Anonymous asked: humble request: rey or phasma, ur choice, for the headcanon meme
Heck, how about some Rey feelings. Please observe that I have literally never given a fuck about the extended universe for more than long enough to Make Things Worse, and I have no idea what Rey’s canonical backstory is in the New EU.
A: what I think realistically
So…this is what I started following Wilde for, way back in the day, but Rey has definitely eaten a dude before, right? Like, she grew up a feral desert orphan child and has definitely killed a couple people to protect herself and her home and her food supply, and. Well. Supposing it was a sort of being whose flesh isn’t toxic to humans…that’s a lot of food. Your average human runs about 40,000 calories, if you eat whatever organs are edible (not all, but a good number) and make appropriate use of the bones. That’s literally almost a month of food for a skinny nervous abandoned teenager. More if you ration it.
Rey feels worse about losing some of the meat because she was learning how to cure it than she does about any other part of the situation.
B: what I think is fucking hilarious
Rey has never had a last name. Neither has Finn. Finn comes into the Dqar base unconscious and bleeding out and who the hell else is going to put themselves down as people to contact in case he needs something (in case he dies, they do not think) except Rey, who Finn came back for, and Poe, who came back for Finn. So through some confusion with medical staff Finn is officially down as Finn Dameron because…well, Poe’s not going to tell them they can’t, okay? Poe has a big extended family back on Yavin IV, they won’t mind one more, and honestly just Finn is starting to look a little lonely, flapping out in the breeze without any other names on it. The guy can pick a last name when he wakes up, but for the moment, Finn Dameron it is.
Rey is informed, after she’s had four ribs and a mild concussion repaired, that they’ll need her last name so that they can record the concussion and make sure future doctors know about it. This takes a remarkable amount of explaining about the point of medical records, followed by a lengthy but competently recalled list of every notable injury Rey has ever sustained.
“Thank you, Rey,” the medic says dryly, noting down the last of them. “And a last name? You can just pick one to fill in, for now, and change it later if you need to.”
“Dameron,” Rey says offhandedly, because last names are about family and family are the people who come back for you and honestly that’s about the extent of Rey’s understanding on the matter.
By the time Rey’s back from hunting down Luke from some backwater corner of the galaxy, the entire Resistance knows that Poe Dameron gave Finn his jacket and Rey his droid (temporarily, he did get it back, but no one seems willing to listen) and the both of them his last name. As far as Rey is concerned, corralling Finn and waiting for Poe in his quarters is nothing short of the obvious solution to everyone’s problems.
Rey is a feral desert child whose knowledge of bureaucratic nonsense is limited at best and nonfunctional at worst. She mis-files a couple of things a week, and usually it’s caught by the actual administrative staff, but how were they supposed to know that she didn’t understand that she’d accidentally filed all her documents with two spouses. She does live with Finn and Poe, she protests when it comes up, and they are her family, and they aren’t related, she just eliminated options until there was only one left!
To Finn, who grew up in a world where marriage barely existed as a concept and certainly wasn’t something he was familiar with, this seems perfectly legitimate.
To Poe, who is literally the last person on base to find out when Leia very dryly hands him an anniversary present and says “I hear you got married this time last year,” this prompts a lot more questions.
C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends
Do you ever think about Rey as a little girl, trying not to cry because it wastes water and she has so little water left, and sitting out under the stars as she wonders why she wasn’t good enough? Why she wasn’t good enough for her parents to stay? Why she wasn’t good enough for them to take her with them?
Why she wasn’t good enough for them to love?
Because if you ever think about that, let me raise you one up. Do you ever think about Rey as a young woman, holding an ancient weapon in both hands and trying to drive back a ragged blade of scarlet light, trying not to fall into the crevasse opening below her feet, trying not to die here, at the hands of this wild-eyed creature behind that terrible mask, this monster who killed the only person who had really, truly offered her a place in the world (do you want a job)—and do you ever think about how, in total desperation, she reaches out to the Force and begs I am not good enough for this, please save me anyway.
And the Force comes to her call with the force of a sun being born and answers oh, wild girl, newest heart, thing-with-teeth-and-starlight-eyes, you are just as good as you choose to be.
And Rey opens her eyes and throws the monster away from her and, prowling forward with her teeth bared and starlight in her eyes, makes a choice.
D: what would never work with canon but the canon is shit so I believe it anyway
Right, so, we all pretty much know that Rey is probably going to be Luke’s daughter because ultimately Star Wars is the story of the Skywalker family more than anything else. But honestly I think if I had total creative control here I would go with that one suggestion that has drifted past once or twice about Rey being the Force’s second attempt at balance, another Force-child meant to repair the damage wreaked in the wake of the last. Her mother was not a Skywalker. Her mother was no one of note. Her mother was not equipped for a child like Rey. Rey was born and the Force shook, and Rey cried and the Force soothed her, and Rey laughed and the sun’s light was less brutal. Her mother ran when Rey was seven.
Rey had no control over it, of course. But alone, scaling the gutted hulk of fallen destroyers and battlestars, Rey always seemed to find the last valuable items, waiting to be ripped from the walls and control panels, and she never stumbled, never fell into the depths below her, never quite got severely injured. Once, she found a ship wrecked on the sand and followed a tug that anchored somewhere under her breastbone, and found a door that had jammed shut in the crash. No one had ever tried to open it.
When she pried the door free, Rey ripped out the hyperbaric chamber beyond and managed to rig up a sledge behind her speeder, and took a dead relic of a dead man who had once been the Force’s own child, unknown father-twin-cousin-self to Rey, to be traded for food. It had earned her an entire month’s portions, and the quick-rise bread and the protein bars tasted strange on her tongue. Like cannibalism, almost. Eating one’s own kind to survive.
The first time Rey uses the Force—intentionally, with anger and willfulness and desperation behind it—Luke and Leia almost have a mutual heart attack. The sunburst of presence, the supernova, is familiar but unspeakably foreign, a gravitational pull like a supermassive star that draws the world behind it and how dare anyone question.
The first thing that flickers through Luke’s mind is an impossible Father? On Dqar Leia feels a fierce lurch of Ben, you fool, don’t you dare—
When Rey fights with her saberstaff, white light a deadly halo around her hands, she could almost be another Jedi, at the height of his power and honor and glory long ago. But Rey has never allowed anyone to dictate to her, and perhaps this is why the Force left her alone, to raise herself and learn her own limits. Rey is a killer, certainly. Rey will do what has to be done for the survival of herself and her people, now that she has people. But no one has ever told Rey to feel nothing, to abandon her heart, and Rey’s heart holds the whole of the Force in its folds, her blood pumping starstuff and power.
When she stands again the First Order, against the Knights of Ren and their captain, against generals and armies and machines, against Snoke, the last of the Sith Lords, the outcome is foregone.
