Sooooo Fucked Up But Padme And Shmi Are Inextricably Linked In Anakin’s Mind As Both His Family, His

could this mean that I'm coming home

summary: Luke Skywalker’s relationships with other Jedi as he builds his new order and academy.

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It takes some time for the festivities on Endor and in the wider galaxy to fizzle down, and even longer still for anything to even slightly settle long enough for both of them to rest. There’s always some new problem arising, some new political drama or skirmish with remnants who don’t take the Emperor’s death well or don’t believe in it at all. But Luke and Leia have always been good at adapting and they always manage to squeeze time to talk to each other, whether it’s in the corner of a peace gala or in a dropship headed to the frontlines. 

For those first few weeks, their conversations always seem to circle back around to the fact that they’re twins, and what this means for them both.  In some ways, there’s not a lot to discuss; their bond goes deeper than blood or friendship, it runs through the songs of the Force, stronger than anything Luke has ever felt.  One night, they spend hours comparing and trying to work out what was coincidence and what were actually latent Force abilities. They talk about childhood dreams of each other’s planets and how — despite both losing all they had once called home only hours before and the imminent threat — everything just felt right when they reunited on the Death Star. Like a small part of them had been missing until then, tied by invisible string to something very far away. 

Outside of it connecting her to new twin, Leia does not seem interested in the Force. She listens intently when he tells her what he knows of the Force, but Leia has never wanted to be a Jedi. She is a politician, like the mother and father who raised her were. She spends her busy days on Coruscant and Chandrila and wherever else she’s required to go to build the fractured Republic her parents tried to save. She finds as much time as she can for him , but she finds time inside of that only to learn the basics of Jedi training, nothing more.  

Luke understands. It’s alright. He’s sure more Jedi will resurface soon, now the Empire has been defeated. It’s just a matter of time...

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this story is already over. nothing can be done to change it.

happy re-release and 20th anniversary revenge of the sith!!

homecoming

He's sweet 🥺🧡

Okay, so. Star Wars has all these concepts that weirdo New Left boomer George Lucas tosses in there but because of storyteller limitations it would kill the plot to fully explain them all, so later writers have to come in for the spin-off materials and bat clean-up to fully explain all this crazy crap. And I would like to talk about something that made me actively angry at first, but which I now adore. And that is the Naboo.

So much about Naboo culture is infuriating from a logical standpoint. They have a queen, okay. A constitutionally elected queen? Weird, okay. Don't know why they'd do that but... She's FOURTEEN? Excuse me? Is it a ceremonial thing or, oh no it's not? Legit head of state? Why does she dress like that? Why does she talk like that? I'm so tired.

Here's the explainer. Let me go cook.

There's this joke in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy where the last living human goes back in time and finds out humans aren't actually from Earth, but an alien culture that tricked all the middle managers, pedantic weirdos, and other infuriating folk into getting in a space arc which they gave the wrong evacuation coordinates to simply get rid of them. The Naboo are like this but they're all artists and poets and hippies, but like classy ones. They fled their home planet during a war and crash landed on Naboo, then did a colonism to the Gungans because, hey, they were fleeing a war and it was do or die. This spiritual rot in their creation story is later rectified by Padmé. But it's super important to their cultural psychology. They're hippies, but will subjugate if needed. They are "peaceful" but I guarantee you every single one of them has a tiny extremely shiny pistol up their sleeve and they will draw down on you if backed against a wall.

The scene that I think says it all is at the end of Phantom Menace when Padmé is surrounded by Nute Gunray and his droids, they've got her dead to rights, but Sabé her double creates a distraction so the queen can make it to her throne. This one piece of furniture is the Naboo in a nutshell. It's richly carved with artistic details, it has two seats to the side so the queen's handmaidens can read the lips of people in the back of the room and use hand signals to communicate with the queen while she can remain focused mostly on who is speaking to her. It is hundreds of years old. And it has a secret compartment in the armrest that is FULL OF GUNS. Layers of artistic opulence hiding their true intentions.

The Naboo were created to be backwards compatible with Princess Leia. They're compassionate pacifists, but they will shot you if needed.

Why do they elect teenage royalty? It's a little creepy. It's giving "age of consent is emotional maturity". It makes no sense.

The explanation they give outsiders is they want youthful idealism untainted by cynicism. What they don't tell you is that they take kids with stated interest in politics and put them in an advanced highly competitive Leadership Academy which is like Model UN mixed with Battle Royale. Well, they don't kill each other but it's intense. It's like what the clones went though just all diplomacy training and tea ceremonies all the time. Which is crazy but so Naboo.

Oh, and all the delegates for the royalty election run using pseudonyms for security. Imagine voting for the head of state but you can't run a background check. It's so crazy.

Why does Padmé dress like that? Well, fashion is one of Naboo's major industries so it's like she's wearing the entire Fall line catalog at once. To advertise not only the talent of her people, but to show how much they favor her. BUT that dress has multiple layers of padding and resin armor. And aforementioned spots for those little silver blasters. And it breaks up her silhouette making her harder to shoot. And it's so elaborate you pay more attention to the crazy dress and not if the person wearing it is really the queen or a decoy. Everything about Naboo is like this.

Queen Amidala has that weird accent while Padmé does not. Because all her handmaidens helped create the accent together so they all can imitate it. It's like if you gave girls at a rowdy sleepover the job of federal counterintelligence. That's what they came up with.

The handmaidens wear colorful identical clothes so you can't tell them apart, hoods to partially conceal their identity, and they don't wear the queen's fancy makeup. So one of them can be the queen and spy on people in the audience. Because the Naboo don't trust shit for shit.

Their public face is so silly to hide all the truly weird shit they do behind the scenes.

They use their reputation as artist hippies to conceal multiple layers of subterfuge and disguise their methods of self defense and assuage their paranoia due to wartime trauma and their disturbing colonial past. All of them are completely off their rocker even by Star Wars standards. And I love them so much. They put on a show so everyone thinks they have them figured out but what they have going on is far more weirder and more sinister than meets the eye. You know how catty, neurotic, and competitive art school students stereotypically are? Yeah, planet art student. Love them!

There you go, @charmwasjess

Andor Jedha, Kyber, Erso | 2.12

star wars is about coruscant

#Galaxy's mightiest heroes

Sometimes I just think about how Breha always wears her hair up on a braid. How it was said that it was a tradition for Alderaanians, especially for the monarch, to wear braids.

How the first time we see Leia, she is not wearing her hair braided, but after Alderaan is destroyed, she starts braiding them. For the rest of the trilogy, she has braids in pretty much every scene she is in.

How most of the time, she wears her hair exactly like her mother used to.

I just think about that, sometimes. If she ever looked at herself in the mirror when she did her hair, and tried her hardest to make it look like Breha used to. If she ever looked at herself, her hair braided into a crown, just to see a glimpse of her mother looking back at her.

I think about that, sometimes.

I think one of the best and unintentionally funniest worldbuilding aspects in Star Wars is the reasoning of why did Bail and Breha adopt Leia instead of having their own children. Leia is first established as the princess of Alderaan before she is written to be Luke's sister. So now we need to figure out how she got to Alderaan. She was adopted because she needed to be hidden and separated from her brother. Bail was placed there to be one of the only people who knew so there would be a reason why it was them who got her. They specifically wanted a daughter. Why? Because Alderaan is a matriarchal society, so they needed a princess. Why didn't the Queen and her husband have biological children? Because they can't. Why? Because the Queen can't have kids. Why? Because she got injured as a teenager and got her internal organs replaced and her body can't handle a pregnancy. How did she get injured so badly? She fell off of a mountain. How did that happen? She was climbing it. Why was the future Queen climbing a mountain in the first place? Because she needed to go through three challenges in order to inherit the throne and one of them required her to go through something physically impressive. Why? Because before that they just held a Battle Royale for all the heirs and the one left alive got the throne and they at some point figured out that maybe they shouldn't be doing that, actually. Oh, okay.