I have meetings to tend to, our visitor will be more than happy to help you,” she grinned more as she sat down to nurse Leia. “You’ll see, Ani. First is getting dressed and fed.”      Listing out how the day was going to go seemed to help him through this strange time, giving tasks and expectations. He seemed to be happier when she had started to ask for certain things around the palace such as mechanical help or even just training. She would do anything to help him return to the man he was.      He only nodded, voice teasing as his head slightly tilted as he couldn’t help but smile more,” yes, Senator.” She laughed then, watching him vanish down the hallway.      She piqued his interest, he could admit that. A visitor? Was it Obi-Wan? Yoda even? Another Jedi that survived the Order? He got himself into the bedroom to get dressed in the Jedi robes he had mostly neglected since stepping foot on Naboo again. He fixed the leather piece upon his shoulders before getting his belt on to secure everything, making sure everything was in order. He got the glove on his hand before pulling on his boots, but he didn’t bother with pulling on the robe that many usually had on the outfit. Besides, he could already feel the heat creeping on him from the numerous layers he just put on.      Exiting the room, he moved to the nursery to still wait for her, getting the modified hovering pram up to have the twins while they ate. He helped her dress them, getting Luke ready while she did Leia before they set them in the pram. There wasn’t much of a shield on the pram, and it was in the chrome Naboo style, of course. He had helped modify one that one of the maidens had found in the palace storage room, but it worked perfectly for keeping the twins close. He got it set to follow their biometric reading as usual, smiling softly to her,” ready for food?”      “I am always ready for food,” she laughed, grabbing his left hand to get them led to the dining hall.      After eating the rich meal, she told one of the staff to let them bring their visitor in. There was a bow given before she slipped off and Padmé looked to her husband softly.      “While we speak with them, we can let the food settle before training. We don’t need to repeat what happened two days ago.”      Anakin let out a soft laugh, looking down with a brief smile,” at least I got to the garbage can before I vomited.”      “It was good you reached the garbage, but I would like to prevent that again,” she laughed as her head tilted back.      It wasn’t too long until the staff member had returned, and Anakin took a moment to look over. However, he froze as he saw Ahsoka as she took the hood down from her montrals to expose the lower, striped lekkus in the front as her blue eyes moved to Anakin. He stood almost immediately,” Ahsoka, you survived.”      “I did get great lessons from my Master,” she smiled before it faded as she looked down. “The Force had sent me a vision of Order 66 and Windu engaging with Palpatine.”      Oh. She knew.      Heavy silence came as he looked down, shoulders falling. He was at a loss of words, a rare event from the Jedi Knight as she slowly came closer. “How much do you know?”      “Enough to know you’re struggling with the Force now and that you want to fix your wrongs… what happened that night, Master?”      Padmé now watched in interest as Anakin searched his memory to try to remember but everything was chopped into pieces. “I remember Windu and Palpatine… They both were telling me something at the same time and I think I cut off Windu’s hand…. Then he was gone.” Thick brows furrow as he moves to sit down again, eyes constantly scanning over the table as Ahsoka watches him closely as she moves to take a seat across from him.      She definitely didn’t have all the answers herself, she was with Rex and some of the 501 troopers when it was engaged. She and Rex had barely made it out alive, and that wasn’t an exaggeration. Still, she listened to him try to piece the night together. A gloved hand raised to his face as he tried to remember desperately. “I… I remember falling back against a console in disbelief, and Palpatine came over…. That’s when he named me.”      Padmé and Ahsoka glanced at each other in worry before Padmé looked at him,” named you?”      “Yes,” there was a heartbeat of hesitancy,” as Darth Vader.”      The silence that followed was heavy. He moved his hand, brows furrowed,” then I was taken to Mustafar for something…. I believe it was a test….an assignment?” He lifted his head more as he tried to remember, blinking rapidly as he felt the familiarity of the Force. Oh. It was clearer then. “The Separatists had a council there. I was ordered to kill them as well. After I had, Padmé and Obi-Wan had come, but we escaped. Padmé gave birth to twins, and we’ve been on Naboo.”      Ahsoka looked around,” is Obi-Wan here?”      “No. He left, and I don’t know where he has gone. Too many Force-sensitives in a given area can be sensed.”      “What about the twins?”      “Luke is strong with the Force, but I don’t sense the same strength in Leia.”      Ahsoka’s gaze dropped to the table, taking in everything as she slowly took a breath in. That was certainly a lot to take in, especially in relativity to him. “You fell to the Dark Side?”      “Yes… I did… I was led to believe the Jedi were seeking ultimate control and I wanted to desperately prevent Padmé from dying in childbirth. I was having nightmares about it.”      “Can you use the Force now? Your eyes aren’t yellow like a Sith’s.”      Looking up to her finally, she saw just how broken he seemed to be now. “No, I can’t use it. I struggle with lifting the lightest fruit.”      Padmé nodded, looking at Ahsoka,” we’ve been trying daily, but he seems blocked. We were hoping you could help.”      “What about Obi-Wan? He is your Master, he knows more than I do,” she reasoned, and Padmé nodded as she spoke softly,” they haven’t seen each other since that day.”      “Oh. I see.”      “Besides,” Anakin said as he stood,” I couldn’t face him now. I failed the Order, the Force… I failed him.”      “But you were brought back. If we think of what could have happened, we won’t focus on the present,” Ahsoka said as she stood with him. “You’ll be able to use the Force again, but it’s not because you physically can’t. It’s your mentality. With you saying you failed, you’re only making it harder to connect.”      He was watching her, a soft, ghost of a smile on his lips as he moved around the table to her,” how’d you already get so much wisdom, Snips?”      Thinking for a moment, the seventeen year old only imagined it was from observing Yoda, Obi-Wan, and even Anakin over the years. “I don’t even know the answer to that. So, are we going to train with lightsabers, Skyguy or keep talkin’?”      “That should be fine for now.” He nodded with a smile at the nickname,” there’s an inside area to train on that will work. Hidden from any wandering eyes, but large enough for dueling.”      “Lead the way, Master,” she said with a soft smile, motioning him out. She gave a final look to Padmé before she smiled softly to her with a nod. This was going to be good for the both of them.      Following him, she glanced over the halls that were in front of them, smiling a little. Naboo was gorgeous and it never ceased to amaze her. Looking up to Anakin, she still tried to piece together how he could have destroyed the Temple. Then she remembered how he had mentioned how he was wary of the Council when they had opted to bar her from it and the Order. Oh, he was angry that day. Was that the day that started to cause the doubts?      He glanced at her, brow arching in silent question as she seemed to hesitate a moment before she spoke. “Was my banishment the beginning of your doubts with the Council?” He looked ahead, jaw clenched a moment,” no. It wasn’t. I was doubtful when I came to it with Obi-Wan and his master, Qui-Gon. I was only nine.”      “At nine, you had doubts?”      “Yes, I did.” He nodded, arms moving to fold in front of him as he walked. “Qui-Gon was determined to bring me into the Temple. He wanted to train me, but the Council didn’t want to. Yoda had said my future was clouded, and the Council was uncertain that I was even the Chosen One prophesied to bring balance. Qui-Gon was adamant though,” he recalled, a small hint of a smile on his lips,” and I was brought to the Council to be tested. I was too old to begin training, but Qui-Gon was sure I was the Chosen One. Obi-Wan had even thought I would be dangerous, and I remember I told Qui-Gon I didn’t want to be a problem.” His smile had already faded by then, voice quiet,” but I became one anyways.”      This was a different side of Anakin to her, so vulnerable, so unsure. She didn’t know how to comfort him, watching him with concern. “We will fix what has been done. I’m sure of it, Master. You haven’t been a problem, you made a mistake. Palpatine lied to everyone. He chose you to be the one he manipulated the most. He targeted your vulnerabilities and doubts in the Council.”      His eyes moved to her as she looked up at him in worry,” I don’t know how this can be fixed. Using a lightsaber can only do so much. Piloting can only do so much. I need to be able to use the Force.”      “You will,” she said with determination in her voice,” even if we have to bring in Obi-Wan, you will be able to use the Force again.” There was some shame at the mention of Obi-Wan, but he knew it was more than likely he needed to learn from his Master. He was more than sure there were other lessons he hadn’t known of yet. “I hope so, Ahsoka. I hope so.”      A month of sparring, dueling, training and he still had been unable to use the Force. He was now plagued with nightmares of Obi-Wan and this large, dark figure. He assumed it was to be him, perhaps if he hadn’t gone with Padmé. If he had stayed on the lava planet. Ahsoka had left, determined to find Obi-Wan in whatever reach of the galaxy she needed to venture to.

     Mos Eisley held clues of the former Jedi, but she certainly wasn’t expecting him to be in a cantina at the bar. She wasn’t expecting him to even be on the desert planet, but here he was. Where he knew Anakin wouldn’t go. He left Tatooine and never looked back. Though, with the various adventures to the planet, she didn’t really blame him.      She kept her hood over her montrals, getting seated beside the Jedi Master as he took a shot. He paused after, blue-gray eyes moving over to her. She ordered her own drink before she looked over to him, a small smile playing on her lips,” hello, Kenobi.”      “How did you find me?”      Ahsoka glanced around then, shrugging briefly,” not easy to find.”      “For good purpose,” he mused, watching her take a shot before making a face. Too much for blending in with the locals. The tender watched in amusement as she tried to cough it off.      “Let me ask then, why did you come to find me?”      “You’re needed.” She simply said,” but we can’t talk here.”      “Very well, I’ll pay for your drink.” He motioned for the bill to be brought as he got the small satchel out.      “Such a gentleman,” she teased as he just rolled his eyes, soon following her out.      He led them to the cave where he had stayed hidden post Order 66, looking to her,” why have you found me, Ahsoka?”      “Anakin needs you, Obi-Wan. He’s struggling with being able to use the Force. If the Empire came to Naboo, he wouldn’t be able to defend himself or his family. He’s been trying with me for months, but mentally, he can’t let go of what happened on Mustafar or with Order 66.” She paced as she spoke, gesturing before she paused to look at him.      “He slaughtered the younglings, Ahsoka. Did he tell you that?” Obi-Wan watched her as she let out a slow sigh.      “Palpatine used him, Obi-Wan. You know he wouldn’t have done that—““That is uncertain. Anakin’s anger…. His fear caused him to fall, Ahsoka. Who is to say that he won’t have that happen again?”      “Because Padmé, you, and I will be there for him this time. Palpatine won’t get to him.”      “He will never learn to let go, Ahsoka. That is what will cause more downfalls.”      “Then maybe we can teach him how to work around it. Understand the fear, but still walk in the light. I’ve seen the ancient text, Obi-Wan. The gray Jedi, I’m sure this is who he is to become!” She pleaded,” I’m sure your Master saw this. Even Qui-Gon himself knew that the Council wasn’t correct in their choices. He knew that Anakin needed formal training. I’ve seen the holocom of Vader being named. I’ve seen the recording of the younglings. I know what he has done, but that wasn’t Anakin. That was Vader. Qui-Gon has come to me, Obi-Wan. This is the correct path.”      That caught his attention, looking at her,” Qui-Gon has spoken to you?”      “Only once…. Days ago.” She murmured,” I don’t know if he’s shown himself to Anakin, but I’ve seen him. He was very kind. Sharp. A lot like you, Obi-Wan.”      He couldn’t help but feel his heart swell with that. He had always wanted to be like his Master, even after his passing. If he could be a fraction of what Qui-Gon was, he would be pleased about it. “What did he say?”      “That Anakin needed both of us in order to use the Force again. That it was not your doing for his fall, and it wasn’t. Please. Come with me to Naboo. You’ll be able to see the twins and Padmé again.”      There was a slow, steady sigh that escaped the Jedi. He thought over it, of what complications would arise at all of them being concentrated in a place like that. Still, if it meant the fall of the Empire, that was a gamble he could take. “Very well, I’ll return to Naboo with you.”

     Anakin was in the garden, walking along the lake before he started to meditate silently. He sat on a stone bench, legs crossed and eyes shut as he drew into himself.      His form hovered over an uneasy dark sea, waves crashing around as skies were dark. His body was in a vague form, red and blue swirling around while his right arm was simply lit by a white light. He could not forget the loss of his limb, but he needed to move on. Attachment needed to be forgotten. The acceptance of loss needed to happen. He needed to learn. Dark red butterflies fluttered around with the blue, the internal struggle of Light and Dark within him. How could he find balance?      A form appeared beside himself, gray, glowing and soft gentle towards him. Turning his head in his meditation, he was able to see Qui-Gon beside him, in the same position as himself. His eyes were closed as a small smile appeared on his lips,” hello, Ani.”      “Been a while, Qui-Gon.”      “It has. I see you still struggle with balance. Too much hatred is twisting inside you. What do you hate?”      “Myself.”      “For what?”      “The past. The actions I’ve done.”      “You must expect me to comfort you, but you did cause great loss. The disturbance in the Force… It was strong. Painful. Thousands of voices crying in pain. You caused the Order to fall, but now you must make it right.”      “How can I make it right if I cannot wield the Force?”      Qui-Gon looked at him, eyes studying how much Anakin had grown since he had seen him last. Still, it seemed as if the same lessons had yet to be learned by him. “First, you heal your mind. Find your peace. I was going to train you to be a Gray Jedi. Understand there is no Light without Dark. The Code restricts. The Council silenced. The way that things had been done needed to be changed. Unfortunately, they ended in violence. The Gray uses the Dark without fully succumbing to it, to the rage, hurt, hatred. The Dark side, it corrupts. It’s a disease that will stay within you, causing you to fall into hatred more as time passes. The Gray avoids this. They understand their emotions, understand the power both sides wield and walk the line between sides. Within this, I believed that you would have been better in your training. You had lived a life many younglings hadn’t. You had a relationship with your mother, you knew people in your area of Tatooine. You had friends. You had a life. They could never understand the pain that comes with leaving that to be a Jedi. I know that leaving Shmi hurt you, Anakin.”      “We should have brought her with me.”      “I could not break her from the contract. I am sorry.”      “The Council is wrong for turning a blind eye to slavery.”      “They are indeed Anakin. However, this is not the lesson. In order to be one with the Force again, you must face those demons. You cannot run from your emotions or how soft your heart can be, but it doesn’t determine your fate.”      Fading, Anakin’s form was left within the large space, the waters below him calmer as his body seemed lighter already. A Gray Jedi. How could he accomplish this?      Pulling from his meditation, he sensed Ashoka back, and he stood. Turning, he saw her and Obi-Wan, faltering a moment as he straightened. Obi-Wan was softer, able to see Qui-Gon beside his padawan as he had meditated before fading when he had left. He knew that was something that Anakin had needed. He was sure Anakin would have had a more clear path with Qui-Gon as his Master.      “Anakin… What did he say?” His voice was soft, slowly approaching closer with softer eyes. Padmé had certainly filled him in the past month, of how Anakin had seemed withdrawn even from her. He only hoped this time they could stop that darkness from growing again.      Blue eyes lifted to him, studying Obi-Wan’s face to see the worry in his eyes. “He spoke of the gray Jedi… and that the reason I am unable to use the Force is because of my mentality. Once I heal my mind, then I can begin to wield it again.”      Nodding, Obi-Wan considered how Anakin would have prospered had he been allowed to use his emotions more. Still, he needed to learn to let them go, that was simply the way of the Light. “He is right. The Force is connected in everything — mind, body, and soul. If your body has the ability, you must also train your mind and soul. I believe that your beginning into the Dark side has caused a disturbance in that harmony.”      There was shame that cloaked Anakin’s face then as his gaze fell to the stone slabs beneath them. Winds blew through the space as shadows still seemed heavy upon his features. Turning, he faced the sun, voice soft,” I am surprised you have even come.”      “Ahsoka is very convincing, but I cannot deny helping you, Anakin. Not when there are things to make right. Let’s begin this lesson.”      She grinned, looking between them,” I could always learn more, Obi-Wan.” She smiled up to Anakin as she got onto his right side, sitting on the ground to begin her meditation.      “Face your memories. Your fears. Approach them, acknowledge them, but let them go.” Obi-Wan sat on the ground upon the left side of the bench Anakin had let himself be seated. Shutting his eyes as he sat to meditate, he let his mind envision himself in Light in the safety of the fallen Temple on Coruscant.      Anakin’s eyes moved between his Master and padawan as their connection to the Force and Light began to let them hover upon the ground. He let out a slow breath before he turned his face to the warmth of the sun, eyes shutting once more as he got in the familiar position his body knew.      The sea was calmer now, and he slowly stepped down to walk across the water, approaching memories as they came of that night… of his betrayal, his hatred, fear, anger, sorrow. There was so much pain now with them. The younglings. The Order. He had caused their destruction. How could he be the Chosen One when he had caused the fall of the Order, of the Republic? Struggling, his soul started to show more red of the shame and fear. He looked to the memory of the slaughter of the Separatists first on Mustafar. It was now clear as the Force aided with the memory he had suppressed. Watching, he acknowledged the anger he had been harboring in that moment as Vader. Consumed by it, but then he let it fade into a light-emitting butterfly that joined the red ones of anger around him. The feelings started to fade, and as he slowly exhaled, his physical body started to levitate again.      Padmé watched, eyes soft as she held Leia close to herself, kissing her head sweetly. Anakin would forge his own path, she was sure of this now. He needed those he trusted beside him after being saved by her on Mustafar. She wasn’t thinking of the fate of the universe at that moment in time, she just wanted to save her husband.

Hi Teddy!

So what's your history? Like with ObiWan, Plo Koon, Din, etc???

-💫 anon

hi 💫 anon!

That's actually great that you've assigned yourself an emoji!

(YALL IF YOU DO THAT IN THE FUTURE THAT WOULD BE GREAT THANKS-)

I'm Anakin's sister, twin sister, but just a lil bit younger. I was taken to the temple with him, and originally was assigned to Master Plo. He's like my dad/uncle who collects children.

Note that I said originally.

Long story short: I was too gay for the Order. 🏳‍🌈 (well, bi, but still)

hehe...so um I decided to have a crush on a fellow Padawan, and as you can see, she was:

a) not gay and b) a total tattletale

So I was kicked out because "aTtAChMeNTs aRE fOrbiDdEN yOunG sKYwAlkEr" 🙄

But Master Plo convinced the council to keep me on to be a healer. I owe @104th-plo-koon everything. 🥰

I watched Anakin grow up...and did a bunch of illegal chaotic things with him. Obi-Wan basically had two Padawans, but since I was only allowed to use the force (in the temple, at least) to heal people, my connection/ability to use it...diminished, in a way.

Timeskip to the war.

The council decided to assign me to the 501st, so that I could keep an eye on my brother and so that Obi-Wan could keep and eye on us both. I met Ahsoka there, I smacked Anakin upside the head for being a jerk, yadayadayada, you get the idea.

But one day I was reassigned to Clone Force 99.

The Bad Batch.

Because they got into wayyyy too many incidents and the Republic was tired of spending medical funds on them. A Jedi Healer is cheaper.

And then I found out that Echo was still alive...

Funsies.

And then I somehow got separated from them??

And now there's Din, Obi-Wan, and Plo...from three different points along the time-line...

My best guess is that we're stuck in an alternate universe. My encounter with Vader told me that much. I'm dubbing it the HoloVerse...

And yeah!

Other info about me:

amab femme enby! she/ze

biromantic asexual!

chaotic!

i was dating echo...and now i have no idea so yeah

i found out that anakin was dating padme right after they came home from geonosis. cmon, i'm not stupid

IF YOU HAVE ANY IDEAS ON HOW TO GET OBI-WAN KENOBI AND DIN DJARIN TOGETHER, PLEASE SEND IT TO ME!!!

Anakin Assists the Jedi Council While On Medical Leave

AU brainstormed primarily by @atagotiak, @gelpenss, and myself.

Basically, a fix-it based in Anakin getting a peek into the daily life on the Council early, and accidentally Figuring Some Shit Out along the way, mostly because Palps Fucks Up.

So, Anakin gets injured in a way that limits him to Coruscant for a few weeks. He can still walk and talk, but he can't fight. The specific injury doesn't matter, just this:

Anakin runs errands on behalf of the council and sits in on meetings to take minutes as a "you're on medical leave but we need all hands on deck, congrats you get to be the secretary until we can send you on stabbing missions again" thing.

Also, there just aren't a whole lot of people with Anakin's clearance level. They had to send out Stass Allie to handle the mission that was originally next on Anakin's roster, and Anakin's the most convenient person to substitute into her position.

He's not super happy about this but he can more or less understand the point of it. Given that he gets antsy about needing to fight almost immediately, he can acknowledge the worth of having something useful to do, if only as the person who's writing down who says what and making sure everyone has the right file on hand.

(Besides, Obi-Wan jokes in a way that Anakin thinks might be encouraging, this is good practice if Anakin ever wants to be on the High Council himself!)

(This is a very helpful conversation.)

BASICALLY, Anakin is resigned to this but agrees because "Usually we have Master Allie handle this but we need her running that mission that was originally set for the 501st, so you get to fill in for her until you can switch back. Think of it as training for eventual mastery or admin or--listen, we're just really stretched thin."

Here's the key thing, though: Anakin isn't supposed to leave the Temple, for medical reasons, so Palpatine doesn't know Anakin is sitting in on Council meetings. They haven't met up since Anakin's last surgery, and because [muffled hand-wave reason] he didn't find out another way, like Anakin comming him or the Council giving him the heads-up about the change in attendance.

It's fine. He's just taking notes and doing preparatory research, he has the clearance, the Chancellor likes him anyway. Hell, they'd have had someone's Padawan doing this, before the war increased the necessary clearance levels. They'll toss in a quick message in the brief they send to Palps that he never reads anyway, and that's really all they need to do. Skywalker's getting some rounded experience and this way the medics won't be freaking out about him stressing his heart after getting electrocuted by trying to spar too early.

Palpatine doesn't talk directly to the Council, he just sends a recording the first time Anakin is there. It's a bit weird, but nothing goes wrong. Anakin's off-screen from whatever device they use to send a response, since he's not technically a member, just assisting for a bit on the part of Master Allie's duties that he's actually allowed to touch (and not the bits that are getting added to Mace, Plo, and Shaak's stuff).

The first four or so meetings are like that. Anakin starts having a bit of sympathy for the Council as he sees how many things they want to do that are hampered by the need for Senatorial approval, things that he would also want to do and didn't think required this much red tape.

About a week in, still mostly recordings with Anakin just sitting on the side playing paralegal, the wheel of fortune turns a few pegs.

Palpatine hands over a an order on the range of injury that a soldier should be treated for, "to ensure that republic resources aren't being wasted on clones that, while expensive, would actually be cheaper to replace than repair."

Oh, he dresses it up in prettier language than that. Anakin doesn't process it as such first.

The Chancellor manages to couch his phrasing in "prioritizing resources for taxpaying republic citizens and employees of the GAR," which... well.

The natborn commissioned officers pay taxes. The Jedi are employees. The clones are neither, because they're slaves.

Probably he frames it as the employees thing, very much the kinda language that sounds halfway ok unless you’re fluent in political bullshit.

And Anakin is really confused at first about why the council is upset by the order because, okay, he would PREFER to be able to use medical supplies on refugees when possible, but he understands prioritizing the soldiers?

He just looks up, totally lost, when someone groans and goes, "That's the third time this year, is he trying to get us all killed?"

And it vibes as such a genuine, aggrieved, sad reaction that Anakin is completely blindsided because it's not the sarcastic, petty resentment he kind of expected? It's just... desperate depression.

And someone gently has to explain that this is the third time they've had resources restricted to only GAR employees and that it's a polite way of saying "prioritize natborn officers, stop wasting resources on clones, we can replace them easier."

Or maybe he doesn't ask, because he's just there to take notes, not argue, and he can see the masters drawing up a response that amounts to "We would like to remind you that our soldiers do not fall into that classification, and to limit their access to our medical supplies is liable to cause a loss of life that we find unreasonably high. Please see the annotations attached to adjust wording so that the clones may receive the same level of care."

Anakin's internally just like "Yeah, that's phrased nice and addresses the main problem, Palpatine will obviously agree and change it!"

And then he comes in the next day and the response comes in and it's just dripping condescension about considering the clones actual people.

"This is why we can't use the bacta tanks on clones anymore, just the patches. We could use them at first, we had a few of the CCs get through fatal injuries with them, but they cut that off and said we could only use the tanks on Jedi and non-clone officers a few months ago. The Banking Clans keep tightening their belts on the army, and the Chancellor insists we put citizens first, and the clones aren't citizens. We've been arguing back as much as we can, but he keeps going on about the economy and we can't... we just can't, Skywalker. We're trying to save as many of our men as we can, but..."

Something like "Allocation of resources reiterated, the Kaminoans have assured the senate that the Jedi are far from exhausting the resources ordered."

And Anakin's like. He can't blame the council for lying about Palpatine's past or future actions. He just saw Palpatine's actions. Those actions were to order people under his control to throw away lives he saw as replaceable commodities.

These are his friends' lives.

His soldiers are being thrown away by a man in a tower that he trusted.

And then that man has the gall to suggest it's the council's fault.

Palpatine is good at what he does, especially in public, he dresses it up in flowery language and everything, but Anakin's just like "Those are my FRIENDS and also this is??? How slavers talked about their property on Tatooine???? FRIENDPATINE, WHAT THE FUCK."

Anakin can be passive aggressive sometimes as well as outright aggressive. So if he brings up the guidelines and why they make him upset in general terms, and Palpatine says something about how he’s sad the council doesn’t care about the clones...

Anakin, internally, having just watched the council scramble to save as many clones as possible within the guidelines that Palps handed down: Uh-huh.

(Anakin is just the gay horror teeth gif from queer eye.)

Just. “Yeah, funny you say that, Palpatine! Because as I remember, you told the council not to waste more resources than necessary while Mace Windu was arguing to expand the treatment range!”

Palps doesn't even have time to salvage the situation or attack Anakin because Anakin just bulldoze rants for fifteen minutes and then storms out.

Anakin... maybe does a little treason and gets a copy of the orders so he can ask Padme "Hey, can you explain the politics of this?" and doesn't tell her who wrote it so she isn't biased (he tells her that this is why he's not sharing the author's/speaker's name), and just lets Padme pick apart all the 'this is a nice way of saying they don't view the clones as people' details.

Alternately, someone on the Council sees Anakin dithering and manages to get him to admit that he's not great at political language and wants to ask someone to help him understand the full implications. The person--Mace? let's go with Mace--is aware that Anakin is on good terms with Senator Amidala, if not necessarily aware of the depth of said relationship. Mace points out that he's probably going to be seeing her soon just because he usually does and, as a Senator, she can get easy access to these sessions since they're not about specific missions, just allocation of resources, etc. It's not an optimal solution, but she's got a bit more free time than anyone else Anakin knows with the clearance levels, like Order members that are actively involved in the war effort.

Anakin dithers and panics and Mace, trying to be helpful, tells him that plenty of Jedi have made friends among the Senate over the years, didn't you know Qui-Gon Jinn was a personal friend of Former Chancellor Valorum?

At any rate, Anakin goes to Padme and asks her to explain it to him, because she knows how to phrase things so he gets it.

Anakin has to have her pause and he goes outside and destroys some things halfway through.

(Anakin maybe thinks back to the times Padmé or Obi-Wan were really obviously frustrated and when he asked, they said stuff like “I can’t stand Palpatine rn, sorry Anakin I know he’s important to you and you don’t want to talk about politics, let’s just talk about something else.”)

(Obi-Wan: I don’t trust Palpatine Anakin: you just don’t like politicians in general Obi-Wan: yes that is also true)

(Obi-Wan does like Bail and Padme but he does also talk a bit about how politicians generally aren’t to be trusted.)

So much of the criticism against the Jedi is stupid and I do not understand people who try to argue that they are the real bad guys at all. However, there are things I think they did wrong. I think they made mistakes and didn't handle certain situations in this best way. Would that mean I'm considered anti-Jedi or could I still be in the pro-Jedi part of the fandom?

Honestly, that's up to you to decide, not me. An unhelpful answer, I'm sorry. 😂 I might have my personal opinions on stuff, but I don't get to decide whether you're pro-Jedi or anti-Jedi, any more than someone gets to decide if I'm pro-Anakin or anti-Anakin, because I criticize some of the stuff he does. If you want my view on things, for me, what it comes down to (in a very, very broad sense, there are always going to be exceptions and each situation should be taken individually, etc.) is in whether there's empathy for the Jedi in the choices they made and why they made them. With me, I don't think joining the war was necessarily the right thing to do, for example. But I defend their choice because I'm not sure what other feasible choices there were when the Republic was set up the way it was (and wouldn't have allowed them to do whatever else they would have wanted) and when there were real lives in danger because the Separatists were murdering and enslaving people, because the Separatists were using people as living shields, because the Separatists were using bio-chemical warfare on worlds. That doesn't mean I think they were actually perfect angels descended from heaven to the mortal plane (much as I joke about it), but that I understand why they made the choice they did, given the limited options they had and can see why it would come across as the only choice, given what the Separatists were doing and who they were trying to protect. Or, like with Obi-Wan, I don't think his decision to keep Anakin in the dark about faking his death was necessarily the right decision, but I understand why I think he did it and I don't disagree with his reasons, especially considering that--from his point of view--the Chancellor's life was indeed on the line and Anakin telling that secret to people (as he is wont to do) could have cost both that life and Obi-Wan's own, if this wasn't a convincing operation. The above are just examples for me personally, not ones meant to start a discussion or anything, but instead to illustrate where I myself think being a pro-Jedi fan is--I have empathy for the choices made and the circumstances that brought about the decisions and the context of often times a lack of other feasible options that would have worked within the setting of the story. But that's my definition and it's not really up to me to declare you either pro or anti, certainly not when it comes to the broad strokes. As for what you're asking in the final bit, without knowing more specifics about you or your situation (and even then WHO KNOWS, PROBABLY NOT ME 😂), I may be off the mark with this, but from my personal experience, here's what I generally find happens: A bunch of Jedi-critical people tend to make a lot of passive aggressive comments about how pro-Jedi fans are annoying for their opinions or have no nuance or don't really understand Star Wars. A lot of pro-Jedi fans are tired of having a) constant, CONSTANT arguments on our posts (I get comments like this literally every single day and I try to mostly let them go, but after awhile it shuts down any urge I have to discuss things with any criticism because it goes nowhere and it keeps getting shoved onto me when I didn't ask for it, which, you know, fair enough, it's the internet, but also I am but one person and it's A Lot after awhile) and so we start drawing firmer lands in the sand because sometimes we just want to have fun celebrating or talking about our faves and yet we constantly get crap about it, in the way that, for example, a Luke Skywalker Is Pure Human Sunshine fan wouldn't. I have no problem with people who are 100% serious that Luke's never done anything wrong in his life! But if I'm going to hear people snidely saying, "Let! People! Have! Flaws!" about the Jedi well, it's hard not to see a double standard when I never see that being applied to Luke fans or Ahsoka fans. (And I don't think it should be applied to them, either!) Nor do I have a problem with people who have criticisms of the Jedi, because not everyone is like the above, I'm

friends with several chill people! I get along with them just fine! But, generally, they're people who respect others' boundaries, understand that arguing about fictional stories isn't more important than the actual person you're having a discussion with, understand that it's possible to disagree without thinking the other person doesn't ~understand~ Star Wars, understand that Jedi fans deal with a lot of shit in this hell fandom (we're not the only ones by any means, but we do get it) and maybe have a little extra care sometimes. I can't speak for any of the rest of fandom, aside from telling you my generalized observations and my own experiences. I can only tell you that, as long as you're kind to other fans, as long as you're willing to give them the same space that you are due in return, I think you can put yourself wherever you like in whatever section of fandom that you want!  (And, for what it’s worth, this comment didn’t ping my senses at all, so I suspect you’d be fine. 💕)

Architect!

Architect : Name the three most important things for you to plan

1. My keystone scenes -- these are the scenes that I'll plot and write the story around, the ones that get stuck in my head and won't come out. It's helpful if I have multiple keystone scenes that fit into different points in the story, since then I can plot the connective tissue by essentially leapfrogging from keystone scene to keystone scene -- for example, Backbone's are the Ahsoka telling Cham about Hera, Cham and Alecto shooting Kanan, Kanan with both red and blue lightsabers on Mustafar (a lot of people thought this was a reference to Shroud of Darkness, but it was actually planned almost a year before that ep aired), Hera's reunion with her parents, the assassination attempt on Cham, and Ahsoka giving Kanan back his lightsabers. (I might be forgetting one or two because it's been a while.) These don't all develop at once; a lot of them will come into being as the early connective tissue gets develops and then become keystones to write towards and around. They don't always stay in their original forms, either -- one of Gambit's keystones was the massacre in the Naboo throne room, but it was originally intended to be Amidala rather than Sabe.

My concept writing tends to be ideas where I only have one or two keystones, because I need at least half a dozen at various points in the timeline to actually be able to plan a full plot. I usually start with a keystone scene (Anakin talking to Obi-Wan's ghost in the vents in Wake, Loki meeting Frigga in the halls of the TVA in Morning) and roll it around in my head as other keystone scenes develop (Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Yoda's conversation + Anakin seeing the Operation Knightfall footage + Anakin pulling Obi-Wan back into his flesh + Anakin vs. Vader on Mustafar in Wake), and then work out the connective tissue to get between those points. One of the reasons that Crown's been stalled is because I have beginning and middle keystones, but not ending ones.

(Morning does have top/middle/end keystones, for the record.)

2. Emotional resonance/theming -- I don't necessarily sit down and go "this is a story about HOPE," but a lot of the time the emotional resonance and thematic notes develops along with the plot and keystones. The Ouroboros trilogy (currently at two out of three) focuses each AU on a reflection of each PT trio member's "worst case scenario" -- Anakin's nightmare universe is, uh, well, the OT canon, where he went to the dark side trying to do the right thing and got everyone he knew killed; Padme's nightmare universe is the one where she dragged a Jedi Knight away from the Order and turned away from the her faith in the Republic and was responsible for the start of a galactic war; Obi-Wan's is the one where his failure led to the destruction of the Republic and the shattering of the Order and where he can't trust the Force anymore. Backbone is a story about identity and faith and family, blood and chosen, and how to get out of a bad situation when you can't admit to yourself it's a bad situation. (So, uh, I got out of an abusive relationship in the middle of Backbone and about six months after that I was rereading what I'd written to date and went yikes, wow, was I ever working through some stuff.)

3. So I'm not a huge fan of the term "fix-it fic," but as someone who writes exclusively AU fanfic, what I'm nearly always aiming for isn't "what canon didn't do," it's "what canon couldn't (or wouldn't) do" -- whether it's because that story has always been told and with rare exception, canon doesn't outright AU itself, or because they're not going to tell ~that kind of story (whether that's sex, violence, darkness, etc.), or because like, they've got their release schedule plotted out for the next ten years and you know the characters aren't going to intersect -- whatever. Star Wars is not going to tell an OT era story where Luke Skywalker is not the big damn hero who saves the galaxy, because, well, the OT exists, but I want to tell the story where that role is played by someone else. Marvel is not going to give me my Asgardian royal family reunion where every single person involved is from a different point in the timeline and from a slightly different universe, but I want to write that story, and while I'm at it I'm going to AU five different movies as a result so that those movies turn out the way I'd have liked, but in order to do that, I have to know those films inside out. I never want to write a fanfic I can scrape the serial numbers off of and get a perfectly intelligible original fic out of, because for me, that's a failed fanfic. I want my fanfic so deeply rooted in canon, no matter how AU it is, that it cannot be disengaged from its canon context. Which doesn't mean it can't be read by someone who's not familiar with the canon -- I got a lot of non-Rebels viewers who read Backbone -- but that as a story it cannot exist without the canon it's based on. And that's a thing I think about a lot while I'm plotting, because if I didn't want to do that? I wouldn't be writing fanfic.

ohh i saw your answer about the sequels of star wars. id love to read you tear through the whole trilogy

Well, I’ve avoided this ask long enough. Part of the reason is this is really a huge topic, far too much for one ask, so I’m going to have to do this at a very high level.

In short, the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy is what one gets when you slap together the goal of selling merchandise and making tons of money, being as risk averse as humanly possible, adding a handful of warring directors with incredibly different visions, and having virtually no imagination when it comes to the imagining and writing of characters.

And we get this beautiful, awful, franchise that for reasons beyond me people seem to actually like (though interestingly, no one seems to like all of it, they may actually like one or two of the films, but no one says all three are actually in any realm of good).

With that, let’s begin.

The Force Awakens

For me this is easily the most tolerable of the sequel trilogy: it’s not great, it’s not terrible. It’s thoroughly watchable, you can be taken along for the movie’s journey and not raise your eyebrows too much at the action and leave the theater feeling this maybe wasn’t a complete waste of your time.

There’s a good reason for that. That reason is called the most blatant form of plagiarism I have ever seen in cinema in my life.

“The Force Awakens” is just “A New Hope” wearing a mustache. Only, it’s one of those cheap mustaches you get from a party store that, if you stare at it too long, just looks like the most false and awful thing you’ve ever seen. The mustache actively makes it worse. “The Force Awakens” is “A New Hope”, but worse.

Seriously, every major character, every major plot point, every major scene I can go directly back to “A New Hope”.

Our story begins when the Resistance, at great cost to our valiant heroes including torture at the hands of the Emperor’s second in command, sends a file out into the wilderness to be received by his people. This file contains plans for the Death Star.

The film then focuses on Luke, er Rey, getting involved in the Resistance, boarding the Death Star, and successfully destroying at the same time even at the lost of a beloved mentor that she just met (trading in Obi-Wan for Han Solo). 

Our evil empire is run by an evil emperor who is so evil he sits in a chair, is served by very Moth Tarkin-esque human storm troopers, and has a second in command who revels in the Darth Vader get up (for no other reason that it makes him feel cool but we’ll get into this).

It’s “A New Hope”. Rey is Luke, Han Solo is Obi-Wan, Poe is a kind of Han Solo, Kylo Ren is Vader, Snoke is Palpatine, Hux is Tarkin, BB-8 is R2-D2, etc.

“But that’s not terrible,” you say, “I liked A New Hope?”

First, it is terrible, it gives a very bad sign of where the sequel trilogy is headed and is just lazy writing. It means that those who produced this franchise were so terrified of taking risks, of possibly ending up mocked as the prequels were, that they will deliver exactly what the original trilogy was. And what’s that? Uh, evil empires, scrappy desert kids, AND MORE DEATH STARS!

That brings us to point number two, the world of Star Wars after the events of the original trilogy shouldn’t support such things. And, if it does, my god what a bleak existence this place has turned into.

The First Order being able to rise easily from the Empire’s remains means that Luke accomplished nothing. Anakin sacrificed himself and had his moment of redemption for nothing. There was no happy ending to the Original Trilogy, our heroes failed miserably, and there is no indication that our new band of heroes can possibly succeed in their place. (More on this as the movies progress).

We now are in a galaxy where this new Republic is so pathetic that Leia doesn’t even give it the time of day and builds her own private army to battle the Empire. The First Order is able to not only rebuild a massive army by raiding villages on many different worlds and stealing children and do so successfully for at least ten years but is able to build a Death Star bigger than any we’ve ever seen before. 

And the movie tries to convince us these are completely new problems, that Luke Skywalker is a hero (remember this is TFA, not TLJ yet), and that somehow these things just sprung up out of nowhere. BUT YEAH, RESISTANCE, WOO!

As for Rey, she’s like... a worse version of Luke. Her only motivation through the entire series is her trauma at being abandoned by her parents. That’s it, there’s nothing else to her, nothing else she ever wants or feels conflicted by. She struggles with the dark side because... the dark side? Genetics? Unclear? She’s absurdly, ridiculously, powerful in a way that’s acknowledged but never that acknowledged (we’ll get into this) and the movies just fail to sell me on her in any way.

Honestly, an easy fix for me would have just been making Rey a much younger character. I could believe a fourteen-year-old having stayed in the desert, scrounging for scraps, believing her parents are coming back every day now. As a twenty-something year old... It starts getting hard to believe she never left. (Also, this gets the benefit of getting rid of Reylo, which is always a plus for me).

As for Kylo Ren, I legitimately walked out of TFA thinking he was supposed to be comic relief. He’s what happens when someone desperately wants a likable, redeemable, villain and we get... Well, as a reminder his opening scene is one of genocide: he pillages and destroys a town with no regret and brutally tortures a man for information. We’re told he’s like this “because evil evil Snoke” and that may well be but throughout the film (and the series) it becomes clear that Kylo Ren’s main motivation is he deseprately wants to be cool. He wants to be a badass like Vader, he dresses in Vader cosplay (either ignoring or not knowing that Vader only dressed like that because his body was completely destroyed), he has these huge temper tantrums and nobody respects him because he’s a toddler in a Vader suit. 

He murders his own father, his parents who (at least in the films themselves) show every willingness to take him back and forgive him what he’s done, so that he can fully embrace his own “evilness”. In other words, he commits patricide to feel cool about himself, then it doesn’t work. 

And the movie series really banks on me feeling conflicted about Kylo Ren or at least wanting him to be redeemed. Granted, the wider internet seems to love him, I just can’t.

Oh, before I forget, the other thing I love about Kylo Ren is that the movies insist he’s a) strong in the Force b) is equal to Rey. Rey consistently beats the shit out of him with 0 training. Kylo Ren has been training in the Force for years. Guys, they are not a Dyad, Rey is far far far stronger than he is and for whatever reason the films never want to admit it. Because I guess we like things coming in pairs now.

But yes, “The Force Awakens”, at a distance not great nor terrible, but a rip off of a movie we’ve already seen that left me going “Welp, the next one’s probably The Empire Strikes Back then I guess we’re getting Ewoks”. I was sort of right on that and sort of wrong.

The Last Jedi

So, JJ Abrams clearly had a vision of where he wanted this sequel trilogy to go. He set up these big questions such as what’s up with Finn, who are Rey’s parents and why was she left on this nowhere planet, will Kylo Ren be redeemed and how, who is Snoke, etc.

Now, I’m not saying these aren’t stupid questions. To be frank, they kind of are. Finn being Force Sensitive was the most inconsequential thing I’ve ever heard of, Rey’s parents should not have been used to drive the plot the way it was, as spoken above I’m clearly team gut Kylo Ren, and that Snoke was actually just Palpatine being the world’s largest cockroach is a beautiful but hilarious answer.

That said, what Johnson did was he decided, “You know what, I’m going to take every trope of Star Wars and completely flip it on its head and absolutely doom the sequel to this movie.”

And by god, he did.

We get a weirdly pointless movie in which Poe, SINGLEHANDEDLY, completely obliterates the Resistance. He first obliterates their bombers by failing to follow command, then goes and bitches about how he’s not put in command when he clearly shows no ability to understand how a military works, actively subverts orders which in turn obliterates the entire Resistance fleet until the only survivors can fit on the Millenium Falcon. They have no ships, no weapons, barely any people, and are ultimately doomed doomed doomed.

We have Finn’s weird subplot with a suddenly introduced character Rose in which the pair aid in Poe’s blowing up the resistance (they send sensitive information using the communication equipment of a guy they do not know, who fully admits to being shady and out for his own skin, and are flabergasted when he betrays them). 

Rose herself is this weirdly sweet person who seems forced into the plot to a) provide a love triangle for Finn and Rey b) provide this forced sunny outlook that I didn’t really need in the film.

We get Rey never really being trained, going into the Cave of Wonders for a few seconds, falling in love with Kylo Ren over weird Force Skype calls (where I did not need to see him shirtless, thank you film) and being horrifically betrayed when Kylo Ren turns out not to be a great guy. Never saw that coming, Rey. 

As for Kylo Ren, well... God, we get Emperor Kylo Ren. Kylo Ren, the Emperor. I’m not even that upset about the anticlimactic murder of Snoke (that was kind of funny, especially in the context of Palpatine going, “Bitch, please, you’re in my chair” immediately in the next film) but just Kylo Ren being emperor. And also that the Resistance only escapes at all because he’s so dumb he made their dumb plans seem smart (i.e. concentrates all his firepower on an illusion for ten minutes while Hux goes, “Emperor, sir, we could actually destroy the Resistance right now.”

Now, you’ll notice I didn’t complain about Luke. A lot of people are upset he became a grumpy, miserable, old hermit who sits around waiting for death. Frankly though, in this universe, that’s exactly where he is. He left “Return of the Jedi” thinking he’d saved the world, he’s resurrected the Jedi Order, and all is well. Only a decade later, his students are all murdered by his nephew, the Empire’s back, and he accomplished nothing. He’s an utter failure as a Jedi (though Luke never realizes he knew jack shit about the Jedi Order and was in way over his head but I guess that’s beyond him). Why shouldn’t he go sit on a rock and wait to die? 

Now, did he have to drink that blue dinosaur milk? Well, I guess it was funny, gross but funny so... Sure, I guess he did. But I do like that he gave Rey 0 training, they had one meditation session and then he whined about how Obi-Wan was such a stupid asshole. And then Rey ran off to be with her boyfriend, who then told her that her parents were gutter trash (which again, was funny, but I don’t think that was supposed to be funny).

Of the characters introduced in the movie, the only one I really liked was the hacker, and it was for the actor/the beautiful way in which he gracefully exited stage left with zero shame going, “You all knew I was going to betray you!” You beautiful man, you.

Rise of the Skywalker

First, when something is called “Rise of the Skywalker” you know you’re in for a rough time.

But anyways, TLJ was filled with a controversy Disney didn’t want (half their audience hated it, half loved it, but at least they sold those penguin dolls) so they desperately get Abrams back. Only, what he clearly wanted from his series has been shot to hell, and now he’s left with Emperor Kylo Ren, a completely obliterated Resistance, a dead Luke, a love interest he never planned to introduce for Finn, Rey’s parental crisis being solved with trash people, Snoke just suddenly dead, Hux planning revenge, and then some.

And so, Abrams goes the brave and hilarious route of shouting “PRETEND THAT LAST MOVIE NEVER HAPPENED”

We open to a fully functioning Resistance (their bomber fleet is back, their fleet period is back, they have all their fully trained personnel). We have Rey getting the Jedi training she needed this time from Leia, who is now a Jedi, because yay feminism rammed down my throat to make the audience feel better. Rose says “It’s cool guys, I don’t want to join the adventure this film, I’m going to stay here and work on robots” so that she can gracefully exit the entire plot. Kylo Ren is demoted from Emperor in two seconds when we discover that a) Snoke was apparently Palpatine b) for unexplained reasons Palpatine’s alive (and I am now convinced that man will never die). Kylo Ren tells Rey at the first opportunity that he lied about her trash parents AND REALLY SHE’S A PALPATINE! THIS WHOLE TIME, REY! THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT. I’M SUPER SERIAL THIS TIME, REY.

Basically, in the course of an overly long movie, Abrams desperately shoves in everything he was trying to get out of the series, while sobbing, and sobbing even harder when things like Finn being Force Sensitive or Lando having a secret daughter get caught. I actually agree with the Producers on this, by the way, the Finn trying to tell Rey something scenes were weird and indicative of a love triangle but him being Force Sensitive instead... It says a lot that the movies did not change when it was removed, at all. And Lando was just this strange cameo who was in the film to make us feel nostalgic.

And this isn’t even getting to the ridiculous 24 hour time limit (which made me think there should have been some video game style clock in the corner letting us know when Dawn of the Third Day is coming), Palpatine’s other secret army on a secret Sith planet that can be easily taken down by taking out one navigation tower, Rey’s hilarious struggle with the dark side in which she has a vision of herself in a cape hissing, Kylo Ren’s hilarious redemption in which the movie in the form of Leia and Han Solo says, “Alright, Ben, it’s time to stop being evil” and he says “okay”, the fight with Palpatine in which I’m supposed to believe he dies for reals because... I have no idea why I’m supposed to believe he’s dead. The Reylo, god the Reylo, and Kylo Ren’s tragic, hilarious, death.

And then, of course, the ending where Rey decides she’s a Skywalker now.

I actually did laugh all the way through “Rise of the Skywalker”, you can’t not, I mean it’s a hilariously awful movie. The only thing that might have made it more hilarious was if we actually did get those Ewoks.

TL;DR

They’re all bad movies, if you want more specifics than this, you’re just going to have to ask me questions.

my privilege, my honor | rex

this was a concept i could not pass up when i got into this conversation with someone on twitter. dad!rex is life. this’ll be split up into parts within a whole (finding out you’re pregnant, pregnancy, birth, life after, etc) and is au in which the war is won by the republic and the clones are freed because i SAID SO.

this is long rip me - i worked all afternoon on this please give me something 

also, rex&munitions!reader live on naboo in the back country where padmé wanted to raise the twins and does because AU!!!!

tag: @obiorbenkenobi​ // @icanbringyouincold​ // @thegoodbatch​ // @amazinggraceling​ // @cxptain-rex​ // @spaghetti-666​ // @kaikai1324​ // @jellyfishpoptart​ // @colorfulloverbatturkey​

In the back corner of the lake country on Naboo, there lives a soldier. Well... he doesn’t call himself that anymore. Not since they won the war. The story that you are familiar with is different in other universes. Less people die. Grief is openly felt and not hidden, mourning happens for the fallen, The Republic works together to unite against a common enemy.

In this story, Anakin Skywalker does not fall. Ahsoka Tano is soon treated with dignity and respect and eventually returns to The Jedi Order. Obi-Wan Kenobi is given the help he needs to be the best Jedi he can be. This story is much happier because they won the war here. Anakin discovers the threat of the Sith far before it’s too late, and Sheev Palpatine remains nothing but a corpse with a soul that has gone to the stars.

In this story, darkness does not prevail. Light does.

Padmé Amidala-Skywalker is a genius. A renowned politician of The Senate and former Queen of Naboo, she works closely with the clones and specific Jedi who advocate for them to ensure they are no longer treated as Republic property and are treated as the people who have earned their right to freedom.

When Cody comes to the barracks to announce to his vod that the bill was passed through the senate, the clones are too riled up to sleep and thus throw the biggest celebration of a lifetime.

In a back corner of Seventy Nines far away from the prying eyes of his brothers and against a wall adjacent to the rear door, Rex kisses the living daylights out of you. You are no longer committed to the GAR and he’s free - he didn’t think he’d ever get to the point where he’d be considered a man and not a weapon - but the way your fingers thread tightly through his hair and your knee slots between his legs to pin him against that wall is the most freeing thing Rex has done in his life. 

Because he can do this now. He’s allowed to show his love in front of everybody. 

  “Rex,” Your voice is thick with the drink you’d been consuming before you’d dragged him over here as you pull away just enough to meet his eyes in the darkness. “Take me.” 

Had this been a year ago or more, Rex would’ve been so stunned by your demand that he would’ve paid for a cab like the good gentleman he was (with Skywalkers credit chit of course) and taken you back to the barracks to hide away in your quarters where he could take you in a bed.. but that’s not Rex now. No. Rex now is desperate and wanting. 

  “Bathroom?” 

  “Bathroom.” 

The spare bathroom at the back of the bar is exactly what you need, and before you know it, the Clone Commander has your legs wrapped around his waist and your body poised on the sink. It’s a good thing you’d jimmied the lock on the door to buy yourself enough time to be ravished. 

By the time Fives and Echo find you both, you’re walking out of the bathroom looking more guilty then you should but you can’t stop smiling because of how flustered you’d managed to make Rex in..

  “I think that’s the fastest quickie we’ve ever done.” You nudge his hip with your own and sling your arm around his waist to pull him against you. 

  “What’s the record now?” 

Oh, of course he’s been keeping track. Kriffing di’kut. 

  “Six and a half minutes.” 

You’re really hoping that Rex isn’t the type to brag about this to his brothers, but if he is, you’d rather him do it when you’re not around. He has to clean up his meager amount of belongings from the GAR barracks before meeting Cody to discuss transport to the planets that gave given permission for the clones to be granted citizenship. 

One of them is Naboo. Skywalker and Amidala have already made their way there after the birth of their twins and Anakin leaving The Order, but you have a couple of people you want to say goodbye to before this is really over. Before you all go your separate ways to live your own lives. 

But oh.. no matter where, you’ll love them all. They’re the only family you’ve had and will always have. It’s not goodbye forever. It’s just the end with another beginning on its way. 

  “I’ll see you later, cyar’ika.” He kisses your temple and allows Cody and Jesse to take him away for one last night together with his brothers. You watch him go with a fond smile. He deserves this. 

The minute you get back to your quarters, the first thing you do is call Padmé Amidala. 

***

Well, if you’re gonna find out about this, you’d rather it be this way then by your own panic. 

You and Rex are welcomed by Padmé and Anakin on Naboo in the Naberrie family home until they’re able to procure their own house, and Anakin seemed to be.. ah.. attuned to something in The Force that was swirling around you. Rex and Padmé are in the nursery tending to the twins - he loves them and you love how much he loves them - but Anakin has kept you behind to talk about what is clearly bothering him more then it’s bothering you. 

  “Wait-Are you serious?” You ask skeptically. “I know you had your opinions about me, Skywalker, but I treat your former commander with reverence and if this is some cruel joke-” 

Anakin held up a hand. “I could tell with Padmé pretty quickly. It’s not hard to tell with The Force, and you’re practically glowing even without being Force Sensitive.” Both your eyes slid to the balcony where you could very clearly see Rex sitting in one of the chairs while Padmé fed Luke, who was now a couple of months old, and blew raspberries on Leia’s stomach to elicit a screech from the baby girl. 

Your heart clenches. That’s... that’s so stupidly cute. And he’s.. he’s smiling. 

  “You should tell him.” Anakin whispers. “I know Rex was skeptical about having a family at the start of the war when he met that deserter.. but honestly, I think he’s reconsidered it since he met you.” The man who had very very quickly become like your brother rested his head against your own as you exhaled a very slow breath. “Tell him.” 

You do tell him later on that night long after Padmé and Anakin go to bed. He goes wide eyed at the remark - because how on EARTH are YOU going to create and carry a human inside your body?! - and you’re almost expecting him to cry, which he does, but there’s happy tears and disbelieving laughter and before you know it, he’s spinning you around the living room and burying his face in your shoulder as you celebrate yet another victory for you both. 

When Rex goes to sleep that night with Luke in his arm and Leia against your chest (you’re really interim parents so the Skywalkers can sleep) he dreams about Cody and his brothers joy for his future niece or nephew. 

The first thing you see upon waking up that morning is the life-size holo of Cody, Wolffe and Jesse who are cheering in strings of Mando’a that you can’t make out well, but you know what they’re so joyful about. They’re gonna have a niece. A nephew. 

In front of them, your former soldier smiles so widely that it sharpens the tears that pool in his eyes. 

***

In the back corner of the lake country on Naboo, former soldiers get to work building a house. A house not made by hands - that’s not all - but by and with love and hope. 

Laughter echoed in the fields of wildflowers as you watch Cody and Rex hurl insults at one another when something doesn’t quite go the way they want it to. After your pregnancy announcement and the wedding - which was just as exciting as the pregnancy - Rex had ultimately come to one decision: He loved General Skywalker but not enough to live with him, his wife, and his two twins. 

Rex wants his own home which means he’s gonna build it with his own hands and the help of his insufferable brothers. 

Walking through the fields of wildflowers that are just outside the area Rex has chosen to hold the foundations of your new home, you hum quietly to yourself as you take flowers and begin to braid them into your hair. 

In the distance, Wolffe yells something crude in Mando’a that makes Jesse laugh hard enough to the point where if Kix hadn’t been there to catch him by his blacks, he would’ve fallen off the roof. 

  “Cyar’ika, c’mere!” 

Rex appears just inside what’s supposed to be your front door. He’s really acclimated to the climate of Naboo - even going as far as to let his hair grow out more then it had been during the war - and he’s wearing a shirt with no sleeves which shows the tattoo he’d gotten when the Clone Wars had ended. 

He’s beautiful. Seriously. 

  “Is someone injured?” You cast a skeptical look at Cody, Boil and Wooley who are looking at a rough sketch Rex had done on his datapad for what he planned for this house to look like. “Maybe Jesse’s dignity? Fives will to live?” 

  “I heard that!”

  “No.. no.” Rex shakes his head and wraps his arms around your middle, hands coming to comfortably rest on the swell of your stomach. You’re only a couple of months along and are just barely beginning to show, but that doesn’t mean he won’t touch that bump every single change he gets. “I just want you to look at it with me.” Both pairs of eyes flicker to the house in front of you. “It’s ours. Our home.” 

Yours. 

That sounds like a dream. 

*** 

Rex is, without a doubt, the best person you could’ve chosen to be the father of your child. He purchases a speeder after a little haggling with a trader in Theed and accompanies you to all your appointments, uses the credits Anakin had given him that he’d accumulated from his time in The Order to buy the food you most crave, and wakes up to be your personal pillow when you’re heavily pregnant and cannot for the life of you find a comfortable sleeping position. 

By the time your delivery comes, he’s practically a walking disaster that somehow manages to inform Padmé, Anakin and Ahsoka (who had been there that week to visit her brother and her nephew/niece) about the delivery and to meet you at the medical station in Theed. 

You don’t know this, but his brothers come too. The waiting room is filled with anxious uncles. 

After a nearly effortless delivery on your part, you were staring up at your husband as he was handed your daughter by the medical droid. 

It’s like the sun admiring all the stars in the galaxy. Rex looks at your daughter like he cannot believe you just birthed something so beautiful, and for a moment... you allow yourself to weep at just how awed the man is by the sight of his own child. 

  “Rex-” You croak, gasping for breaths between your tears as you motion to your husband. “That’s your kih ad.” 

Amber irises flicker over to meet yours as your daughter lets out a wail so loud that Rex cannnot seem to comprehend that a creature that tiny just made such a sound. 

  “What do you want to name her?” He asks as he hands his little girl back over to you reluctantly, clearly wishing to keep hold of her for a little while longer before handing her off to the medical droid for cleaning. “She’s not just my daughter, you know.” 

  “Alaia.” You say it so quickly and without hesitation that Rex is taken a back by how sure you are. “It means joy.” 

Considering how much joy that little girl ends up bringing to your lives, there’s no surprise that’s the name you choose. And oh.. speaking of joy.. it’s only mere days later when Rex finally lets his brothers - who had barely left the waiting room other then to go back to your cottage and refresh themselves - see their niece, it’s like a stampede of over eager children coming into your hospital room. 

Cody brings you flowers. He’s respectful like that. Jesse is just too thrilled at the prospect of having a niece that he too brings you flowers, but they’re native to Naboo. If you’re right.. they come from outside your home. 

The sight is enough to make you lean out of bed just enough to kiss his cheek. He swoons at the gesture and nearly passes out. Di’kut. 

The remaining members of The Wolf Pack who had been given citizenship on a world in the Inner Rim with the help of Plo-Koon follow suit the day that you’re discharged from the hospital because they’ve been tending to your house in the absence of their brother, and Wolffe is the one you see first. 

He doesn’t tend to come around alot but the sight of him and how he gasps at the sight of the child in your arms is enough to make you beam for the millionth time. All the clones are surprised by the sight of a baby. That doesn’t address the fact that said baby is the child of a clone. 

It’s like a dream come true for them. 

 “Skywalker’s wife said you’d like this, and so did Tano.” He holds up a bright pink onesie that reads proud niece of a million uncles and the sight of it is enough to make you laugh so hard you wheeze because that is so something Anakin and Ahsoka would find hilarious. 

Alaia wears it to bed for her first night in your home. 

***

alaia - five months old 

Maker.. there’s alot of stars out tonight. 

At the cry of your daughters voice, Rex peels himself away from the warmth of your body and rubs the sleep from his eyes before moving across the master bedroom to retrieve his little girl from her crib. 

The same crib that had taken him, Fives, Cody and Echo to build. Cody and Echo ended up having to do it because Rex had Fives in a headlock by the time they were halfway through assembling the kriffing thing. 

  “Alaia, ner ad,” He whispers lowly, scooping the baby from her crib and moving to the balcony before quietly shutting the door behind him. It’s not often that he’s unable to sleep anymore. There are rare occasions, like tonight, which memories of the war keep him awake. The nightmares stopped a long time ago. He’s at peace now. Mostly. “Sh.. sweet pea. We don’t want to wake your mother.” 

Just as he’s done since you made him aware that she was teething, Rex nudges her lips open and allows Alaia to suck on his fingertip. She goes quiet immediately at the relief it brings. 

  “You know, I don’t know if you dream.. but I do. I dream about the war. If you dream... I hope you dream about me and your mom. I want to be a good father. It’s better then not having a dad at all like I didn’t.” 

He goes silent at that. The closest thing he’d ever had to a father was Kenobi, and even he had been more like a brother to the clones by the end of the war. Anakin was just... he had his own struggles, he’d trusted Rex with information he couldn’t even trust Obi-Wan with and the thought of being so wholly trusted by someone again terrifies him. 

That will be his daughter. His undoing will be how much she trusts him, and it’ll be how much he loves her and you. 

On the balcony of a cottage home in the lake country on Naboo, a former soldier sleeps, and his infant daughter dreams. Together they are bathed in starlight. 

*** 

Alaia - five years old 

When Alaia is old enough to take into the fields outside of your house, you sit on the porch and watch Rex trek into the wildflowers with his little girl on his shoulders. 

You watch from the porch with a cup of tea as your little girl toddles through the flowers that have just recently sprouted from the ground, and she yanks with all the might her little arms have to begin pulling them out. 

Rex has been rather - ah- adamant that he’s going to keep his hair longer then it’s been in years. It’s not too long to curl over his ears, but it’s definitely not the normal haircut you’d grown so used to seeing on him. 

Conveniently, for Alaia, it’s just long enough to stick flowers in. 

  “Oh, oh no. This I have to take part in.” You set down your cup of tea and move from the porch to meet your husband and daughter in the field. “Rex, cyar’ika, you know what this means.” 

  “Flower crowns, Mommy!” Alaia yells. “Flower crowns for daddy!” 

The man is beaming as you sit down crosslegged and begin weaving the flowers together until you’re confident in your crown, and you turn towards Rex to place it gently against his forehead. 

  “A crown fit for a King.” 

He smirks at you in that way that reminds you way too much of Anakin’s smugness and you quietly curse under your breath at the effect your former General had on his former Commander. 

  “Now we need a crown fit for a Queen and a princess.” Alaia screeches as Rex’s arms wind around her waist and his fingers dig into her stomach which elicits such a high pitched laughter you can’t help but smile at, and while you work on weaving two more crowns, Rex lays his daughter across his hands vertically and begins waving her little body around. 

  “Look Mommy!” Alaia cries out, face pinched in concentration as she sticks her arms out in front of her. “I’m flying!” 

Fly high, little one. 

***

In the lake country of Naboo lives a former soldier, a former officer and their daughter. Their daughter grows up surrounded by her uncles - Jesse, Fives, Echo and Cody are her favorites - and she learns Mando’a so quickly that by the time she’s eight, Alaia is as fluent as her uncles. 

She grows up hearing stories about the uncles she lost. Her uncle Boil cries when he talks about Umbara and Waxer, and she reaches up and wipes tears from his face as he buries his face in waves of blonde hair. The uncles who survived Umbara don’t like to talk about it, but if they do, they leave out the stuff about war and talk about their fallen brothers. 

Mama doesn’t want her to know anything but peace, and neither does Daddy. She trusts Daddy’s decision. Maybe it’s for the best. 

  “It is my privilege and my honor to be your father.” Rex’s fingers are nimbly braiding her hair back into the usual braid she’s kept it in since she was a child. The day is comfortable and her uncles are here with the twins while you’re in the capital city with Padmé. 

  “You’re talking like it’s the last time you’ll ever say that.” 

  “Well, if your mother finds out what I’m letting you do, yeah it’ll be the last time I ever speak.” 

Anakin wants his kids to learn how to defend themselves. They probably can with a lightsaber just as well as he did at that age, but they’ve never done hand to hand before today’s training lesson. There’s no threat of war looming on the horizon but given that they’re both force sensitive, he wants them to have a good partner and for some reason that means Alaia gets to volunteer. All three kids are close enough in age to learn together. 

  “I’m gonna win.” 

  “It’s not a-” Rex pinches the bridge of his nose as Wolffe comes up behind his vod’ika and clasps her shoulders gently in his hands. If anyone is good at sparring, it’s him. “Oh, kriff it. Go on.” 

Wolffe waits until you’re out on the porch and wrapping your hands to say it, “You’re too much like your buir bal ba’vodu.” He had feared initially that she’d be afraid of him because of his cybernetic, but after he’d told her how he lost it to Asajj, she hadn’t looked at him with fear one time since. 

  “Ni kar'taylir.” 

Anakin stands on one side while Rex and Cody stands on the other, their spectators on the sidelines watching with wide eyes for something to go wrong.  

  “Alright. Luke,” Anakin nods to his son who tosses his saber behind him at the same time Leia does before they both turn towards Alaia. “Leia.. remember the rules. No Force Use.” 

  “What fun is that?!’’ Luke whines. “She’s not even Force Sensitive!” 

Alaia, Luke and Leia are between the ages of fourteen to sixteen the first time they do this. Alaia has been raised to not fear Jedi, much less the children of The Hero With No Fear, so she simply approaches this as an obstacle to be conquered. 

The daughter of the former soldier and officer of the Republic cracks her knuckles and eyes her opponents head on. The way she looks so much like Rex makes Anakin laugh. It’s downright terrifying. 

Her ba’vodu cheer her on as Leia downright launches herself at Alaia, to which the girl simply pivots sharply on her heel and throws her hands up to defend herself from Luke’s attack. She isn’t aware of this, but Luke uses The Force to calculate each movement she makes. Leia doesn’t. He was the more attuned of the twins. 

  “Get him, vod’ika!” 

  “Show them who’s boss!” 

Rex is utterly stupefied by the way Alaia moves. Of course, Luke and Leia do catch her off guard a couple of times, but part of him has always wondered if the ‘’soldier’’ part of him would be passed off his kids. That part of him that was a fighter from birth. It seemed he was right. 

You’re gonna kill him when you get back. 

His daughter throws her elbow right into Luke’s nose - Leia had yielded when she’d been subject to a pretty brutal chokehold - and flips him over her shoulder without so much as an issue, and the older Skywalker twin slams his hand against the ground before she can so much as try to incapacitate him further. 

  “Do you yield?” 

  “I-I yield, you-you insufferable gundark!” 

The two teenagers are too busy arguing with each other while the clones laugh hysterically in the background and Kix tends to Leia to ensure she’s alright to notice the return of both you and Padmé. 

 “What’s going on here?” You question, arching an eyebrow at the pair of husbands in front of you who both turn around and are so guilty that they’re both blushing deep scarlet. “Rex?” 

  “Cyar’ika, I can explain-” 

You extend your arm to where Alaia is being held back by Fives and Jesse and Luke is cursing fluently in Huttese while Kix tends to his nose. “I was waiting for the day you’d crack and see what she could do!” You exclaim. “Kriff, Rex.. She nearly broke my nose when she was a toddler because I told her she had to eat her vegetables! Or do you remember the time we took her to see Obi-Wan and Ahsoka on Coruscant and she yelled  ‘’leave my dad alone you di’kuts’’ to a bunch of Jedi?!” 

  “Yeah-Yeah, I do.” He’d laughed at that when it happened and he’d laugh at it now. 

Rex slings an arm over your shoulders as Echo and Cody exit the house beckoning you all for lunch before murmuring, “It’s good to be home.” 

Your eyes flicker to the Skywalkers and to the clones who are all chattering along in a way that just feels so alive. So unlike any dream you’d ever had before the war ended, and it makes you realize that yeah... it is good to be home. 

happiness by taylor swift is a disaster lineage song, sorry I don’t make the rules

okay so yes I should be writing or doing homework instead of making this extremely rambly, slightly incoherent post but it’s friday so I’m vibing and you lovely people get to join me!

this is the ultimate star wars grief song for our tcw trio and I see it in three different contexts:

Ahsoka’s POV to Anakin, Obi-Wan, and the Order after she leaves in the season 5 finale

Ahsoka & Rex during/after Order 66

Obi-Wan & Ahsoka to Vader (Obi-Wan on Tatooine and (REBELS SPOILERS) Ahsoka after her duel with him in The Twilight of the Apprentice—for reference, I’ve only seen parts of Rebels so if some of that stuff is inaccurate, let me know!)

so we go . . .

honey when I’m above the trees / I see this for what it is

on a ship, in the Force, in hindsight

but now I’m right down in it / all the years I’ve given / is just shit we’re dividing up / showed you all of my hiding spots

#1: Ahsoka’s years learning in the Order, being a Padawan, her dedication to the Jedi and her faith to their teachings (”the values of the Jedi are sacred to me”), all the years she’s given are just completely thrown away as soon as there’s suspicion against her (in the unfinished episodes, Anakin says “well what choice did we give her? the moment there were any suspicions about her loyalty the Council turned their back on her.”) they both share this anger about her expulsion, and Ahsoka brings it up later during the Siege of Mandalore when she says “and what? defend the Council’s actions? I hardly think I’m the best person for that.” 

#2: again, Ahsoka’s years fighting alongside the 501st, growing close with Rex and Jesse and everyone else to suddenly find them turning on her (this is before she knows about the chips, of course). she could also be feeling this in tandem with Rex—“those soldiers, my brothers, are willing to die and take you and me along with them!” all the years Rex has given in the 501st, with his brothers, fighting for the Republic, having to watch his brothers be killed and not be able to do anything, all his hardship just means nothing. their attempts to be themselves, to be unique, to not just be “another number,” were useless in the end. the “showed you all of my hiding spots” line points to the closeness and friendship that they had with each other

#3: again again, pretty self-explanatory, all the years Ahsoka and Obi-Wan have given to teaching and learning from and loving Anakin are just completely thrown away by his fall to the Dark Side and him ultimately trying to kill them. the same for the last line applies here, they were brothers, they were sister and brother, they were a family and then it was all ruined.

I was dancing when the music stopped

In each of the scenarios, they were preoccupied, in the middle of something else (the war, capturing Maul, defeating Grievous, helping Ezra, etc.) when everything stopped and collapsed. each situation was completely unexpected and each time, their worlds fell apart.

and in the disbelief / I can’t face reinvention

#1: all Ahsoka’s ever known is the Jedi, and now without them (without anyone to help her or any connections or support), she has to completely change her way of life, as well as lie or invent a new background for herself (”Skywalker Academy,” “my older brother taught me,” “I used to live on the upper levels of Coruscant,” etc.)

also—Ahsoka becomes Ashla, and then Fulcrum (reinventing herself over and over again) and Obi-Wan becomes Ben. obviously, they don’t want to have to change, and again with “in the disbelief,” each of these events was unexpected and a complete gut punch.

there’ll be happiness after you / but there was happiness because of you / both of these things can be true there is happiness / past the blood and bruise / past the curses and cries / beyond the terror in the nightfall

I don’t think this line needs any explanation, but I’ll give some anyway! In a meta-sense, the audience started Star Wars with the happiness after all three events, but especially Vader. the Original Trilogy showed the end of the Empire, the Rebellion, the happy endings of Luke, Leia, Han, etc. in-universe, both Ahsoka and Obi-Wan hold this sense of bittersweet nostalgia (because how can you not?), both with Obi-Wan training/looking after Luke and Ahsoka joining the Rebellion and helping the characters in Rebels. they’re both trying to ensure happiness after Anakin. 

but, of course, of course there was happiness because of Anakin, that’s what The Clone Wars shows us! we see them happy (or, at least, somewhat) in tcw, which obviously makes everything much sadder, but still. they were happy. and Obi-Wan and Ahsoka both know it—we see it explicitly with Ahsoka meditating to Anakin’s holo and reminiscing in Rebels. they found happiness and love and family in the war, where there was so much death, so much destruction, so much darkness and terror. they found each other, they found happiness anyway. this can also apply to the OT, since that trio also found family and happiness in the midst of the Empire.

it’s this inherent optimism that both Ahsoka and Obi-Wan share that Anakin doesn’t (or didn’t) that’s keeping them afloat. it’s the adherence to the light, to kindness, to compassion. 

haunted by the look in my eyes

#1: going back to our three scenarios, you could say Ahsoka was probably haunted by the look in the Council members’ eyes—especially Yoda, Plo, Obi-Wan—when they expelled her. as well as, of course, the look in Anakin’s eyes when he begs her to stay and she says no. the ending image of season 5, the last image we ever saw of tcw for years—with Anakin’s sad, wide eyes—yeah. that look.

#2: overall, this context has less to it, but I’ll still argue that the look in Rex’s eyes, in the clones’ eyes haunted both Ahsoka and Rex, probably especially Rex. or even, not seeing his brothers’ eyes and instead seeing their blasters pointed at him. their final scene, with the eyes of the helmets (Ahsoka’s eyes painted on) stuck on sticks. yeah, that definitely haunted them both.

#3: Obi-Wan and Ahsoka both get horrifyingly clear images of Anakin’s gold eyes. Anakin’s look when he shouts “I hate you!” surely haunted Obi-Wan, as well as Anakin saying “Ahsoka” and “then you will die” with a very clear, obvious image of Anakin’s gold, scarred eye through his mask. 

that would’ve loved you for a lifetime

#1: Ahsoka was prepared to be a Jedi forever, for a lifetime

#2: Rex, more in this case, but both he and Ahsoka did and would’ve loved the clones forever. those were Rex’s brothers and it’s so clear, especially with the scene of him crying in the hangar bay, that this is killing him

#3: Obi-Wan and Ahsoka would’ve loved Anakin for a lifetime—and I’d argue they did, despite everything (”you were my brother, Anakin! I loved you!” and “my Master could never be as vile as you” and “to the best of us”)

leave it all behind

#1: sorry if this is getting repetitive, but yeah, Ahsoka left everything, her entire life, everything and everyone she’s ever known behind

#2: Rex and Ahsoka leave everything on that moon, including her lightsabers that she just got back and then had to give up a second time

#3: Obi-Wan leaves everything behind and flees to Tatooine. Ahsoka tells Ezra this—to let Kanan go, essentially leave the past behind him. And she can’t “save her Master” either. she too must let him go. 

tell me when did your winning smile / begin to look like a smirk?

this is just so Anakin slowly falling to madness and the Dark Side. Ahsoka and Obi-Wan thinking about the signs they’d missed, if there was some way they could’ve stopped it, if just one thing had been different, if they’d just noticed. trying to figure out where it all went wrong. 

when did all our lessons start to look like weapons pointed at my deepest hurt?

#1: “the values of the Jedi are sacred to me”—and then she’s expelled and told that it was part of her great trial in becoming a Knight. a foundation of the Jedi Order and its process gets turned against her.

#3: this line becomes literal—Padawan lessons, sparring, suddenly became dueling Anakin to death, for both Obi-Wan and Ahsoka

no I didn’t mean that / sorry, I can’t see facts through all of my fury

#1: you could argue that Obi-Wan is right when he said Ahsoka let her feelings cloud her judgement in leaving; that she couldn’t see the facts through the pain of being betrayed by the Council. and then, when she comes back in the Siege of Mandalore, immediately, she and Obi-Wan start arguing, and then both of them are clouded by their feelings, both feeling hurt by the other and lashing out.

#3: again, this is just so Anakin turning to the Dark Side. he obviously doesn’t realize that he’s being blinded by fury (or maybe he does and just doesn’t care, or probably, thinks that is the only way). but he is. he’s completely blinded to logic, to reality by the fury that Sidious has spent years amping up and harvesting and Anakin himself has spent years bottling.

you haven’t met the new me yet

this line is really painful if you view it from Anakin’s perspective. they both believed he was dead, but no, turns out he’s a Sith Lord, in fact the Sith Lord that’s been the Emperor’s tool in causing immense pain and destruction across the galaxy. it’s this evil, excited little line from his POV (think that ROTS comic: “please say it’s Kenobi. Lord Vader gets such a thrill from killing people who care for him”)

there’ll be happiness after me / but there was happiness because of me / both of these things I believe

again, there’s that optimism, that desire to help people, to do good in the world, and this faith that Obi-Wan and Ahsoka both have. that’s why Obi-Wan helps Luke, that’s why Ahsoka joins the Rebellion. it’s all to ensure that there will be some happiness, some light after them (and maybe a little because of them. again, see the first chorus. they were happy once, and they both know it. “we’ll be fine, as long as we stay together.”)

there is happiness / in our history / across our great divide

I see this mostly as Ahsoka and Anakin (and Obi-Wan) during season 7. there’s still a connection, of course, love and happiness between them, despite the ending that’s right on their heels, as well as the great divide of Ahsoka leaving the Order.

there is a glorious sunrise / dappled with the flickers of light

Anakin does end up returning to the Light Side and his reunion with Obi-Wan is surely like a “glorious sunrise” that ended the darkness of the past twenty+ years. the second part I just see as a fun, literal line—flickers of light are lightsabers, blaster fire, the Light Side

I can’t make it go away by making you a villain

in short, Obi-Wan and Ahsoka can’t make the pain or the past happiness go away because Anakin’s now Vader. they still both remember Anakin fondly and with love, despite his fall. they loved him, still. in ROTS, when Anakin says “from my point of view, the Jedi are evil!” Obi-Wan doesn’t say “then you are evil,” or even “you are wrong,” he says “then you are lost.” lost. as in, can be found again. not evil, not unworthy, not wrong. just lost. there’s this goodness that Anakin has that he is ignoring and straying from (”there is good in him”). and in the context of Order 66, Ahsoka can’t and doesn’t make the clones villains because she knows they’re actually the victims. as much pain as it causes, they’re not the villains and she can’t act like they are. 

so I know there’s a lot of discourse about Anakin apologists or whatever, so all I’ll say is that George Lucas has said that the prequels are to show how a “nice little kind kid, who has good intentions” turns into Darth Vader. the whole point of the PT is this line—while Anakin/Vader is no doubt the villain in the OT and in ROTS to a degree, that doesn’t make everything else go away. the other stuff doesn’t excuse what he did, all the pain he caused, but we can’t make it go away, just because he’s a villain. that’s one of the beauties of the prequels, that we get this extremely fleshed out, torn and struggling kid who ends up making all the wrong choices and becoming the terrible villain we see in the OT. 

I guess it’s the price I pay for seven years in heaven

while none of these scenarios is seven years exactly, it does continue to drive the point of “all the years I’ve given is just shit we’re dividing up.” everything these characters had, individually and with each other, just gets utterly, completely ruined. 

in a more meta-sense, the ending of The Clone Wars is the price we, the fans, pay for seven seasons of the show. 

no one teaches you what to do / when a good man hurts you / and you know you hurt him too

this could point again to Ahsoka and Anakin, but also Ahsoka and Obi-Wan after she leaves the Order. when she comes back, none of them really know what to say, what to do, how to act around each other. this obviously comes out as arguments and words that are so close to what they really want to say, but just short. they’ve all been hurt and none of them know what to do about it. 

and, of course, Obi-Wan and Anakin in ROTS. Obi-Wan doesn’t want to believe that Anakin’s fallen to the Dark Side, and later on Tatooine, knowing he’s hurt and been hurt by Anakin, doesn’t know what to do

after giving you the best I had / tell me what to give after that

again again, all the years they’ve given. all the love they had. everyone they knew & loved. gone. 

leave it all behind / and there is happiness