#or something?? maybe jedi is a recognized religion

[rexscanonwife]

Also it's so funny how there's some references to Star Wars in MHA like the train station being called Tatooine and the beach being Dagoba(h) so like...I wonder if it's canonically a movie/show series in this world or if they revere it as something like ancient greek mythology?? So much so that they name landmarks after it?? 😂😂😂

[pomplalamoose]

Love your Luke relationship headcanons! How about headcanons for Luke x Force sensitive reader where you meet after ROTJ?

Thank you thank you thank you, this means a lot to me! I hope you will like these as well🫶🏻

• okay so I think for this we are going to assume you are about Leia's and Luke's age, maybe a little bit older or a little bit younger 

• based on that lets say you had a similar childhood as well, growing up with a loving family in a loving home, leading a calm and uneventful life 

• when you came of age you maybe wanted to help build the New Republic, simply travel or seek out a certain education 

• due to the extinction of the Jedi order before or shortly after your birth, you know nothing about it, even less so about the Force 

• maybe you were told some bed time stories when you were a child, but those always seemed too far away, too fantastical to be true

• unlike Luke you did not have a desert hermit, that then turned out to be the former Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi, come and pick you up for an adventure around your twenties 

• neither did you encounter Yoda on Dagobah or faced down Darth Vader and the Emperor; at this time the only known force sensitive people still alive

• you weren't introduced to the matter, no matter how brief, like Luke was

• and since it's mentioned during ANH that everything to do with the Jedi is dismissed as an old religion, useless and outdated (at least by many), it would have been pretty much impossible for you to even know about your force sensitivity 

• however you and those around you could have noticed certain special abilities of yours when you were growing up 

• maybe you had a way of easily getting what you wanted, being so charming that hardly anyone could resist you 

• maybe you often managed to be "in the right place at the right time" without planning on it

• maybe you always had an uncanny way to follow your intuition (e.g. because of a gut feeling, a dream, etc.) in certain situations that strangely turned out in your favor 

• maybe, just like Anakin, you were and still are exceptionally talented when it comes to something requiring quick flexes and incredible focus 

• maybe you are so "empathetic and understanding" that one could think you are able to read their mind

• despite these more or less obvious signs nobody thought anything of it, least of all you

• everyone has something they are good at after all and so that was that 

• when you meet Luke he is probably the one that will, after enough time spent with you, recognize your little "quirks" as what they really are 

• even if it might take him a while 

• he just fought a war, found and lost his true father and had to say goodbye to many loved ones 

• also he has shouldered the burden to rebuild an ancient order from scratch and additionally wants to support Leia in her political aspirations 

• plus, for most of his life, he wasn't aware of his own force sensitivity either, so spotting it in others can't be easy if you still have a lot to learn yourself 

• what was noticeable right from the beginning though, was the way you immediately gravitated to each other 

• or rather, how you were drawn to him like a moth to the light 

• obviously you are attracted to him too (many are, let's be real) but there is something else about him, something so familiar and intriguing, you simply can't stay away 

• before even speaking to him once you feel a strong urge to be in his company 

• you never had a crush this intense 

• (you are not aware this is not just a simple crush but the Force making sure your paths cross; instead you think you've gone slightly insane)

• also I feel like crushing on him during that time would be like crushing on a celebrity; he's not just some guy anymore, he's THE Luke Skywalker 

• but because he's Luke, he doesn't let it get to his head; in fact he is rather embarrassed about all the attention 

• so, following your intuition, you try to seek him out whenever you can, unconsciously using the Force to do so

• this will create lots of very embarrassing moments for you though 

• you find, you have a tendency to zone out as soon as you spot him and often get caught in places you have no business being in

• it's like your brain just short circuits in these moments and everything around you fizzles away 

• the more you try to stay away the worse it gets until, finally, he notices you as well

• he's really busy, okay?

• but since he feels pulled in your direction as well, he will make time for you

• in the beginning it's just for a little chat here and there

• Luke enjoys these, especially because you seem genuinely interested in him as a person and not only view him as "the hero" or "the last Jedi"

• so eventually he will ask you to spend more time together, for example inviting you out to take a trip to a market with him

• or, if you're a good mechanic, to tinker around with his x-wing 

• I like to think that there is always a lot of discreet blushing and shyness involved, mostly on your side (on Luke's too but he hides it much better)

• glad that the war is mostly over and he can focus on other things (you), Luke is happy to do so and you grow close rather quickly 

• this too is somewhat unusal, war changes people after all, and for a while Luke was somewhat withdrawn

• through meeting you he slowly comes out of his shell again 

• even more so when you find out about the certain similarities you have 

• while it took him a while to open up about it, you love listening to the way he talks about his life before the war and following that, especially about his time with Obi-Wan and Yoda

• in return he's curious about you as well and more and more are you able to find parallels between each other 

• you dare to admit to the way you felt about him since the very beginning then, trying your best to describe that strange pull towards his person 

• he immediately understands what you are trying to convey, has experienced it himself with Yoda and then you

• he shares his thoughts and together you come to the conclusion that you are either force sensitive, will be playing an important part in his life or both 

• he decides to teach you all that he knows so far

• if that's what the Force wants, who are you two to deny it, right? 

• while outwardly ever the professional, he's secretly relieved, even thrilled to have another reason to spend more time in your presence 

• from the outside it's painfully obvious how much you like each other; meanwhile you both stay unaware 

• you are convinced Luke doesn't return your feelings, instead only seeing you as a close friend 

• he deeply buries the part of him that desperately wants to pursue a romantic relationship with you

• attachment is not allowed and it troubles him a lot

• (Leia is loosing her mind)

[starkskypines]

be like the love that discovered the sin

the sith!cas au that's been rotting my brain for months

***

Dean can only stare at the man in front of him, so similar to the person he once called friend. The dark robes that flow around him are so different from the tan he always favored. His dark hair and strong build are the same. The face too, except for a new scar across his eye. It makes him look sexy, deadly, capable. And of course, the golden yellow eyes where there used to be blue orbs that Dean rotated around like they were a planet and he was the moon. Now blue is replaced with the sun, burning bright and causing Dean to enact caution.

When Baby got caught in a tractor beam, Dean thought it was the Republic or a pirate organization. He never thought it was a ship from a brand new Empire popping up in the middle of the Outer Rim. But here he is, staring at Cas in front of him, coming from a ship that declared itself the police force for the Novak Empire.

“Cas?” Dean asks through a lump in his throat. He doesn’t know why he feels the urge to cry. Sam had told him what Cas was doing out here. Sam told him about the sieges and takeovers and destruction. Dean knows what Cas has become.

But Dean never really believed Sam. Dean always thought deep down that it had to be a mistake. The Cas he called friend was never after power. He was more of a scientist than Jedi, studying the ecosystem of whatever planet he landed on. The Clone Wars changed things but not this much. Surely, not this much so that even the blue eyes that Dean fell for are now gone.

“Dean. I recognized your transponder.” Cas steps through the doorway and onto Baby’s deck. He moves the same grace he’s always had, but where before he had a quiet power that thrummed in his bones, it’s now curled power under the skin of a predator just waiting to strike. It’s alarming and enticing all at once, and Dean forces thoughts of the latter down deep.

“What’s up, buddy? You don’t write. You don’t call. I hear you left the Jedi Order.”

“I apologize for my lack of communication. I had to establish my territory quickly lest I be challenged. I did intend to contact you of course. How could I not?” His eyes burn with something that gets right under Dean’s skin and reminds him of the last time Cas had a similar look in his eyes. The one and only time Dean had convinced Cas to sleep with him. Their one beautiful night of sex on top of more sex.

“Well, it’s good to see you,” Dean says because whatever’s happened with Cas, that will always be true. Dean will always be happy to see Cas. “Didn’t have to jack my ship though.”

“I’d like you to come down to see the capital with me.”

“Yeah sure, just tell me where to land.” Dean’s always been quick to agree to what Cas wants. His brother says it’s desperation for Dean to get Cas back in his pants, but Dean knows it’s something more than that. Dean just wants to please Cas. He wants Cas to look at Dean and decide that maybe he could be content to wake up every morning with Dean in his bed. He wants Cas to see Dean as someone that will cook him breakfast every morning while he meditates. He wants Cas to see that there can be room for both Dean and his Jedi religion in his life. He wants Cas to be happy with him and no one else.

The Novak Empire is sending Dean the very clear message that Dean will never be enough to make Cas happy.

read on ao3

[writerbuddha]

@allronix, I'm reading your reply to my Pro-Jedi Essay On the Life and Fate of Shmi Skywalker, with unwavering interest! I address this part of your response in a separate post, since I think the seriousness of the topic and the space I need to address it properly, requires it.

"Just like when we hurt our finger, we don't think, "Oh, my finger is hurt, maybe I should help it", but rather, there is an instant and intuitive, natural response to it, our quest to be happy and not to suffer is inseparable from and complemented by the same quest of our loved ones. Unlike attachment, compassion can extend beyond the individuals who we're close with or make us feel good; based on the realization that all living things want to be happy and doesn't want to suffer, just as intensely as we and our loved ones are, it can encompass all living beings wanting to be happy and free from suffering"

This is a nice and lofty concept. And like all nice and lofty concepts...I never see it work in reality and I doubt it's possible. Call it the cynicism of a burned out idealist; we're inherently selfish, sadistic, tribal and hierarchical. Neuroscience points to hard coded limits in our ability to care for others, as much as idealists want to re-code human nature to be otherwise, often by by the barrel of a gun. Sure, we can recognize that another guy across the table isn't any different from us on a situational basis. Sure, great acts of generosity and altruism happen. Can people love the theoretical concept of all mankind? Sure. Universal love, though? The more I see people IRL proclaim they're all for peace, justice, and universal love, the easier it seems to scratch of the veneer to reveal the hate for some other tribe, be it the wrong political party, religion, or the rival sports team.

The nature of our discussion is to exchange perspectives, and me trying to persuade you into accepting the philosophy I live by would be a severe violation of these unsaid, but obvious rules. Thus, if our worldviews are colliding on these topics, I shall take it as a sign that I shall go so far and no further. However, for the reason I would find it rather tasteless and inaccurate to simply reply, "agree to disagree", and there are important things I feel I need to clarify about what I mean by "universal love" and so on, I address a few things that is not directly Star Wars.

I thank you for your reply, what I take as your advice to be cautious, and in turn, I aim to give something to reinforce hope.

Compassion is different from Empathy

I must point out that the articles you linked are about psychology and not neuroscience, and they echo the findings and ideas of Paul Bloom, author of "Against Empathy": we're not really capable of empathizing with the suffering of a million, we're better at zooming in on individuals; too much emotional empathy, that is to feeling the feelings of other people, in the sense of picking up the emotions and feelings of others, will possibly leave us drained and exhausted, as if we were running out of empathy. It should be added, though, that other psychologists are warning against not to take these findings as a judgment on empathy in general, pointing out, culture is able to influence our ability to relate to large groups. What's more important, and this is recognized by Bloom, too, the compassion I talk about is different, philosophically, psychologically and even neurologically.

What we mean by Universal Love?

There's a notion of universal love that's to hold all life, all humanity in your heart at once, that is a profound, immense feeling of love, care, benevolence just radiating from you and embracing all living things. This notion is present various cultures, and it's most often attributed to God in theistic traditions. In those traditions, this universal, divine love is said to manifest in the unselfish love we have for one's fellow humans. Ultimately, I believe, this type of universal love is reversed and possible only for, say, God. I'm skeptical whether it's possible for humans. Nor I think that it's humanly possible to have close, stable relationships with all living things, nor that we should strive for that.

True Compassion is based on Reason

Compassion is not an emotion, a feeling, an emotional response - true compassion is a state of mind, a mental attitude, and a firm commitment founded on reason. It's something that you have to cultivate and nourish, it takes diligence and time. This is why I said, genuine compassion is based on the understanding, all that lives is essentially one and the same in wanting happiness and not wanting pain. Continually familiarizing our mind with this basic fact, training our mind to look deeper, to look beyond the superficial differences and into the hearts of others, deflates selfishness, sadism and the hierarchical and tribal approach, and gives rise to the empathetic understanding of our underlying oneness, to the genuine wish for another to be free from suffering and to have happiness.

Compassion is unconditional and universal love, since it's a genuine concern for the well-being and happiness of others, that is based on and a reaction to a universal experience. Once we understand the universality of wanting to be happy and not wanting suffering, we can understand that even our worst enemies are motivated by this simple desire, and what we resent in others is also within ourselves, our reaction to their desire for happiness and not wanting suffering, will be the same: we will want them, just like everyone else, to be happy and free from suffering. The same with strangers. And if we allow this reality to sink in deep enough, it's really not hard to have a sense of connectedness to everyone we meet or know about, to genuinely care about their well-being.

Compassion is to feel with, experience with, suffer with another, and thus, we rejoice for their happiness and we want to alleviate their suffering as if it was our own, there are feelings of profound empathy, which allows us to have the sense of being parts of each other, and the well-being of another person, we will reach out to others as if they were us. This is why it's compared to hurting your finger - your hand reaches to help its pain in an instant and intuitive, natural response. The finger and the hand are parts of the same organism, and similarly, we can sense ourselves part of the same organism of all life, and we can have compassion and care for all.

Empathy Fatigues, Compassion Energizes

This cannot be equated with mere empathy, that is to take on the suffering of others or pick up their emotions, feelings and so on, which could lead to the so-called "compassion fatigue" which is, however, proposed to be a misnomer. In the West, there's a notion that compassion is always you sacrificing for others, that if you are truly a compassionate person, you serve the needs of the others on the expanse of yourself. It's crucial to understand, true compassion includes self-compassion: genuinely wanting ourselves to be happy and free from suffering. It's not surprising that self-compassion is actually, along with self-care, the core of preventing and overcoming what is called "compassion fatigue", but, in the same time, said to be comprises of "empathy overload" or becoming "over-empathetic" to a level where one feels numb to the suffering of others, "viewing self-care as selfish", leading to burnout. "If I have empathy toward you, it will be painful if you’re suffering. It will be exhausting. It will lead me to avoid you and avoid helping." Bloom explains, continuing: "But if I feel compassion for you, I’ll be invigorated. I’ll be happy and I’ll try to make your life better."

Unlike bare empathy, compassion involves wisdom and insight, making us able to understand the reality behind the huge numbers of suffering people, and in the same time, the empathetic aspiration to make others happy and free from suffering, based on the recognition of the simple fact, others, just like ourselves, want to be happy and don't want suffering, creates healthy emotional distance from the person and the situation, and rather than leading to discouragement, distress, fatigue or decreased empathy, it brings strength of mind, inner balance, courage, boost self-confidence, helps us to become more resilient and improves our overall well-being. Based on my experience, it's very much true that the more we genuinely care for the well-being and happiness of others', the greater our sense of well-being becomes. Our hearts become warm, open, bonded to others, we even feel physically better, and our mind is automatically put at ease, which is the foundation of happiness.

Compassion is Something we Practice and Nourish

Compassion is something you must practice, practice and practice. You can't just pick it up somewhere or you know, deciding to be a good person from now on, or receive it through prayer, or just born to be good as opposed t others who born to be less good. It's inherent to all of us, be we need to take time and effort to bring forth. The more conscious and mindful we become to the reality of others and of ourselves, the more naturally our compassion will flow.

The healthiest and easiest way of cultivating compassion is to train ourselves to recognize our essential oneness with our loved ones, the people we're close with, to cultivate our unconditional love for them, to want them to be happy and free from suffering on for the simple reason that we know, they want to be happy and free from suffering. Then, through understanding our oneness with the circle of the living beings who're close to us, we can go further and further, we can understand the oneness of all humanity, of all life, the basic fact that all that lives wants to be happy and free from suffering. And so, we can embrace them into our unlimited compassion as well, even if we won't and most likely can't get close to them.

Obviously, this takes time and effort, especially because we must also learn how to rearrange our way of thinking about the people who wrong us or don't care about us. And we must learn how to include ourselves into our compassion, how to be kind and caring toward ourselves. That's a very hard thing to do, considering that we have a tragic tendency to hate ourselves, blame ourselves, say things to ourselves that we would never say to another living thing.

But I am absolutely certain it's possible.

I'm working on my reply to the points you raised in other parts of your response, and await the further parts of it! :)

[briarcrawford]

Add More Lore with Sayings

There is “May the force be with you” from Star Wars, “May the odds be ever in your favour” from Hunger Games, “Winter is coming” from A Song of Ice and Fire, and so many more. These are all sayings in books that are repeated often enough by characters that readers recognize them right away.

Of course sometimes these sayings are put in for the importance of merchandise, but most often it is to add to the lore of the story. What better a way to say “good luck” than “May the force be with you” when you are Jedi following the religion of the force? Or “Winter is coming” sounds simple enough, until you realize how long the winter will be and what comes with it.

These quick one-liners hint of a long history, and can add interest or even mystery to your story. For example, if you come across villagers with the saying “May the shadows hide you” that is a quick and simple way to hint to readers that something is not completely right with those people.

Maybe your novel saying will be how a troop of soldiers show respect for their trade, maybe your saying will be a unique way your people say goodbye, or maybe your saying will be how a group of people end meetings while hinting at a coming danger. Whatever it is, just know that there should only be a limited time when it is appropriate to say it, or it will start to annoy readers. For example, if characters are constantly saying “May the wind be at your sails” several times a chapter, it loses its punch. Instead, try to use it when emotions are high or it will have the most meaning.

If you already have a saying in mind, here are three things you will want to answer:

What is the meaning behind it?

Where and when did people start saying it?

When is the proper time to use/say it?

Once you answer those, have fun adding your new saying to your book!

[spideyanakin]

sunrise (c.k)

summary - jedi! reader, after order 66, you hid as a Mandalorian bounty hunter. You thought Cal hadn’t survived, but you’re proven wrong when you come face to face with him.

back to main masterlist

cal kestis masterlist

part 1, nightcall

"This might sound weird but, would you like to grab a drink after?" Your question seemed to take him aback a little, but he quickly cleared his throat and answered.

"I finish in um.." he looked up to the makeshift clock he remembered having to fix the day before "An hour?"

"Perfect. Leaves me time to-" you looked at the man you were holding by the arms, not wanting to say ‘yeah this gives me time to put this guy under carbonite and store him in my ship’

"Nevermind. I saw there was a bar not far from here? Would there be alright?"

"Yeah it's not bad." He shrugged.

"Alright, well I'll see you in an hour."

"See ya." He looked at your figure disappear back into the maze of hallways.

Cal didn't understand one bit of what had just happened, but an hour later and he stood in front of the bar in question, watching as you walked up to him.

After a short and almost awkward greeting, you sat at a table for two.

You weren't even surprised when Cal ordered blue milk. It had always been his favorite, even back then. Somehow in the few minutes that you had seen him he almost hadn't changed one bit. You recognized the guy you left and thought was dead after the purge.

"So how did you come to work as a scrapper?"

"It's um, a very long story." You nodded. You knew he wouldn't open up so easily, especially when he didn't know who was behind the helmet.

You kept sensing how he was on his toes - trying to figure out if you had a bounty on him or some other twisted reason you wanted to grab a drink with him.

A new silence fell upon the two of you. You somehow couldn't stop staring at him and you were scared that he caught up on that. You didn't know how he would react to you, especially since you were all dressed in your Mando armor.

When the waitress came by you thanked her, and to Cal's surprise you didn’t remove your helmet when you brought the drink to your lips. You simply loosened the edge by pressing a button on the side, it revealed a little of your skin as you leaned to drink.

All he could see from you was the color of your skin - which wasn’t enough for his curiosity.

"You never take off your helmet?"

"No."

"Why?"

"This is the way." You replied, dropping your cup back down and fully facing Cal again.

"Mandalorian religion is pretty strict huh?"

"Yes. But I am greatful." You smiled a little under the helmet. "The purge left me a foundling." That was more information than you had ever told anyone, but once again Cal knew more about you then anyone else. He knew who you were under the mask, even if he didn't know it yet. He was probably only the third or fourth person alive in the entire galaxy who knew your face.

"I'm sorry but what is this?" Cal asked out of no where, making you blink. "Do you have a bounty on me or something?"

You shook your head, of course this was weird.

"No- I um- You seemed like someone nice. I don't have many friends around the galaxy. Mostly enemies." You stuttered out.

"Oh." That seemed to weird him out even more, and create even more tension in between the two of you.

"I'm sorry - maybe I shouldn't have asked to grab a drink so suddenly." You dropped the cup, ready to pay, stand up and leave.

"No- no it's alright." He awkwardly shuffled on his chair again and cleared his throat. "I um- I don't get to see Mandalorians often."

"I get that."

To your surprise, conversation flowed like a waterfall after that. It truly was like you had never separated, as if you had always kept in touch and the Empire hadn't brutally separated you.

You were giggling as you walked Cal back to his job. The tension had fully disappeared and your mind was quick to think of a way to talk to him somewhere private - somewhere where you could tell him who you truly were, and fix what had been broken.

"Hey um-" Before you could speak up, Cal spoke his thoughts. "Do you think we could see each other again? I mean, I don't have many friends either." He jumped a bit on his heels and made a full stop as he was in front of his work place.

"Are you free tomorrow?" you smirked under your helmet.

"Yeah - I finished at 7"

"I'll come at 7 then." You smiled.

"Good. I can introduce you to Prauf and we can take the train down to my favorite part of the city." He smiled, a certain joy in his voice you had missed hearing so much.

"That would be amazing"

~

Cal hadn't expected to reveal his Jedi secret to Prauf the next day. But one thing led to another and he had to save the poor guy's life. Tension had taken over his shoulders and seeing your bright Mandalorian armor was somehow the only thing keeping him from exploding in stress.

He didn't know how or why, but somehow seeing you suddenly fixed every single one of his problems.

But he quickly shook his head and tried to tone down the happiness of meeting you again. He didn't know who you were behind that shiny helmet - and he still didn't fully trust you.

But why did he feel so comfortable around you?

He didn't have much time to dwell on these feelings because you were quick to bring his mind onto another subject. Making small talk on the train accompanied by Prauf who often chimed in.

What you didn't expect was the train to get controlled.

4 storm troopers made you evacuate the wagon, and Cal felt his entire body stiffen.

But so did you.

You tried to think of every way they could have found you, or maybe they were here for Cal, or maybe there was another lost Jedi in the train with you. You weren't sure who they were searching for, but you didn't like the fact that their commander got out of her ship, inspecting every person in your wagon.

Next to you, Cal was blaming himself for having used the force hours prior.

The rain was pouring down and you were grateful for your armor. Your lightsaber felt hot agains't your hip. It was hidden by a multitude of clothe layers.

What you didn't expect was Prauf speaking up, your stare frantically shifting to Cal who was reaching for his own saber.

All you remember was screaming when she ran her lightsaber through Prauf. Cal was quick to fight back - and you didn't have a choice.

You pulled your saber out just like Cal had done seconds prior, and the fight had started.

The shock on Cal's face when the two purple blades lit up the space was enough to distract him for a second - but you were quick to knock out the man that had taken a hold on him.

Of course they had seemed happy about the fact that they were about to catch not one, but two Jedi's. But you and Cal knew better.

And that's how the fight started - you both fought and climbed as the train kept moving and storm troopers kept coming for you -trying to find a way to escape alive.

Cal was confused and raging at the same time. How someone dared to take and use your light saber was outrageous. It didn't even cross his mind that it could be you under there, because you were gone.

You had been ripped away from him and now someone dared to take your weapon and use it.

All he could think about was how it should have been buried along with you. It was your lightsaber, and yours only. He never thought he would ever see it again - especially not in the hands of a Mandalorian bounty hunter.

And that's all that clouded his mind, even when the both of you were saved Cere and Greeze.

You rolled onto the ship, pressure dropping away from your shoulders as you watched the ship's door close back and create a wall between you and the swarm of storm troopers that wanted nothing more but your heads on spikes.

You wobbled yourself to stand - taking a long and needed breath as you tried to process what had happened.

Your eyes fell on Cal who was taking his spirits back as well. You quickly scanned for wounds but he seemed fine.

What you didn't expect was him pounding at you the second he was up.

Cal didn't waste a minute to shove you agains't a wall "Where did you get this!?" Anger was filled every bit of him "Where did you get this light saber?" Your head spun for a second, but you quickly blinked the shock away.

"I think you know where." Your words weighted in the space around you. Cere and Greeze didn't understand one bit of what was happening, watching the scene with wide eyes.

Cal dropped his hold on you and took a step back, question filling his pretty traits.

With a shaky breath you took all your courage. Slowly placing your hands towards your helmet and pressing a side button. It made a release noise until it was fully loose - making you able to remove it.

Your hair fell all over the place when you did. Cal didn't understand right until you opened your eyes to meet his.

It took him a second but when it did everything clicked in place.

It was you.

you.

Y/n.

"Y/n."

It was your eyes, your beautiful hair color, and all those traits Cal liked so much about you.

Your hair style was different, but it suited you just as well. He frowned when he noticed the battle scar across your eye and a few other small marks that came with order 66 and the life you were following.

The way you looked as a child melted into the way you looked now and Cal had no doubt that it was you.

His childhood best friend was standing right in front of him.

He didn't even have to time to register it that you both crashed into a comforting hug. You were both tearing up, comfort filling every bit of you.

"How?" He sniffed onto your shoulder.

"It's a long story."

"I have all the time in the world when it comes to you"

[theoriginalcarnivorousmuffin]

"I have some problems with [Luke] as a character)" was mentioned in your Reylo response post. Very interested in what your thoughts are on Luke! 👀

Do you want me to get murdered?! Well, if I didn’t get lynched for calling Sirius Black a Stephen King villain I can surely do no worse here.

Let’s do this.

Caveat that, as usual, I am wearing a heretic hat and expect no one to agree with what I’m saying.

Luke Skywalker, much like Harry Potter, is not the character the authors and vast majority of the audience seem to think he is. Luke is seen as the true coming of the Jedi, the light side of the Force incarnate, and someone so innately good he was able to redeem his father, restore peace to the galaxy, and restore the Jedi Order.

I disagree with all of this.

I think this is what Luke thinks he did but the truth is far sadder and, well, in general worse.

First, let’s start off with Luke’s hero’s journey throughout the saga.

Luke starts your ordinary guy, he’s not bad by any means, but he’s not particularly good either. He lives in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, part of a relatively well off family, and set to inherit the world’s most boring business: moisture farming. He has dreams of going out, seeing the world, and becoming a great pilot.

Important to remember but what most people gloss over: Luke starts if not pro-empire then neutral towards it. Luke wants to attend flight school, given his desire for glory and adventure, he probably wants to join the empire’s military. He might not like Storm Troopers all that much but the fire of revolution doesn’t burn in his heart the way it does Leia’s.

Now, personally, I like this about Luke. It makes sense to me. Given where and how Luke grows up, given all he’s ever known, I think this makes perfect sense for his viewpoint. He might get hassled by stormtroopers now and then but the empire really doesn’t interfere with his life except in a) propaganda b) offering an escape from his dull existence. What would someone like Luke know about the Rebel Alliance?

The movie however... sort of goes out of its way not to acknowledge this, and this is where I start having problems with Luke. Luke gets Leia’s message about Obi-Wan Kenobi, sees the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen in his life, and gets to embark on this amazing adventure. The story sort of takes it for granted that he then agrees with old hermit, Obi-Wan, that the empire is evil. This is helped because Luke does too.

In other words, Luke’s opinions are very shallow and lack any introspection. Finding himself in the company of Jedi, smugglers, and hot rebel princesses, Luke suddenly goes, “Ah, yeah, I hate the empire!” We never really see him change his mind by reflecting over what the Death Star means/the destruction of Alderaan, the death of his relatives, or his meeting with Darth Vader. Luke seems to be won over... Honestly, it feels like it’s because the Rebel Alliance let him fly a plane before the Empire did.

Then he blows up the Death Star, is a galactic hero/enemy number one of the empire, and he’s full on board resistance man and the next Jedi.

Which brings us to point number two, Luke legitimately thinks he’s a Jedi.

Obi-Wan gives him half a word of advice for maybe half of a day, watching Luke swing a sword around and get shot at by a robot. Yoda trains Luke in a swamp for, generously, maybe a week or so before Luke ditches him (against his advice even) to go save his friends. Luke has 0 training (beat out only by Rey, who wasn’t trained at all). More, he lives in a world where everything he knows of the Jedi is colored by Palpatine’s propaganda and old legends. The Jedi temples have been ransacked and presumably next to nothing of the Jedi culture remains, I can imagine Palpatine as being nothing but thorough in his elimination of the Jedi religion. The Jedi survived in Obi-Wan, Yoda, and in some sense Anakin Skywalker.

They do not survive in Luke. Luke puts on some quasi-Jedi robes, slashes his sword around a few times to save Leia from Jabba, and he says, “Now I am a Jedi!” Luke is that kid, LARPing, yelling “firebolt, firebolt, firebolt!” Only, that is, if the LARPing consisted of him representing a massacred culture thinking he’s it’s sole legitimate heir. So... Luke is playing Cowboy and Indians, and he’s the Indian.

In my opinion, Vader wasn’t so much redeemed as he always had a very high priority in finding his son and keeping him alive. The obvious way to do this would be to take Luke as an apprentice and, eventually, murder Palpatine. Well, that didn’t pan out, and eventually Anakin chooses murder-suicide to save his son’s life. It’s very touching, I’m not knocking the moment, but I do think a lot of that was Anakin vice the inherent goodness of Luke.

Anyways, Luke and pals save the day, they start a new republic and then they learn life is complicated. The new republic fails within decades, worse, it’s feeble and likely torn apart by civil war, strife, and constant infighting. It is utterly powerless, to the point where the First Order easily rises to replace the Empire and take over its vast resources (with Palpatine building a secret sith army on the side no less). That Leia rather than lead an army through the new republic in the sequels is leading her own private resistance army is very telling.

Fitting in with this, Luke starts a Jedi Academy. The prequels, and yes go ahead and slander them all you like but they’re better than many admit, taught us a few things but one of them is that it is hard to be a Jedi. To walk the path of a Jedi is to open yourself up to great temptation to use the dark side, and the dark side isn’t just some strange quirk or sense of duality, it is the equivalent of selling your soul. It is an unnatural action that leads to unnatural abilities. 

You get a bunch of Force Sensitive kids in a room: you better know what you’re doing.

Luke doesn’t. He collects a handful of the remaining Jedi artifacts that Palpatine somehow didn’t destroy, opens up his Jedi School (even teaching his nephew), and within maybe five years the place is burned to the ground, his students murdered by his nephew, and his nephew runs off to join a Sith Lord who appeared out of nowhere (Luke not realizing that this was just immortal cockroach Palpatine). 

Luke then becomes a grumpy old man who just can’t deal, sits on a rock drinking blue milk, and whines that for how shitty of a teach he was that Obi-Wan guy was worse for messing up with his father. Which, frankly, is very in character for Luke.

Luke has never really failed in his life, or at least, never had to recognize his own failure. So, when he does, he a) doesn’t realize what went wrong b) blames everyone but himself c) sits on a rock and waits to die.

So yeah, that’s Luke for you.

A whiney, shallow, stupid, somewhat narcissistic, hero. I... don’t dislike the concept of his character, played more straight I’d love his character, but I dislike that people talk about him like he’s the most noble creature to ever grace the planet and has this inherent understanding of a murdered people that the murdered people themselves never had. 

(All the Jedi were doing it wrong! Luke made the real Jedi Order! Is something I see a lot and... well... say what you will about their philosophies, but this kid who was not a part of that culture “doing it better”... That’s real problematic folks, real problematic.)

[captainkappa]

Fanfic:: What the Water Gave Us

Din can tell something is wrong the minute he walks off the ship. Luke and Grogu meet him on the landing pad as always, but there’s something in the way Luke holds himself, the simple way he says “Hey.”

Din doesn’t run down the gangway, but it’s a near thing. “What’s wrong?”

In which Din and Luke deal with some of Grogu’s more recent trauma, Din gets wet, ripcords are abused, and both of them are trans.

So this was supposed to go up for dinluke week day 6... and then day 7... and now it’s now ^^; BUT I’m still really excited for it and I hope yall are too!

Title inspired by Florence + The Machine’s What the Water Gave Me

AO3 Link

-=-=-=-=-=-

Din can tell something is wrong the minute he walks off the ship. Luke and Grogu meet him on the landing pad as always, but there’s something in the way Luke holds himself, the simple way he says “Hey.”

Din doesn’t run down the gangway, but it’s a near thing. “What’s wrong?”

“I-” Luke sighs. “Nothing’s wrong, I’ll tell you later.”

“Tell me now.”

Luke doesn’t say anything as he passes Grogu to Din, letting Grogu get settled in his arms before continuing, “Grogu is fine, there was just… an incident. He fell into the lake and got… really scared.”

“Oh.” And Din immediately realizes the reason for that. When he had first gotten his quest, his focus had been on finding Grogu a teacher and he hadn’t considered the long-term effects of the events of Trask. Whenever he wakes up from dreams of water pooling up under his helmet, he considers it a good night and waits for sleep to claim him. He hadn’t considered…

But Luke is still talking.

“…so, I feel the easiest way to help him would be to teach him to swim but…” and now Luke looks embarrassed. “I can barely tread water and Grogu is so scared so… would you be able to help?”

“How?”

“I think you being there to show the water is safe would do a lot. Plus, if you knew how to actually swim, that would just seal the deal.”

“I… don’t.” And there are a lot of reasons for that. The main one being the Creed. All those years ago, Xi’an had made a quip about beskar bikinis and… yeah, the crew wrote a lot of terrible jokes. The second reason is that buying specific swimwear for him was never a priority. They had felt like a frivolous expense in the face of the Covert’s financial situation. As the covert’s bounty hunter and main source of income, he had limited all expenses on himself.

“But,” he continues before Luke’s expression can crumble further, “I want to help.”

“Okay that… that’s good. You’re not afraid of water, are you?”

He shakes his head. “I’ll be good.”

“I don’t think it’ll take that much to help him. We could try tomorrow? Forecast says it’ll be hot, we could go to the lake after lessons?”

Din nods. “Sounds like a plan.”

He smiles like the sun. “Great, let me show you to your room.”

Din knows where his room is, he’s been here a couple of times, but he doesn’t comment as he follows the Jedi.

-=-

As he gets ready on the next day, for the first time in maybe ever, Din thinks about what he’s going to wear, which is a futile effort. He doesn’t exactly have… clothes, just beskar and flight suits. He leaves the armor in his room save the helmet. He’s been slowly trying out not wearing his helmet in front of people, but he only lasts maybe a half hour around people and situations he knows, so the helmet stays on.

Midway through zipping up the flight suit, he pauses, considering his compression top. Wearing it wet is never fun, but he also doesn’t need to disappear in his head when he’s trying to help Grogu. He keeps it on, figuring he’ll just endeavor to stay dry above the waist. Most of his weapons he leaves behind as well, except one blaster and a knife. Weapons are still his religion, even if he’s spending most of the day at a lake.

The sounds of Luke and Grogu leaving the Temple filter past his window. It’s a normal routine; Luke and Grogu doing their lessons, leaving Din to putter about for the day, and then they rejoin for the evening. He and Luke agreed he could come for some lessons, but Grogu should learn to control his powers independently of Din being there.

Thankfully, there was enough broken in the temple to leave Din’s hands busy. By the time he’s gotten the basement lights to stop flickering, Luke has lunch packed and Grogu in a sling at his side.

“I figured we could end lessons early to go to the lake,” he explains. Din nods, trying to take in the words and not be distracted by how Luke looks in a birikad.

It’s a longer walk than Din expected to the lake. It’s less than an hour away from the school, but between maneuvering the wild forest and the sun beating down, he’s actually looking forward to going for a dip. He guesses it wouldn’t make sense to have a large body of water near little kids.

When they arrive, Din can’t help but take a moment to admire it. The lake is a dark blue color, nearing green by the rocky shore’s edge, but the sun still makes it sparkle. Low hanging branches edge over the lake, casting shadows in the water. There are some large rocks to the far side as well as other clear pieces of shore.

They settle on a dry part of the shore, putting both picnic basket and Grogu down. The child immediately toddles towards Din, one hand gripping his flight suit, looking warily out at the water. Din leans down to scoop him up.

“It’ll be okay, ad’ika,” he says, “The water can’t hurt you.”

Luke chimes in, “Your dad’s right.”

Grogu doesn’t seem convinced yet.

With lunch set away, Luke pulls off his robes and then his tunic and oh- Din hadn’t been expecting that.

The other man looks up at him, suddenly sheepish. “Sorry, I hope you don’t mind? I’m baking under all those layers.”

Din stumbles through telling him it’s fine, hoping Luke doesn’t realize his gaze is at the twin incision scars on his chest, somehow drawing his eye more than the fractal scars that span the rest of his chest. It’s not a rarity to find others like Din in this wide galaxy, but it’s an unexpected familiarity, especially to find with his son’s teacher.

Luke pauses, still holding his tunic. “Are you okay? I don’t want you getting heatstroke either.”

“I-I’m fine!” he stammers out. Maker, he’s met other trans people before, why does it feel so different with Luke?

“Well, don’t feel obligated to take anything off,” Luke says, folding his robes. He pauses to look Din up and down. “Well, maybe your shoes if you plan on going in.”

Din takes the opportunity to set Grogu back down on the rocks, forcing himself to tear his gaze away. He kneels down to fumble his way through untying his laces.

“So, what is the plan?” he asks, gaze firmly on his boots.

There’s a thump of fabric. “I figured we could start by just getting the two of us in the water, show him it’s safe. Then we’ll just… play it by ear?”

Din looks up once he has his boots off and flight suit pulled up to his knees. Luke looks… nervous? That’s not the word, but there’s something in the expression that Din recognizes as Luke picks up Grogu, speaking softly to him and pointing across the way at the lake. He wants to get this right.

Grogu is still looking at the water hesitantly, big brown eyes threatening to wobble, ears pressed tight against his head. Din walks up and strokes one of them.

“Grogu,” his son picks up his head to look at him, something Din doesn’t think he’ll ever get tired of. “I’m going to go in the water, but I’ll be fine, okay? You can just watch.”

He tilts his head, considering him for a moment and when there’s no resistance, Din walks into the water.

He bites down on the curse threatening to escape when his bare feet touch water. It’s cold, despite the sun beating down. He looks behind to see Grogu staring at him wide eyed.

“I’m fine, ad’ika. See?” He waves his hands in what he hopes is reassuring.

He walks deeper into the lake, water halfway up to his calves before he hears Grogu’s whimpers. He turns, but his foot catches on a rock and suddenly the ground isn’t firm beneath his feet. The world goes sideways as he loses his balance and cold water is pouring through his helmet.

He scrambles up into a seated position, thankful beskar doesn’t rust. His chest feels tight with the compression top soaked though, which he files away to take care of later. He lifts the helmet just enough to spit out the water, to catch his breath. It’s only then does he hear the kid’s cries, Luke’s attempts to settle him.

“Grogu, Grogu, I’m okay, see?” But something tells him Grogu doesn’t care about his words right now. He sighs, soft enough for it not to be picked up by the voice modulator, and gets out of the water. He slogs through the water, happy that his son doesn’t seem to be reacting in any more dramatic way beside crying.

That is, until he reaches shore and the tide comes in with him. He sits none too gently besides Luke and his son. Grogu immediately holds his arms out to him.

Din takes him, only considering for a second before taking off his helmet. His son touches his face none too gently, grabbing and pinching with those tiny nails of his.

“Yes, I’m fine. I’m safe, Grogu,” he says, softly.

He doesn’t rush Grogu, letting him touch his face, feel the breath escaping his lips, touch the wet flight suit. He doesn’t think about Luke being right there, able to see this moment between them, able to see his face.

Grogu settles in his arms, head tucked between his shoulder and chin. Din turns just enough to catch Luke’s eye

“Call it a day?” Din asks, not being able to calm the annoyed feeling in his heart.

Luke shrugs. “We still have lunch.”

They do, so they settle a couple feet farther from the shoreline, Luke offering his robes by way of a blanket. He hands out the food he made for them. Grogu still seems scared for a couple of minutes, but then he’s wolfed down his food and found an insect to follow in and amongst the trees. Din knows he should stop him from then trying to eat the creature, but he doesn’t have the heart. Neither, it seems, does Luke.

The two of them eat in silence, eyes on the still lake or Grogu running around. Din can’t help but berate himself for such a simple slip-up.

He sighs, no longer hungry, as the question that had been on his mind since yesterday bubbles over.

“Did Grogu show… Did you see…?” He doesn’t understand the Force enough to begin to ask the question, but Luke, whether because he’s a Jedi Master or just a good person, seems to understand.

“He… showed me what happened. He was unharmed, but I think he was just… scared.”

“I should have realized he would remember that.”

“You had – have a lot on your plate.”

“But he’s my kid.”

“And I’ve met plenty worse fathers than you,” Luke says with an easy smile that betrays the weight of his words. “But really, you were trying to get him to safety. If we’re going to play a game of what ifs, then I should have gotten to the cruiser faster.”

“You got to us just in time,” Din says, the hint of a question in his tone.

Luke shrugs, “I was too far away. If I was closer, I could have stopped him from experiencing all of that fear and anger.”

Din’s heart clenches, remembering those few days between losing Grogu and getting him back, those sleepless nights, unable to think of anything but the worst possible scenarios.

“Maybe we should stop asking these questions.”

“I agree.”

The conversation dies down after that.

With his heart marginally calmer, Din finds himself better able to appreciate the space around him. The sun’s rays feel like a physical thing against his face. Has he ever had a moment like this? Was this what he was missing when he never took off his helmet. Can he say he missed it when this is the first time that he’s experienced it?

Grogu walks back a little later, dirty with an insect leg poking out between his teeth. Din and Luke share a look before they start packing up.

When they get back to the temple, Din is suddenly made more aware of his wet compression top, clinging to his skin like a vice. He also suddenly doesn’t feel like wearing his flight suit, like a too-small second skin.

Luke seems to notice some of this, because when they get back to the temple, he scuffs his foot on the cobble and asks, “Do you need a change of clothes? We’re not exactly the same… build, but I should have something that fits.”

Din thinks about how long it would take to dry out his clothing, whether he’s even done the laundry yet.

He shrugs. “Sure.”

Luke nods, beckoning him forward to a set of rooms he hasn’t been to before. They’re no bigger than the rest of the temple’s rooms, they honestly might be smaller, but that might be the clutter of droid parts scattered around the floor with every flat surface available covered in objects of strange shapes and yellowing books. It’s not at all what Din expected, but that seems to sum up his entire experience with Luke.

He stands there as Luke pushes aside machinery to open a set of closet doors. He roots around in there before pulling out a couple of black garments.

“These will probably do fine! Just let me know if they don’t.”

Din takes them and thanks him, but he stays where he is, a battle warring in his throat. He’s hyperaware of his chest and while he knows the robes will probably flow well enough to hide, he still feels the need to say something. He knows he doesn’t owe Luke or anyone an explanation, be he wants to.

“I… Back at the lake, I wasn’t staring at you… I mean… I’m trans too.”

“Oh, okay,” his smile is bright enough to fill his chest. “Will you be fine while Grogu and I finish up his lessons?”

Din nods and his heart feels a little more at peace.

The robes are indeed too short, leaving his wrists and ankles completely exposed. He’s not used to the extra layers, how it flows behind him, but the layers help hide his chest, so he’s able to get through the rest of the day.

Any initial discomfort is worth seeing Luke’s face when he comes back in from afternoon lessons. He tries to hide it, but Din spots how he pauses in the doorway, looking straight at Din as he cleans his armor. It only lasts a second before Luke is distracted by Grogu again, so Din files it away for later and goes back to rubbing out the lake smell from his helmet.

-=-

It’s the day before he has to go, but Din feels more restless than normal. Every day since they went to the lake, it’s rained, a downpour that soaked them to the bone if they had to leave the temple for anything.

Din turns to watch Luke and Grogu out the window, meditating in the rain, twin domed force shields above their heads to stay dry. His HUD lights the two of them up in bright reds and yellows as compared to the calm blue of everything else.

He turns back to the lamp he’s been trying to fix for the past hour. He just can’t stop thinking about that day on Trask, how he hadn’t seen the obvious trap, how he’d been unable to rescue his son, how his son still remembers that.

He has to make it right.

When the two come back inside to start their lessons, Din unceremoniously takes Luke by the elbow and brings him into the kitchen. Starts thank Luke, he doesn’t question the sudden detour and just stands there, waiting for Din to put his thoughts into words.

“Can… I borrow Grogu?”

Luke gives him a look. “Of course? He still has time between lessons so, yes?”

“No, I-” Din sighs, “I need both of you… for something.”

Luke tilts his head to the side and Din explains, haltingly, not knowing if this is the right course of action, but it feels necessary. Luke just smiles.

“I think it’s a great idea, and I’d be honored to help.”

They wait until after dinner, when they’ve cleaned up. Grogu just looks at them as the tree of then sit on the couch in the common area. Din’s heart has been jackrabbiting since he and Luke agreed to this, most of his afternoon taken up by what exactly he was going to say, what would happen if it went poorly.

He takes off his helmet, setting it on a side table. Grogu looks up at the movement and is already reaching for him. He can’t help the smile as he lifts him up. He glances over to Luke, who gives him an encouraging nod.

“Grogu?”

He looks into his eyes at that and Din feels his heart break a little more.

“I… I don’t want you to feel bad for being afraid of water. It’s understandable considering… everything. Luke and I will help you be less afraid if… if you want. I should never have put you in danger like that on Trask. I will always prioritize your safety. Ni ceta. Can you forgive me?”

Grogu stares at him with those big brown eyes before reaching for his face. Luke’s ungloved hand comes up and touches his son on the back.

Luke opens his eyes and gives him a smile.

“You were already forgiven.”

Din pulls his son in for a tight hug. If tears form at the corner of his eyes as he thanks Luke for his help, Luke doesn’t say anything.

-=-

The next day was supposed to be Din’s last day, but early that morning, when he wakes up and sees the rain has stopped, he calls Bo-Katan. What he wants to say is that he can come here to collect the damn darksaber because there’s nothing more he wants to do than stay here. He doesn’t say that, but he does tell her he’s staying a few days more. He hangs up on her before she can reach a fever pitch.

At breakfast, he just tells Luke he can stay longer. Then he recommends they try going to the lake again.

The walk to the lake isn’t any more tense, but he can feel Grogu curl up tighter against his chest as trees give way to the lake. The lake is bigger than last time, much of the coast now disappeared under the water.

“Why don’t you go in this time?” Din offers.

Luke smirks at him, “Now are you afraid of water, Mando?”

On instinct, forgetting he’s at a bright lakeside and thinking he’s in the sewers of Nevarro, he punches Luke’s shoulder like he would’ve Paz’s. Luke goes careening to the side, only barely keeping himself on two feet. His expression is shocked and there’s an apology on Din’s tongue until Luke bursts out laughing.

“Maker, if you wanted me in the water that badly, you only had to ask!” Luke says, punching Din back. The flight suit lessens the blow, but Din still feels as knocked over as Luke was.

“S-Sorry,” he manages to get out.

Luke waves him off, still smiling. “If I couldn’t take a punch like that, I’d never survive being Han’s friend. You just surprised me.”

He removes his robes again and Din is thankful he thinks to avert his gaze beforehand.

Luke walks in, hissing at the chill. He only goes up to his ankles, before kneeling down, black pants growing darker by the second as water laps around him.

“See, Grogu? The water’s fine.” Luke splashes his hands gently in the water, creating little ripples.

Din looks down at Grogu, still in his arms. His head is ducked into Din’s shoulder.

Din kneels down so they’re more at eye level.

“Grogu? Look, what’s Master Luke doing?”

The child turns and watches. Luke has the same kind smile on his face the whole time. Grogu watches, ears twitching the whole time.

And then a different expression comes over Luke’s face. He shifts his position, now sitting with legs crossed, his hands held out above the water and eyes closed. Din is just about to ask what he’s doing when the water around him moves and rises.

Individual balls of water lift into the air, surrounding Luke. A couple are as big as Grogu’s head, some are as small as a pebble, a multitude of sizes. Sunlight reflects off their surface so that it looks like crystals. Then they move, gently circling around Luke.

Luke cracks open an eye before smiling. “See, Grogu? Water can be scary, but it can also be beautiful.”

Din can’t get his mouth to work, still trying to put these two images together, of a man with a bright laugh and a decent punch, and this ethereal wonder.

He manages to break his gaze and look at Grogu, who for the first time this whole visit, looks at the lake with awe instead of fear.

-=-

The next time Din is able to make it to Yavin IV, after a long quest to retake a minor city in Mandalore, he’s met with smiling faces at the end of the ramp.

“C’mon!” Luke says with no preamble. “We have something to show you!”

It’s not the first time Luke has led with that. Grogu likes showing his progress and Din is the best audience, being impressed with whatever Grogu has to show.

Instead of the Temple or the usual outside training ground, Luke heads straight for the lake. As he follows, Din can’t help but spot how there’s more of a path worn in through the grass and plants. He can even see straight to the dirt in some areas.

The lake looks the same as ever, clear water, low hanging trees, a rocky coast.

Luke doesn’t bother shucking off his robes, just walks in the water with Grogu still in his arms and kneels down. Luke lowers Grogu down into the water and Din is glad his helmet doesn’t pick up his gasp when Grogu doesn’t fuss. He just stands there, waist deep, looking up to his teacher.

“C’mon, Grogu,” Luke says, smiling, “like we practiced.”

Grogu nods before taking a deep breath and blowing out air before slowing lowering his head into the water. Small bubbles escape the water where his mouth is. It feels like Din’s heart has grown in his chest.

“Good job, Grogu!” Luke exclaims as Grogu stands up straight.

Din rips off his boots before joining the two in the water. Luke picks Grogu back up so he’s not overwhelmed by the waves Din makes. He settles in beside Luke, sides brushing as he takes a knee.

“That was really good, kid!” Din exclaims, picking up his son and holding him tight.

Grogu burbles happily. Luke catches Din’s eye and he can’t help but smile more.

-=-

Trips to the lake become a regular occurrence when Din visits. Yavin IV is temperate, so if the sky is clear and the day warm, the three head out to the edge of the lake. Grogu is happy to chase frogs near the edge, less scared of falling in now, especially with more lessons in blowing bubbles and painstaking lessons in floating.

Din has since picked up swimwear of his own, after he couldn’t get the lake smell out of one of his flight suits. It’s a tank top that still functions as a compression top and board shorts. He still brings his helmet with him, but he finds himself wearing it less and less by the lake, especially when he gets in the water.

It’s… nice. It’s one of the nicest things Din has had in a while. It’s a sanctuary from the stresses and pain of life in the galaxy, something for just the three of them, even if three sometimes becomes four when Artoo gets bored, and sometimes four becomes seven or eight when Luke’s friends make supply runs and then linger after. Even still, Din thinks of that spot as “theirs;” him, Luke, and Grogu.

The thought frightens him sometimes.

What also frightens him his how his heart rate continues to skyrocket when Luke takes off his robes to bask in the sun, this time not because of that twinge of familiarity at seeing the incision scars. His heart also can’t calm down on the day when Luke explains how he feels more attune to the Force when he feels the sun beat down on his bare skin, how it almost feels like home.

Din doesn’t know how to respond, especially when he realizes in some way, he understands, so he can only nod.

-=-

Late one day, when Din is underneath his ship, tightening up a part that got loose the last time he jumped through hyperspace, he hears the familiar pat of feet against the launchpad.

“I was out by the lake late at night,” Luke says.

Din grunts in response.

“It was really beautiful. Felt like there were thousands of lightning bugs out there.”

“I bet it was.”

“I’d like to show it to you… tonight… alone.”

That gets Din to roll out from under the Crest.

“What about Grogu?”

“The Temple has a state-of-the-art security system and Artoo can keep watch.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Tonight.”

“Yeah, once it gets dark enough.”

And suddenly anticipation fills Din’s stomach for the rest of the evening. He doesn’t know what “dark enough” means, the sun’s barely set by the time he’s done with the Crest and he can see two lighting bugs blinking by the Temple Garden. Luke waits until after dinner and after Grogu is fast asleep to walk Din out, gloved hand in gloved hand, even though they both know the way there. Neither of them makes a move to disentangle themselves.

The lake is both gorgeous and terrifying at night. There are just as many lightning bugs as Luke promised, lighting up the area. Even still, the water is as dark as space, and looks just as infinite.

Din is thankful he kept his helmet on. He’s glad Luke doesn’t comment on it. In fact, Luke doesn’t seem to mind at all.

They only go up to their knees in the dark water, looking out at the dancing light show and just talking. Their hands keep finding each other, after taking off their shoes, after releasing a lighting bug that’s landed on one of them, after righting oneself after nearly slipping.

Din tries not to think about how perfect this feels.

-=-

It’s a couple of days later that they are able to go back to the lake. It’s another washout, but none of them particularly mind. Din finds himself bumping into Luke more and more, the physical contact a welcome novelty.

Neither of them talks about the night at the lake. They don’t have to.

Once the rain stops, they wait a couple of days for the waterline to recede before going back to the lake.

And he has to assume it was because of being cooped up in the temple for a couple of days that causes Luke to ask him, “Have you used some of those tools for… non-bounty hunting purposes?”

Din tilts his head in Luke’s direction and takes longer than necessary to respond. He knows its rude to watch Luke squirm under his gaze, but after a question like that, he has to.

“What do you mean?”

“I just… see that tree branch?”

Din looks in the direction where Luke is pointing and spots a tree hanging over the lake. He nods.

“I bet you could use your ripcord and swing into the lake.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Seems fun, I assume kids who grew up around water would do that. Seems like the kind of thing.”

It does, like when he and the other foundlings would climb the pipes in Nevarro before an adult found them out.

“I don’t want to be a bad influence.”

Luke gives him a look. “Grogu has seen you fly out of the mouth of a greater krayt dragon, which I still need more details on.”

Din snorts, before considering it. All of these days by the lake means he actually is a somewhat passable swimmer. He can’t swim fast, but he can hold his breath and maneuver pretty well.

Plus, the more he thinks about it, the more it does sound like fun.

“Fine.”

“What?”

“I’ll do it.”

“I mean… don’t feel pressured.”

“Nope, I have to now.”

Luke looks at him before cracking into a smile. Din just shakes his head as he divests himself of unnecessary gear. He takes only the gauntlet that contains his ripcord, leaving his helmet and everything else safely on the coast before walking in the direction of the tree.

He climbs through the thrush, glancing over to make sure Luke is still looking at him. Why does he care that Luke’s looking at him?

He has to circle back to find the tree Luke had spotted. He steps around roots poking out through the soil and into a flat rock. The tree itself bends over him, a couple of lower branches nearly skimming the water. He jumps up and grabs into the tree, making sure it can hold his weight and won’t snap when he’s airborne.

It feels solid enough, but he pulls on a few branches before spotting what looks to be the best for the job. He lets out the ripcord, tugging on the branch before disengaging the chord from the spinning mechanism.

He glances to the shore, where Luke and Grogu are watching him. Din shakes his head, why does he feel so nervous for something like this? Then he gives it a test swing, gripping the rope and running to the edge of the stone before jumping off.

He doesn’t let go just let, more focused on making sure the branch doesn’t snap as he swings back and forth. He lands back on the rock, firm ground beneath him.

He looks at the window of clear blue surrounded by leaves and trees. Something flies through his heart like hope, like joy, and he doesn’t think anymore. He grabs the rope, runs forward, swings out and lets go.

A whoop comes unbidden from his chest and soon he’s flying, but unlike those precious moments where he had the jetpack, he can feel the wind flow around all of him. He crests in the air and the weightless feeling lingers for a moment longer before he’s being pulled back down to the lake and is suddenly plunged into cold.

He takes a moment just to let the cold settle over him before searching out the light of the sun and kicking off a rock to shoot upward toward the surface.

He breeches the surface to twinned cheers and rapid beeping. He shakes the water from his eyes, peeling curling hair out of his eyes to see Luke cheering, with Grogu clapping on top of Artoo’s head. He waves, the grin on his face threatening to break.

Maker, he wants to do that again.

But with the buzzing on insects, the gentle lapping of the water around him, and the sun beating down above him, he can’t help but roll onto his back and float, his eyes sliding shut as the sun lands on him with warm pressure.

It only feels like a few seconds have passed when a loud and clear voice rings out tough the clearing.

“Look out below!”

Din opens his eyes and sees Luke, mid arc. He’s stripped off to his basics and he is soaring, arms spread wide, whooping and hollering as he flies.

He crashes into the water mere feet from Din, the waves he creates overturning Din. He tumbles briefly in the water before he’s able to resurface, coughing out a small mouthful of water.

Luke is beside him, golden hair clinging to his forehead, chest glistening, and absolutely beaming.

“Having fun?” Din asks, voice rough from the water swallowed.

“We have to do that again.”

“Where’s Grogu?”

“On the shore, being watched by Artoo.”

Din looks and sure enough, Grogu has attached himself to one of the droid’s legs.

“Race you back?” Luke asks, already turning in the direction of the rock.

“Wait!”

Luke turns back, an eyebrow raised.

Din pushes himself to close the small distance between them. “Can I kiss you?”

Luke smiles. “Yes.”

Din could count on one hand the number of kisses he’s had, and he’s definitely never been kissed while treading water. Their legs bump against each other and Luke has to steady himself on Din’s shoulders. Both of them taste of lake water and it’s hard to get a grip on Luke’s torso, but when Din lets himself forget about how they’re probably sinking a little, and just enjoy the press of their bodies, the glide of their lips, it’s everything he didn’t know he needed.

[maaruin]

The Institutional Problems of the Jedi Order

Preface

I think it is time to finally write this post. These ideas have been going through my head for some time after reading some Jedi discourse. But I should preface this with: even though the Jedi made mistakes, this does not mean Palpatine’s genocide of them was justified. It only means that he saw certain flaws in the Order that he could exploit. I suspect that without these flaws, he probably still would have managed to take over and persecute the Jedi, but much more of the Order would have survived.

For this post, I am mostly using the prequel movies with a bit of lore added from the old Expanded Universe. I’m not using The Clone Wars, because its depiction of Anakin’s fall to the dark side is different from the movies. And I’m not using the new Disney Canon, because I don’t know what has been retconned so far and what hasn’t.

Depending on how we count, I think there were either two or four major flaws. I’ll number them as four, but the first three could be grouped together.

1. The Jedi Order is a religion but isn’t organized like one

The Jedi are a religion. They are a group that believes certain things about the universe and practices a way of life that fits with these beliefs. But they are also entirely organized as “Jedi Knights” who are “guardians of peace and justice in the [old] republic”. This is… odd. The entire religion is basically made up of full-time professionals. Or rather, monastics.

If you want to study the Force and use it, you have to become a monk, basically. And more than that, to be accepted you need to already have a special talent in using the Force. Actually, you can’t even do that, they only take toddlers, so your parents have to decide if you should join this religion and become a monk. (Or maybe the Jedi Order just takes all Force sensitive children no matter what the parents think, it’s not entirely clear.)

A normal religion isn’t organized like that. Normally most members of a religion are normal people with normal jobs with varying levels of devotion. They participate in the practices of the religion in a way that fits into their daily life. Then there are religious professionals like priests who work to make it possible for the normal followers to practice this religion. And then, in some religions, there are monastics who dedicate their life to practicing the religion, generally apart from the normal believers. The Jedi only have the last group.

That alone would make them much easier to target and wipe out. But it is even more like that. The entire Jedi Order is integrated into the institutional framework of the Republic. All of the higher ranked Jedi (we will talk about the lower ranked later) basically work as special police and special diplomats for the Republic. “and” not “or”, all of them must fulfill both roles. And, when the Clone Wars start, they all become officers in the Republic military.

Now, in principle I don’t think religious institutions working closely with the state and fulfilling important roles for it is necessarily a problem. But if this is the only way this religion can be practiced, the practice of this religion will become poor in variety and closed off to most people who would be interested in participating.

2. Slavery in the Galaxy

There is slavery in the Galaxy Far Far Away. It is illegal in the Galactic Republic, but it is widely practiced in the planets of the Outer Rim, which might or might not be members of the Republic. The Jedi know that slavery is bad. What should they do?

Well, as much as a like the image of a hundred Jedi waltzing into the Hutt Cartel and killing/arresting them all, that probably wouldn’t be the best idea and cause much more chaos and harm than it solves, at least in the short run. But there are alternatives besides doing that and mostly ignoring it. For a start, here are two:

Establish underground railroads to smuggle slaves to freedom or assist on already established ones. Jedi mind-reading and precognition abilities will be very helpful in such endeavors.

Assist in organizing and fighting in slave revolts. One Jedi can turn the tide on the battlefield and if they are respected diplomats, the can help the slaves in finding supporters.

But this isn’t what the Jedi do because they are preoccupied with their role in the Republic. Qui-Gon says to Anakin that he didn’t come to Tatooine to free slaves. Which is true, he was sent to assist the government of Naboo against the Trade Federation, not the slaves on Tatooine against the Hutts. And why was he sent to Naboo and not Tatooine? Because Chancellor Valorum decided that resisting the Trade Federation was in the interest of the Republic, but freeing slaves wasn’t.

As mentioned in part 1 the number of members of the Jedi religion is smaller than it should be and integrated into the Republic in a way that leaves little room for it to act independently.

3. The Clone Army

Suddenly, an army for the Republic conveniently appears in time when the Republic is about to go to war after centuries of peace. This army is made up of, for all intents and purposes, slaves. Slaves that have been bred to be especially obedient. The Republic is expecting the Jedi to serve as officers in this army. What should the Jedi do?

Serve as officers, because the clones would suffer more without them?

Refuse to serve because that would mean supporting the introduction of slavery into the Republic?

Throw their political weight around and demand the clone troopers be freed and given Republic citizenship and in addition demand an end of the clone production in return for serving in the war?

Serve on both sides of the clone wars because the Republic obviously doesn’t have the moral high ground anymore and if their service in the Republic army leads to less suffering, their service in the Separatist army will do so as well?

There are probably more options. The Jedi decided to pick the one that reduced the suffering of the clones in the short term, but by doing that squandered the opportunity to take a stance against the creation of the clone army. And we don’t even see meaningful discussion within the order about this choice. This is, I suspect, because the Jedi are so used to their role as enforcers in the Galactic Republic that the alternatives weren’t really on the table.

(Palpatine’s plan was counting on the Jedi to behave this way when he planned Order 66.)

4. Dealing with emotions (the problem with Anakin)

While the Jedi Order may not demand it’s members to be emotionless, it does demand that they keep their emotions under very strict control. Nonetheless, almost all the Jedi we see do seem to be emotionally well adjusted. Obi-Wan, Yoda, Qui-Gon, Mace Windu, all of them seem to have little trouble with this demand.

Anakin, on the other hand, has a lot of trouble with it. He often has emotional outbursts through Episode II and III, then shortly afterwards walks back and apologizes. Curiously, this isn’t the case in Episode I. There he is actually quite good in dealing with his emotions. In other words, his time in the Jedi Order made his ability to handle his own emotions worse. Much worse, actually.

I think the reason for this is that whenever he feels something, other Jedi tell him that this is not right. It starts with Yoda in Episode I. “Afraid are you? […] Fear is the path to the dark side... fear leads to anger... anger leads to hate.. hate leads to suffering.” Criticisms like this no doubt continued all the way through his training until, by the time of Episode II, every time he feels an emotion he is angry at himself for feeling that emotion, which leads to more emotional instability, not less.

But why is this a problem Anakin has and not for the other Jedi we see. Maybe it is because he started his training later than is normal for a Jedi. But I suspect it is something slightly different: The Jedi who go through their training either find a way to handle their emotions in a way the order approves of, or they are sorted out. In the Expanded Universe there is a so called Jedi Service Corps where Jedi who fail their training go to work as farmers, explorers, educators or medical assistants. These jobs are, however, seen as lesser and going there is considered a failure. This is unfortunate, I think the Jedi could do much more good in the galaxy if the best of them were able to work in different fields instead of all being stuck with warrior-diplomat. Nonetheless, the Service Corps actually mitigates one of the flaws the Order has to some extend, if it works like I suspect. If the Jedi don’t have a way of dealing with emotions that works for everyone, the next best thing is to only pick the ones that can handle it and put the rest somewhere where they are useful and can’t do damage. Certainly not ideal, but an understandable adjustment.

But anyways, Anakin wasn’t sorted out. It is never confirmed in the movies, but I would suspect they made an exception for him. Yoda already made an exception for him when they decided to train him at all. And because he was the chosen one, I think they thought that his potential would be wasted if he only got to be in the Service Corps. If we ignore the Service Corps and only go off the movies, my criticism still stands: Yoda recognized that Anakin might not handle Jedi training well and he should have stuck to his guns and refuse Anakin to be trained within the Jedi Order.

Why are the Jedi like this?

Personally, I like to explain these flaws of the Jedi Order historically. Now, the EU doesn’t really fit with the theory I have. Because in games like KotOR and SWtOR the Order seems very similar to the Order in the Prequels. On the other hand, other sources say that this structure of the Jedi Order is a product of the Ruusan Reformation which happened after the end of the last Sith War a thousand years before Episode I.

To defeat the Sith at the end of that war, all Jedi were brought together as one army, no matter what they had done before. They didn’t really defeat the Sith (the Sith were deceived by Darth Bane to destroy themselves), but they thought they did. They thought they almost single-handedly saved the Republic from destruction.

Because of this, they rebuilt the Jedi Order in a way that was explicitly integrated into the institutions of the Republic. They built it in a way that made the fighting Jedi the core of the Order, other forms of being a Jedi were downgraded to the Service Corps. Because many Jedi had fallen to the dark side in that war, they taught a very strict form of emotional control and only trained force-sensitives from birth. And because they were so linked to their role as enforcers for the Republic, the neglected many other things Jedi should do, like helping slaves free themselves.

A better Jedi Order

No matter if this is how it happened, I do think the Jedi Order could be different (better). Here is how I would change it:

A Jedi Laity: Every living being is connected to the Force, so let them participate in practices that serve this connection like Jedi meditation. They may never be able to move things with their mind, but that’s not the point.

Jedi who serve the people should live among them: Jedi priests, Jedi healers, and yes, even Jedi knights should not form their own community but instead be in the same community as the Jedi laity.

Monasteries for the monks: Jedi who fully want to focus on their connection with the Force could still live in monastic communities.

Don’t completely integrate into the state: Working with the Galactic Republic could still be a thing, but the Republic should never depend on the Jedi and only a minority of Jedi should serve the Republic directly.

Help people everywhere: Because they are not completely bound to the Republic, many Jedi can decide how they will serve the people in the galaxy. Some might decide to help the slaves in the Outer Rim.

A Variety of Emotion: Not every Jedi will be as capable of controlling their emotions as the others. If there is a large variety of ways to be a Jedi, I suspect that most of them could still find their place to fit into the Order.

Allow adults to join: With adults it is much easier to determine if they would make a good Jedi and what way of being a Jedi would suit them. If there is a Jedi laity, they can be trained as children to some degree before they decide if they want to join.

Would this Jedi Order have fallen to Palpatine’s manipulation? I don’t know. But I think it would have been harder for him. If most Jedi didn’t serve in the Republic military and weren’t in a small number of Jedi temples, Order 66 would have claimed much less of the Order. (Probably 10%-20% instead of >90%.) Jedi would find it much more easy to hide in the population and the laity could help carry on the Jedi traditions in secret. Anakin might have been more emotionally well adjusted and not fall for Palpatine’s manipulations. (On the other hand, in a more open Jedi Order like this, there might be more people who could be turned, so who knows.)

Well, this is my contribution the Jedi discourse. The Jedi aren’t evil, and they certainly didn’t deserve genocide because of this. But as the Prequels depict them, they have certain tragic flaws in the way they are organized that Palpatine could exploit.

(Maybe I’ll make a shorter Part 2 about how Luke deals with this.)

[clanoffetts]

someday. | paz vizsla x fem!reader

chapter iv

masterlist

synopsis: Paz Vizsla finds himself stuck on Dantooine with a broken ship and no credits. Luckily, he finds you, a mechanic that will fix his ship for passage to Hosnian Prime. Over the course of your time together, a courtship blooms.

warnings/things to note: star wars swear words; reader has hints of PTSD that show up in this chapter, mentions of night terrors/nightmares and some alluding to depression; blatant lack of knowledge of ship mechanics; altering the canon timeline a little (my blog, my canon)

word count: 5.7k

note: i ended up moving a lot of Han and Leia stuff to the next chapter, so this one is a little shorter than I originally anticipated. still, I hope you enjoy!

Travels in hyperspace got very boring very quickly. The view out the windows was the same blue light, and there was no turning or swerving or other ships passing to break up the monotony. Sure, cuddling and holodramas were nice for a while but two days in, you were restless with boredom. 

Paz, of course, was not restless. Occasionally he’d do some push-ups or pull-ups but you knew it was not the result of boredom. 

“Kebiin’ika?” he asks, sitting down in the cockpit with you. 

“Hmm?” You tear your eyes away from a book on your datapad to look at him. 

“Wanna learn how to use one of these?” He pulls his vibroblade from his belt and holds it up. It looks very different from the one he gave you, there are no intricate markings on the one he holds.

“I think I’m going to be a slow learner,” you warn.

He laughs. “I’m patient.”

“I know,” you nod, remembering how he could just sit for a long time. “Alright. When am I learning?”

He gestures his arms out. “Right now. We can move the table and the couch.”

You agree, anxious to finally have something to do. You help him with the anchors on the round table and the booth-like seat around it, moving them up towards the cockpit. Paz carries the seat with ease, leaving you behind to grunt with the heavy metal table until he finally returns to help you, sliding it across the floor with one arm.

“Show off,” you huff, but he just chuckles. 

“Go get your blade, mesh’la,” he commands. You turn and walk back towards your room, retrieving the blade from your bag where it was carefully wrapped in some fabric. You study it as you slowly walk back to the common area, taking note of the differences between yours and the one Paz had pulled from his belt earlier. The blade that was now yours had a beautiful handle made of some sort of dark stone, embellished with gold metal. The blade had intricate carvings on it as well, one you recognized from Paz’s armor as well as many you didn’t recognize. It seemed important, almost like an heirloom, why’d he give it to you?

You return back to the common area and find him just standing there, waiting. “You ready?”

“As I’ll ever be,” you reply. 

He’s holding a wooden blade in his hand now, it’s dull and chipped in some places. “Don’t want to hurt you,” he explains. “You don’t have a body of beskar.” 

“Right. But I don't want to hurt you either,” you say, though you didn’t think you could hurt him if he tried. 

He knocks his knuckles on the chestplate. “Mesh’la, beskar is one of the strongest metals there is. Resistant even to the weapon of the Jedi.” 

You were a little shocked, first at the mention of Jedi, and then that beskar could hold strong against the swords you’d heard of the Jedi carrying. You’d seen Luke Skywalker’s on his belt, but never seen it ignited. You knew Leia trained with him often and now had one of her own, but you never asked to see it. “Oh,” you say. “Then I guess I don’t have to worry about you.”

“Right,” he agreed. “Now, what do you know about fighting?”

You recalled your very brief ‘lessons’ back on the rebel base. “Shoot the guys in white.” He looked a little confused. “The stormtroopers,” you explain.

“Yeah, I picked up on that part,” he says. “That’s all they taught you?”

You nodded. “I was a mechanic, love, not a soldier.”

“Alright. Well, maybe that’s best,” he says. “No bad habits to unlearn.” You agreed with a nod. “Ok, first thing is your stance.” 

He begins moving your body around, your arms and hips and feet, positioning you for the form he thought would be best for someone your size. He was murmuring things to himself but you had no clue what they meant. You also had no clue how you were supposed to get into this exact stance in the middle of a fight, but you let him do it anyway. 

“And then you’d take the blade and jab me here,” he says, gesturing to his stomach. “Won’t work on a man in beskar, but most people won’t have beskar. Or any armor, for that matter.” 

He continued showing you moves, small self defense ways to get out of bad situations. He made you run sequences with him, but they made you feel a little useless. Yeah, if he let you win you wouldn’t learn, but, Maker, a win was needed right about now. It’d been three hours, you were sweaty and defeated.

“I have a man in beskar,” you say, defeated yet again, laying on the floor. “So do I really need to be proficient with a blade? I’m obviously not doing well.”

He cocks his head at you, sitting down against the wall next to you. “Kebiin’ika, I won’t always be there. Besides, you are doing well.”

“I’m doing awful, Paz, don’t lie. I haven’t even gotten close to winning.” 

“Because I’m a Mandalorian, mesh’la,” he tells you. “I’ve been training with a blade since I could hold one. You’ve been training with one for three hours, and I promise that you’re doing great.”

You hum out a thank you and then sit in silence for a moment. Your eyes wander back down to the blade vibrating in your hand, studying the markings. “Why’d you give me this one?” you ask. “The pretty one, I mean.”

“It was forged from some of my mother’s armor,” he says. “House Vizsla and Mandalore’s markings are on the blade. Armorer made it for me when I was fourteen, when I put my armor and helmet on for the first time.”

“Your mother’s armor?”

He nods. “They both died, my buire, when I was thirteen. Armor is passed down through families, this armor has been with us for as long as anyone can remember.” He doesn’t expand on his parents’ death, and you don’t pry. The wound still seems fresh, and you wouldn’t be surprised if that’s because he’s never had anyone to talk to. Mandos don’t seem like that type. 

“And you trust me with it?”

“Of course I do,” he says. “Weapons are a part of my religion, mesh’la. A part of who I am, especially that blade. I wasn’t just giving you a blade.” You knew it had been a show of vulnerability, but not one so great, so full of trust. 

You didn’t know what to say. What could you say? So you just leaned into him, ignoring the annoying press of his armor into your side, relieved at the coolness the metal provided. 

You’re not sure how long you sat like that, lost in thought. Paz broke the silence, “We should probably eat and rest. We’ll be in the Hosnian system in ten hours.”

It set in as you watched Paz make soup for lunch that you’ll be seeing Leia soon. You hadn’t kept up with her life in the tabloids, that’s not what she would’ve wanted nor what you wanted. You wanted to know everything, to spend days in her house on Hosnian catching up. But you didn’t want to keep Paz from his home. And yet, you didn’t want to find out what would happen when you and Paz arrived back at his tribe, how they would react to you, an outsider.

As boring as it was, if you could stay in hyperspace forever you wouldn’t need to find out. But you wouldn’t be in hyperspace forever, and you will find out, but for now you push it out of your brain and focus on Paz as he brings soup over to the recently re-anchored table. 

“Here you go, mesh’la,” he says, sitting the bowl down. “Mandalorian specialty.” 

And it was special. Full of spices, ones you would’ve never put together, and vegetables, it was hearty. You slurped it up quickly, before excusing yourself to take a shower so Paz could eat as well. 

The shower was nice after your sparring (if you could even call it that), the hot water felt great on your now sore muscles. You had a hunch that trying to move the table contributed to that just as much as the knife fighting. 

“Paz?” You called as you exited the ‘fresher, now in pajamas. You weren’t too tired, but you knew it was important to make the transition from Yavin time to Hosnian time, and once you were cozy in bed, it wouldn’t be long before the tiredness set in. 

“I’m coming!” He called back, and sure enough he appeared, holding something in his hand. “Made you this while I ate. Well, I altered it.”

He holds out a leather sheath that holds the vibroblade. It’s identical to the dark brown one that still sits on his belt, but this one has a shorter belt, and the leather fits the blade snugly. “Thank you, Paz,” your voice is breathy at the gesture. 

“If you’re gonna fight someone with it, you’ve gotta have a way to carry it,” he says. 

Before you realize it, you’re on tippy toes, placing a kiss to the cheek of his helmet. “It’s lovely, Paz, thank you.” 

He slips past you into the ‘fresher for his turn in the shower as you admire the craftsmanship. Where he shortened the belt and tapered the sheath, the stitching got uneven, but you didn’t mind. The stitches were made with care, with kindness, with love. 

As Paz stripped off his armor in the ‘fresher he felt heat rise up in his body. You’d kissed his helmet. He’d never seen anyone do that before. It was adorable and there was a small mark left on the cheek of his helmet by your lip balm. As the water heated in the shower, he stood and studied the mark of your lips. 

You were settled on the bed when Paz emerged from the ‘fresher in his sleep clothes. He always looked strange with the helmet and none of his other armor on, but it was endearing. You had the sleep mask in hand, a precaution that Paz insisted you didn’t need, but one you took anyway. “You ready to sleep, mesh’la?”

“Yeah, I think so,” you say. “C’mon.” You pat the spot on the bed next to you. The cold of hyperspace is starting to create goosebumps on your skin, and Paz Vizsla is basically a furnace. He moves wordlessly to turn off the lights, watching as you slip the mask over your eyes. The click and hiss of the helmet sounded through the room, barely audible over the hum of the ship. 

The bed dips down as he climbs in, sheets rustling as he settles himself. You lay on your side facing where he would be, but you weren’t sure how he was laying. Extending an arm, you tried to find him. 

“Need something, kebiin’ika?” He asks as your hand lands on his stomach. 

“Just looking for you,” you murmur. He gives you a little chuckle and places his hand over yours. His hand is large, and it engulfs your small one easily. “Night, Paz,” you whisper. 

“Night, mesh’la.” His voice is a low rumble in your ears, and combined with the warmth he’s brought to the bed, sleep comes easily. 

-

The chrono is cruel the next morning. You got enough sleep, sure, but it was cold when you got out of bed and stumbled into the cockpit where Paz sat. He swiveled around in his chair to look at you, still in your pajamas. “Good morning, mesh’la,” he greets. “We’ll be there in two hours. There’s some cereal in the kitchen, if you’d like it.” 

You did like it, the sugary cereal didn’t seem like something Mandalorians would keep on hand, but you were glad they did. You excused yourself back to the bedroom, going through your things and picking out jeans and a t-shirt. For a brief moment you wondered if it was nice enough to meet with Leia, but you quickly dismissed the thought. Leia didn’t expect an ornate gown, you knew that. 

You and Paz moved about the ship, preparing for the landing and preparing the ship to sit dormant in a hangar for at least a few days. Every so often, Paz’s gloved hand drifted to the side of his helmet, where your lips had pressed the night before. He watched as you folded your clothes in different ways so that they’d fit comfortably in your backpack. He watched as you bit your lip, studying the ship to make sure nothing you’d need had been left behind. The same lips that touched his helmet. The heat rose in him again, culminating in his face, making the helmet uncomfortable.

“Kebiin’ika,” Paz says to distract himself. “Where’s your vibroblade?”

“In the cockpit.” 

“C’mon,” he says, gesturing you into the cockpit behind him. “Wanna see what it looks like on you.”

You shuffled into the cockpit behind him and he threaded the belt of the sheath through the belt loops of your jeans, fastening it around your waist. He takes a step back, looking at you with your new weapon.

“Very badass,” he says and you laugh, the both of you taking your seats.

Finally, the ship jolted out of hyperspace. The stars, the planet, and all the other ships in the system were a welcome change from the monotony of hyperspace. “Ready, kebiin’ika?” 

“Born ready,” you reply, grinning at him. There’s a giddiness welling inside you, not only that you’d be seeing Leia but that you’d be in a huge city again, on a Core planet. The years spent in the Outer Rim were peaceful, but sometimes you just want to be surrounded by people.

You were cleared to land on a platform in the heart of the city, Korrie said Leia requested C-3PO be sent for you. Her way of making a joke, you figured. The workers of the hangar would take care of the ship once you’d landed, and you knew Paz was less than thrilled at handing his ship over into the hands of strangers.

“We’re guests of the princess,” you remind him before you disembark. “They won’t hurt your ship.”

“The princess doesn’t know you’ve brought a Mandalorian,” he retorts. If you could read minds you’d know he was terrified of ruining your trip to Hosnian Prime by simply being there. 

But you couldn’t read minds. Instead, you weren’t really sure why that mattered, sure you’d heard of some bad feelings towards Mandos in the Outer Rim but you couldn’t see why that would carry over into the Core. But that didn’t matter at the moment, you needed to get off the ship and into the speeder with the droid. 

You were the first to step out of the ship, the Mandalorian strangely meek behind you. Everyone in the hangar seemed to suck in a breath as the armored man stepped out behind you, all motion stopping momentarily as everyone took in the sight of a Mandalorian. It reminded you of when Paz first walked into town on Dantooine, the whole town halted for a moment.

“Miss! Miss!” A mechanical voice is calling across the hangar. 

“We’re coming, Threepio, give us a second,” you say, pushing on through the oglers towards the golden droid at the mouth of the hangar. The speeder is state of the art, blue with no top, perfect for the kind weather of Hosnian Prime. 

“I’m afraid I was only expecting one person,” C-3PO says as he ushers you two into the speeder. “Though I suppose it won’t affect anything.”

Paz looks at you, and you can only guess he’s rolling his eyes. “This is my Mandalorian friend, Threepio,” you say. “He brought me here.”

“Splendid.”

“How’s Artoo?”

The speeder pulled out of the hangar, exposing you to the breeze as you sped over the city. “Artoo is with Master Luke,” the droid began, continuing on in excruciating detail about how the astromech’s wiring is performing. 

“That’s nice, Threepio,” you say finally, cutting him off halfway through his opinion on the best replacement for R2-D2’s outdated thrusters. “I think I’d like to enjoy the scenery for now. In silence.” You heard Paz exhale in relief next to you, the Mandalorian was close to losing his practiced patience with the droid. C-3PO had that effect on some people.

“Very well then. We will be arriving at the Organa estate in fifteen minutes.” 

You looked out over what was now the less busy parts of the capital city, the further away from the new Senate building, the quieter things got. No wonder Leia liked to live so far out of the city. You found your mind drifting from the scenery to what Leia’s home may look like. Would it be in the typical, Alderaanian minimalism style? Or is she too much like you, pushing away reminders of home? But Alderaan was so much more to Leia than just home.  

The speeder stopped on the steps of a fairly small place on the far outskirts of the city. It was a sleek white on the outside, boxy in shape like most of the homes you’d seen so far on the planet. Paz drew in a breath next to you as the two of you exited the speeder, C-3PO leading the way to the door.

Once inside, you knew Leia was not, in fact, like you. It was like you’d stepped back into a home on Alderaan. The art on the walls evoked Alderaanian style, the white furniture and gray accents were the tells of an Alderaanian decorator. 

“Y/N!” Leia calls from a hallway at the back of the foyer. “And...another guest?” Leia’s hand went to her belt, you weren’t sure if she was searching for the safety of a blaster or her lightsaber, but neither was there. 

You step forward, ahead of Paz. “This is my, uh, boyfriend, Leia.” 

“Ma’am,” Paz said with a bow of his head, not sure if that was the right thing to say. 

Apparently, it wasn’t, as C-3PO stepped forward. “It is ‘Your Highness’ upon the first address of the conversation. After that it can be ma’am, princess, or senator.”

“Oh,” Paz said. “Sorry, Your Highness.” 

“No, no,” C-3PO started, but Leia cut him off. 

“Hush, Threepio, it doesn’t matter,” she says, still eyeing Paz. “Leave us, Threepio.” The droid almost seemed like he would protest, but the look in Leia’s eyes told him not to, so he shuffled out of the foyer and deeper into the house. 

Leia motioned for you to come to her, and you did, wrapping her into a hug. “I’ve missed you, you know.”

“I’ve missed you, too,” Leia said into your neck. “But why in the nine Corellian hells would you bring a bounty hunter into my home?”

You step back and look at her. “He’s not a bounty hunter-”

“Well,” Paz says from behind you. “Not right now, anyway. I only do it out of necessity for my people, ma’am.” You’re slightly taken aback, but take care not to show Leia. Not yet, anyway. It hit you that you’d never really inquired more about the work that had brought your Paz to Dantooine.

Leia looks torn. “You know what one of those Mandalorians did to Han. To me, to Luke.”

“Boba Fett?” Paz asks. He’d heard of the princess killing Jabba the Hutt. He’d known it was Fett’s work. Hell, there wasn’t anyone in the Outer Rim that didn’t know.

“You knew him?” Leia is growing hostile again and you aren’t sure what to do.

Paz shakes his head. “Fett had never even been to Mandalore. I can assure you my people are not like him.” Paz knew that was a bit of a lie, but he hated to screw up this reunion for you. “I’ll give you my weapons while I’m here, if that’s what you want.”

“No,” Leia says, her guard dropping. “I know you’re not a threat. Not to us anyway.” And then she looks at you, then back at Paz. “C’mon, I’ll show you to your room and you can put your stuff away.” 

You follow her through the house, and you aren’t sure how to feel. It feels like Alderaan, the decor, the climate, even the smell somehow, and it’s welcoming for a moment until you remember that this isn’t Alderaan, and nothing will ever be Alderaan, no matter how well curated. But you trained your eyes on Leia, her hair wrapped in braids upon her head, a comfortable white sundress fluttering about her as she walked. 

“Here you are,” she says, leading you into a brilliant room, furniture white, though some pieces tinted with blue. The bedspread is blue, the curtains are blue. All pale and deep shades, the room is calming. “Blue’s still your favorite right? Figured this would be right up your alley.”

“Yeah, blue’s still my favorite,” you smile. She’d remembered. 

“I figured as much. Considering you chose a mountain of blue to be your boyfriend,” she quips, and you roll your eyes. Paz felt his face get hot under the helmet again. Boyfriend, boyfriend, boyfriend, he repeated in his head. “Oh, will you be needing a room, too?”

“No, ma’am, I don’t think so,” Paz tells her. “Unless kebiin’ika would like me too.”

You shook your head. “He’s with me,” you say as you toss your backpack onto the bed. “Paz, I’d bet you’d like some time without your helmet. Maybe Leia and I can go somewhere else to catch up?” Paz got the hint like you knew he would, and he nodded. 

“Great,” Leia smiled, taking your hand and pulling you out of the room. “Through here,” she says, walking through what you assumed was the master bedroom into a study. 

The study was cozy, full of actual paper books, and warm colored furniture as opposed to the stark white of the rest of the house. Han’s doing, you assumed. “Your home is gorgeous, Leia,” you tell her as you sit in one of the large chairs. 

Leia drapes herself on one of the couches and her dress settles around her stomach, where her hands clasp atop it. She sees you staring at her belly and smiles. “I’m pregnant,” she says. 

“Congratulations!” You exclaim, and she thanks you. “I swear that wasn’t there when I commed you a few days ago, though.”

She giggles. “My clothes are good at deception.”

“Taking notes from Amidala, I see,” you joke, and she laughs. 

“I did actually ask for Rabé’s help. She was my Amidala’s wardrobe mistress,” Leia says. “But enough about me for now. Since when do you date Mandalorian bounty hunters? And why does he call you kebiin’ika? You don’t have a bounty on you-”

You laugh, cutting her off. “It’s a nickname, Leia, I promise I don’t have a bounty on my head. And, well, it’s a long story,” you say. 

You’re not sure how long you sat there, telling Leia of your time on Dantooine, all the way up until the day that Paz came into town, and when you’d landed on Yavin, and when he’d given you the blade. 

“You’re kidding! He gave you a vibroblade? Where is it?” 

You pat your hip, and unsheath the blade. You move to sit next to Leia on the sofa, holding it out for her to see. “These markings on this part of the blade are his house markings,” you say, “And these are just Mandalorian, I think.”

“So, is it like an engagement ring?”

You shook your head. “No, no, I don’t think so. But from what I gather...Mandalorian courtships usually mean marriage.”

“You’re ready for that? You’ve known him, what? A week?”

You sighed. “No, I’m not ready. But I think I could be. Someday.”

“I hope so,” she says. “He makes you happy. A lot happier than the last time I saw you.”

“Leia...I just, I don’t think I can be involved anymore,” you say, the winds of the Naboo lake country gently whipping through your hair. “Now that we’re not fighting all the time, I’m thinking a lot more. About Alderaan, about everyone we’ve lost.”

Her hand was soft on your back. “I know it’s hard,” she said. “But if you take this position in the New Republic you can help so many people. And you can build a house that feels like home. Like Alderaan, just like Sabé made her home like Naboo.”

“I can’t Leia. I can’t make a fake Alderaan and pretend it’s ok. I won’t,” you say. “I have dreams of Alderaan that break me. Dreams of Yavin that break me. Dreams of kriffing Endor that break me. You’re asking me to break myself again for a kriffing committee.” 

Leia’s cheek landed on your shoulder. The tears fell from your face now, and by the feeling of her cheek, she was crying, too. “No,” she whispers. “You can’t break. I need you, a lot of people do.”

“They’re going to have to learn to live without me for a while, I think.”

 “But, whenever you’re ready, you’ll come find me, right?”

“It’s going to be a long time, Leia.”

“But you’ll still come find me. I don’t care if it’s four weeks or forty years, you could show up at my doorstep and I’ll hug you like I always have.”

“Yeah,” you said. “I am a lot happier. I worked through some things. Some things can’t be worked through, though.”

“Alderaan,” she murmurs, leaning into you. “I know. That’s why I love this room so much. It’s so Han, so Corellian, and so not Alderaan.”

“Didn’t take this as a smuggler’s style,” you joke. 

She laughs a little, too. “He doesn’t have a style. I think this is Lando’s doing, Han just put his name on it.”

The room did seem to have Lando’s taste written all over it, though you could guess Lando would rather not have Corellian furniture in his house. Your eyes drifted back to Leia, her hand absent-mindedly stroking her stomach. “When’s the little one due?”

“Four months,” she said. “It’s a boy.”

“A boy with a name?”

“I’m thinking ‘Ben’,” she says. “After Ben Kenobi. Han was thinking ‘Bail’, but I don’t know. I like ‘Ben’.” 

You smiled. “That’s a nice name,” you say. “Besides, a Skywalker needs a Jedi name.”

“Right,” she agrees.

She sits up to face you now. “Will you train him?”

“No,” she says. “I’ll let Luke do that, when he’s ready. And when little Ben is ready. It was never my destiny to become a true Jedi. That was always Luke.”

You smile at her. “You know Mandalorian armor is invincible against a lightsaber?”

“Beskar,” she says. “Yes. It’s very strong. I saw a staff made of beskar once, back on Alderaan when I was little. In a museum, I think.” 

“That’s what Mando wears,” you catch yourself before you say his name, replacing it with the one-size-fits-all nickname. 

She laughs. “Mando isn’t his name right? That’d be awfully unoriginal.”

“No,” you reply. “But Mandalorian religion, it’s...it’s interesting territory. I know his name, though.”

“What’s he look like?” She asks with girlish intrigue, the gossipy voice usually reserved for teenagers poking through.

“I don’t know. And even if I did, I couldn’t tell you.”

Her brow furrows. “You’ve basically agreed to marry him and you don’t know what he looks like?” 

“Ok, first, I agreed to court him.”

“Same difference,” Leia interjects.

You roll your eyes playfully. “And, second, it’s against his creed to remove his helmet unless we’re married.” 

“Oh, maker, I can’t believe you’re going to marry someone for just a kiss, not even dic-”

“Leia!” You cut her off. “Your son can hear you, you know. Through the Force or whatever.”

She lightly hits your arm. “Not how the Force works, dear. And you know I’m right.”

“You aren’t right, your highness,” the nickname annoys her to no end, and that’s exactly why you employed it. “He’s sweet to me, Leia. He even taught me how to fight with this thing yesterday.” You pat the vibroblade on your hip.

“Mandalorians must be patient. I remember when you tried to learn to shoot a blaster,” she smiled with nostalgia at the ‘lessons’ from Yavin IV. The marksmen gave up quickly on teaching the mechanics how to fight.

“Ok, I wasn’t that bad,” you tell her. “And my Mando says I’m doing very well with the knife, thank you very much.”

“Oh you’re in love,” Leia said. “I can see it in your eyes. Kriff, before long you might look like me!” She gestures to her pregnant belly. “Do the Mando babies pop out with the helmet on? That might be an issue.”

You let out an embarrassingly loud laugh at the thought. “Maker, Leia, you’re getting ahead of yourself.”

“Seriously, though,” she says, putting a hand on your knee. “I’m glad you’ve found him. I think he makes you glow.”

It was well past lunch time when the two of you ventured out of the study again. You’d barely scratched the surface with Leia, but the morning’s talking had already made you tired. “Threepio, we’re hungry,” Leia said as she led you into the kitchen. “Ah, Threepio, you sure you aren’t a mind reader?” The table was set for three, some kind of elegant sandwich and soup combo awaited you. 

“Do we invite Mando? Since he can’t really eat with us?”

You nodded. “I’ll go get him, if that’s ok? Don't want him to get lonely or something.” You walked back out of the kitchen, picturing Paz sitting on the edge of the bed still as a statue. 

You knocked on the door. “Paz? It’s me. Can I come in?” It was a moment before he answered, and then you let yourself through the door. He was lounging on the floor against the bed, your datapad in hand. Not at all what you pictured. 

“Hope you don’t mind,” he says, holding up the datapad. “Wanted to catch up on that show. I’ve been a little confused.” 

You giggled a little at the thought of a big bad Mandalorian itching to watch a holodrama. “It’s alright, love. Would you want to come sit with Leia and I while we eat? I think she’d like to get to know you as much as she can.”

Paz wanted to say no. He wasn’t a social man, especially not after the tension between him and Leia from earlier, but he knew it meant something to you. So, he climbed up off the floor and followed you into the kitchen. 

“Master Mandalorian,” C-3PO greeted as Paz walked into the dining area. “Uh, su cuy’gar. Olarom at yaim Organa-Solo.”

“I can speak Basic, droid,” Paz says as he sits down. 

“What’d he say?” You and Leia asked in unison. 

“He said ‘welcome to the Organa-Solo home’ in Mando’a,” Paz translates.

Leia turns to the droid. “Where the kriff did you learn Mando’a?”

“I am fluent in over-”

“Yeah, yeah,” Leia said, and waved him off. “I don't know how I forget that.”

You took a bite of the soup, not as good as the Mandalorian dish Paz had made, but it was delicious nonetheless. 

“Mando,” Leia says between bites. “I assume you’re from Mandalore. Do you still live there?”

Paz shakes his head. “No, ma’am.” 

Leia looks at you, and then you look at Paz, silently trying to let him know that it’s ok to open up to Leia. It was ok for you, just not for him. Not yet, anyway. 

“Do you have any siblings?”

“Used to.”

“Not much of a talker,” Leia murmurs to you. “You met my friend on a job?”

He nods. “More or less. I was coming home from one. Had to stop for supplies.”

“You have a family in your Tribe?”

Paz nods. “The Tribe is my family. All of them. We care for eachother.”

The lunch went on like this, and it was a bit tiring. Leia would ask a question, she would get an answer that did not satisfy, and then ask another. You wished Paz would open up, but you understood. Maybe, with time, he would, and Leia would approve of him. You didn’t need Leia’s approval, but you wanted it. You wanted her to like him, she was very important to you, just as he was. 

Once the bowls of soup were scraped clean and sandwiches were gone from two of the three plates, C-3PO informed Leia that she was needed at the Senate building. 

“I’ll be back soon,” she said as she tied an overdress around her. “Help yourselves to anything, alright?” She kissed you on the cheek and went out the door. 

“I’m sorry I’m not good company,” Paz says as soon as Leia leaves. “It’s not in my nature.”

You shake your head. “Nonsense. She understands, even though it may not seem like it.” 

“I am trying,” he insists. “I just can’t answer those questions.”

You take his gloved hand into yours. “I know,” you say, pressing a kiss to the back of his hand. “I’ll explain more about Mandalorians to her when she gets back. And who knows? Maybe someday you’ll be an open book with her. Best friends with Princess Leia of Alderaan.”

He laughs. “Yeah, maybe,” he says, voice dripping with uncertainty.

It had been a long time until Leia returned home. You’d wandered around the living room for awhile while Paz ate his late lunch, and then the two of you sat on the couch and watched a holo. Paz felt like he was intruding, and told you so many times, but C-3PO consistently reminded the both of you to make yourselves at home.

“I have prepared a dinner for the two of you, if you would like it.”

“Thank you, Threepio,” you say from your place on the couch. Paz had shed his cuirass so you could cuddle into his chest.

He released you from his arms and said, “You go eat first, mesh’la.”

“We can eat together. Take it to the room and sit back to back,” you say. “Would that be alright, Threepio?”

“You might spill it,” Threepio says. “But I suppose it would be alright. I will bring the trays to the Blue Room.”

You nodded your thanks, Paz standing behind you. He picked his cuirass up off the floor and followed you to the bedroom.

“Where we sitting, kebiin’ika?”

“Floor might be best,” you reply.

He nodded, lowering himself onto the floor and you followed suit. C-3PO appeared with the food on trays, handing them to the two of you and shutting the door on his way out.

The familiar click and hiss met your ears and you saw the helmet hit the floor in your peripheral. The food was a pasta with some vegetables. “Looks good,” you say.

“Indeed,” Paz agrees, and you hear his fork begin to twist on the plate.

As you are, your mind returned to your conversation with Leia. Her asking if you were ready for marriage. Paz told you Mandalorian courtships were short, it was a throwaway comment and you knew that, but it still hung over you.

“Paz?”

“Hmm?”

“Are...” you stop for a moment, wondering if you should continue. You decided to. “Are we going to get married?”

You couldn’t see Paz almost choke on his food, but you heard it. Once he recovered from his coughing he said, “why are you asking, mesh’la?”

“You remember when you told me Mandalorian courtships don’t last long? And that usually Mandos who court get married...”

He sighs. “That’s what it means for a lot of Mandalorians. But you, my love, are not a Mandalorian. Our courtship means what you want it to mean.”

“But we might get married?” You weren’t sure how shaky your voice sounded to him, but you hoped it wasn’t much.

“Yeah,” he replies. “Someday, I hope.”

You smile at your plate. Both of you felt the hot flame of love consuming your bodies, rising to your faces. “Someday.”

tags! @remmysbounty @ladyjenny19 @shadowsoundeffects13

[kosdaoziro]

The Origins of Kosdaoziro

Note, that this is going to be a long post, and more than a bit rambly, as these are direct quotes from a chat I had when the inspiration struck.

Kosdaoziro (or Kosdaŭziro in Esperanto), is made by forming the Esperanto words Kosmo ((outer) space), Daŭro (duration) and Deziro (wish, desire). A perhaps too short summary of the religion as a whole is that Arceus and Jirachi are symbols (it’s... complicated) of internal improvement and connections with others respectively, and learning lessons from them on how to do this.

I may update this post, beyond the “read more” link with additional commentary on these messages. However, I will not edit the messages themselves, which will be in block quotes, and the comments will be out of block quotes. All messages are from me, and presented in the order they were written

... I'm legitimately considering writing a "fake" religious text for Espatiemsado. Obviously, a religion needs followers too to be real

“Espatiemsado“ was a fictional religion I made for a roleplay involving Arceus and Jirachi. The name is a corruption (as in, deliberate sound changes and shortenings) of  espacio-tiempo sagrado , meant to mean “holy spacetime” in Spanish. I do not speak Spanish, so I have no idea if that makes any sense.

Obviously, I can't have actual literal Arceus... Maybe. And obviously, I'd write it in English, and I would not claim it actually came from the divine. Fortunately, Jedi has proven that you can be a real religion without alleging a divine source

... Yeah, uh... I’m not certain Arceus didn’t get involved, though my lack of connection to spiritual things makes me unsure.

I just wonder about the teachings part, rather than just the mythology

While the in game mythology was useful for coming up with a framework, the actual mythology itself is not part of the religion. This does not mean it is false, instead it is up to the person to decide if they want to believe Arceus made the world.

What can be learned from Arceus and Jirachi? I feel like one fragment of an idea is to always be able to adapt yourself to a situation, similar to the plates. Maybe something about respecting those who do things for you, like a trainer should with their Pokémon?

Adaptability in situations with others and respect are more Jirachi things, as I see them now. However, self adaptability is an Arceus thing, so Adaptability is a trait relating to both of them.

How to appreciate what you are given, how to be dependable, and the importance of creation and removal (with Giratina representing destruction and clearing out of ideas and things that are no longer needed)

It is very important to recognize that Giratina is not evil. Arceus made Giratina for a reason, and that reason is to clear away things that should be destroyed.

The principals of Dialga, of how to allocate and spend time, the principals of Palkia, of how you should define and interact with your space, and the principals of Giratina, about removing things and when to let go

Each of these will be written into collections of google docs called “books” at a later date. They are all equally important.

Every person is in a way, an Arceus of their own world. They don't have endless power, of course, but they can create. So a follower would then create their own version of the Trio, be them parts of themselves, or something they share with their friends

This, is the core of the Symbol of Arceus. The idea of a Symbol is that what a symbol actually is in reality, or if it even exists, is up to the person. What is important is what they represent.

Those relate primarily to the internal. The external is more governed by Jirachi, where one shall seek to strengthen good wishes of others and resist selfish ones from themselves or others. Each person can, in their own way, grant the wishes of others

This is the Symbol of Jirachi. All social interactions are, in some way, relating to granting wishes of others, which are defined as wants or needs that someone cannot satisfy on their own.

Neither truly has meaning without the other. To focus entirely inside is to ignore the natural urge for connection, the natural wish of humans. To focus entirely outside is to squander the potential of the self as someone besides what others see

I now consider both the want to connect with others and the want to create as The Desires, two fundamental things beyond survival that all humans wish for in some way. Again, the message of balance is important.

(some time passed)

It might not actually say that Arceus is real as a being separate from people. I typically really don't like the concept of gods, as I believed that they took away the agency of man. I say believed, because weirdly I'm okay with Arceus being real

More evidence that Arceus might have started influencing me.

And then, I gave it the name. Thanks for reading, my ask box is open, and I will try to post at least somewhat regularly.

[starwarsfic]

Gai'se bal Mande 1: Alpha-17

Originally posted September 4, 2020

Summary: There's one basic fact of the galaxy that lots of people agree on: Qui-Gon Jinn does not deserve to raise Obi-Wan.

Details: Alpha-17 & Obi-Wan. Time Travel AU. Mandalore Mission AU. For the Punch Qui-Gon and Adopt Obi-Wan challenge.

xxxxxx

Death came in battle, it was all that Alpha-17 could hope for.

That it was battle against the Vod'e, the younger siblings he'd raised and trained and who'd gone suddenly, horrifying blank-faced before turning on the Jedi around them, left something to be desired.

He thought of the ones off Kamino, legions of Vod'e that could very well be doing exactly the same thing. Trusted--some even loved--by the Jedi around them.

He thought of Kote. And how he'd entrusted him with Obi-Wan.

His heart ached.

And then he hit the water, the impact knocking him out, the current sucking him under, and stopped thinking.

***

Alpha-17 came awake with a gasp. He hadn't expected to come awake at all, so he did as he had been trained to and accessed the situation before allowing any signs of waking. He was lying on grass, somewhere with moderate temperature on the cold side. There were at least two people in the immediate vicinity, he could smell the faintest fumes of blaster fire but not hear any of the telltale sounds of armor.

"Hey, are you okay?" The voice was on the young side, the words were Mando'a, the accent familiar--achingly familiar, he realized.

He opened his eyes and a too-young version of Obi-Wan was leaning over him, staring down at him. Was this the afterlife? Were one of the religions that said there was some sort of 'heaven' after death right? But he'd think he'd be staring into Obi-Wan's face as he'd been when they first met, that those eyes would be alight with recognition.

This...this kid was younger than a shiny and definitely didn't recognize him. He had the telltale Padawan haircut, which looked somehow extra ridiculous and extra adorable on his fluffy red hair. He wasn't wearing robes, though, instead dressed like some sort of spacer.

Beside him was a girl, a little older than him, light colored hair and--oh.

Oh.

The Duchess. His General and the Duchess.

"What--what year is this?"

The two exchanged looks, clearly concerned for him. "You fell out of the sky, there aren't any ships around. Whatever happened to you--you're disoriented."

"I'm not," Alpha-17 insisted, sitting up and inspecting himself.

The blaster marks were there on his armor, but the wounds were gone. His bucket was missing, too, but that was probably for the best--the armor he might be able to pass off as Mandalorian style, but he couldn't do that with the helmet.

Neither of them recognized him--neither of them would have seen Jango Fett before, he didn't think. How old would Jango have been right now? Would they be too close in age and looks to risk showing his face?

He spared a moment to think about tracking him down, it wouldn't be hard to get a slip on him, he wouldn't be expecting anyone to know as much about his skillset as Alpha-17 did.

"It's 7938 CRC," Padawan Obi-Wan finally says, watching Alpha-17 for a reaction.

"Right, that scans," he stated, in acknowledgement, remembering his General liked that sort of thing. "I want you to reach out with your Force banthashit, and ask it if the next thing I say is true or not." Obi-Wan's eyes widen and, after another quick look at Kryze, he nods. "I'm from the future."

Kryze lets out a disbelieving noise. Obi-Wan, who'd been crouching beside him, falls flat on his ass, still staring. He believed him, then. That made things slightly easier.

"Duchess, you're dead. I'm dead, or was. You...Obi-Wan, you probably are, too. There was a war," before Kryze could say anything about how there was currently a war, he waved a hand, "a galactic wide war. Lots of people died. If I'm back here, now...it's so we can prepare for it."

All through his words, Obi-Wan's eyes hardened, his face chilling into the determined look Alpha-17 recognized from battle. He'd been in battle, he realized, now, and before now, even. He'd said as much when they'd talked about his past. Obi-Wan might be missing a few decades of experience, but he wasn't missing his earlier knowledge of warfare.

"You believe him?"

"The Force is--it's hard to explain, Sat'ika. It's ringing with truth all around him, screaming at me to believe him."

Kryze had the resigned look of someone who had worked with a Jedi for long enough to know they were all completely crazy and also actually did have mysterical powers.

"Fine." She stood up a little straighter, looking down at him with an air of authority at odds with her dirty spacer disguise. "What's the plan, then?"

***

He told them enough, Obi-Wan confirmed anything with the Force that Kryze thought was just too unbelievable. It wasn't hard, after that, to get their help tracking down Jango (Alpha-17 remembered just enough about his stories to have a good guess of where he might be) and, even though neither of them seemed too hot about it, killing him.

Taking his identity felt creepy, but they needed it--the Duchess of the New Mandalorians and the Mand'alor of the traditionalists working together? Yeah, they needed that.

And if anyone noticed the gaps in "Jango's" memory, well, there was a lot of trauma there. No surprise he'd repress most of his old life.

Eventually Jinn tracked them down, too, clearly not knowing what to make of the fact his charge had gone so far off the rails she'd allied with a missing political rival.

Definitely no one was surprised that "Jango" didn't want a Jedi involved in anything (Obi-Wan didn't count, of course, but there were lots of reasons people could give for that), and he blocked him out of their planning meetings.

Frustrated and petty, Jinn drew Obi-Wan away just a day after they all reached Sundari. "I...suppose our work here is done, then. Padawan, it's time to return to Coruscant."

"So you can send him off alone in another warzone?" Alpha-17 challenged and the people around them tensed in anticipation, knowing how much "Jango" liked the apprentice. "Let him starve for a few more months when he's supposed to be growing?"

Jinn's eyes flashed with anger, his expression reminding Alpha-17 of Anakin--who'd been nineteen, not some old man entrusted with raising multiple kids. It was impossible to believe this guy raised someone like Obi-Wan Kenobi, though he figured that was because Obi-Wan mostly raised himself.

"Obi-Wan is my Padawan learner, as his Master--"

"You're supposed to take care of him, not treat him like a neglected strill that will keep obedient because it doesn't know better."

"Jango," Obi-Wan tried to interrupt, but Alpha-17 shot him a look and he backed down and shuffled away, Satine gripping his arm, both seeming more curious than concerned.

Maybe it was Obi-Wan's easy obedience towards Alpha-17 or maybe it was the protective anger Jinn was feeling in the Force, but he stepped forward, looking down at Alpha-17 like his height was something to be intimidated by and not just a quirk of genetics.

Alpha-17 had spent too long dealing with the longnecks to give a shit about Qui-Gon Jinn being taller.

"Our mission is over, Mand'alor," the title was hissed in displeasure, "and it is time to return to our home."

Alpha-17 turned towards Obi-Wan, whose eyes were wide. They'd discussed this--the need to prepare Mandalore for what was to come, the fact that the Republic, the Jedi Order, couldn't be as ready. He took a breath, let it out steadily, as he did when he was releasing emotions in the Force. Then he nodded.

"Ni kar'tayl gai sa'ad," Alpha-17 stated, the room erupting into chaos as "Jango Fett" adopted a child.

Jinn clearly didn't know what that meant, but knew there was some significance. He strode forward and, instead of stopping in front of Obi-Wan to speak to him as Alpha-17 had been expecting, he grabbed Obi-Wan's arm.

"We're going, now, Padawan."

He didn't get more of a tug in before Alpha-17's fist landed cleanly in his kidney. Letting out a wheeze, the older Jedi stumbled away, Obi-Wan just managing to get out of his grip. Satine was whispering frantically to him, glaring at Jinn as she did, probably telling Obi-Wan how unacceptable Jinn's move had been even if Obi-Wan had been conditioned to think that was alright.

"You're leaving, Jinn. And you're not taking my son with you."

The Mandalorians around them weren't the Vod'e, would never be as close or know him as truly, but they were still Mando'ade, and quickly filled in the space to block Obi-Wan from Jinn's view as he turned his attention back to them.

The Jedi Order would protest the whole thing, probably fed some lies by Jinn about what actually had happened, but there were more than enough people here to know and spread the truth through the sector. There was nothing more Mandalorian than fighting the Jedi and with any luck this might even get Death Watch interested in "Jango's" rule.

xxxxxx

"gai bal manda" is the Mandalorian adoption rite, it means "name and soul." This is me doing my best to pluralize that into "names and souls"

[current-mcr-news]

Carry The Fire Podcast with Gerard Way: Full Transcription

Welcome to Carry The Fire, a podcast where we explore the big questions of life through the lens of the good, the true, and the beautiful. I’m your host, Dustin Kensrue, and my hope is that through these conversations with people of diverse and divergent backgrounds and beliefs, we can glimpse the world anew through each other's unique perspectives.

Gerard: Fiction is something to a degree that you'll hide behind in a way, and it allows you to expose yourself… I always saw the characters that I've played as some aspect of myself turned up to 12... Overall, I considered The Black Parade to be a death fantasy… death and rock and roll were kind of intertwined… Every time you get onstage you have to be prepared to die.

Dustin: Hey everybody. It is episode five of Carry The Fire podcast. Today we are joined by Gerard Way who is the singer of the band My Chemical Romance as well as also having released some killer music on his own. He has spent the last few years though, spending most of his time writing comics, including the very popular Umbrella Academy comics which have recently been adapted into a great show on Netflix. In our conversation, we talk about creating worlds and inhabiting characters, we talk about the beauty and the difficulty of creative collaboration, the complexity of trying to incorporate time-travel into a story, and we also get into Gerard’s spirituality a bit, and I want to give a brief heads up for some of you regarding that.

Gerard is going to talk a bit about magick and witchcraft. While I’m no expert on either, I do know enough to know that these words in this context probably don’t mean what most of you think they do. Some of you might not bat an eye hearing them but a lot of you probably came up inside a worldview where someone who was interested in these things was considered very evil. Gerard is very far from that. If I can try to provide a new framework for you it would be this: Generally, modern practices of magick and witchcraft, while being diverse in form, incorporate various insights and rituals from animistic pagan and folk religion, as well as incorporating some psychological intuitions from different fields and traditions. Practitioners generally tend to be very concerned with the earth and our connection with it. While this is not my spiritual tradition or practice, I recognize that we all have things to learn from each other. I think especially the ideas in these traditions about finding our place within the natural world are a helpful corrective to a lot of the western traditions’ tendency to want to dominate over nature, rather than seeing ourselves as a part of an interconnected web of being. I had no idea we’d be talking about any of this going into this conversation, but in the spirit of this podcast, I was so excited to hear from another unique perspective on the good, the true, and the beautiful, and I hope you will be too. Let’s get into it.

Dustin: Thank you so much for doing this.

Gerard: No problem.

D: It's super good to see you.

G: You too!

D: I'm trying to think of the last time we even saw each other and I- it was probably on tour.

G: Was it on the arena tour?

D: That's what I'm thinking.

G: It's been a long time.

D: And we were playing a bunch of World of Warcraft.

G: Yeah! That's my strongest memory. I have a lot of great memories of you guys, obviously, but the one that sticks out in my head the most is when we're all playing Warcraft in this big room and you had to go onstage, and you literally had your rig hooked up, you had your in-ears, they weren't in yet, but you were wired up, and I believe you even had a guitar, and you were still playing. You went literally from the keyboard from the computer right on stage.

D: Dude, I got way too addicted to that game. It's your guys' fault.

G: It was our fault, yeah!

D: Oh dude, it was so fun. It was probably like, what? Eight or nine of us playing in a room.

G: Yeah!

D: I don't know if it was the tour after that or two, and I had started just dreaming in Warcraft, and I went onstage one day and I was onstage and I had this moment where I was like, "I'm done! I can't," because I had tried to wean a little bit and it wasn't working, so I was like, "I gotta go cold turkey."

G: Yeah.

D: And I got offstage and I gave someone the Warcraft and I said, "Don't give this back to me. I'm done. I deleted it." Yeah. Which is funny because I seriously hadn't played video games since then until I just bought my kids a Switch.

G: Okay!

D: And they're playing Zelda.

G: Zelda, yeah.

D: And I decided to treat myself.

G: Nice, nice.

D: That's why I got a Switch for the road because Zelda's the best.

G: Yeah, I play Zelda with my daughter and it's so big though. We're having a really hard time getting a handle on the game because it's so vast.

D: Yeah, it is crazy. 

G: I had to quit Warcraft too. I had to go cold turkey because it was still in my life when I wanted to write The Umbrella Academy.

D: Oh.

G: And I actually had this- I was at the crossroads and I had this moment where I was like, "I can either play Warcraft or I could write this comic."

D: It's a time sink.

G: Totally.

D: That game especially.

G: Yeah.

D: The social aspect, it just ends up being enormous.

G: Yeah yeah, so that was it. I quit and never looked back. 

D: So, I was gonna ask you, prompted you earlier to think about it. What was something that gave you a feeling of wonder as a kid?

G: Okay so, I have a couple really obvious-

D: Or multiple things.

G: Multiple things, yeah, I have a couple real obvious answers.

D: That's alright.

G: And I know this is such an obvious one but Star Wars was really big. It just was and I know it was for millions of people. Once I saw that, it was like the first movie my parents ever took me to see and I was really young, but the thing back then was they were running these in theaters for like three years.

D: Oh really? I don't think I realized that.

G: Yeah. So Star Wars had come out and then they just kept running it until The Empire came out. I must've been two or something and they brought me to the theater.

D: Oh wow! I think I remember, I think my first memory of going to a movie was seeing- Was Jedi '84?

G: '83, yeah. I think it was '83.

D: So I remember going to see that, standing in line with my dad.

G: Me too!

D: That's the first, I don't know, there's just those moments where you have those- I remember listening to certain records in my dad's car.

G: Yeah.

D: And he'd turn it up loud.

G: Yep. That's one of my favorite memories of my dad is him picking me up from school early and then taking me to go see Jedi.

D: Oh that's cool.

G: Yeah, we waited in big lines that wrapped around. Even back then, there were a couple people ordering pizza. That's one of my favorite memories of being with my dad.

D: That's super cool. What about Star Wars specifically created that wonder? Was it the world?

G: The world, I think. It was the world, the scope, just this world you wanted to live in, that you wish existed and there was only three movies back then, so your brain would kinda fill in the gaps like, "What is it like? What are their supermarkets like?" And your brain would kinda- and later, that would come into play when I would RPGs, which is another thing I'll bring up in a minute. There was a time where I was in college, or right before college, where we were playing a Star Wars RPG that I was running, and it's just such a rich world.

D: Like a tabletop one?

G: Tabletop, yeah. And it was a really great game and it was super epic because the one thing about it was everybody already had a sense of that world in their head.

D: Yeah, you don't have to build that already.

G: Yeah, you didn't have to build.

D: You just add onto it.

G: Yeah yeah, so they all knew the world so when you would describe something, everybody had a vivid picture in their head, and then anything you hadn't seen before, you would just describe, but people had a point of reference so they would know.

D: That's pretty cool.

G: But yeah, Star Wars was like the first one and I was just obsessed with that for my whole childhood, playing with the action figures with Mikey, and we had our own sarlacc pit which was a dirt pit, and stuff like that. And then the other thing that was really important to me were tabletop RPGs. So, I was in the 3rd grade at a new school, but I still hung out with my best friend who was still at the old school. Anyway, basically he had an older brother- his friend had an older brother in college and he was way into D&D and he would run D&D for us, and we're all 3rd graders. That was a major moment for me.

D: That's pretty cool.

G: Yeah, it was. And to have a college-aged Dungeon Master who knew the game inside out was a really amazing way to play.

D: That's pretty cool.

G: Yeah. And that really opened up a big world for me. So then I would go on to- so I never stopped playing since the 3rd grade and then I took a try at being a Dungeon Master, and even just from playing and Dungeon Mastering, I learned how to tell stories, and I was really into that. You'd learn things even about leadership if you go to become the party leader, or if you're the DM, you learn how to keep people engaged. You learn how to keep momentum, things moving.

D: That's interesting. I feel like that's something that maybe a lot of storytellers are not paying as much attention to as they used to. There's the book I brought you, it's called Invisible Ink.

G: Oh, cool!

D: This guy, Brian McDonald, who's kind of like a story guru. He consults at Pixar all the time, teaches screenwriting, he's very cool. But he grew up watching a bunch of the classic movie directors coming up in the '60s and '70s or whatever, and they all had this vision of what stories were and really paid attention to how- they thought about how the audience would react, imagined them in the theater, or whatever. And then, something he was talking about is he just feels it's dropped off, that interplay of trying to connect and let that influence how you're actually creating the story.

G: Yeah. I'm excited to read that. I'm a big fan of structure and I'm a big fan of outlines.

D: Okay.

G: Yeah.

D: You'll like this.

G: Yeah! Good! I'm a big fan of those things because the way I see it, if you know your whole story, and I always feel like you don't need to know all the details, you don't need to know all of it, but you should know kind of- you should have some kind of outline or a structure, and then you get to have fun because you do know the beats you need to hit, but all the spaces in between, you get to fill that in.

D: I think it's rare that anyone doesn't do that and does it well. Stephen King's maybe the only one that I can think of that just doesn't write that way, and somehow he just has internalized it or something, and it ends up working itself out.

G: Yeah.

D: That's cool, man. So would you say those kinds of things, these imaginary worlds, these built worlds, are the things that still bring you the most wonder and joy in a sense?

G: Yeah! And it's something that I wanted to do when I grew up. I wanted to build my own worlds that people could share and be a part of, and that was something I did all throughout the band was just kinda- and building all these different worlds and the people that inhabit those worlds and the details down to the stickers on the Trans Am for Danger Days, those were all planned out. So my favorite thing to do is world building. And I've done it for projects that haven't come to fruition as well. Like I was working on this sci-fi TV show for a while and I just went deep, and I just came up with- with my friend Jon Rivera, we just came up with this whole world. So world building is something I'm a big fan of. And it's something I've noticed people talk about when they're talking about either my work with Umbrella Academy or My Chemical Romance, is the world building aspect, so. World building as a job title isn't a job, but I think it's- that element is, I feel like, one of my strengths.

D: Yeah. As far as the world building, I feel like you've not only built those worlds, but with MCR, you lead in inhabiting them in a way.

G: Yeah.

D: It's fun to watch. It's scary for me a little bit, watching it. Is it scary for you or is it safe for you? To be in that character.

G: That's a good question. I think there's a bit of safety that comes with being a character, and obviously, I was looking up to my heroes when I was constructing that. I was looking at David Bowie, especially around Black Parade, that's when I was like, "I'm gonna be a character." Early Black Parade stuff was like, I had written this line out that basically said, "What if Death had a rock band?" It obviously changed from that and we all became Death in a way, the whole band, but there was a safety with inhabiting a character, and the character I was during Black Parade was fun because I think in an entertaining way or a positive way, there was this level of disdain that you would have for you audience as playing as The Black Parade. But it was, to me, a healthy kind, because you were just playing really. And I thought that was a fun aspect of that character. But then there's a lot of you in the character and it's kind of- I always saw the characters that I've played as some aspect of myself turned up to 12. It's interesting when I would meet people afterwards and stuff, they would be like, "I didn't think you were gonna be so normal when I met you," just because the way I would act onstage. And I met a lot of kids who were like, "I thought you were gonna be such a jerk."

D: That's funny.

G: Because I would play one, you know. And it was just part of the drama for me.

D: Yeah. That's cool. Have you read any Ursula K. Le Guin?

G: I love her! I just reread Earthsea, the first one.

D: I haven't read it. I've heard it's amazing.

G: Yeah, it is.

D: I just got into- I read The Left Hand Of Darkness.

G: Oh, I've not finished that, but I loved what I've read.

D: It is a very slow book, in a sense. It's not exciting, in a sense, but it's got this patient movement and by the end, I was just floored by it. It was fantastic.

G: I have to finish that one. I love her and her work, especially Left Hand Of Darkness, it does have a patient movement, I think that's the best way to describe it. And I've also loved the way that she talks about storytelling in writing, and one thing I've read from her recently that really stuck with me, this is a quote of hers, and I'm paraphrasing it, I don't know if I'm getting this exact, but she basically said, "Not every story needs to have a message. It could just be the act of telling a story. You don't have to lecture your readership or your audience, or hit them over the head with this big message. It doesn't have to have one."

D: Which is interesting because I feel like she is a very message orientated writer in a certain way, but maybe that's coming in in a very natural sense.

G: Yeah.

D: [C.S.] Lewis talked about that too, where he was like, "The last thing you wanna do is write this thing that's just trying to tell something." He's like, "Whatever truth that you actually believe, those things are coming out if you just write."

G: If you just write, I agree with that.

D: Like Narnia, apparently, started from- he had a picture in his head of a faun in a snowstorm holding a parcel with an umbrella. That's the whole world built out of that, and he loved that image, and his love for it blossomed into something.

G: Yeah! That's awesome!

D: It's super cool. So, the beginning, in the intro of Left Hand Of Darkness,  Le Guin says, "I am an artist, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth. The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor." So even when you're making music, you were talking about you're making these fictions, you're lying as it were. I was watching something the other day, you said something like, "Sometimes fiction is closer to fact," or something in that range. Is that accurate of how you feel creating, that sometimes by- you're getting at a deeper truth by telling a fiction?

G: Yeah yeah. That could happen, and I think it's kinda magical when it does happen. Black Parade especially is filled with a lot of metaphors and maybe the fiction is something to a degree that you'll hide behind in a way, and it allows you to expose yourself. Because exposing yourself is really hard and one of the- just allowing yourself to be vulnerable is really hard and one of the things that Rob Cavallo said to me when he was producing Black Parade was, "Making a record, a great record, is you're almost pulling open your insides and you're pulling all your guts out," and things like that, and it's a brutal process because of that, but I think I did that on that record a lot. There's a lot of self loathing and there's the Catholic guilt I grew up with appears in stuff like Mama and House of Wolves, how you think you're destined for Hell and things like that, but it's cool, yeah. Fiction gives you a way to express these things and make yourself vulnerable and open yourself up and that's the way I like to use it, and then sometimes, there's stuff that's just straight fiction or fantasy. Overall, I considered Black Parade to be a death fantasy. A rock and roll death fantasy because I thought death and rock and roll were kind of intertwined in a way, because I think Mick Jagger had said once, "Every time you get onstage you have to be prepared to die." 

D: That's amazing.

G: Yeah! So, it was this rock and roll death fantasy, Black Parade.

D: That's cool. I have the worst memory. So, I was preparing for this and somebody was like, "Hey, ask Gerard if he really wrote the treatment for the Image Of The Invisible video," and I was like, "Holy shit!" I totally forgot that-

G: Oh my god! 

D: That you did that.

G: Oh my god! That was so fun too! I totally forgot! I gotta rewatch that.

D: What's funny too is I watching your videos and I was like, "This is so cool, these characters. We've never really done anything like that. I guess Image Of The Invisible is kinda like that," but didn't even make the connection, but it's totally that way because you were building that world!

G: That was so much fun.

D: And I got to live in it and it was cool.

G: That's cool. Yeah, I was really honored that you asked me to conceptualize a video for you guys.

D: It was fun. I don't think we've ever had another one where it was such- well, definitely not such a developed story.

G: Right. Didn't we do something too where we had lights on their helmets?

D: Yeah.

G: Their eyes were supposed to be lights or something?

D: Yeah, maybe it was like a single eye was a red laser-y light.

G: Yeah. That was cool. I'm gonna rewatch that when we're done.

D: So you grew up with the Catholic guilt, you said. Did you ever feel like you inhabited that world, or was it something being kind of thrust on you that you didn't- I mean, it's hard as a kid.

G: Right.

D: You don't even know, but I'm curious about that and then where you'd feel like your kind of big frame worldview is now on like, "What are we all doing on this rock?"

G: Right, right. My family, my parents, they weren't super religious. I come from this Italian Catholic background though so it was the kind of thing, my grandmother would go to church sometimes, but never would push us to really go. But for Christmas or something, my mom would go with her. But I think they thought, my parents thought, "This is the right thing to do. We should raise our child with believing in God and raise them Catholic because we're good. Even though we're not always there, we're good Catholics." So, they kind of put me on that path and I think the first thing I learned from being Catholic, or just religion in general, maybe it's somewhat at times specific to Catholicism, is this fear. And this fear of Hell, that's they really instilled in us. I think I was in the 1st grade or something, really young, and there was this thing that would happen where they would talk about death and Hell and all that stuff, and there was this period which, because of these classes, these after school classes, I would have these bouts of just crying. I guess I was coming to terms with the fact that my parents wouldn't be there forever or I would lose them and they would die. But then the additional fear of, "Well, if they behave bad, they'll go to Hell, and I'll go to Hell too," and so, there was this period where it was really upsetting for me, and I channeled that. I tapped into that stuff on a couple records, and on Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge, I borrowed a lot of Catholic imagery, and that second video for Helena being in a church, and things like that. So I kinda started- and in some of our merch designs too. I remember we had one with a cathedral and a rosary and all this stuff, and then that would come to a head in the song Mama on Black Parade but, yeah, my journey in terms of spirituality and where I came with that. Obviously, at some point, I was confirmed in the 5th grade, so I did that. But then after that, my parents didn't have any more requirements out of me, because it was all about baptism, communion, and confirmation. And if you did those three things, you were good, then you could go as you wanted. So they never pushed me to go. And then, over the years, obviously I got into punk rock and I didn't believe in God for the longest time, and then I just started to really need spirituality in my life as I got older. And I'm more of the sense where I believe in there being some- I don't know if it's a God, but I do believe there's something.

D: Something, yeah.

G: Yeah. There's something out there, there's some kind of reason. I also believe we come from- because we do, we come from star stuff. 

D: Yeah.

G: We come from the universe. We're birthed from the universe. I'm a believer in the fact that the universe is chaos and born out of chaos and it's uncontrollable, and there's kind of no rhyme or reason to anything, and tragedies and accidents and bad things happen and good things happen, and it's really just chaos being this constant true thing in the universe, and I came to those discoveries through my study of magick, occultism, and things like that, which I was inspired to do by my friend Grant Morrison. He's kind of like a big brother to me, mentor, he's really supportive and he's very into magick. And so I became interested and he's given me some lessons, and I actually wanted to do a podcast one day with him where I literally just sit down with him and have him talk about magick, because the way he describes it is, you would almost need it to be recorded to fully explore all the theories and things like that. So, I started to need magick, high magick, chaos magick, and eventually witchcraft, and witchcraft is something I felt more comfortable with because I always felt like, when I was reading about chaos magick, it felt like it was about making the universe bend to your will, whereas I was looking for something more that you were in service to the universe.

D: Interesting.

G: I think I got this from reading Crowley's book on magick, but basically, I don't know exactly what he said, but basically reality is your perspective. And that was kinda one of the key points of magick, your brain builds your reality.

D: Yeah.

G: And I thought that was a really great take away from all that. So, yeah, I've been interested in spirituality and things like that and studying shamanism, and all that stuff. We, with our daughter, we didn't raise her with religion, but we, Lindsey, my wife, is really spiritual too. Not like a practicing witch or anything, but she's just naturally adept at those kind of things. She's really in tune with nature, she knows a ton about herbology, a lot of the founding cornerstones of witchcraft is just kinda part of her life. And so, we do raise Bandit with- Lindsey teaches her all about herbs and plants and we have a witch's garden, and communicating with nature and trees and animals and things like that. So we're teaching our daughter that there is a kind of magick to life and magick does exist. It's not Harry Potter magic, but you know.

D: A lot of that seems like it's about an embodiment, a connectedness to everything, to other people.

G: Yeah, connectedness, for sure, yeah. And just teaching her that she's connected to the universe. And if she grows up and wants a different kind of religion, that's great too, and I know I explored those. I was looking for a religion in art school, because I had a class where we had to study all the religions, or most of them. And I kept going from each one and I was like, "I like bits of this one, but I don't like that." I couldn't find one that I landed on until I got later in life into more spiritual things like magick and witchcraft.

D: Cool. So with something like witchcraft, which for a lot of people are gonna hear it and have not at all the idea that you're talking about I think, so something like the idea of goodness in that, where does that derive from? Is that coming from the inter-connectedness? It seems like there's a moral view to it rather than morality being a decree maybe. It's something that arises out of those connections?

G: Right right, yeah! I think the positivity in it, to me, and here's the thing. I don't consider myself a practicing witch or anything like that, I just read a ton of this stuff. And that's one of the things they kinda warn you about with magick and everything, you could read all the books you want and some people spend their whole life reading books and never practice, but the thing they tell you to do is practice. And I think yeah, the goodness comes from being in service to the earth. Being connected to that and also, what I've learned about witchcraft, or at least the kind of witchcraft that I like, is it's very gray. It's not black magick, it's not totally white magick, it's just understanding that the universe and all things in it are very gray, there's no black and white to everything. And I've really liked that the most, because I get older- when I was younger, I was very black and white about a lot of things. Especially in the earlier days of My Chemical Romance, everything was really military and rigid, and black and white, and this is right and this is wrong. You kind of get older and you start to realize, "No, things aren't that simple. Not everybody's all good or all bad. There's a grayness there." 

D: Which, I think, I have a song of the latest Thrice record called The Grey and it's dealing with that idea of deconstructing the black and the white, and I think the biggest danger there is the idea that even if there was straight black, straight white, you are betting a lot on your ability to discern it at any given moment.

G: You are.

D: And then if you are actually holding to it, and you're basically betting on your ability to discern this thing and now it's of the most ultimate consequence and you filter out everything that doesn't fit into that, which is basically a bunch of yourself and a bunch of everyone around you.

G: Yeah, exactly, yeah.

[ad break]

D: So I have a couple questions I’ll pepper in here from some of the Patrons. James Corvit said, “What is the purest form of goodness you’ve experienced as a human being, and how do you explain it?”

G: Purest form of goodness.

D: I don’t know, it’s deep.

G: Yeah.

D: I don’t know if that’s from someone or just internally.

G: The purest form of goodness. It’s a tough question but it’s a great question. I think the purest form of goodness is forgiveness. Or that would be something I would say is a very strong form of goodness. Even when you see people that the most terrible things happen to them, like a serial killer murders their loved one and then some of these people, not all of them, and I don’t blame the ones that don’t find forgiveness, but some of them find forgiveness and are able to forgive people for the most atrocious things, and so that feels like a really powerful form of goodness.

D: Yeah, I feel like in the middle of me deconstructing a lot of that stuff, something I was like- the idea of grace and forgiveness is something that goes deep there and I’m not willing to let go of that. Over the centuries, there’s been countless efforts to define beauty. Aristotle defines beauty as having “order, symmetry, and definiteness.”

G: Hm.

D: But it’s always struck me as a fairly anemic version of beauty. And then I saw on the cover of the My Chem single Sing, there’s a question on there that says, “Would you destroy something perfect in order to make it beautiful?”

G: Right.

D: This makes me think that you probably also take issue with that definition a bit. I wanted to ask, is there something about brokenness that’s near the heart of beauty for you?

G: Absolutely, yeah. And that, I was trying to remember that phrase a couple months ago too, that was on the cover saying, yeah, “Would you destroy something perfect to make it beautiful?” And yeah, I think beauty is way more complex than symmetry and I think there is a brokenness to beauty. I think, you look at a lot of musicians, you could arguably say from a certain perspective, if you subscribe to symmetry and things like that, a lot of musicians or front-people, men and women in bands, some of them you could say they’re not traditionally beautiful, or not what you would think is beautiful, but something about their vulnerability or their confidence and things like that, make them beautiful. And that’s in any case, even non-musicians. Like people that just go to work in the world and have normal jobs, there is something about beauty that is much deeper than just what you see visually.

D: One of the Patrons was saying that, “My Chem’s music reinforced to me and my friends that being an outcast was okay.” Was that something that you wanted people to feel? What were things growing up that made you feel like it was okay to be an outcast or a misfit?

G: I think by the time I was definitely not in elementary school- well, I didn’t have to struggle with being an outcast in elementary school. I actually went to a really cool school, it was just a normal public school, but the one thing I thought looking back that was very interesting about those years is we all got along, we were all friends, even the weirdest kids, and a lot of kids would just have these parties back then and everyone was invited. And then my first real experience with being an outsider was going to middle school, and then so, you aren’t all friends anymore, and there’s all divisions and cliques and things like that, and then I found myself to be one of these outcasts, one of these weird kids that listened to heavy metal and wore flannels. There were only a handful of us in the school that were like that. But it wasn’t until high school where I fully embraced being an outcast. The first year, freshman year was really hard because I was really an outcast and I didn’t even know where to sit at the lunch tables, because I didn’t fit in with any of these groups. And it turns out I ended up sitting with a table of metalheads because they saw me sitting by myself and they were like, “Why don’t you sit with us?” And that’s where I would learn about certain bands that they were into, like Murphy’s Law and the kind of things they were listening to back then. But it was important for me to have something that spoke to outsiders with My Chemical Romance because when I was that age, there wasn’t anything that really spoke to me like that. Or there wasn’t something so specific to being an outcast. There was lots of stuff that if you were an outcast you listened to like The Cure or The Smiths, so of course, I found all those bands. But there was nothing specifically geared to somebody that feels invisible or is an outcast or rejected and things like that, so when we started My Chem, it felt very much like we were channeling the energy of being an outcast onto whoever listened to us. And in the early days, it wasn’t a lot of kids. I mean, there weren't any kids that really listened to us. It was kinda older punk rockers, it was very interesting in the beginning. And of those older punk rockers, a lot of them were actually outcasts as well.

D: Yeah.

G: Within a scene so. And maybe they weren’t even full-on punk rockers, they were just a guy with a leather jacket at a bar who just saw something in us.

D: Yeah. That’s cool. The Patron Jonathan Clark is asking, “Do you have any rituals or practices that you do to find your center, wait for yes, get connected, see the good, the true, the beautiful in others, or let go a bit?” Basically he’s kinda asking if you have any meditative, mindfulness, something to practice.

G: Right right. I really enjoy T.M., Transcendental Meditation. Actually, I’m in an interesting spot with this though.

D: That’s where you’re chanting.

G: A mantra, yeah. You have a mantra and you kind of just repeat it in your head. It helps you, basically when you’re doing it, it releases negative energy and tension and things like that, and it’s very good. But sometimes, at least in my experience, and this is why I’ve kinda paused my practice at the moment, sometimes it could release trauma and things like that, and sometimes you end up reliving that and it makes it- and granted, your body is letting go of it, but sometimes it’s hard and I found when it would get its most intense, I would catastrophize things in my head and be- so I would be focusing on the mantra, but then things would happen like I would be thinking about the worst things that could happen to my family or my loved one, or something bad happening to them or getting hurt.

D: Is that something that happens to you? Do you tend to catastrophize in general?

G: Sometimes. I do tend to catastrophize sometimes, and it’s something I work on in therapy. I’m a big believer in talk therapy and, I don’t try to push medication on anybody, but I always just share my experience, and that it’s helped me.

D: Yeah.

G: I was somebody who was extremely imbalanced all through the years of My Chemical Romance, and go through these extreme highs and crushing lows where I wouldn’t get out of bed for like three months, but then I would be in a manic phase, and I would be up until 4am working on zines all of the sudden, and I would say to Lindsey, “I don’t need to sleep. Why do people sleep? I don’t get it.” So there was a lot of that, and then Lindsey found me a therapist and we did a lot of really hard work and I faced myself a lot, I looked inward. And at the same time, before we were able- before we explored and did the work, we stabilized my brain chemistry. That was the key. Once we were able to stabilize my brain chemistry-

D: You were able to actually…

G: Do the work, yeah. So, I am a big believer in T.M., it’s just that sometimes I struggle with it, but I know all I have to do is check in with the T.M. center and explain what I’m going through, and actually my therapist had found me this woman who’s one of the heads of, I’m not sure if it’s the David Lynch Foundation or something else, she actually said, “You should come in, I’ll talk to you, I’ll walk you through the trauma stuff and all the hard stuff.” But I’m a big believer in it because when it was cooking, and there were two months this year where it was totally changing my life until some of the negative came out. It was, I was a more productive, more focused, calmer, more engaged, more present. I’m a believer in it and a big believer in therapy and just having somebody to talk to.

D: Yeah. That’s awesome. On the drive up, I was thinking about Umbrella Academy and I really love it in general. I remember getting the comic when it came out. The show turned out so great. Are you really happy with it?

G: Yeah yeah! I’m totally happy. At the end of the day, it was somebody else’s vision and I was able to let go of that. I think I needed to. When the process first started in making it a TV show.

D: That’s gotta be hard.

G: It’s hard.

D: That’s your baby.

G: Yeah yeah! But I was really upfront when I was talking. I went in to meet with UCP and Dawn and the people there. I was with Dark Horse and they said, “What is your goal?” And I said, “My goal is to make great comics because I already went through a whole big thing with Universal trying to make this a movie and it just drained me.”

D: Oh okay.

G: And it was full of really difficult things, it took up a lot of my time, and disappointments, and I really turned my focus back to comics because I was like, that’s where you’re in charge. Nobody can- you have an editor, obviously, if you have a great editor, you’re doing great work together and you’re making changes, but it doesn’t feel like something creative is being ruled by committee, and that’s what it feels like in Hollywood. I was really upfront with Dawn and I said, “I want to make great comics so you guys have good material to make a good show.” I ended up being more involved than that. The extent of my involvement is giving notes, especially about things like wardrobe, costumes, the look and feel of the world, the fact that it’s kind of an alternate reality, and I give notes on scripts and I give notes on edits and things like that, so I am involved for sure. But I was able to realize this is somebody else’s baby and I’m happy with the results for sure. My whole thing is the proof is in the fact that everybody loves it.

D: I like Klaus a lot and I can’t remember, because I read the comics so long ago, how true to the book that character is.

G: Right.

D: Do you feel like it’s capturing what you were trying to get out with it? G: It is capturing, yeah. It’s capturing, to me, what Robert who plays Klaus, he’s capturing this kind of sadness and tragedy to the character. Also obviously, the humor. In the comic, Klaus is a little bit more of what I call a dry goth. He’s very nihilistic in some ways.

D: Not quite as whimsical, maybe.

G: Yeah, not quite as whimsical as what Robert ended up doing. But the way Robert approached the character really ended up working and he adds a lot of humanity to the character, that maybe there’s not so much of it, or you don’t see it very often in the comic with Klaus. Klaus just does bad things and makes bad decisions and obviously, a lot of that is coming from a place of trauma that he experienced as a child, and in the show, it’s cool because the drug use is there to help him quiet the voices in his head. They explored that a lot deeper and I thought that that was really cool.

D: Is that less of a focus in the comic?

G: A little bit. I never really explored the fact that he’s constantly seeing and hearing and talking to ghosts, and so these drugs kind of quiet his mind. I’d never explored that really deeply.

D: Which is cool because you, it’s another evidence of you’re building a world and someone else was living in it, and then they were like, “Well yeah.”

G: Yeah!

D: “Of course he’s like that,” and you’re like, “Well dang.”

G: Yeah! That’s a cool thing. They’re able to point at things you weren’t seeing because sometimes when I’m doing stuff like creating a world like Umbrella Academy, a lot of it is running off the subconscious. A lot of it is, some things you don’t realize you’re putting in there. And when they look at making a TV show or a movie, they really kinda deconstruct it and look at it and say, “Well, this makes sense because of this.”

D: Some of the beauty with the comic is that the concise kind of form makes it to where you don’t always have to trace down all of these rabbit trails, but when you're trying to blow it up into something else, you’ve gotta figure out how to make sense of it all.

G: Mhm. And to bring it back to the question of a sense of wonder. That was the other thing I thought about this morning when you asked me the question was, “what do I get a sense of wonder from,” and comics were a big one. Because to me- and then I would later reinforce these feelings when I started making them and writing them. You could do anything in them and that’s really what’s beautiful about them. I also love the mechanics of them, because there’s definitely things you could do in comics that you can’t do in film and TV and I love that. So I’ve really learned to embrace the medium when I’m writing them. I think I’m writing comics that are definitely comics, and they’re not just a TV show playing out in a comic.

D: Yeah. How much do you draw your own stuff just to get your ideas going? Or is it more conceptual?

G: Quite a bit. No, I do- well especially for something like, less so on Doom Patrol but Umbrella Academy, Gabriel Ba, the artist and I have this really cool relationship and I think the ideas kinda need to start with me, and I’ll do a sketch and then Gabriel will completely reinterpret that and kinda make it much cooler and much better.

D: That's because that’s your complete world from scratch, whereas with Doom Patrol you’re reinventing something?

G: In the beginning, Umbrella was definitely my complete world from scratch and I had this idea, but Gabriel, especially even in the early days, he helped build that world. I was able to give him a couple references and I’m like, “I don’t know, maybe it’s the ‘60s, maybe it’s the ‘70s. People are dressed like the ‘60s and cars look like they’re from the ‘60s, but there's modern things too.” And he loves drawing architecture, which you don’t find a lot of in comics. A lot of people try to stay away from the buildings in the background and the architecture, but he embraces the architecture so he really built that world with me in the beginning. But we still have our process and the process usually, not always but usually is, especially if it’s a villain or something like that, I’ll do some kind of sketch, even if it’s bad, and then Gabriel will take that and make it something.

D: That’s cool. Collaboration is terrifying and super fun when it’s working.

G: Yeah! When it’s working, it’s amazing, yeah. I love collaborating, and I’ve learned to really embrace it over the years. Delegating and collaborating were two skills I really needed to get really good at, and I think I got better at collaborating after the band. Although, we were pretty good about collaborating in the band, I just got better at it though.

D: Yeah. It’s definitely for Thrice, the most fun but also the hardest thing for sure, and it causes the most tension.

G: Right. Yeah, for sure.

D: Just because you care.

G: Because you care, yeah! You care, and sometimes you do see or hear a complete vision so you want that realized.

D: I think that’s the hardest part. You’re like, “I see all this,” and you’re like, “Okay but there’s three other people.”

G: Yeah!

D: Every single time that I’m set on something, and then everyone else is like, “Dude, no,” every time by the end, I’m like, “Wait, what was I stuck on?”

G: Yeah.

D: It didn’t matter anymore.

G: Yeah!

D: It’s totally a psychological issue at that point.

G: It is!

D: “It has to be this way.” No, it could be a million ways and they’re all different and cool.

G: Yeah. And that’s what I learned too when collaborating on music, is exactly what you just said. You don’t even remember what you were hung up on.

D: Totally.

G: Because it’s just much better after everybody's worked on it.

D: It’s very similar to being super upset about something in the moment and you’re just not thinking clear, and you sleep and you wake up and you’re like, “I was real upset about that. It doesn't seem like a big deal anymore.”

G: Yeah.

D: Time travel is a big thing in Umbrella Academy.

G: Yeah.

D: Which it’s notoriously troublesome to write stories with time travel.

G: Yeah.

D: And not have it just fall apart. If you’re trying to get a specific future, you have to have a bunch of people constantly fixing these things.

G: Right right!

D: I like that way of interpreting because usually it’s, “Oh, we fixed this one thing,” and you expect it to just keep going straight, but no way.

G: Right. I really like that the show took that from the comic and really explored it. All these people making these little corrections, sometimes they’re violent corrections, but sometimes they’re very simple. But time travel is such a pain in the ass. I did not envy them when they were starting to do the writer’s room for Umbrella Academy.

D: They try to make it all work.

G: Try to make it all work. And they’d have to put up these big timeline boards and be like, “Alright, this happens this year,” and that’s what I was doing when I was writing the second volume, Dallas, because there’s not much- I don’t think there’s any real time travel, besides Number 5 coming back, there’s no real time travel in volume one, Apocalypse Suite. But Dallas is all about it, so that was the hardest volume I’ve ever had to write, because time travel is just, it’s so hard.

D: Are there any stories that you like that you feel do it really well?

G: I don’t know if I’ve read enough time travel stories. I mean, I thought Back To The Future did it really well.

D: But then I always get stuck on the idea that you have to, there’s an endless cycle of Martys that have to go back.

G: Oh right!

D: And keep- my brain breaks when I try to be like, “But what if he doesn’t? Then none of it works anymore?” It all breaks.

G: Yeah, it can break very easily, and I think almost every time travel story has the possibility of completely breaking, or at least in some person’s mind out there, it is broken.

D: Yeah.

G: So sometimes you have to take time travel stories almost at face value and be like, “Alright, this works.”

D: Yeah, you can’t- well I think part of that is on the writer or whoever’s making it to address and deflect. The Brian McDonald guy I was telling you about, he talks about that somewhere where he’s like, “You gotta spot the problem and then you just need to have some character address it, and then sweep it away,” just so that it helps whoever’s watching or whatever, it helps them be like, “Oh yeah, what about this?” And then, “Oh, they thought about it.”

G: Yep.

D: And it’s not like it’s making it perfect, right? But it gives you permission to let it go, I think.

G: Yeah yeah. And you do have to address these concerns. I realized my answer might have been possibly a little lazy about taking things at face value, but one of the things I had to do in Dallas was address every concern that I thought the reader would have. 

D: Which is great. When you do the addressing, it lets the reader or the watcher or whatever, it lets them let it go and enjoy the story.

G: Yeah, exactly. I’m about to start volume four of Umbrella Academy and I’m really happy because I don’t think it’s gonna have any time travel in it, so I think we’re a little bit away from more time travel in Umbrella Academy.

D: Alright, this is a question from Mike Morale, he says, “In his recent arc, Cliff Steele aka Robotman, regains his humanity, at least in outward form. But on Gerard’s latest, ahem, cliffhanger, Steele burns it all up after facing the painful inhumanity of someone with power to hurt him. I suppose my question is, how do we protect the precious beauty of our humanity while remaining vulnerable to those who have meaning in our lives?”

G: Oh wow. How do we protect that humanity? Well that’s a big question, because especially with given how the world is now and the toxicity out there online and things like that, how do you protect your humanity? Because toxicity, like the kind that Cliff experiences when he goes to visit his mother in that nursing home, it’s a very real thing and it’s something you have to deal with. I don’t know how you hold onto your humanity, it’s hard sometimes.

D: While being vulnerable too.

G: While being vulnerable, yeah exactly.

D: Which I guess is almost synonymous to holding onto your humanity.

G: Yeah. 

D: Because you could close off but that’s not good.

G: Yeah exactly. I know this isn’t the healthier, great answer, but I think one of the things I did was to kind of remove myself from certain social medias. But it wasn't unhealthy because what I did was I decided to look inward at that point. Instead of, and I could tell you as many harsh people are on the internet, I was much harsher on myself. I looked in and I asked myself tough questions, I really asked myself what’s right and wrong. I think about these things deeply when I’m writing, but holding onto your humanity is very hard. And Cliff, obviously, he doesn’t hold on to that humanity, and he goes back into his cage because that makes sense to Cliff.

D: His follow up question was, “And does skin make the man, or can metal reflect who we really are just as well?”

G: I believe metal can reflect who we are just as well. I think Cliff Steele is very much Cliff whether he’s a human or a robot. He’s still Cliff and I think that’s one of the things that’s great about the character and why he’s so fun to write because no matter what, he’s still Cliff.

D: I wonder if there's anything you’ve been listening to, watching, reading, that you think people should check out?

G: Let’s see. What have I been reading recently? Well, this is old but I just decided to reread Lord Of The Rings from start to finish, and I made it through the books rather quickly and they’re just such a joy to read. They’re so relaxing, but there is a real build up to Lord Of The Rings. It gets so dark at one point, and horrific, but there’s a calm and a peace to reading it. And the way Tolkien writes, you’re just thinking about the greenery and the trees and the rivers and all of those things, and so it’s a real relaxing read for as much as it ramps up. I have a hard time watching TV. I feel really trapped when I’m watching it so I tend not to watch it at all, which is interesting about having a TV show. I bring a different perspective when I’m giving notes because I don’t watch a lot of TV. And more or less the only TV I watch is edits of Umbrella Academy. But every once in a while, Lindsey will rope me into a show that she feels like I absolutely have to watch, and she did that with Breaking Bad, and I’m really grateful she did. She literally rewatched the whole thing with me, made me watch it, and it’s still one of the best I’ve ever seen. And then she got me into Cobra Kai, have you seen that?

D: No, is it good?

G: I think it’s really good, yeah. Especially the first season is really amazing.

D: I had huge doubts about if that would be good at all.

G: Yeah, watch the first season and one of the things that actually helped hook me into the show is the episodes are a half hour, so it was really cool. I didn’t feel as much of a prisoner of the television when I was watching them, because you can watch a half hour and be done.

D: But books don’t make you feel that way? They expand.

G: Books are my favorite thing, yeah. Books are- you know how a lot of people will use a television to kind of tune out and shut off and relax? I use books to do that, so there’s piles of books next to my bed.

D: Thanks so much for sitting down. It’s been so good to talk to you.

G: You too! It’s been a long time. I miss you.

[pulpwriterx]

RESURRECTION: CHAPTER 4- A GAME OF THRONES

Links to previous chapters

Chapter Three

Chapter Two

Chapter One

CHAPTER 5: A GAME OF THRONES

(Author’s Note: Not a crossover. Title based on an observation Ben Solo makes about Skywalkers and the Galaxy)

When Leia sat up with a start, freeing herself from a heavy white sheet, she knew Ben must be alive.

She walked into a huge celebration of victory that she was distracted from only by her thoughts of him.

It also became a celebration that the reports of the General’s death had been greatly exaggerated.

In the midst of all of it, Leia kept looking for Chewie.

When he picked her up in a big Wookiee bear hug, howling for joy, she knew she was really alive.

And she felt better knowing he was there with her.

“Ben did this, Chewie. I’m alive because Ben is alive. We have to find him?”

Chewie cocked his head to the side, questioningly.

“Why? Because I need to know what he’s up to.”

***

More than anyone else could be, Leia was sure that her son was up to something.

Leia heard Rey’s heartbreaking story about Ben’s passing, and the poor girl cried and cried in her arms.

She tried to tell Rey that if she was alive that meant Ben was, too, but Rey was adamant.

She had seen him die.

Most people thought Rey's story about Ben’s alleged passing was romantic.

Not Leia.

What was it that Arkanian pain in the ass Armitage Hux often said about her son?

Leia ruefully remembered.

The man originally known as Ben Solo is an amoral, charismatic merchant of dreams. If you want your dreams he will sell them to you. Or if you prefer your nightmares you can have those, too.

She had been trying, for the past decade and change, to remember the Ben she knew.

Ben had been a sweet, kind, funny, little boy.

He had a goofy smile, and a ready laugh and she really didn’t see where Han got that whole dark, ancient eyes thing.

He was quirky, and weird, but in an endearing way, and she found lovable in his gangly awkwardness.

But even as a child he had a dark side, all you had to do was ask the boys who bullied him, and they would tell you through pulped noses and broken teeth why they had stopped.

He had moods, and Leia suspected that Ben also had mystical visions.

But it was only when he reached his terrible teens that things began to go downhill.

Ben Solo had left the Jedi Temple, twice, to pursue his father’s vocation, and he had excelled at being a ruthless pirate.

The second time, he was suspended for breaking his vow of chastity, multiple times, with the equally black-hearted daughter of an Arkanian warlord.

Hux, her Force null cousin, had been sent to keep her out of trouble.

He failed.

At the meeting with his Master, Ben had listened to everything Luke said, and then replied?

“Well, Uncle Luke, you’d better kick me out, then, because after being a virgin for twenty years, all I want out of life is Hela Darkstar's gorgeous ginger cunt. You can’t convince me that hokey religions and ancient weapons are better than fucking. Nothing is better than fucking. Except maybe crushing your enemies, having them driven before you, and hearing the lamentations of their kinsmen. Can I go back to space, now?”

Han was so proud.

Leia had been appalled.

After he had dismissed Ben, Han and Luke had laughed over what Ben had said for about fifteen minutes, but Leia didn’t see the humor in it, or the fact that Ben was going back to Anchorhead with his father as soon as Han could stop expressing his relief that Ben had finally got a girlfriend.

At the time, she had though that a pirate’s life was the worst thing that could happen to him, and she made Han send him back to Luke after Ben’s suspension was over.

The third time was the charm on that one.

In hindsight, it would have been better to let him go back to space with his father, and stay there.

But Ben had that option.

After Luke had tried to behead him, Ben could have left, found his father, went back to space and never had anything to do with the Jedi, or the Sith, again.

But, and unlike his Uncle, Ben wanted to play the game of thrones with his mother.

She was willing to make a place for him in the governing of the Galaxy, in time, and with maturity, but Ben Solo didn’t want to wait for his piece of pie.

So he became Kylo Ren, and threw in his lot with the Sith.

That was only his first move.

And killing Snoke was his third.

Leia believed that Ben really was in love with Rey, but it was awfully expedient for his purposes for that to have happened.

That was his second move.

But a funny thing happened as he shed Kylo Ren, the mask Ben Solo wore, on his way to become Ben Solo, Hero of the Resistance.

To kill the badguys, win the day, and get the girl.

He died.

But that was only a temporary setback for a Skywalker.

Skywalkers had many death and many births, and lived many lives, in-between.

Ben’s hunger for his victory, and the spoils of it, and for Rey were intense enough to bring him back from the other side, and her with him.

That meant his power was growing; that he was almost as strong in the Force as she was.

No, it wasn't romantic.

How had Ben managed to court Rey, and win her love when they were enemies, and all their encounters ended just short of murder?

It was something, the bond between Rey Palpatine and Ben Solo, but romantic wasn’t the word that came to Leia’s mind.

Terrifying was more like it.

She knew that Ben would come for Rey, and now that the man she loved was Ben Solo and not Kylo Ren, Rey would welcome him with open arms.

Leia was glad that Ben had returned to the light, and that he was alive, but she was still worried.

Hela Darkstar seemed to be out of the picture, but Leia had thought that in the past.

Ben was more sentimental about his women than his father had been; Hela was bound to take a part in Ben’s story again, sometime.

That and Leia knew that Kylo Ren was the mask that Ben Solo wore, and she suspected that Ren had been a means to the end of becoming the Galactic hero Ben Solo now was.

Galactic heroes often end up becoming galactic rulers.

Leia found would be happy going back to the Solo empire on the Outer Rim, to be a Pirate King.

It was, she knew, the best thing for him, and not the worst.

Still she remembered what he had said to her on the remains of the Death Star, as he thought he lay dying.

Don’t think I’m going anywhere, General. I know the game we play in this Galaxy. It’s all a game of thrones. And if you’re not a Skywalker? You don’t get to sit on the throne.

And as for Rey?

Leia could have told her about all the things she was going to discover, good and bad, if she went off with Ben.

But when she had been about Rey's age and Han had been about Ben’s age?

Leia knew she wouldn’t have listened, either.

That night, Leia’s rival had heralded his arrival with the presence in the infirmary of a 5 man squad  suffering from various scrapes, contusions, scratches, shiners, fat lips, bloody noses and even a nasty human bite.

They had snuck up on a really big guy while he was pissing on a rock in a deep cave on Exegol. A man the size and breadth of a short Wookiee, and he must have thought they were attacking him, because he fought back so fiercely they let him have an X-Wing.

These were compounded by reports of a barefoot naked man in a blast helmet wandering around camp, looking for something.

What did that mean?

That Ben was back in the game and he didn’t need a weapon, or even pants, t play it?

The last report came from Finn and Poe, who burst in to the command tent without knocking.

“General! There’s some man in Rey's tent and he’s assaulting her like a raging Wookiee! You can hear her screaming all over the place! And he won’t let me save her!” Finn told her

“She doesn’t need saving! He’s full of shit, General. Finn's just jealous because it’s not him in Rey’s tent. Did you know Ben was with Rey?”

“My son, Ben? How do you know it’s him?”

“I recognize his voice. We, uh, I worked with him and Han. Before the war.”

“That guy is still a fucking animal! You wouldn’t believe the stuff he's screaming at the top of his lungs! I think we should check on Rey, General. Make sure she’s OK.” Finn insisted.

“Yes, I would believe it. Alright, Finn. If you really think Rey is in trouble? We'll go find out.”

It was just conceivable that Finn might be right, and Poe might be wrong.

Call him Kylo or call him Ben, Leia suspected that to get what he wanted, her ruthless pirate son was capable of goddamn anything.

Rey was the brightest light in the Galaxy, the only Jedi of her generation.

Claiming her just might be Ben’s next move.

***

Ben just laughed, and turned his head, sparing his mother having to see the face he made when he shot his wad.

Deeply embarrassed, Leia slammed the door shut and locked it.

Ben was still laughing.

It made her think of a time when Ben was about seven or eight, and Han hadn’t locked their bedroom door, and Ben had walked in without knocking.

And caught them in the act.

“DAD! This is so gross! Cantcha take Mom someplace else to do that? I live here!”

“So do we, kid! Get out of this room and lock that door, Ben! You know you’re not allowed to just walk in here without knocking!”

“It’s still gross.” Ben said, and left.

Locking the door before he shut it.

Han had neither been ashamed or missed a stroke.

And he saw no reason for them to stop, either.

Ben had just put the radio on, and later, when Leia was too deeply embarrassed to breathe, Han had put his pants on and gone out and made Ben’s lunch.

“Dad, did you do something weird to Mom? How come she’s hiding in your bedroom?”

“Most people get embarrassed about shit like that, kiddo.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Eat your lunch.”

It didn’t bother either of them.

Born without shame.

For the first time since she had realised he was alive, no, for the first time in a decade and change, Leia began to think of Ben as her son, only.

Not an opponent, or a rival.

Not as an enemy, or a symbol.

As her son, Ben.

He knew she would be embarrassed, so even though he thought it was funny, he turned his head and laughed.

What am I going to do with him? How can I just be his mother, now? All those scars, holy mother Force, what did they do to him? 

Is there anything left of the boy I knew, in that man I just saw?

“Is she OK?” Poe demanded.

“What about the raging Wookiee?” Finn demanded.

Leia smacked their heads together.

“Idiots! Do you think I wanted to see that? Do you think I raised a rapist? An animal? A monster? Rey is fine. She looked very happy. It’s just that she has a boyfriend, Finn, and it’s not you.” Leia snapped

“Rey has two boyfriends, and neither of them are me.” Finn said.

“Yeah, but I know Ben. He won’t care about me. You? He’d cut your head off.” Poe explained

“I talked to him. It was definitely Ben Solo. He didn’t threaten to cut my head off.” Finn said.

“Because he probably figures it’s me, not you. Rey’s into flyboys. What can I say? Was it really Ben, General?”

“Not that it’s any of your business, Poe, but yes. It was. He wasn’t embarrassed, because Ben has no shame. Solo family trait. But I am very embarrassed. So, from now on? You boys just  mind your own business.”

The General began to walk away.

“That makes sense. If Rey is Ben’s girl, that's why he killed Snoke and they killed all his guards.” Poe said

“But Rey killed Kylo Ren.” Finn added

“Rey killed Palpatine. Ben probably killed all the Knights of Ren to get to Kylo Ren, and killed him to avenge Han.” Poe explained

“He told me the Sith held him in detention for three years and tried to break him.” Finn expanded

“That was a mistake. You cross Ben Solo? You die.” Poe reminded Finn.

Rey’s door opened.

She shut it.

Leia turned around.

She was frozen to the spot

“Ben, put these on.”

“I don’t want to wear those, I hate underwear!”

“Just put them on. To go out. You’re naked!”

“Okay, okay.”

The door opened and Ben stepped out.

He looked like he’d just made the Kessel Run on foot.

He brushed his sweaty hair out of his face.

Poe started applauding him, and Ben grinned.

“She made me work for it.” He said.

“Always does.” Poe agreed.

“Oh, so it’s you. That’s OK, Poe. Because I know you. So tell me, Tiesdays and Thursdays only, right?”

“Right, Ben. You think I want to die?”

“I know you don’t. This way, we’re keeping it in the family. But any of these other guys? We kill him.”

“Immediately.

Poe and Ben both laughed.

Ben sat by Rey’s campfire, and started poking the embers with a stick.

“What, Mom? I’m beat. I have to get some sleep.”

What Mom.

That was all he had to say?

The last time she had seen her son in person he was a boy of 23, still a little soft around the edges

Now he was a grown man, 35 years old, hard, and scarred, the tough guy his father had always wanted him to be.

But he still had her little Ben’s sweet, goofy smile.

And after all these years?

What, Mom?

“Can you try to be a little quieter, in there?”

“Sorry. I got carried away in the moment.”

Ben poked the fire.

He looked at his feet.

Then he looked up at his mother, again.

“Well, here I am. I came home. Like you wanted. Now what?” he asked.

“There’s so many things I want to say to you, Ben. Is that all you have to say to me? Here you are? Now what?” Leia demanded.

“I did a pretty good job, didn’t I? I mean, it’s over now. Maybe too many people got killed. And I killed too many of them. But I ended it. If I didn’t do what I did, , it never would have ended. Somebody had to do it. That somebody could only have been me.” Ben said.

“Ben, I don’t want to talk about religion and politics. What are you going to do with your life, now? Are you OK? Really OK?”

“I think I’ll be OK. With time. And I’m just going to go back to work. I still have the ship. And the place in Anchorhead. I’ve got money stashed. I’ll be fine, Mom. Really.”

He seemed like he really needed to hear her praise him.

“The Galaxy owes you and Rey a great debt. You did a pretty good job, Ben. But this isn’t all is forgiven and everything is fine. It can’t be.”

“I am not going back to jail. You might as well just kill me.”

“I said this wasn’t about politics. In the morning? We need to talk. And none of your bullshit stories, or I will pull the truth out of your head. I’ll be back at 9. Have clothes on.”

“Okay. Can I go lie down before I fall down?”

“You had better. I'll see you in the morning, Benjamin.”

***

Morning broke.

Ben snored.

Rey woke up.

Ben rolled over.

And snored.

“Ben. Wake up. Your mother will be here, soon. She was very sick.”

“Bullshit. Skywalkers don’t die. He'll be back too. Many deaths, many lives. Skywalkers come back.”

“What?”

Ben sat up.

“She fooled you, huh? It’s alright. She fools everybody. I know better. My mother is the most powerful living Force sensitive being in the Galaxy. I have only begun to sense the contours of the universes that she commands. It’s a game, Rey. A game of thrones. And if you’re not a Skywalker? You don’t get to sit on the throne. But I’m not ready to be the King. Let her have the Galaxy. For now. That’s what she wants to know about. And if I were her? I’d be worried about me, too.”

“But Ben, the General is your mother.”

“Yeah. But did she hug me? Did she cry? I had to drag it out of her to say I did a good thing for the Galaxy. She doesn’t trust me. She can’t. She’s not my Mom, anymore. I’ll always be the enemy to her.”

Ben’s voice quavered.

He stood up, stretched, and sat on the stool she had made to put his socks on.

Rey noticed his left ankle was bruised and his foot was swollen up.

“Ah, shit. Sprained my ankle. That’s why it hurt to walk on it. Probably when those guys were chasing me. Now I can’t even escape before she gets here.”

Then he put one boot, and  the coveralls.

“I like the beard, Ben.” Rey told him.

It was a lame thing to say, but she couldn’t think of anything else.

“Disguise.” he replied.

“You have to give your mother time, Ben. It took me years to allow myself to love you. And to trust you. And I still almost killed you when you crushed the Sith wayfinder.”

“That didn’t go the way I pictured it. I thought you’d fall into my arms when I told you the only way you were going to Exegol was with me.”

“Well, maybe you’re wrong about your mother, too. Maybe she didn’t want to hug you because you were all sweaty and covered in come and squirt.”

Rey had insisted they wash up in the stream before getting back into her bed. 

That made Ben laugh.

At 9, his mother and Chewbacca both came to Rey’s tent.

Ben was sitting on one of the stools Rey had made.

When Chewbacca walked in Rey sensed an emotion in Ben she didn’t think he had.

Shame.

Ben bowed his head, and rounded his shoulders, making himself look smaller.

He made a mournful sound that Rey didn’t think could have come from a human throat.

Chewbacca chastised him, angrily.

Ben made the same mournful sound.

Chewie was so sad and so angry that Rey couldn’t even understand him.

Finally she understood Chewbacca ordering “Kallaurra” to lift up his head.

Ben was crying.

Real tears.

“I’m sorry.  I can live with everything else I did. But not what I did to the Old Man. It’s horrible. Worse than just killing him. I’m not even sure if he’s alive or dead. He might not be dead, Chewie. At least I don’t think he is.”

“Your father, Ben?” Leia asked.

Leia had been up all night.

Crying because she had her son back.

Crying because Han was gone.

“Ben, I've seen his ghost.” Leia told Ben.

“Me too. But I, uh, I pushed his spirit out of his body. So he wouldn’t have to stay frozen.”

“What? Benjamin Skywalker Organa Solo, what did you do to your father?” Leia insisted.

“We had a different fight, before the fight Chewie saw. The Old Man punched me in the face, and I hit him and long story short, I almost didn’t give him the blast vest. But I knew I had to give the Hutts something.  Then again, it’s not like I wanted him to suffer.  I used the Force to push his spirit out, so when he fell into the freezing chamber, he wouldn’t be trapped. It’s still connected. Once he’s out of hibernation, body and spirit will be reunited. I think. I’m pretty  sure.  I did it to myself, a couple times, when I was in too much pain to take it, and I’m still here.”

Leia interrupted Ben.

“I’m sorry, you did what? Is this something the Sith taught you?”

“No. I figured it out myself. While I was doing my Sith training, which is pretty much torture in solitary confinement. I got hurt pretty bad during training. All of us did. The pain drove some of us mad, and some of us just died. But I figured out how to use the Force to push my spirit out of my body. If the pain was too bad, or if I was too sick? I’d just leave for awhile. You can pretty much go anywhere you want. Me, I used to like to go to forests. Or deserts. I went to Hoth a few times. Quiet places where there were no people. So I did the same thing to the Old Man. Pushed his spirit out of his body. He should be fine. I always am.”

Leia looked at Rey.

There were tears in her eyes, too.

But she quickly got angry when Ben finished explaining himself.

“Anyway,  that chasm the Old Man fell into on Starkiller Base? It was a huge carbonite freezing chamber.  Before I delivered him to Jobi, I checked the slab.  He’s alive. Or he was, then. Right now, he’s hanging on Jobi the Hutt's wall. At Jabba’s old palace on Tattoine. At least he’s been completely safe for the whole war.”

“You ruthless little pirate bastard! What did you owe the Hutts?”

Leia slapped Ben.

Chewie sat down heavily, opposite him.

He muttered something.

“Rathtars? What rathtars? Chewie, you and Han were selling rathtars to the Hutt syndicate? Were you insane?”

“They were my rathtars. It’s your fault, Mom. When you sent Dad to Starkiller Base, he was supposed to be delivering my rathtars to Jobi. The Hutt wanted both of us on his wall after the Old Man didn’t deliver his product. And I couldn't give Jobi the money back, because I already invested it in some product he was selling me that I already had buyers for. That and I owed him for the rathtars. But he made me a real sweetheart deal to get Captain Solo back on the family wall. I really didn’t have a choice.

“You were still in business, Ben? The whole time?”

“Everybody was, Mom. What was I supposed to do, quit? You already gave Dad the boot and what were he and Chewie gonna do? Starve? Were we all supposed to miss the opportunity to get rich off another Galactic War? I gave the Old Man a Captain’s Medal, and he stayed on the Outer Rim. He was safe, we made money. People got to have booze, cigarillos, coffee and rubbers so they could have a little fun during this war, because I brought them in. So don’t say Ben Solo didn’t help the war effort. Everything worked out until you decided my Daddy needed to come and bring me home because I had been a bad boy.”

Leia slapped him, again.

This time, Ben fell off the stool.

“Shit, Mom, quit hitting me! My balance is off, I sprained my ankle.”

Leia forgot about everything else she was going to ask him.

“You’re hurt, Ben?”

“It’s fine. I fixed it, before. When I first put by boot on, last night. It’ll heal. No doctors. Mom. No needles. No bacta tank. I can’t do any of that. If I get sick enough, ever to need needles and medical droids and bacta tanks? They’ll have to keep me unconscious the whole time. You don’t want to know, and telling you about it would break my mind. No. No fucking doctors.”

Ben’s voice raised in pitch and in volume

He looked scared.

He was terrified.

Without thinking, she reached for his hand, and her mind was assaulted by a barrage of terrifying images from his memory.

She could hear his screams.

Ben tried to pull his hand away.

But Leia pulled him into her arms.

“It’s alright, Ben. You’ve carried this pain long enough. I’m your mother. I can bear some of it, for you. Now I understand. I understand.”

Ben hugged his mother back, and started to cry. 

“I’m sorry, Mom. I’m really sorry.” he sobbed.

“You’re still my son, Ben. And I love you. And I’m so glad you finally came home.”

Ben cried for a long time.

***

“Ben, let me see your ankle.” Leia demanded.

Ben stuck his foot out.

“It looks really bad. I can’t stand on it, today.” he admitted.

“It does. If this isn’t set right, Ben, you'll be limping all the time. How about one doctor. An old lady, like me. No droids, no bacta tanks, no needles. No exam room. I’ll bring her here, to Rey's tent. You don’t want to limp for the rest of your life, do you?”

“No. I’ll try.” Ben agreed.

Leia went to get the doctor.

“Fucking ankle! What about the Old Man? I fixed up a place for all of us to lay low, but I can’t go now, Chewie. I can’t walk.”

Chewie told Ben that they needed to make a plan, anyway, and they'd wait to rescue Han until he was healed.

Rey laughed.

“What’s so funny?” Ben asked.

“If Han survived, he'll be so proud of you. You’re a real pirate, Ben. You sold your own father to settle a debt and get a load of swag from the Hutt Syndicate.”

They all laughed at that.

***

The doctor wanted to see Ben, alone.

Chewie knew how afraid he was, and refused to leave him.

The doctor came out, after she was done, to talk to Rey and Leia.

They waited for the doctor.

“Your son is a powerful man. Without the use of the Force. With brute force, he could have crushed me with one hand. He’s almost the size of Chewbacca! A rescue party made the mistakes of approaching him in a way that looked like an attack, and I treated five people for minor injuries they sustained. With no weapons. And he was terrified of me. Terrified.”

The Twi’Lek doctor sighed.

“When they held him captive, Leia, the First Order tortured your son. I don’t…well, the ankle, first. The ankle isn’t broken. It's badly sprained. He tied two sticks to it with a rag, shoved his foot in the boot, laced it up tight and walked on it. I’m not surprised. He’s tough. He had to be. There are scars on his ribs, on both sides, he’s broken every one. And the scar on his collarbone tells me that someone stapled it together. The scars around the stitches are ragged. They held him down, stapled his collarbone together and sewed his muscle and skin shut with no anasthesia. Then they probably let him lie, and after it festered, shut him up in a bacta tank. He’s also broken his elbow. And there’s a scar. It starts on his right hip, crosses over, wraps around his leg, and ends just above his knee. It’s from a torture droid. Your son is a strong man, mentally, that he could survive.”

“What about his ankle, doctor?” Rey asked.

She didn’t want to hear any more of the other things.

“Ben needs to wear a brace for a month, and limit his walking for about two weeks. Keep his foot elevated. Use a crutch or a cane. I told him. He didn’t like it, but I told him listen to me, or limp forever. Does Ben have somewhere to go? Someone to take care of him?”

“He does. And I don’t mind. If he can fly? We can leave, as soon as he gets something to eat.” Rey volunteered.

Ben came out of the tent, hopping on one leg.

“I’m not using that crutch. It’s undignified.”

“Ben, if you were worried about your dignity, you should have conducted your personal business a little more quietly last night. Or come to this camp with pants on.” Leia suggested.

“All that added to my legend. This crutch makes me look weak.”

Rey ran into the tent, rummaging around, and then came out.

“Here, Ben. I found it in a wreck in the woods. I restored it and used it when I twisted my ankle, even though it was too tall for me. The bottom part is real wood. Some kind of dark wood, it’s not painted. That top part is a geode.”

Rey handed Ben the cane.

“This is better. I’m going home, Mom. To the Outer Rim, to Tattoine. I have a place out in the hinterlands to hide. Tell me when it’s safe for me to go back to Anchorhead and be Ben Solo again.”

“Rey, you know Ben Solo makes his home in Anchorhead because he’s a smuggler and a pirate, don’t you?’’

“Honestly, Master Leia? I’ve always had a problem with flyboys. I don’t mind at all.”

“Be careful, Rey. My son, here? He’s a whole bunch of guys. One for every occasion.”

Rey waited for Ben to deny it.

But, he didn’t.

“Add one more, Mom. Ben Skywalker. I am a Skywalker, after all. Ben Skywalker, and his lovely wife. Just two nice kids without a lot of money, trying to get by.”

“Rey Skywalker? Master, Leia, can I can be Rey Skywalker?”

“Yes, Rey. Welcome to the Skywalker-Solo family. I’m very sorry for you.” Leia replied.

She hugged Rey, and then hugged Ben again.

“Don’t make waves, kid. I need to think about what I’m going to do about this Ben Solo and Kylo Ren problem. Do you have anything to prove you killed him?”

“I brought his broken mask and his gloves to Exegol with me. They’re still in that cave. Why do you think I fought so hard?”

“What about his lightsaber?” Leia asked.

“Threw it away. This is Uncle Luke’s. I’m going to make another one. I liked the crossbar, but I’ll make the beam a different color.”

“Good idea. Lay low, and don’t worry about your father. Chewie and I will figure something out.”

***

“Luke, I need you to do me a favor.”

The Jedi Master’s Force ghost sat down beside his sister.

“I don’t think I need the Force to predict what you’re about to say.” he replied.

[megilins]

Star Wars and fiction-based religion

(This is an essay I wrote as my final assignement for a class about pop-culture in English-speaking countries in May-June 2019. As I was writing it a few months ago, some people reached out to me, because they were interested in reading it. I hesitated and didn’t upload it, but now that TROS happened, I’ve decided to revisit it myself, just to see what was my opinion of Star Wars back when I still thought it had some cultural meaning. Oh, and for reference, I got a B+ haha.)

Star Wars and fiction-based religion

The world is becoming more and more secular. This spiritual vacuum needs to be filled with something meaningful. It is more important now than ever to have stories communicating basic values of humanity. Myths as part of a religion help people to make sense of the universe, but after modern disenchantment traditional religions are less and less popular and as a result people are less and less in contact with these stories.

I would argue that fiction-based religion could be a next evolutionary stepping stone and Star-Wars-based religion has a potential to be recognized as one of the first ones. When I say Star-Wars-based religion, I don’t mean just the regular Star Wars fandom. Of course, fandom and religion are two completely different things. Fandom is composed of people that share some common interest and it could be anything from knitting to watching the same TV show as opposed to religion which applies to the spiritual, the supernatural, faith, the meaning of life. However, with fiction-based religion, the line between the two is a bit more blurry.

Creating a myth for modern age is exactly what George Lucas had in mind when he was writing Star Wars (1). When he created the concept of the Force, inspired by Chinese tradition of Qi, he wanted to rekindle some sense of spirituality in children and adults alike and to make them once again believe in something bigger than themselves. And with his use of rhetorical power of images, color symbolism, and story structures he made his story resonate with people all around the world.

Star-Wars-based religion already exists. Jediism has thousands of followers and it is recognized in some countries alongside other traditional religions. For example the Teple of the Jedi Order is legally recognized as Jedi Church and ministry of Jediism (2). I believe that each fully formed religion is composed of three main components: tradition, aesthetics, and myth. I think that Jediism encompasses all of these. It is on smaller scale than traditional religions, but all of the components are there.

Maybe the tradition does not seem centuries old at first glance, but the core values of these stories are based on millennia old concepts – compassion, hope, tension between good and evil, the importance of family and love. Also Star Wars as it is in its more than 40 years of existence is already part of the shared consciousness of multiple generations of people.

When it comes to aesthetics, Star Wars has a very specific feel – retro but sci-fi. The imagery, color schemes and design of characters are instantly recognizable as a part of that world. General audience is able to distinguish between a Star Wars set and a Star Trek set in a similar way a person can instantly distinguish two churches of two different denominations of Christianity.

Lastly, I consider the main story of the three trilogies to be the myth component – the drama of Skywalkers, fight between light and dark, all of it happening on the backdrop of political intrigues.

I believe that the existence of fiction-based religion could be beneficial to our society in the near future. Humans need role models and structure in their lives and when they can’t trust traditional religious movements anymore, it might be helpful to take into consideration myths of today’s pop-culture even though we know the authors.

Sources:

(1)   George Lucas: “When I did Star Wars, I consciously set about to recreate myths and the classic mythological motifs and I wanted to use those motifs to deal with issues that exist today.” The Mythology of Star Wars. Directed by Pamela Mason Wagner, Films for the Humanities, 2000.

(2)    “FAQ, What is TotJO” Temple of the Jedi Order, <https://www.templeofthejediorder.org/faq>

[alpha-centari27]

Redeeming an Irredeemable Character:  A Case Study of Kylo Ren / Ben Solo -- The Moral Event Horizon

So, there has been a lot of very detailed and compelling arguments for why The Rise of Skywalker as a whole sucked and especially the ending.

I decided to do some digging online to find some writing guides that talk about the nuts and bolts of redeeming an irredeemable character.

As much as possible I am going to incorporate the key information and cut out everything else.  The source material is in bold and my commentary will be in normal text.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MoralEventHorizon

TV Trope The Moral Event Horizon:

Named for the boundary around a black hole from which there is no escape once crossed, this trope uses the black hole as a metaphor for evil; the Moral Event Horizon refers to the first evil deed to prove a particular character to be irredeemably evil.

Note the word irredeemably. It is a demonstration of permanent evil: the moment which confirms that this character will always be a bad person. [...]

Ok, so in The Force Awakens the first truly evil thing we see Kylo Ren do is order the slaughter of an entire village.  That is really bad.  And chances are this is not the first time this has happened.

Then later on in the movie Kylo Ren murders his own father.  Also very bad, which is made even worse by the fact that both Han and Leia want their son to come home.

The key phrases I want to focus on in the paragraphs above are: “permanent evil“ and “this character will always be a bad person“.

If you have seen the movies then you know that Kylo Ren / Ben Solo has done some good deeds.

For example he had every opportunity to kill his mother, but he did not take the shot.

He could have killed Rey in The Last Jedi, but he didn’t.

Kylo Ren / Ben Solo also killed Snoke.  This is going off on a tangent and this is my personal speculation, but I can’t help but think Kylo made the decision to kill Snoke and save Rey because he recognized the way Snoke was trying to manipulate Rey because Snoke has done similar things or the exact same things to him.  And he couldn’t stand the thought of Rey having to endure what he endured.  And maybe Kylo thought about what his father said to him.  That Snoke is just using him and when Snoke gets what he wants or he is of no further use to him he is expendable.  Because Rey refused she was expendable and Snoke told Kylo to kill her.

While they may not have had a term such as this to define it, many authors clearly recognized it. Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land referred to it as being the result of an act that was "so bad, so black" that it was basically unforgivable. Meanwhile, multiple religions have the concept of "perdition," where those who have committed a truly unpardonable sin are irrevocably doomed to punishment in the afterlife.

Obviously, it follows from the definition that a character can't cross this boundary more than once. Crossing it implies going from redeemable to irredeemable, and that's it; the other way around contradicts the definition. [...] Sometimes all that stands between man and monster is a Single Tear... or even a full-out weep. Perhaps a show of respect for the enemy. A Heel Realization that you've gone too far. Sometimes they become The Atoner. But the act has been committed, and they will never fully succeed...

Ok, if I am not misunderstanding these two paragraphs.  We could categorize someone as crossing into irredeemable territory and passing The Moral Event Horizon by the character showing a lack of emotion.  They feel no guilt, no remorse, no regret, etc.  They do not feel conflicted or distressed about their choices and the results of those choices.

Kylo Ren / Ben Solo is shown to be a conflicted character.  In The Force Awakens he feels himself being pulled toward the light and he feels compassion for Rey.

Another point worth bringing up.  There was a scene cut from The Force Awakens where Snoke and Kylo Ren are talking.  Kylo has killed his father and he is torn up about it.  There is a visible tear running down his face.  I don’t think it is explicitly said that killing Han Solo cut Kylo to the bone, but I think many people have contended that Kylo Ren killing his father adversely impacted Kylo’s ability to defeat Rey in lightsaber combat.

And since it's subjective, some characters will think you've crossed it, while others may be still prepared to believe in your possible redemption.

Just as with a real black hole, the closer you come to a Moral Event Horizon, the harder you must try to escape.

A Complete Monster lives on the other side of the Moral Event Horizon, but crossing the Moral Event Horizon does not automatically imply that the crosser is a Complete Monster. [...] A character who performs an act that should make them irredeemable but somehow gets away with it is a Karma Houdini. Unless they realize it, feel horrible, and work their ass off to atone for that crossing. Then maybe it'll evolve into Forgiven, but Not Forgotten; that one crossing certainly will stay as a black mark, but they're working to be a better person. Such instances, however, are rare.  [...]

When people decide in-universe that someone has crossed this line, the character in question is considered Beyond Redemption.

Rey in The Last Jedi when she first starts having force skype calls with Kylo she calls him murderous snake and says that he is a monster.  Just going off the dialogue it seems at this point she considers him beyond redemption.

After she learns about what happened between Luke and Kylo she starts to change her mind and thinks that he is not beyond saving.

I feel like Luke goes through the same transition.  I don’t think it is directly stated out loud, but the fact Luke decided to do something to help Rey, Leia and the resistance says something--at least I would like to believe it.

From Leia’s point of view until the very end I don’t believe she gives up on Kylo Ren / Ben Solo.

Based on everything that has been covered, where does this leave us?  Is Kylo Ren / Ben Solo a character worthy of being redeemed?

I think the short answer is yes.

- Kylo Ren / Ben Solo is shown to be a conflicted character.  He feels drawn toward the light, but wants to shut himself off from the light side of the force and immerse himself in the dark side.

- He is neither consistently or permanently evil.  He spared Rey’s life and Leia’s and killed Snoke.

- He feels compassion for Rey.

- I suspect most of the characters see Kylo Ren as beyond saving, as beyond redemption, but not everyone agrees.

- Although this is not talked about in the article about the TV trope The Moral Even Horizon I think something else worth factoring in is the backstory we are given on Kylo Ren in the comics The Rise of Kylo Ren.  I have not read the comics for myself, but it is revealed in the comics that Kylo was not responsible for the Jedi Temple being burned down and the murders of the students training alongside him.  As others have said, Kylo Ren / Ben Solo was stalked, groomed and manipulated from a very young age because of his lineage and potential to be the next Darth Vader.

And on a final note: I do not believe a character has to die in order to be redeemed.  This can be one way to earn redemption, but it is not the only way.