“I’m a Republic officer, General. I swore an oath to protect the Republic, to—” “No, you misunderstand. I like it. It was rash of you, as I said, it was foolish. But we could use some rash these days, and foolish and passionate are often confused, and passion is something we desperately need.”
#my favourite thing about this parallel is knowing how much poe would love it (via)
oh he WOULD he would love it SO MUCH, maybe he even volunteered for the Jakku mission because of the risk of getting captured by stormtroopers, he knew it happened to Leia and he’s all IT’S A RESISTANCE RITE OF PASSAGE I MUST SUFFER THROUGH THIS TO BE MORE LIKE HER
I’ve got to believe that the Resistance’s intelligence officers are just. constantly Done. With everyone.
Rey’s understanding of aurebesh is more functional than formal, which isn’t a problem until the Resistance starts asking her to submit mission reports—she rarely spells anything the same way twice (”even her name!” the intelligence officer moans) and her sentence structure is….not so much a structure as “a loose grouping of things that might be parts of speech”
“…..I don’t understand, what’s the problem?” Finn asks because Finn’s grammar is impeccable, once you decipher the dense nest of abbreviations, First Order codes, and trooper slang that fill his reports. (This does not save any more time.)
“If you could maybe…..not? wax lyrical about the TIE fighter?” the intelligence officer tells Poe, when he finally gets around to submitting his report on the escape from the Finalizer. “Not that understanding enemy technology isn’t a vital contribution to intelligence, but we don’t need 500 polysyllabic words about how the sun glinted off the casing.”
General Organa still submits reports like they used to in the Rebellion (her battle damage assessment style is about thirty years out of date, and she calculates galactic coordinates like it’s the late republic) but everyone in intel is fucking terrified of bringing this up to her. Instead, they have a designated officer who deals exclusively with translating General Organa’s reports into more modern New Republic standards,so they can be processed.
(At least yours actually submits reports, their counterparts in the First Order would say, if they all got together in a bar somewhere to commiserate about how hard soldiers make military intelligence. Kylo Ren has submitted exactly one misrep in the last 15 years. Thirty-two people died and it just said ‘it was the Force’.)
Captain Phasma gets hauled in by the Resistance at some point
and because she’s the highest-ranking officer they’ve ever caught, Leia comes in to question Phasma personally, with Luke in tow
they enter the interrogation room, and behind the blaster-proof viewport, standing at parade rest, is this 6 ½ foot brick shit-house of a woman in stormtrooper under-armor
Leia just sort of… freezes, and then she’s grabbing her brother’s arm and dragging him back out into the hallway
the door’s barely shut behind them before she’s doubled over in laughter, helplessly, the kind of laughter that comes from having to keep yourself together for years before something finally breaks
and Luke is this close to calling for a medic when Leia manages to gasp out,
“Don’t you think she’s a little tall for a stormtrooper?”
dark-siren asked: I hope you don't mind me asking, and please feel free to ignore if you do, but someone mentioned to me that you had a Phasma redemption theory, and I'll be honest, I'm *all over* that shit, and I'd love to hear it if you'd ever want to talk about it?
ok look, before we go into anything substantial the reason i have a phasma redemption theory in the first place is i really want to care about someone from the bad guys’ side and so far you couldn’t pay me to give less of a collective flying fuck about kylo, hux and supreme leader snood. phasma on the other hand has the excellent potential of the under-explored and also there’s the whole gwendoline christie in shiny chrome full-body armor thing that speaks directly to my id, by which i mean she has express permission to bench-press me at her convenience
anyway
now that we’ve established that, i bring you: my phasma redemption theory
pahsma went from lawful evil to chaotic neutral in the time it took to say ‘holy shit did a desperately under-staffed, underfunded military offshoot of the republic blow up starkiller base with nothing but a dozen shabby x-wings and four people on the ground??’ drifting among the debris in her damaged escape pod, phasma has a crisis of faith. for the first time ever she experiences bitter disillusionment because she had sincerely, unquestioningly believed in the first order: that it was visionary and righteous, but most of all that it was infallible. phasma was the perfect product of stormtrooper conditioning that had drilled those things into her from an early age. but now it’s all gone. starkiller base, the first order’s greatest achievement, along with most of its command and troops. all blown to pieces in a matter of seconds.
phasma thinks of fn-2187.
she realizes with a dull sort of surprise that she’s not angry with him. not at all. she’s just– curious? why did he walk away from the order? phasma had never really stopped to consider his motives, only to label him as a failure and momentary disappointment, and move on. but something must have driven fn-2187 to the point where he caused the destruction of everything he was conditioned to believe in.
(if phasma knew anything about the force maybe she’d understand this sooner, but she’s about as force-sensitive as half a brick, so)
her escape pod is picked up by pirates/scavengers just as life support is beginning to fail. they very briefly consider turning phasma over to the republic, but then she breaks someone’s legs probably, and then they consider flying her to wherever she wants, no charge, please don’t hurt us we’re just small-time crooks okay? phasma has no idea where she’s supposed to go now. she knows in her heart that she can’t go back to whatever’s left of the first order because Doubt and the uncomfortable beginnings of questioning the ideology she’d submitted to and also a tiny voice that’s telling her hey hey you could do anything and go anywhere, that’s kind of neat, right? it’s a very small voice though, and phasma decides that since her life is meaningless now she’ll just go along with whatever happens.
this is how she ends up in some seedy system in the outer rim where she becomes illegal pit-fighting champion, or something similar. at some point obviously she runs into finn, rey and poe and gets roped into working together sort of grudgingly for the Adventure of the Week.
(and finn knows. the second he lays eyes on her he knows that the first order’s failure broke her and she’s been trying to put herself back together all this time, only it came out different and strange. he gets it. gets it so much it’s pissing her off)
when they part ways they aren’t friends, exactly, but there’s a feeling that when they meet again it won’t be on hostile terms. phasma nods at each of them, nods at fn-2187 and says ‘finn’ before she turns and leaves.
this is where it starts. she has a long way to go.
