#also i realized mara has red hair just like mara jade

[thecncitygirls]

After mulling it over for a while I decided to work on Jora's Rogue's Gallery. Where Ben mainly deals with aliens and science-based foes and Gwen's revolve around magic, Jo's villains are more focus on the environmental, societal, and Elemental aspects of the world. These two are Kudzu (left) and Mara Winters/Black Ice (right)

Kudzu is an environmentalist and entrepreneur who sees herself as Gaia's vessel against the pollution and chaos of the world. When she's not advocating for the use of essential oils, she's going around trying to make forests in urban cities with no compassion for people that could be left homeless by her actions. Kudzu is trained in the martial arts and has limited plant and animal manipulation. She hopes one day to achieve spiritual enlightenment to create a new age of nature and spirituality under the word of Mother Earth.

Mara was a former figure skater who was involved in a career ending scandal, eventually coming into contact with Kudzu and became one of her top spies. Through experiments and spiritual therapy she began developing cryogenic abilities, able to generate paths of 'invisible' ice to confuse and harm the enemy. She's very aloof, apathetic and professional, but at the same time yearns for something that could have been. Not as obsessed with the Captain Planet routine as her boss, but she keeps her mouth shut as long as she gets paid.

Kudzu was made on the Dinogeddon app; Mara on the Azalea Dollmaker app

#oc villain #ben 10 omniverse #ben 10 uaf #ben 10 original series #kudzu #mara winters #black ice #also i realized mara has red hair just like mara jade #villainess #dinogeddon #dollmaker #azalea's dolls #fan characters #ben 10 oc #jora holiday #rogue's gallery #fanmade rogues #fan villains

[dettiot]

sometimes you don’t have to decide

Imagine that this is set about two years after the end of Mandalorian s2, and the Thrawn trilogy has happened in that interval.

“You know, I wanted to kill Skywalker.” 

Din stood very still, looking at the woman in front of him. She twirled the staff in her hands idly, acting like she didn’t care how he took her words. 

But he knew something about wearing a mask to hide your face. Mara didn’t use a physical one like he did, but it didn’t mean it was any better at keeping someone from reading you. If they were determined enough.

Like Luke had been for him. 

“Why tell me that?” Din asked, lowering his beskar spear only slightly. Because Mara more than matched him at hand-to-hand and he wasn’t about to let down his guard. 

She shrugged a little. “You’re his boyfriend. You must have some thoughts on him training me.” 

“I stay out of Luke’s school, he stays out of my business,” Din said. 

“The bounty hunting, you mean?” Mara asked. 

“It’s a living,” Din said. “Gotta pay off my ship somehow.” 

(It was still a bitch not having the Razor Crest. The Foundling was a good ship, but it wasn’t the same. But at least he had a ship--thanks to the loan from Luke.)

She cocked her head to one side. “So you really don’t have a problem with me training here?” 

“Luke trusts you,” Din said quietly. He paused, then lifted his helmet off to look at her directly. To get this message across. “Besides, you don’t want to kill him.”

He left the words unspoken, wondering if Mara realized how she truly felt about Luke. 

But as someone who had also fallen for Luke Skywalker, it was pretty easy to see the signs. 

Mara pressed her lips together. Then her weight shifted, and Din dropped his helmet and brought up his spear to meet her attack. 

Wood and beskar thudded against each other for a few moments, until Din put a little extra strength into a push back against her staff. 

He slid his spear into the holster on his back and leaned down to pick up his helmet. “It’s okay,” he told Mara, whose face was red and whose eyes were looking anywhere but at him. 

“No, it’s not,” Mara said quietly. 

Right now, Din felt every one of the extra years he had on Mara. “When Luke and I got together, we knew that it wasn’t the center of our galaxies. I had my work and Grogu. Luke had the school and being a Jedi.” 

He paused, wondering if he was betraying what he had with Luke by telling Mara this. It wasn’t casual, his relationship with Luke. It just couldn’t come first with him. Grogu did, and the other kids he found throughout the galaxy and got them help, and the never-ending headache that was Mandalore. 

And even though Luke would have protested, Din knew that he didn’t come first with Luke, either. 

“I’m willing to share him with the galaxy,” Din said. “And that includes anyone else he’s interested in.” 

At that, Mara’s eyes leapt to Din’s, wide and disbelieving. 

“Think it over, Jade,” Din said as he left the training room.

XXX

Luke was fidgeting. And not in a good way. 

Din eyed him as he watched Grogu work with Mara. It had been a week since his talk with Mara, and he had been looking for an opportunity to talk to Luke. To give him whatever he needed to actually look at Mara. 

But as if he knew what was on Din’s mind, Luke had been avoiding him. And avoiding Mara. 

It couldn’t go on. 

Moving over towards the Jedi, Din took his elbow. “I need to talk to you.” 

Luke practically jumped out of his skin, then took a deep breath. “Of course.” He looked over at Grogu and Mara, who were both focused on each other. Then Luke followed Din into the other room. 

Pulling off his helmet, Din reached out and rested his hands on Luke’s shoulders. Luke gave him a small, lopsided smile. “Guess I’ve been pretty distracted lately, huh?” 

Din nodded and smiled back a little. Then, because he could, he leaned in and kissed Luke. 

Like always, Luke responded, with warmth and softness that was a balm Din didn’t know he needed. Luke’s hands rested at his waist, slipping between the beskar plate and flak vest to rub his flight suit. 

It was soothing and soft and quiet. Din moved his hands to Luke’s neck, stroking the hair curling there. “Are you okay?” he asked, keeping his voice low. 

“I . . . I just have a lot on my mind,” Luke said, a bit of tension creeping into his shoulders and neck. 

“You should talk about it,” Din said, pinning Luke with his gaze. 

For a long moment, Luke looked at him. And then he let out a deep sigh. “You know. How I feel about Mara.” 

Din smiled. “Hard to miss.” 

“I’m sorry,” Luke said, his eyes big and blue and sad. “I wish . . .” 

“Shh,” Din said, kissing him again. “It’s okay. Look, I talked to Mara.”

Luke blinked. “What?” 

Din huffed out a laugh and rubbed Luke’s neck. “She wants you, too. And I don’t have a problem with that. So you’ve got her and you’ve got me.” 

“Really?” Luke asked, looking like a kid who had just been told he could have a blaster and a set of beskar’gam. 

“Yep,” Din said, grinning at him. “So go talk to her, okay?” 

He nodded slowly, but then suddenly grinned back and kissed Din before heading back into the other room.

But not before Din was able to slap Luke on the ass, making the Jedi laugh and grin at him again. 

It was hard being the only one with common sense around here, but that was why Din kept coming around here. Somebody had to point out the obvious.  

Well, that, and getting to see Grogu. 

End.

My Star Wars Fic Masterlist

#din djarin #luke skywalker #mara jade #din/luke #luke/mara #star wars #my fic

[astudyinimagination]

Obi-Wan Kenobi, meet Mara Jade

Here it is! Here it is!

The first installment of the “Obi-Wan adopts Mara” AU!

This will go up on FFN and AO3 later. Please let me know what you think!

Once a year, Obi-Wan Kenobi rented a speeder and travelled to Mos Eisley on a special errand. Bail Organa would put money into an account for “Ben Antilles,” and Obi-Wan would withdraw just enough to see him through the year. In the past ten years since he’d arrived on-planet, these outings had never been very eventful. Tatooine, for all its harshness, was a planet which was dependable in that harshness, the vices of criminals and the tyranny of Hutts as steady and unending as the desert itself.

No wonder Anakin had hated it.

This year, however… as he stepped out of Mos Eisley’s one bank, he heard the outraged shrieks of a young girl and the curses of grown men—noises that, heard together, never boded well.

Slinging his sack over his shoulder, he hurried towards the source of the commotion. A human man and a Weequay were trying to subdue one small girl, too small to be even a young teenager. The child, pale and redheaded, was putting up a good fight, twisting and punching and kicking and even biting when the opportunity arose, and Obi-Wan saw signs of basic combat training in her moves. More than that… heavens above, she was a shining beacon in the Force!

Nevertheless, she was only a child, and Tatooine was not kind to lone children.

He drew close and raised his voice. “Excuse me, gentlemen,” he said in a reasonable tone and an Outer Rim accent. “Would you mind unhanding my daughter?”

The three combatants froze, although the girl blessedly caught on quickly enough and cried out, “Papa!”

“This your brat, mister?” the human snarled, giving the girl a shake.

“She’s my daughter,” Obi-Wan said with a calm he no longer felt. There was real fear in the girl’s wide green eyes, and it tugged at his weary heart. “Be so kind as to let her go.”

“Your brat’s a thief,” the Weequay spat. “Tried to snatch my pal’s wallet. We have ways around here of dealing with little thieves.”

The girl’s fear and panic in the Force spiked, and that did it.

Obi-Wan moved.

A decade in the desert hadn’t stolen from his body a lifetime of rigorous training and even more rigorous battle. He punched the human hard in the face and at the same time was already moving to deliver a kick to the Weequay’s stomach. Howling, both men let go of the child, and she darted forward. Obi-Wan then kicked the human down and gave the Weequay a punch that also sent him to the ground, then spun around, grabbed the girl’s hand, and ran, initially dragging her until she decided to stop fighting him and move with the flow. The pair behind them shouted in pain and outrage, and, soon enough, Obi-Wan and the girl were dodging blaster bolts.

“Where are we going?” shouted the girl, her accent now Coruscanti rather than Rim, and Obi-Wan nearly halted in shock. It had been a long time since he’d heard that accent.

Obi-Wan said nothing, merely nodded at the speeder ahead of them. As they reached it, he hauled her bodily into the craft, ignoring her indignant shout, and clambered into it, ducking again as a blaster bolt nearly singed his hair. He revved the engine, hoping that the blasterfire would not damage the rental, and shot the speeder forward, doing his best to weave around traffic without hitting anyone. “Blast,” he gritted out. Get-away flying wasn’t his expertise—that had always been Anakin’s. He did his best to ignore the pang in his chest as he concentrated on flying.

“I think you lost them!” the girl called after half a minute.

“Perhaps, but best to get out of the city before we let our guard down,” Obi-Wan told her. The green eyes widened at his own Coruscanti accent surfacing, but she didn’t comment on it. The next moment, he felt her presence in the Force wink out of existence, and blinked—those were some very powerful mental shields she was employing. She had had training—who had trained her?! Most Jedi initiates wouldn’t have been able to shield like that at her age, which he thought must be around ten.

Around the age Anakin had been when Obi-Wan had first met him.

As luck would have it, however, they cleared Mos Eisley in another minute without any sign of pursuit, and Obi-Wan decided that the danger was indeed over. He slowed the speeder a little and looked over at his young companion. “I do believe we’re in the clear,” he said dryly, hoping to get a smile out of her.

There was a flash of one, and then apprehension stole over her delicate features. “Thanks for helping me,” she said softly.

“My pleasure,” Obi-Wan assured her gently. “My name is Ben; what’s yours?”

“...Celina.” She grimaced as she realized how unconvincing she sounded.

Obi-Wan smiled. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance, ‘Celina.’ Might I ask what a Core girl is doing out here on the Outer Rim alone? You are alone, I take it?”

“...yeah.” She frowned. “Well, what about you? You’re from the Core, too.”

“Retirement.”

She snorted. “Who retires to a place like this?”

“Perhaps,” he said slowly, carefully, watching her, “a person who, much like a child showing up alone on the same planet, does not wish to be found.”

She went silent, eyeing him suspiciously past the red-gold hair flying around her face. At last, she said, “Where are you taking me?”

“Back to my home, if you don’t mind. I don’t know where else to take a runaway child; Tatooine doesn’t exactly possess child services. I can give you a decent meal and, more importantly on this planet, some water.”

“And after that?”

He sighed. “Let’s see how supper goes, shall we?”

She frowned heavily, then her face cleared slightly. “I don’t… I don’t mean to sound ungrateful.”

“You’re a young child wandering alone who has been picked up by a man you don’t know,” he said reasonably. “You should be suspicious.”

“But you want me to trust you.”

“I hope that you will. Enough to tell me what you are doing with yourself so that I can help you.” Enough to tell me how you learned to use the Force.

She turned away to watch sienna and beige-streaked stone pass by them. “We’ll see.”

#Obi Wan Kenobi #Mara Jade #Star Wars #sw fic #the Obi Wan adopts Mara AU #Sky writes stuff #I wrote this in a fit of inspiration yesterday #gosh it's so nice to write for the SW universe proper again #it's been YEARS

[nzvalley]

Rey’s Mother 2.0

For a long time before The Force Awakens came out I thought that Rey (known then as Kira) was Han & Leia’s.  I even thought she was the twin sister to Ben (known then only as Kylo), and I thought they were resurrecting Jaina & Jacen as Kira & Kylo. 

The theory took hits with the news that Kira wasn’t Kira and Kylo wasn’t Kylo, and when I saw all the Luke and Anakin parallels in the teasers/trailers I really started to waver.  Eventually, especially after reading the Original Rey Skywalker Conspiracy, I became a believer that Rey was Luke’s daughter.  That opened up the real mystery: who is her mother?

Before TFA was released I did a quick rundown of who I thought she could be, on the assumption that she would be introduced and set up years before the reveal.  This allows some fans to get to know her on her own, and for her character to be developed outside of being Rey’s mother or Luke’s love interest. Then when the revelation happens, there’s a plethora of canon material for new fans of the character to go buy.  This new list is an expanded version, with advancements in canon taken into account.

Just as a note of my own bias, basically I’m sticking to what Disney/LucasFilm has presented to us visually and not character from only the novels.  Starting with those that won’t be the mother, first I excluded aliens. Next I excluded characters based on their age or their canon fate.  Rey wasn’t born until a decade after Endor, so I excluded anyone above 35-ish at the time of Yavin.  Along the same lines, certain characters we know die before Rey was born.

Lastly, I excluded characters with blue eyes or blonde hair.  Some traits just don’t match up genetically, and two blue-eyed people resulting in a hazel-eyed daughter, or two blondes having a brunette, just don’t match up.  There’s no guarantee that Star Wars will follow real-world genetics, or that the writers won’t invoke some one-in-a-million mutation, but I’ll stick to them as guidelines.  

Characters excluded for species, age, or genetics: All aliens, Rae Sloane, Mon Mothma, Bo-Katan, Jora Astane, Ketsu Onyo, Brunson, Bixene, Evaan Verlaine, and Queen Trios.

After excluding those characters, there weren’t a ton that fit the bill.  None of them are exceptionally strong candidates, without any controversy. When I first made this list, there was a clear front runner (although not named yet) in Jyn Erso.  She fit all the requirements and she was the lead role in a huge project, but that has seemingly fallen apart.  Without her as the front runner, possibilities include controversial choices that are getting a lot of focus, minor characters who are technically possible but not satisfying, or that one of the minor characters will see a late jump in narrative focus.  

With this dearth of choices, I’m wondering if maybe there is a twist coming up.  Here are a couple of characters that are, according to the official word, impossible candidates, but could make a dramatic appearance:

Jyn Erso – Some of you may think I’m crazy, but I personally think the fandom bought into her death way too easily and that LucasFilm wanted the heat taken off the speculation.  Both the book and the movie play Jyn and Cassian’s deaths ambiguously, leaving a lot of room for their survival.  In the movie we never see their bodies or their actual deaths.  In the novel the scene ends with Jyn becoming one with the force, which is a metaphor used for death… but it’s also a metaphor used for connection to the Force.  Chirrut says “I am one with the Force” constantly throughout the film.  It’s possible that Jyn’s latent Force abilities could have come to life in the face of certain doom, like Emma Frost’s secondary mutation in Genosha.

Mara Jade – It’s the perfect time to introduce her.  If none of the new, living characters really fit then only Mara could be a revelation that requires no multi-year buildup.  Instead, it’s a multi-year cover up.  Years of downplaying the idea of her reintroduction, and then she appears in all her glory.  People that know her would love it, and for everyone else there’s a simple explanation. “She’s Luke’s wife from the old canon.”  It’s easy to understand, and there’s plenty of stuff for people to go out and buy to get a fuller picture.  With new stuff on the way, most likely.  So yeah, I’ve seen some bitterness about Mara Jade recently, but I actually think she’s in the best position for returning since the reboot.

With those out of the way…

Many of the remaining possibilities are minor characters, and most of them, especially the ones getting narrative focus, seem to be of a different race than Luke- which would upset a lot of people if Daisy Ridley’s Rey were to be put forward as mixed-race.  It remains possible genetically, but it would be a controversial choice.  Looking at the possibilities, there aren’t a lot of unambiguously white characters that have been introduced in new canon, and all of them are either minor, officially dead, or have blue eyes/blonde hair.  It was this realization that led me to consider the above twists.  It’s always possible too that Rey isn’t Luke’s daughter, but this post is all about the possibility that she is.

Anyway these characters are all technically possible, but are mostly one-offs: Wiley, Iden Versio, Sosha Soruna, Tula, Tace, Uwa Pareece, Tolvan, Ssaria, & Chanath Cha.

The ones that receive the most narrative focus and interact with the most central characters: 

Pash ‘Bash’ Davane – Co-lead of Star Wars Annual 2; only unambiguously white person in the top tier.  Red hair, green eyes (which we know Luke likes)… an intelligent, strong badass. She saved Leia and debated ethics and morality with her.  So far she has only had one appearance, but characters introduced in the Annual have returned before.

Zarro – Co-lead of the Chewbacca miniseries; she looked younger to me, but she’s described as a teenager… meaning she’s at most 7 years younger than the 19/20 year old Luke.  With Rey not being born until over a decade later that would put Zarro around her late twenties and Luke around his mid-thirties. 

Sana Starros – Supporting character in Marvel’s Star Wars; Sana has received a lot of media and fan attention since her introduction, and has become an essential part of the team within the Star Wars comic series.  Funny and badass.  She has a romantic past with Dr. Aphra, but she has also has one with Han and has had some flirtations with Luke. 

Sabine Wren – Main Cast of Star Wars Rebels; probably has received the most attention, being a TV character.  Around Luke’s age, a staunch believer in the Rebellion, wields the darksaber, but so far they have never canonically crossed paths and we have no idea how long she lives.

Chelli Aphra – Co-lead of Darth Vader and Screaming Citadel; Supporting character in Star Wars; Lead of Doctor Aphra; Easily the breakout character of the new canon. I mentioned her in my first list as my dark horse candidate, and her importance has only grown since.  Although her age is ambiguous, I wouldn’t put her beyond ten years older than Luke.  She has had numerous interactions with Darth Vader, Leia, Han, and Luke himself.  She is currently teamed up with Luke on an adventure.  She is also privy to who his mother is and she knows that Vader was obsessed with him. She has a romantic past with Sana, but she also has flirtations with Vader and Luke. So much of her development is tied up with the Skywalker family and with Luke in particular, that her being Rey’s mother would be a really great reveal at this point. 

ETA: There were originally images above the top tier, but “@senator-organa” expressed displeasure at the use of one of their images.  I removed the others just in case anyone out there was feeling the same.  Make sure to click on the Wookiepedia links and take a look at everyone I mention.

#Star Wars #Luke Skywalker #Rey Skywalker #Jyn Erso #Aphra #Mara Jade #Pash Davane #Sabine Wren #Sana Starros #and almost everyone else