skymurdock asked: hello I am here to tell you about Worst Time Traveller Han Solo, possibly post-TFA, grumpily rolling through the Clone Wars and accidentally earning a Reputation for knowing, strangely, exactly where to invest his money and what to do when confronted with Completely Unexpected Events. also, for some reason, he keeps running into baby-Vader a lot. STOP SHOOTING AT ME, yells Anakin, possibly just before they find themselves in another hot mess. sorry, force of habit, says Han.
also, at least once, somebody’s like “ok dude you’re a bit TOO accurate with your blaster shots as Anakin keeps complaining, lemme take your midichlorian count” “midi WHAT NOW” “I mean, you’re clearly Force-sensitive” “NO I’M NOT IT’S LUCK.”
Anakin has found his next Padawan! (Bonus if timetraveler!Han is the biological age he would have been during the actual Clone Wars - which would have been between five and ten, I think. )
okay, so you’ve got two very interesting ways that could pan out:
ONE. Han Solo either remains the same age he was when he died or the same age he was post-ROTJ when he’s dragged back in time to the Clone Wars. he wakes up somewhere on the planet that Starkiller Base used to be way back in the Clone Wars with lots of vibrant green forests and even a small thriving spaceport, finds some poor sonuvabitch with a ship, and talks his way onto it. conveniently, shit goes down and they crash-land on a planet being battled over by the Separatists and the Republic, and Han somehow finds himself face-to-face with Anakin goddamn motherfucking Skywalker.
he spends like a day in the brig of a Republic cruiser with a nasty bruise bc he shot at baby-Vader out of instinct. (that’s what he will forever use to refer to Anakin Skywalker in his head. Anakin is pissed bc of the baby part, mostly. Han is goggling at him.)
also, he prob uses a false alias, bc Han Solo currently is a tiny eight-year-old happily rolling around on Corellia.
TWO. Han Solo wakes up eight years old, on Corellia, and spends about ten minutes screaming into his pillow because NOT AGAIN. and then he v quietly runs away from home - it’s fine bc home is kind of terrible, anyway - and stows away onto a ship.
the ship gets shot down over a Separatist-controlled planet, Han finds a blaster, and then runs right into Anakin goddamn motherfucking Skywalker. Anakin, seeing a small eight-year-old stowaway, immediately decides to try and get this kid out of this absolute warzone. Han shoots at him and misses bc eight-year-old body does not have the muscle memory and rock-solid aim of seventy-plus-year-old body.
and then Anakin has to save this tiny little runaway child who is also beating angrily on his chest like LEMME GO and screaming obscenities that children should not know but smugglers-turned-war heroes-turned-smugglers again do. Han does not know what the hell kind of shit he’s landed himself in this time, but he does know he has a Very Bad Feeling about all this.
A tiny, foul-mouthed little orphan brat who knows things he shouldn’t, is far more skilled then he should be for his age, had a bad attitude, constantly surprises people, is insubordinate to the extreme, probably makes Obi-Wan and Anakin look at him very sharply indeed when he states he has a Bad Feeling about something, is obviously Strong with the Force…
It’s Anakin Skywalker mark 2.0. (Anakin is not certain why everyone is looking at him.)
(Of course Han is slated to be Anakin’s next padawan. He fights tooth and nail against it - be probably insults the High Council to their faces, and keeps trying to run away.)
Han does not WANT to be anyone’s padawan, especially not - UGH - baby-Vader’s, UGH. he just wants to find his ship and his first mate and also probably keep the galaxy from careening into a trash fire like it did before. he develops a habit of running off on missions - bc for some weird reason he does not ever actually stay at the Jedi Temple for more than a few days despite everyone’s best attempts to keep him there and actually teach him how to use the Force for things that aren’t CHEATING AT CARDS - and on one of these occasions comes back with a ship that he claims to know how to fly.
Anakin spends all of a day silently doubting him until they have to get OFF the planet and he is somehow injured and can’t pilot, so Han takes over for him and does something completely goddamn insane like - dive into an asteroid field, like he’s done it before.
(meanwhile Han is trying v desperately to pilot this brand-new non-modified version of his beloved Falcon without thinking of all the times he and Leia were in this same cockpit together. oh god he misses Leia. oh god baby-Vader is next to him yelling watch out for the asteroid like HE DOESN’T FUCKING KNOW SHUT UP.)
Anakin, you have no room to talk considering the whole ‘won a space battle at age ten’ thing. And the podracing thing. AND the illegal swoop bike racing in Coruscant thing. And your ENTIRE ADULT LIFE thing.
Han’s habit of running away - well, trying to run away - dies the second he is introduced to Senator Padme Amidala. Han probably takes one look at her and knows - and then promptly starts trying to desperately set up baby-Vader and the Senator. (He doesn’t know that they’re married, he just wants Leia and Luke born ASAP, is that too much to ask?!)
lbr Anakin can be kind of hypocritical sometimes, oops.
oh, lord. Han looks at Padme Amidala, then at Anakin, and the clearly besotted way they look at each other when the other is not looking, and comes to the right conclusion that they are In Love and the wrong conclusion that, bc of the whole Jedi thing, neither of them are acting on it.
and he wants Luke and Leia conceived YESTERDAY, so. he finds a way to trick both of them into a closet, lock the door, and then run off. two birds, one stone, he reasons, bc if baby-Vader is too busy getting busy with the Senator then Palpatine can’t get to him and if Palpatine can’t get to him then nothing goes straight into the shitcan and Luke and Leia will be born! it’s a brilliant plan.
Palpatine, meanwhile, is wondering why Anakin is running late for his meeting, and is seriously side-eyeing the shit out of this tiny baby padawan who Knows Too Much, clearly.
(Ahsoka shows up, at one point, possibly during a mission that went rapidly FUBAR on the same planet she was on and quickly grows to like Anakin’s new padawan. he’s Weird but he clearly knows what he’s doing! maybe a little too well.)
LUKE SKYWALKER: Myth is so much more important and true than history.
LEIA ORGANA: Well, history is just journalism, and you know how reliable that is. ….
The new documentary
THE RESISTANCE tells the
eye-opening
history of the Second Galactic Civil War from the point of view of those who fought in it. To capture this vantage point, director R.B. Arraneth has gathered together the rare candid holo footage of its soldiers, pilots, droids, and lauded generals, splicing it together with interviews and excerpts of their own words. The result is an intimate portrait of the heroes of the Resistance, as they truly were.
“The documentary explores how life actually was on the ground of an ongoing conflict,” says Arraneth. “Though it profiles of a handful of soldiers, it is really meant to serve as a reflection on us in a post-Civil War galaxy, and the sense of mythos we project on the people who fought in it.“
THE RESISTANCE is a tragic, heartening, personizing, and revelatory report from the front lines of a struggle that spanned the known galaxy.
I wonder if, in superhero universes, the villains ever get contacted by those “Make a Wish Foundation” and similar people.
I mean, the heroes do, of course they do, kids who want to meet Spiderman or Superman or get to be carried by the Flash as he runs through Central City for just thirty seconds.
But surely there are also the kids, who - because they are kids and sometimes kids are just weird - decide that what they really, really want is to meet a supervillain. Because he’s scary or she’s awesome or that freeze ray is just really, really cool, you know?
Oh, man, that would absolutely be a thing. The heroes would be so weirded out by it. The villains with codes of ethics would totally band together to force the villains without one (should they be the one requested) to do their part for the cause.
But imagine the person who has to track down the villains and organise everything?
Like, the first time it happens, no one actually thinks it’s possible, but one of the newbies volunteers to at least try. They get lucky, the kid wants to meet one of the villains who is well known to have a personal code of ethics (eg one of the rogues), and it takes them weeks to track the villain down to this one bar they’ve been seen at a few times, plus a week of staking out said bar, but they finally find them.
So they approach the villain, very politely introduce themselves and explain the situation, finishing with an assurance that, should the villain agree, no law enforcement or heroes will be informed of the meeting.
The villain, assuming it’s a joke, laughs in their face.
At this point, the poor volunteer, who has giving up weeks of their time and no small amount of effort to track down this villain, all so a sweet little girl can meet the person who somehow inspired them, well, at this point the employee sees red.
They explode, yelling at this villain about the little girl who, for some unknown reason, absolutely loved them, had a hand-made stuffed toy of them and was inspired by their struggle to keeping fighting her own and wasn’t the villain supposed to have ethics? The entire bar is witness to this big bad villain getting scolded by some bookish nobody a foot shorter than them.
When the volunteer is done, the villain calmly knocks back their drink, grips the volunteers shoulder and drags them outside. The bar’s patrons assume that person will never be seen again, the volunteer included. But once they’re outside, the villain apologises for their assumption, asks for the kid’s details so they can drop by in the near future, not saying when for obvious reasons. They also give the very relieved volunteer a phone number to call if someone asks for them again.
A week later, the little girl’s room is covered in villain merchandise, several expensive and clearly stolen gifts and she is happily clutching a stack of signed polaroids of her and the villain.
The next time a kid asks to meet a villain, guess who gets that assignment?
Turns out, the first villain was quite touched by the experience of meeting their little fan, and word has gotten around. The second villain happily agrees when they realise it’s the same volunteer who asked the other guy. Unfortunately, one of the heroes sees the villain entering the kid’s hospital and obviously assumes the worst. They rush in, ready to drag the villain out, but the volunteer stands in their way. The hero spends five minutes getting scolded for trying to stop the villain from actually doing a good thing and almost ruining the kid’s wish. The volunteer gets a reputation among villains as someone who can not only be trusted with personal contact numbers but who will do everything they can to keep law enforcement away during their visits.
The volunteer has a phonebook written in cypher of all the villain’s phone numbers, with asterixes next to the ones to call if any other villains give them trouble.
Around the office, they gain the unofficial job title of The Villain Wrangler.
I think almost every time I’ve written a situation where I planned for a character to get killed off, when I thought like “well what if I didn’t do that” the prospect of them just dying seemed like the lazy way out, or something I was just writing because “that’s how stories like this go”.
Like, years ago when I thought I was going to be on an extended hiatus I was planning to do a MGDMT graphic novel that had nothing to do with video games and just focused on the original super soldier characters. Mostly the idea was the same theme, Macho Action Dude Reacting to Movie Tropes Like A Reasonably Normal Guy, so it was gonna have all the motions of those same old conventions, but play out differently. At one point the idea was “the girlfriend character dies and he has to deal with it like an emotionally believable person and not a larger than life action guy”. But when I thought about it, that didn’t sit well with me, because even if it was trying to comment on a trope, it was still “female character gets killed for no reason other than the male lead to have a character arc about it” and that rubbed me the wrong way. So I thought, okay, what if she still gets kinda messed up, so they build her some cool robot parts and she’s like Shit Yeah! This is the best! And she thinks it’s so rad having robot parts it kinda throws off the course her life was going down because suddenly the idea of being Robocop seems a lot more exciting than nesting with her high school sweetheart. And he doesn’t have to go have emotions about a dead girlfriend, he has to learn to come to terms with someone he was very close to having a life experience he can’t exactly empathize with that put her on a road to becoming the person she’s decided she wants to be, but not the person he ever planned on her becoming. So his arc is sort of dealing with the grief of a lost hypothetical person, and learning to respect her autonomy to make decisions that he might consider “a bad idea” but improve her quality of life as she wants to live it. Which, in the end, felt like a lot more of an interesting story than “the girl dies so the main character can have emotions about it. But I only got to that point by recognizing the original idea was stale and racking my brain to do something different.
I guess what I’m saying is, when I see professional TV writers get excited about what a twist it is that they kill a beloved character in something to shake up the snowglobe so to speak, I can’t help but think that they fell into that rut of thinking “this is the convention I have been trained to attach to this story”, and didn’t even stop to think there may have been a more interesting and unique route they could have gone. Intrigue comes from giving the audience something they don’t expect to see. It’s easy to think that killing a character for shock value suits that task, but that’s become such a normal device to throw out there that it doesn’t surprise anyone anymore. It’s always worth at least considering what would happen to the story if you didn’t just go down the first path that came into your mind, because the first will almost certainly be the most well-trodden with the least surprises along the way.
Humans quickly get a reputation among the interplanetry alliance and the reputation is this: when going somewhere dangerous, take a human.
Humans are tough. Humans can last days without food. Humans heal so fast they pierce holes in themselves or inject ink for fun. Humans will walk for days on broken bones in order to make it to safety. Humans will literally cut off bits of themselves if trapped by a disaster.
You would be amazed what humans will do to survive. Or to ensure the survival of others they feel responsible for.
That’s the other thing. Humans pack-bond, and they spill their pack-bonding instincts everywhere. Sure it’s weird when they talk sympathetically to broken spaceships or try to pet every lifeform that scans as non-toxic. It’s even a little weird that just existing in the same place as them for long enough seems to make them care about you. But if you’re hurt, if you’re trapped, if you need someone to fetch help?
You really want a human.
you know fantasy dragon soulbonding fic i want more of that where the humans are the dragons, like, we’re huge, we’re old, we’re scrappy as hell, and if you are small and cute enough we would be delighted to carry you around on our back
Oh god, now I’m imagining sapient species with lifetimes of, like, a year, and there’s one family that’s been attached to, like, a pirate since she rescued the doll-sized matriarch. She was 23 and just getting command of her first space cruiser, and because she rescued the matriach, the entire family regards her as their protector, they literally live in her bedroom until they reproduce too much (They have a litter every month), then they start traveling around her ship, and there’s entire societies all throughout the ship after, like, 5 years.
She goes down to the engine room for the first time in a decade because she has to find the head engineer for reasons, and there are literal little beasties down there who hail her as the “First guardian” and are so astonished to see her, and they want to come with her to the promised land, and she’s just like “Where?” They describe a luxurious land of softness, and she realizes they mean her bedroom.
So she starts making a habit of visiting every place on her ship multiple times a year, bringing the little buggers to see her room and bringing them home, and her legit crew thinks these guys are hilarious and adorable, and anyone with one of them in attendance has permission to visit her room, and long story short, after 20 years, she’s like a crazy cat lady, but with hundreds and hundreds of doll-sized little aliens who literally worship her.
Alternatively, what about the story where we’re the equivalent of the sentient cats? Like we’re small and kinda funny-looking and our lifespan isn’t that great, but we bond with other species like whoa, so most starships have a human as a mascot (the long haul freighters have an entire family, maybe even a village)
And mostly we’re just seen as the cute mascot. But then every now and then the shit hits the impeller. And that’s when you get stories like “he jammed our sonar, and he had a gun on us and we thought we were done for! But, I guess he’d forgotten how flexible humans are. Our ship’s human had crawled out of her nest and behind the console, you know, in that wiring gap? She jumped on his back and ripped his antennae out! With her bare hands! He threw her into the console and she just got right back up and kept fighting, smashed her upper joints into his flaps over and over again, and she didn’t stop until he quit moving, even though she was leaking everywhere and we could see a piece of her inner skeleton! We rushed her to the med techs but we were sure she was done for. But, did you know, humans can reattach their skeleton parts?? She gets around just fine now, says it doesn’t bother her. She saved all of us. She could have just stayed in her nest and been fine, but she defended us and saved the ship. I’m never serving on a crew without a human ever again.”
“Yeah, did you hear about the crew from over Ktl'ree way? They had a gas leak in the middle of that awful nebula they’ve got, took out everyone but their humans. Turns out, their humans rewired their wormhole drive so they could get the ship home in time to get everyone medical attention. Said they figured they’d either all survive or they’d all go together. Now that’s loyalty. Can you imagine?”
“I’ve heard they’re even more fierce about defending the ship if you have a bonded pair. We’ve just had the one, since we’re short haul, but we’re looking for another one after that incident. It’s hard to find one the right age who doesn’t have a ship, though, never mind one she likes. There was one attached to another ship, they actually did bond for a bit, and the other ship offered to pay for our search for a new pair if she’d come with them. We talked to her about it—but she refused to leave us. She said ‘girlfriends come and go but we’re family.’ Can you believe that?”
“They’re amazing. I don’t understand ships who don’t have at least one. I served on a luxury cruiser that had a whole bunch, five or six families. Have you seen their young? They’re so adorable!”
“I know, right? Ours has offspring-from-the-same-parents she talks to whenever we’re in port, and she shows us pictures of their young. We’d find the room if she wanted some, but she says no, she’s not ready—but maybe if we find another one she can bond with. We’re kind of hoping.”
Yesssssssssssssss. This is awesomeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!! I am INSPIRED.
… have you guys not read @seananmcguire’s stories featuring The Mice?
CHEESE AND CAKE! CHEESE AND CAKE!
But what if Anakin isn’t ignoring Kylo Ren? What if that great pull Kylo feels towards the Light is Anakin Skywalker desperately trying to save his grandson from his own fate, the way his wife and son tried to save him?
what if Anakin is literally constantly standing behind Kylo Ren, sputtering with ghostly frustration, going, “No! No! No! Do not do that! Do NOT do that! oh for fuck’s sake.”
This is almost certainly what is actually happening.
“Ben if you skewer my son-in-law with that lightsaber then SO HELP ME”
“Ben Solo your mother is blaming me for this, get your ass home and apologize now or I swear-”
And Yoda and Obi-wan are watching, shaking their heads. “Now you know how we felt,” Obi-wan says.
Yoda agrees: “A bitch, karma is.”
I love this. So many people can just totally see Anakin trying to strangle Ben from the afterlife.
