can we get some rouge facts? pretty please 🤲🏼 she’s v interesting and i know nothing about d&d so i’m a little clueless about her role in the team. love your world building btw
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cw: cisfem reader, reader has a set background and personality, MENTIONS OF GROOMING AND ABUSE!
"Why don't you join them?"
The fiddle swelling and dips and the dancers do the same. You watch where your friends have blended into the crowd, their elbows crooked into the arms of strangers as they prance about. The alcohol has wiped away their inhibitions, but only strengthened yours.
Obsidian has left his partner on the dance floor and returned to you, arm outstretched. He must have seen you watching him and misunderstood that forlorn look in your eyes as something else.
"I'm alright here," you dismiss with a laugh.
"Let me teach you." Obi gestures again, "Or is our fearless leader afraid of the dance floor?"
He hums along to the song, hitting none of the correct notes. Even when he's making mistakes, he's undeniably charming.
"I'm okay, really." You try to laugh again, but the sound is tight in your throat. The crowd spins and laughs and jeers and the sound of it all stuffs your ears. Obsidian steps towards you, closer than a friend should be, with a chuckle on his lips.
"I insist."
Your stomach sours a bit and you aren't sure why. This is familiar in ways you don't want to admit. "Obi, not tonight."
"I simply wish to dance with the most beautiful girl in the room," His fingers loosely wrap around your wrist, but the pressure makes your mouth go dry. There's an ache, deep in the narrow of your bones, radiating out as he lightly tugs, "Come, it will be-"
You rip your hand from his with all the force you can muster. It's much too forceful-- you end up smacking yourself and knocking over your stein. Beer fizzs and bubbles across the waxed bartop, spilling down and over your legs.
"I said no." Your voice aches with the way to rips from you, "Why does no one listen to me when I say no?"
Obi's face drops. Green eyes wide with shock, he simply watches as you push off from your stool and weave out through the crowd. You bump elbows with a poor halfing halfway out the door, only offering the briefest of apologies.
The crisp night air brings you a bit of clarity, but it aches in your lungs. The cotton of your shirt suddenly feels much too tight and you cant help but tug on the edges to free yourself.
You're aware of being followed. It's like a stray dog, tailing behind you just fair enough to avoid any possibility of retribution. He continues until you stop and settle, sitting in the dew soaked grass. It doesn't matter- you're already soaked.
Obsidian stays quiet for a while, rubbing his sleeve against his nose sheepishly.
"Can I sit with you?" he says after a while.
You glance up at the dragonborn. The spot he rubbed is significantly shinier than the rest of his scales, catching the moon shine as he speaks. Your anxious settles just a bit at that; it even tugs a smile onto your face. You pat the ground next to you and the man settles down on to his knees.
"I am sorry," Obi says after a moment, "I should not have pushed you."
You're very aware that wasn't a normal reaction. The shame makes your stomach curl. "It's alright."
"Clearly, it was not." He rubs his snout again, "I should have listened to you."
He places his hand gently on to your thigh- no pressure, just reassurance. "I'll listen now, if you want to speak about it."
The truth is heavy on your tongue. You know better than to speak of it, and yet:
"Adam saved me. I know that," you say carefully. Your husband is always the elephant in the room, waiting to be addressed, "He took me off of the street and gave me a place to live. I'd be nothing without him-- I know that."
Obsidian prickles a bit at that, just the slightest flash of teeth, but he doesn't interrupt.
"He'd bring me to galas. The prettiest dances you've ever seen. I'd wear the nicest dress I could find and he would dance with me until my feet bled from those god-awful shoes." You flex your foot. The thick leather boot barely gives to the pressure.
"I hated them. I hated every minute," you say, "I'd beg him to let me stay home. I'd //beg.//"
You close a hand around your own wrist. Your body has changed over the years, almost to the point of unfamiliarity, but the pressure of a palm against the inside of your wrist always snaps you back to the brittle age of eighteen.
"And he still made you go?"
Eighteen was the first time you started measuring your steps, walking in the shadows to avoid drawing his attention. Eighteen was the first time love felt sour on your lips.
"All anyone would ever say to me was that I was so lucky to be his wife. How he loved me so much." You take Obi's hand from your leg and intertwine your fingers with his. The span and width of his grip are so much different than anyone else you've ever known. "And all I wanted to do was tell them how scared I was of him.'"
"Why didn't you?" He's asking, but its not a question. It's a door, open just enough to let you keep going. "Someone surely would have listened."
"Where would I have gone?" You almost laugh at how ridiculously pathetic you sound. "I didn't have friends, and he was the closest thing I ever had to a father -"
Obi's grip stiffens, and you know you'd made a mistake. His eyes narrow and he knows//.
"Father?" he repeats, voice dark, yet trying to stay even, "He wasn't-- you--- what do you mean by father?"
Those sharp, kind eyes watch you, unblinking, as if he closes his eyes, you'll disappear.
"What do you mean by that, my dear?" he repeats, much softer.
The bar behind you clambors with din, the night is rich with the cicada song, and yet you feel like the world is so, so quiet. All of your words feel earshakingly loud.
"He didn't pursue me romantically until I was eighteen," you whisper, "But Adam took me into his home when I was thirteen."
You brace for what's coming. The anger, the disgust. By the time you realize you've closed your eyes, the silence has stretched out too far. It takes an effort to look at him and face the music.
Obi doesn't seem mad, he's just... sad.
"You were just a child." His voice is so brittle, "I-- Why didn't anyone protect you?"
You wish you knew the answer.
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I've recently been watching these very interesting Star Wars video essays on YouTube (yeah I know, a rare breed) and it brings up these comments Lucas has made about how he views Star Wars as almost like a silent film in terms of how important the visuals are to him in comparison to the dialogue. But this essay also points out how important Lucas finds all of the "rhyming" moments in his trilogies and the way he utilizes them to remind you of something else for emotional or thematic reasons. And there's so many of them, both in visuals and in dialogue, and it's interesting to consider how important this is to him, the repetition for a purpose as well as the storytelling through visuals above everything else and then to look at Star Wars since the Prequels came out and realize how little has really been able to match up to those ideals since then.
The ONLY thing that's come out since the Prequels that I think really hits these two things the same way is, in fact, Andor. One of the things I noticed about the way people discussed Andor as it was airing in a way I haven't really seen for any of the other shows or films was the visual SYMBOLOGY. So many times I saw people noticing the Imperial cog everywhere, from the aerial shot of Narkina 5 as the prisoners escape to the architecture of Mon Mothma's house. There were people picking up on the use of items in Luthen's shop that are familiar from other things to give this idea that Luthen is from another time, he's attempting to preserve this world he lost, that if you're not looking closely enough you won't notice what he's really saying or doing with this shop. The color choices for the different locations and people got analyzed because the people involved spoke about how they intentionally utilized color to SEND A MESSAGE about the characters and the world. We know that the people who made the costumes and sets really worked hard to treat Star Wars almost like a period drama and study the history of the franchise as if it were a real place so that the things they came up with felt like they belonged in this world everyone knows so well even if it's completely new. And of course there were all of the myriad references to things from Rogue One, the constant repetition of "climb", the sunset on the beach, etc.
Nearly EVERY SHOT in this show was created with so much intention behind it in order to say something meaningful about the characters, the world, this specific story they're in, and the overall saga of Star Wars itself. It's insane how much greater impact this show was able to achieve through the incredibly careful usage of visual symbols and thematic repetitions, much like Lucas did before them. It feels like they didn't just study the history of the galaxy far far away, but they studied the history of STAR WARS and what Lucas was trying to do and say with this story. They peeled back his onion a bit more and were able to create something that really has that same visual feel even when it's not created for a child audience. It also is experimenting with its narrative style through its structure and through Cassian's character being allowed to be somewhat more reactive than proactive, and while that didn't work for everyone, it does feel like it's following in Lucas's footsteps of experimentation through Star Wars. Push the boundaries of what Star Wars is and can be and what you can say with it.
But this only works because they peeled the onion back enough to TRULY understand all of the messages Lucas was sending with it. They got the heart of Star Wars and despite its lack of space wizards, despite the lack of most major characters in the Saga, this was a show that honestly got the message more than just about anything else Star Wars has put out since the Prequels. The choices between selflessness and selfishness, the themes about how you always HAVE to make a choice even when it feels like you don't have any (sometimes ESPECIALLY when it feels like you don't have any), and how important it is to make sure to choose the path of compassion above everything else. The themes of connection to others, the symbiotic circle and the impact even the smallest person can have on world around them, it's RIGHT THERE and it's CENTRAL to Andor's storyline.
So yes, it experiments a little with narrative structure, but it's possibly the most Star Wars thing to exist Revenge of the Sith because it honestly truly GETS what Star Wars was about, both in its themes and in its filmmaking. A lot of people said that Andor didn't feel like Star Wars to them, usually because of the lack of space wizards and the fact that it's not a story aimed at children. But to me, Andor is EXACTLY what Star Wars is and has always been. They're stretching the boundaries of what Star Wars can be, but it's saying the exact same things Star Wars has always said, it's just saying it slightly differently. This doesn't feel like fanfiction to me, not really. Unlike things like the Mandoverse or the books, Andor isn't just taking some of the toys out of the sandbox and going to play with them somewhere else. Andor is IN that sandbox. It's building a slightly different sandcastle, but it's still within the sandbox, using the same sand that Lucas did.
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In the assigned married fic, has Anakin even begun to process Padme saying that both of them will be moving to Naboo together? Like, they spoke earlier in the chapter about Anakin moving in with her on Coruscant, but Obi-Wan apparently spilled the beans about a much more permanent relocation to Naboo, and I am looking forward to Anakin's response to that, once he gets through processing everything else and remembers that part of the "conversation"....
i think padmé views moving to naboo more as a possibility than a future concrete plan -- the offer to be a permanent advisor on naboo is something she'd like to discuss with anakin as her husband before taking it or rejecting it. she says there's a lot of work she still wants to do in the senate, and she's probably thinking that it will be a few years before she would be able to go anyway. definitely after the war, but in her mind, she thinks anakin has every intention to leave the order after the war's over....because he kind of told her that. at least, in her mind he did: (from chapter 1)
“[Obi-Wan] asked me if I planned to leave the Order after the war,” he tells his wife. “And I lied, and then I think he began to support me. That’s what he looked like, anyway.”
Padmé blinks at him, eyelashes falling slowly onto the jut of her cheek and then rising. “That’s good then,” she says, sounding hesitant. “That he supports us.”
“Yeah,” Anakin replies, raising his hand to tuck a tendril of hair behind her ear.
“Though…I’m sorry you had to lie,” she says, pressing forward until their faces are only a hand’s width apart. “Hopefully…” she trails off, biting her lip. Then she shakes her head slightly, and her mouth turns up into a smile as if she cannot help herself. “Hopefully he will not take the truth so hard.”
so anakin never says what lie he told obi-wan, he just says that he lied when asked if he was going to leave the Order, and that lie made obi-wan support him.
from an outsider's perspective, especially a biased outsider who is married to one of the insiders and believes them to have a future together, padmé's immediate understanding of this is that obi-wan asked if he was going to leave the order and anakin lied to him and told him he planned to stay and obi-wan began to support their marriage because he thinks he won't be losing anakin (padmé, who has three braincells, has long since realized obi-wan's obsessed with her husband)
and that's why she's smiling at the end (and also why they have sex at the fade to black) -- she believes anakin has just told her that when the war ends, he'll leave the Order to be with her and build a future together <3 so the offer to go to naboo is an option she can talk to her husband about, but she knows that anakin is going to no longer be a jedi....and if he's not a jedi, and she's not a senator....what's keeping them on coruscant?
BUT it's not just obi-wan that's feeling a bit catty during that dinner party scene, so i intentionally wrote padmé as putting this idea forward as less of a possibility and more of a done deal that she knows anakin will accept -- she talks about it like it's great big BACK OFF signs picketed around anakin because obi-wan is the biggest threat to their marriage in the entire galaxy and she's always known that
(but also no anakin has not begun to process that whole thing - but padmé, who now realizes they're NOT on the same page, is absolutely going to bring it up post-haste in the next chapter)
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