velkleyaenjoyer

[velkleyaenjoyer]

What do you think Kleya’s life was like before the war? Before we (and Luthen) meet her?

What was her planet like? How did her family live? Was she (mostly) happy as a child? Is there anything that she and Vel have in common in their upbringing?

I honesty think the two of them had basically nothing in common during their childhoods

Vel grew up in the absolute peak of luxury, surrounded by opulence and absolutely miserable with zero familial love beyond mon

Kleya’s planet and family were dirt poor but she spent every day waking up happy and surrounded by love and the empire burned it all

Both of their rebellions are ultimately born from losing their homes, but in radically different ways

[velkleyaenjoyer]

We Could Be Heroes, Chapter 11

chapter 11 of my VelKleya fic is out now

this one features a spaceship, it features homosexual behaviour, it features demisexual kleya, what's not to love

[velkleyaenjoyer]

I previously posted this on twitter but for all the smart people who don't have that hellish app, here's an entirely too long analysis on how Kleya and Dedra are mirrored characters and foils to one another

Both Kleya and Dedra are orphans. They had their families and innocence ripped away from them as children at the hands of the Empire, or, if we want to be more specific taking into consideration Dedra's age, at the ends of a government that rules via violence and repression.

Kleya's family and people are massacred and she is raised by one of the men responsible for said massacre. Dedra's parents are arrested and she is raised in a kinder block, an apparatus that works in tandem with the one that took her family away from her.

Dedra is 3 years old when she is taken away from her parents. At such a tender age, she has no recollection of her prior life, which means she completely interiorizes the Empire's values she's exposed to. Kleya is 11-12, old enough to remember exactly what was taken from her, to know it was an atrocity, and to hate who did it.

Dedra has no sense of self outside of the system that phagocytized her. She becomes the Empire. Its rules and structure are home to her. She finds affirmation in becoming the oppressive force that tears families apart, so she dedicates her life to enforcing that chokehold.

Kleya, too, was shaped by what was done to her, but she becomes the Cause. Her life is in service of freeing the galaxy from the Evil that took everything from her, of making sure no one else will ever have to experience what she did. Most importantly, it's her own choice.

The Empire wants the homogenization of its subjects, and Dedra embodies the Empire, but here is the hypocrisy and brilliance of her character: she is selfish. She is ambitious, ignores orders to seek personal glory. Dedra works in service to the system, cannot imagine anything outside it, but within the system she exists in, she wants to emerge as DEDRA.

Kleya fights for the freedom and individuality of every being in the galaxy but she has stripped herself of any individual hopes/desires. Her own self does not matter to her, to the point that in 211 she doesn't get why Cassian wants to save HER instead of just caring about the intel. 

Even the fact that Dedra dates Syril shows this Selfish/Selfless dichotomy. Having a partner is, broadly speaking, a self-indulgent choice. It's an exclusive bond between yourself as an individual and another person, and Dedra gets herself a boyfriend who is like a pet that will do everything she wants. Kleya instead sacrifices everything to the altar of the Cause. She deprives herself of love or friendship or meaningful connections, she doesn't even entertain the possibility of seeking something for herself. 

And speaking about that, both Kleya and Dedra are extremely controlled, contained, emotionally guarded characters. The rigidity in their physicality reflects the need they both have to maintain control at all times, because vulnerability scares them.

They both grew up without tenderness or affection. Dedra understands love only through a lens of control and power. Kleya wills herself not to feel love at all.

It's very boring to me when people interpret Dedra and Syril's relationship as "she never cared about him, she only ever manipulated him because she is EVIL". That is so two-dimensional and not at all accurate. Yes, she is evil, she is a fucking monster. But also, from her perspective, Dedra does love Syril. We see it in the way she steps up to Eedy to defend him, when his happiness after the meeting with Partagaz causes her happiness. But that's the beauty and tragedy of it, and why she is such an amazing villain. Her understanding of love is completely warped. To her, love is all about ownership and control. But love is the opposite of ownership. True love is selfless, and it is freeing, and Dedra is terrified of freedom. She is someone who wants to love, but never can. Not really. Because control isn't love.

On the other hand, Kleya is someone who very much does not want to love. She wants to be as cold and unfeeling as she can because that will make her free from any vulnerability and she will better serve the Cause. But underneath that armor, she loves immensely. Kleya wants to be heartless, but love spills out of her.

They both have nervous tics that manifest when the control they desperately need is slipping from them. By definition, a nervous tic is something that can't be controlled. This crack in their armor reveals itself literally through a betrayal by their bodies.

Dedra in particular literally needs the dark to be vulnerable. She needs Syril to turn out the lights to have sex. She lets herself sob in Narkina only after the lights go off. Everything that reminds her that she is human is something to hide, something to be ashamed of.

Both have a mentor in Luthen and Partagaz. Dedra spends years trying to impress Partagaz only for him to make no qualms about casting her aside after the Axis fiasco. Kleya wants to hate Luthen, she refuses to consider him a father, yet she cannot help but love him, and when the time comes, Luthen gives up his life to save her. One is a bond of opportunism, the other is a bond of love.

And this is where it shows why they're such perfect mirrors as villain and hero. Dedra spends her whole life in service of a system that rejects her and spits her out. Kleya is ready to be tossed aside, but is instead offered love and kindness, by people she oftentimes had a hand in hurting. She is reminded that her life matters.

This show is SO intentional when it comes to its transitions. In the final montage of the show, Dedra and Kleya's ends are shown back to back, and I don't think it's a coincidence at all. 

Dedra ends up in prison bc of a chain reaction that started with her inability to let go of Axis. She disregarded all protocol in her obsession to catch him. And once she found Luthen, her arrogance led her to face him. She didn't just want to neutralize a threat to the Empire. She NEEDED him to know that SHE beat him. Except, she didn't.

Because Luthen wasn't Axis. Or at the very least, it wasn't just him. Kleya is the Axis Dedra never found, the one she never even knew existed until it was too late. Back in season 1, she tortured Salman Paak and he revealed that a woman had approached him and convinced him to hide the fractal radio in his backyard. That woman was most definitely Kleya. But Dedra, so meticulous with every other bit of information, didn't focus much on it. Her obsession with Axis blinded her. In her hubris, she let the most important piece slip through her fingers. She destroyed her own life for nothing.

Look at their final scenes. Kleya steps into the sunrise, sees the community she doesn't quite feel part of but that she helped create, a community that welcomes her. And she smiles. Dedra, alone and forgotten in the dark, is consumed by misery and despair, in a place that values its prisoners less than droids.

They both essentially started out in a box. Kleya in the metal compartment on Luthen's ship, Dedra in the kinder block. Kleya ends her journey out in the open, surrounded by light and life. Dedra ends her journey back where she started - in a sterile, lifeless box.

Dedra's ultimate personal defeat wasn't the leak of the Death Star information. That's a defeat for the Empire. Dedra's goal was to win against Axis. And she doesn't. She loses. Because Kleya gets to live.

[velkleyaenjoyer]

Cursing myself for having a username this long but I will lock in (so many E's)

Valerie - Amy Winehouse (Vel coded song)

Everybody Wants To Rule The World - Tears For Fears

Liar - Paramore

King - Florence + The Machine

Lay All Your Love On Me - ABBA

Ecstasy - Crocked Still

You've Got The Love - Florence + The Machine

All These Things That I've Done - The Killers

Everything To Everyone - Reneé Rapp

Nothing Matters - The Last Dinner Party

Jolene - Dolly Parton

Once in a Lifetime - Talking Heads

You First - Paramore

Emily I'm Sorry - boygenius

Red Wine Supernova - Chappell Roan

Going to change my username to vlklyanjoyr after this

Tagging: @pagesturnedsblog @mehlsbells @missmert @carpekl76 @asexualdindjarin

Task: Pick a song for every letter in your tumblr-URL. Tag at least as many people as there are letters in your URL. (I also do not know that many people, lol!)

Thank you for the tag @goldenwingediris. This was a lot of fun, although I did make it harder for myself by limiting it to one song per artist, something which is nowhere in the original rules!

The Kid - Cry Cry Cry

Hallelujah - Leonard Cohen

Red Red Wine - UB40

Eric's Song - Vienna Teng

Eleanor Rigby - The Beatles

Piano Man - Billy Joel

Willow - Taylor Swift

Ophelia - Natalie Merchant

One of Us - Abba

Downpour - Brandi Carlile

Mary Jane - Alanis Morissette

All This and Heaven Too - Florence + the Machine

Raglan Road - Loreena McKennitt

Life for Rent - Dido

Elsewhere - Sarah McLachlan

You're Aging Well - Dar Williams

Tagging @rachg82, @tyasante, @rowenasamuel, @onaperduamedee and anyone else who wants to do it!

[velkleyaenjoyer]

We Could Be Heroes, The Second Interlude

New Mini chapter of my VelKleya fic is out now!

This one is another interlude, containing 3 little flashback sections all stitched together

[velkleyaenjoyer]

What's the first gift Vel buys Kleya? Why does she buy it?

somehow this is the second ask in a row i have to answer like this but: gimme like two weeks of fic writing time :)

[velkleyaenjoyer]

KLEYA MARKI - ANDOR

reasoning: lesbian

[velkleyaenjoyer]

I’ve got this Kleya headcanon that I think we all share that she probably didn’t sleep around casually a lot because it was too risky. But that she took care of business herself, efficiently and quietly. So I have this vision that when things finally escalate between her and Vel, Vel notices she’s biting her lip, stifling her cries, and it clicks for Vel ‘oh, of course she was quiet’ and so it becomes Vel’s absolute mission to crack her. She encourages her to voice her pleasure and at first Kleya is just beat red blushing but when Vel does pull a moan from her it seems to spur Vel on just as much, and Kleya gets it then that yeah, her pleasure is Vel’s pleasure.

I'm not sure we all agree that she didn't casually sleep around much - I know there are quite a few people who headcanon that she enjoyed it quite a bit, though personally that's not my take.

Other than that! No notes here anon 10/10 agree with you and perhaps I've had this very conversation in private with a mutual just a couple days ago 🙂‍↕️​🙂‍↕️​🙂‍↕️​

[velkleyaenjoyer]

How do you envision Kleya and Vel’s first kiss? First time? First I love yous?

gimme like 2 weeks of fic writing and you will have your answer :)

[velkleyaenjoyer]

I like VelKleya but it feels kind of wrong to ship them after what the writers did to Cinta, ykwim?

Short answer, no I don't think there's anything wrong with shipping them, but let me give you the long answer too.

This to me is an example of when an issue that exists outside the show seeps into the narrative and kind of contaminates it. While there are certain things I would have liked to have been executed differently, I don't have any problems with season 2 of Andor except for one thing, and that is the way they handled Cinta's death.

To me, it's not even the fact that she dies that's the real issue. Honestly, before season 2 started, I was certain both she and Vel were going to die. It's the execution of said choice that is the problem. It's the fact Cinta comes back in one episode, has all her character development off-screen and delivered via dialogue (though to be fair, that's an issue that hovers over the whole s2 because of how they had to squeeze everything into one season, but there sure are certain things I would have tweaked to make room for more Cinta), and is then killed off in that same episode to hurt Vel. It's the "lesbian gets together with the woman she loves and gets killed 5 minutes later via stray bullet" trope. I don't know how much time I spent on twitter explaining to Star Wars bros that the issue isn't that they killed a queer character in a show where "everyone can die", it's how. The senseless death they found emotionally impactful and shocking was most definitely neither for queer audiences. We are depressingly used to it. The second that blaster came out, I knew she was getting that stray bullet. And it's angering and frustrating. The reaction isn't shock, it's more like shaking your head and going "we are still doing this in 2025, uh?" I am a bit frustrated that no journalist questioned Tony Gilroy on the issue of the specific trope Cinta's death fell into and simply stopped at a vague "so you killed this queer character", because of course he would answer the way he did if he has no idea this is an issue to begin with. I do believe they still would have killed Cinta off, but I doubt it would have happened in this exact manner had there been a queer person in the writer's room or among the group of people who call the shots.

So, as a trope in television, Cinta's death is very much a problem. All that said, it is a problem that exists outside the show. Within the TEXT of the show, none of this is there. In-universe, Cinta is a soldier who dies by friendly fire and the woman who loved her is haunted by grief and guilt. As for Velkleya, personally speaking, a big thing that makes them so compelling is the existence of this "ghost" of Cinta who hovers over both of them. Velkleya isn't about replacing Cinta with Kleya. That's not possible, nor something that anyone I talked to wants. I would understand the complain or issue more if say, Cinta was alive as a canonical lesbian woman of color, and people ignored Velcinta to latch onto a non-canon ship with two white women. Sure, personal taste and preference IS a thing, but it would be disingenuous to ignore the fact that in fandom there is very much a pattern of ignoring the non-white love interest to focus on a white one that maybe isn't even a love interest in the story. That happens constantly, in straight, gay, and lesbian ships alike. But that's not the case here.

In the universe of the show, Cinta is dead. She is gone. So, if you're imagining a continuation of the story, you either decide that Vel is going to be alone forever and mourn Cinta for the rest of her life, or you have to imagine her moving on, and what that looks like. To me, dramaturgically, psychologically, and emotionally, that's what's so interesting about Velkleya. From Vel's side, it's about a woman who lost who she believed was the love of her life and has decided that she has nothing to live for, only to realize she is developing feelings for the last person she could've ever imagined, and how she struggles with those feelings, with learning to love again, with accepting that she deserves to have love in her life.

Can you argue that in-narrative, Velkleya would not even be a possibility if they hadn't killed off Cinta? Sure. But that goes back to a (again, very real) problem that exists outside the show, not within.

Also not to go there, but this has made me think about a bigger phenomenon/discourse/issue, call it whatever you want, which is certain people thinking it's only ok to consume or engage with art if it's "not problematic" (whatever that means), because if the DO engage with said art, it means their own morals are questionable. Opposite to that, by only engaging with something they have decided is unproblematic, they put themselves on a pedestal and can pat themselves on the back while pointing their finger at the Bad People, as if shipping two characters who don't exists is some sort of activism.

We are talking about fake people. They are all fictional. As characters who exist within a fictional universe, you can do with them what you want. You aren't a good or a bad person if you prefer one character over another, if you want two characters to kiss, or not kiss. Dedra and Syril is one of the most popular ships in the Andor fandom and those are two space fascist freaks. Personally, they aren't my thing, but is everyone who hardcore ships them morally reprehensible the way Dedra and Syril are? I really do not think so.

There is also personal preference. If you dislike something in real life, it's likely you're not going to seek out ships that engage with those elements that you don't like. In the ao3 tag I've seen Krennic be shipped with the most improbable people and my gut reaction is to ask "why?" but I'm free to not read it and to not engage with it. Sure, there are extreme cases like idk, shipping something that is p*dophiliac, or the ever-spreading romanticization of abuse, but that is a whole other issue.

Coming back from that massive tangent, all of this was to say that it's absolutely understandable and valid to not like or want to engage with Vel x Kleya because you take issue with Cinta's death. 100%. But at the same time, it isn't wrong to ship them, nor is anyone who does doing anything bad.

[velkleyaenjoyer]

[fic] still water

Fandom: Star Wars, Andor Rating: Teen Pairing: Kleya Marki/Vel Sartha Additional Tags: Hurt/Comfort, Bathing/Washing

“Should just cut it,” Kleya says. “If you have shears.” She does, has cut her own hair with them. Mon’s, too, just once. She thinks, then, of Cinta on Ghorman. Hair cropped, beautiful. “I don’t,” Vel lies.

[velkleyaenjoyer]

What do you think Vel and Kleya would do after Endor? Do they remain in the alliance or do they finally break away to build a life together?

i think post war they definitely end up close with mon again, winning the war is the easy part but building what comes after is hard and i think they both really have a vested interest in the new republic and trying to make it better then what came before. i think they’d still take the occasional mission as the need arises for their particular skills but a lot of what they’d end up doing is rebuilding and de-imperialisation

[velkleyaenjoyer]

Do you think Luthen ever told Kleya he was proud of her?

Not directly, no. It's more likely he praised her in the context of a mission using a less loaded wording like "Great work there", or "Well done", much like he did in the flashbacks when she managed to sell the piece for 18 credits instead of 7. But the words "I'm proud of you"? I really don't think he ever told her. Anything that would explicitly reveal his love and affection for her is off-limits. Luthen isn't her father. Kleya doesn't have a father who could be proud of her because of Luthen. His guilt prevents him from even daring to try to fill that role. How could he? With what courage? In my opinion, Luthen doesn't think he has the right to be proud of Kleya, or to treat her like a daughter. They only get to share a life together because he destroyed hers. Luthen was a drunk self-loathing soldier who had nothing, and suddenly found himself with a purpose and something - someone - to cherish. Kleya was a little girl with her whole life ahead of her who was robbed of everyone she loved in the most horrifying way possible, and found herself having no one except for a man complicit in taking everything away from her.

So no. He doesn't say "I'm proud of you", he doesn't say "I love you". Is he proud of her, though? Does he love her more than anything? Absolutely. He loved her enough to switch their places when he realized ISB was coming for them. She is his everything. The Luthen we know really is born once he finds Kleya on his ship. That man begins with her, and ends for her.

[velkleyaenjoyer]

[velkleyaenjoyer]

height check. how tall are you people in my phone

[velkleyaenjoyer]

[velkleyaenjoyer]

We Could Be Heroes, Chapter 10

Chapter 10 of my VelKleya fic is up now!

This one features two whole new POV's so check it out if you are interested!