#and he doesn't actually make his own lightsaber until after he joins the Jedi

[azems-familiar]

Vyl Kivan

(unfortunately i only have screenshots of him in the consular playthrough i made for him, so we have none of his outfits when he's in the Empire. whoops.)

Vyl is the youngest of the start a war cast, being only seventeen when the class stories begin. a household slave to a Sith Lord whose son is Force-blind, Vyl is sent to Korriban in the boy's stead and told to become a proper heir for the family, his freedom contingent on his success among the Sith. a very young, but very powerful person with the rare gift of Force empathy, Vyl is an innately Light person and struggles with what becoming Sith means, especially as he's picked up by Darth Baras to be used as yet another tool in the Sith's arsenal. he spends much of his story struggling with morality and philosophy and what sacrifices are acceptable to make for freedom, and juggling his desire to run from the Empire and join the Jedi with the ingrained belief that the things he's done in Baras' service have left him unworthy of the peace that defecting would bring him.

by the time he faces down Baras and stops the coup, Vyl has settled into his role as a tool once again, this time of Vitiate and the Hand, but though he accepts the position, he refuses to sacrifice his own morality and beliefs for what others expect from him. he rejects an attempt to recruit him to the Jedi on Ilum, mostly once again out of his constant internal struggle, though he leaves the planet with a young padawan attached to his hip. when he's deputized by the Dark Council to join his friend and unofficial second-in-command of the sphere of Defense, Rheja na'Korriz, on an invasion of the Jedi homeworld of Tython, however, he can no longer continue arguing with himself. he meets Master Orgus Din there once again, as well as master healer Riali Enaran, and this time ends up accepting the offer to become part of the Order and finally free himself from the Empire and the Sith.

a natural-born consular, Vyl studies Force healing and other mental arts while with the Jedi, and when Zakuul attacks he puts his experiences to good use by fighting in the war. unfortunately, the Republic loses, and Vyl ends up following his long-term partner, Theron Shan, and becoming one of the founding members of the Eternal Alliance. he's a part of the Jedi enclave on Odessen, a member of Alliance High Command, and a well-known Jedi master.

he's also trans :)

reference sheet done by moonlitalien

#swtor #swtor sith warrior #oc: vyl kivan #character bio #he is my Beloved and i will never shut up about him. baby. baby boy #he has a cape for a bit when he's the Wrath #you know the enigmatic hero set? yeah that one #other fun facts include that Vyl is so naturally light that he basically passively heals lightsaber crystals #and he doesn't actually make his own lightsaber until after he joins the Jedi #he carries the lightsaber he found in naga sadow's tomb - which he healed to a very light blue - #and the lightsaber he took off master yonlach's dead body on tatooine after #yonlach refused to surrender to him #i love this man. his entire arc is about being kind and idealistic and NOT sacrificing his ideals for the greater good or whatever #it's about how being a jedi isn't about being a hero just about being good. being kind. making the galaxy a little better than you found it #obsessed with him #he's like. my comfort character. my beloved blorbo. i love him literally so much i will talk about him forever please #ask me questions about him #canon: start a war

[rentfreeinmyskull]

relationship chart for my main characters (didn't include Qeeo cause she's vibing on her own with her hubbie and their space dog).

long explanation coming so it's below the cut.

Nuri and Mai - are Master and Padawan (until Nuri was knighted). They got off on a rocky start - Mai was very cold and emotionless and Nuri had trust issues regarding people trying to tell her how to control her powers or what to do with them. However, after they crash landed on a planet and had to work together to survive, they gained a real respect for each other. Which eventually grew into mutual familial love. They just loved each other so fucking much. And then Mai sacrificed herself on Ziost so Nuri could escape and that scarred Nuri for years yay! Mai and Leiko - very much a 'let's adopt this wet dog' vibes. Leiko has a complicated relationship with his parents and with mentor figures in general, but Mai proved she wasn't like the others. Leiko really looked up to her and Mai loved him like he was her own.

Leiko and Rin - GOD. Okay. They're twins, they grew up together, trauma-bonded a shit ton, protected each other, had a very co-dependent relationship. And then Leiko got brainwashed and was ordered to kill Rin to get rid of his weakness. Leiko did nearly kill her, attacking her in the middle of the night, but he resisted the brainwashing long enough for her to fight back. Rin didn't know he was brainwashed so she just thought that her sibling had been her enemy this whole time. Long story short, Leiko escaped, joined the Jedi, got rid of his brainwashing, while Rin did her own thing in the Empire, heartbroken and lost. Rin found out about Leiko joining the Order and decided to hunt him down and make him pay. They fought, Rin nearly killed Leiko but then she found out he was brainwashed and 'forgave' him. I use that word sparingly cause she was still pissed but she realised it wasn't his fault. Eventually, they repair their relationship in full, but because they were apart for so long, they're not nearly as codependent and have actually become more mature people because of it.

Rin and Varn'ya - they are the guard/protectee trope. Just, so much fucking devotion. They love each other. They're gay. Enough said.

Varn'ya and Nuri - They're chill.

Nuri and Natila - They're also chill, but have the added thing of their shared love for Mai and eventually, their shared grief. They care about each other a lot and definitely needed each other after Mai's death.

Mai and Natila - Tragic sapphics, childhood friends to lovers to not speaking to hesitant allies to lovers to one of you died. You guys know the drill. They hurt me.

Nuri and Leiko - star crossed lovers! Accidentally forged a Force bond during their first fight, then Leiko escaped to the Jedi after nearly killing Rin and they became friends. And eventually lovers. Battle couple, I would kill for you, I would live for you vibes.

Rin and Nuri - Complicated. Rin didn't know the full picture of Leiko's brainwashing, etc, so she thought Nuri somehow tricked Leiko or did something to him to bring him over to the Order. Rin pretty much hated Nuri for a while there. But THEN, she saw a recording of Nuri and Leiko on a mission together and saw how much Leiko clearly cared for Nuri. Later, Nuri got captured by the Sith and was tortured. Rin found out and helped her escape, out of love for her sibling. They respect each other and eventually become friends.

Mai and Rin - their first interaction was a deadly lightsaber fight where Mai ended up cutting off Rin's arms, so their relationship didn't get off to a good start. They don't particularly like each other, but they have basic respect.

Natila and Leiko - they don't interact much, but they vibe.

Leiko and Varn'ya - enby/enby hostility. Varn'ya doesn't like Leiko for how he treated Rin (intentionally or no).

#oc: mai #oc: natila #oc: nuri #oc: leiko #oc: rin #oc: varn'ya #txt #making this chart i realised that most attempted murders have been aimed at leiko which is a bit unfortunate

[mischiefxmuses]

Zash Baen - HW INTRO

Was that [Mackenyu Maeda]? Oh no no, that was just [Zash Baen], a/an [OC CHARACTER] from [STAR WARS]. They are [TWENTY EIGHT] years old, use [HE/HIM], and [ARE] aware that they are not actually from Washington DC. Too bad they can’t stray from this city for long.

Past:

Zash was born to a relatively wealthy family but left them at a young age to be a Jedi. At a young age he was strong with the force and believed that it was the correct path for him. He loved the idea, fighting, protecting people. As many do he fell in love, he was always caught between duty and the love he had for her. They spent a lot of time together in secret. He really made an effort to make sure none of his fellows found out about her. A few months in she became pregnant. Zash knew it was more important now than ever to keep her and the baby secret. He survived order 66 by luck because he had been with her that day, as she was giving birth and her home was completely secret. After the order and his fellows died, he felt tremendous survivor's guilt. He should have been there with his fellows but at the same time he was needed at her side and their baby was health. He remained hidden with her and the baby, letting people think he was killed. But when his partner was killed by a runaway speeder, he was left alone to raise the baby. He couldn't do it on his own and give his child the life they deserved. He reached out to his parents who had joined the empire. And much to their unsettling delight they agreed under one condition: he join the empire. Zash knew he couldn't do it on his own and for the good of his child agreed. So he moved to Dromund Kaas with the baby with the aid of his parents and joined the Empire.

He didn't want to draw attention to himself so he joined as a low level official. Unfortunately when you have the force it's not secret for long and he made move showing that he was a force user, the inquisitors found out and immediately had him join their ranks. They used his child as a persuasion tool and he became an incredibly strong and feared Inquisitor. He always used two sabers that could be put together to one duel lightsaber.

The main thing was he got to watch his child grow up. Until he was out on a mission and got into a space battle. His ship took a beating and he went down. Crashing on the planet below. He managed to free himself but it did him little good. About three days later he succumbed to his wounds.

Personality:

He doesn't have a bad heart but he is very reserved and closed off. He was raised to be so. Poised and well spoken to fit into his family's lifestyle. He kept that some attitude when he was a Jedi and as a Sith too. He was sarcastic and distant.

Towards his child he was almost a completely different person. Smiling and laughing. Even playful sometimes.

In order to see that side of him it takes a lot of work and patience while getting through layers of sarcasm and defenses.

He was very broken, through knowing his friends died. That the love of his life died. He closed himself off to protect himself.

Possible plots:

Fellow jedi (Best friend) - would have been very close friends. Can be two ideas: 1. The friend was killed during order 66 or 2. The friend survived and they became enemies. Former Jedi Master - This person would have taught him everything he knew about being a Jedi. Sith Master - He would have been respectful to this individual. Challenging them a little but knew that he needed to fall in line to save his child. This can be a positive connection or a negative one. fellow sith - again can be positive or negative. Zash would have been very distant and not want to really make bonds but could have one or two individuals in the empire with whom he did bond with. His child - haven't decided if daughter or son. Could be either but he would have doted on this child and wanted nothing more than to give them a proper life. enemies - sith or jedi. He's gonna pick up some enemies. ex-girlfriend and mother of his child - he cared about her a lot and was very conflicted when it came to her. The confusion between duty and love. slow burn ship (heterosexual) - he will need patience and understanding. He still doesn't think he'd be allowed to really feel. Everything he showed out all his life was fake except around his ex-girlfriend and child

#zash & headcanons #zash & interactions #long post tw #hw: intro #mischiefxmusesxintro #pregnancy tw #death tw #order 66 tw #guilt tw

[jadelotusflower]

It’s Cold in that Fridge: The Case of Nakari Kelen

Since The Case of Mara Jade has been doing the rounds again, I’ve finally gone back to this post that has been sitting in my drafts for literally years. So let’s honour this absolute badass who deserved better:

Once upon a time, the Star Wars universe was but six films (and a tv series) in the story of the Skywalker family. But beyond George Lucas’ story was an absolute boatload of books, comics, games, and other materials that made up the Expanded Universe. When Disney purchased Lucasfilm and the rights to the Star Wars saga, everything in this universe was decanonised and deemed “Legends” - some aspects of this universe were retained or re-purposed, others sit in Disney’s figurative vault and will likely never see the light of day (and seeing how the ST turned out, maybe that’s for the best).

But this transition between Legends canon and Disney canon was not so simple, because the nature of publishing meant that there were novels approved during the time of Legends canon that would be released in the time of Disney canon. In particular, there had been the planned trilogy “Empire and Rebellion”, set between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, with each novel from the perspective of one of The Big Three.  

Razor’s Edge (Leia) and Honor Among Thieves (Han) were released prior to the Great Canon Split of 2014.  But while the Luke-centric novel had been planned, it was not due to be released until well after the Split. So Heir to the Jedi (so called as an homage to the Legends progenitor Heir to the Empire) became one of the first books of the Disney canon.

What does this background have to do with Nakari Kelen?  Perhaps nothing, but I do wonder how the writing process was affected by the shift from Legends to Disney - was the novel a relic of the old EU with any reference the LFL storygroup didn’t like excised during editing, or was it a trendsetter for the new EU, a Sign of Things to Come?  

The most salient point being, of course, that Nakari Kelen - like so many love interests before her - was not allowed to go along her merry way at the conclusion of the novel, but was shoved into the fridge.

If there was one constant of the Legends EU, it was that Luke Skywalker’s love interests couldn’t catch a break. Mara Jade naturally lasted the longest relationship-wise, with almost twenty years of marriage to Luke before some bright spark decided she had to go (as per the aforementioned case study). But before Mara there was Jem, Shira Brie, and Gaeriel Captison (who came close to escaping the curse), and in the Legacy of the Force series they brought back sole survivors Akanah and Callista, only to kill them off for good too (and rather brutally, if I may add).

So perhaps when Kevin Hearne began writing HttJ within the confines of the Legends continuity, he was merely sticking to the status quo, or perhaps once subsumed by Disney they needed to make sure Luke's slate was clean (so to speak).  And I can’t put all the blame on Hearne since I don’t know whether it was his idea, or LFL mandated - but regardless it was a poor decision.

The root cause of fridging, imo, is limited imagination.  How best to cause your male protagonist pain if not kill off someone they love, or at least have strong feelings for? The answer is of course, easily. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The Luke Skywalker of HttJ is fresh from his victory in ANH, a lieutenant in the Rebellion: young, not dumb, and full of...

Nakari Kalen is an absolute Queen a civilian volunteer and crack-shot sniper who loans her ship Desert Jewel to the Alliance. Luke is immediately attracted to her, they bond over a mutual love of fast ships and leaving behind desert home planets, and engage in the inexpert flirting of two nineteen year olds while also risking their lives several times over.

I want to make it clear: I actually really like this book. It's a breezy read, almost serialised as The Early Adventures of Luke Skywalker, and is ofttimes genuinely funny. And credit where it’s due to Hearne, many of of the supporting roles in the novel are female. Other than Nakari, there's Soonta, the Rodian who gives Luke her uncle’s lightsaber, Sakhet the Kupohan spy, and the Givin cryptographer/math genius Drusil Bephorin. In a genre where male characters are often the default for these kind of roles, it was nice to see, but makes the regressive fridging of Nakari even more egregious.

Luke and Nakari make a good team fighting brain-sucking monsters and Imperials, but more importantly they have fun together - she encourages him to work on his Force skills, and he successfully moves objects with his mind for the first time (leading to Nakari adorably dub him "a little noddle scooter"). It's a very sweet, if brief, relationship, and a respite from the danger of the mission. They spend the night together (leaving the reader to decide exactly what happened behind closed doors), and share a kiss before splitting up to try and escape bounty hunters. No prizes for guessing what happens to Nakari immediately after she received the Skywalker Kiss of Death.

I assume there were two motivating factors for why Hearne and/or LFL couldn't let Nakari live:

1. If she survived, fans would wonder why she doesn't appear in ESB/subsequent material.

I recall this bandied about on forums back at the time of the book's release, and to that I say - so what? Fans are always going to wonder, and try to paper over the gaps in canon, to make up their own headcanons to explain any any perceived inconsistencies. It's certainly no reason to kill someone off.

It is in fact possible for two young people to have a romance that just fizzles, or doesn’t work out for whatever reason - it should not require great maneuvering or explanation. If Nakari doesn’t show up in the next book in the timeline, what about it? The reader is smart enough to assume she and Luke broke up, decided to just remain friends, whatever. But it seems that the only way for a female character to exit stage left is for her to die, which is bullshit.

And actually, there's no reason why she couldn't have shown up again. ESB and RoTJ cover a month and a few days, respectively, of Luke's life - just because there was no mention of Nakari doesn't mean she didn't exist at that time, whether or not she and Luke were an item. She could have made an appearance in a subsequent novel, or Rebels, or the comics - she could have become a recurring character, showing up when the Rebellion needed her, or - heaven forbid - even have her own comic/book/show! Her existence in Star Wars canon didn't need to begin and end with Luke Skywalker, merely to service his plotline and backstory and abandoning the richness of her own.

No, the only reason Nakari had to die was to facilitate this:

It was a blow to the gut, realizing what that sudden absence meant. I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, but I had felt Nakari's life snuffed out through the Force, and into that void where she had shone anger rushed in - anger, and a cold sense of raw power and invincibility...I took a step to join in the hunt but stopped, breathing heavily, unaccountably sweating even though I felt so cold inside and the power of the Force roiled within me... I shook with emotion and power, and none of it felt the way the Force had before...I saw what kind of space it was , a black hole that would always be hungry no matter how much I fed it. I might never feel warm again if I didn't get myself under control.

Luke feels the dark side and is tempted by the boost of power it offers him, but immediately identifies it as dangerous and unnatural. I can understand why Hearne wanted to include this - it is a book of firsts after all: Luke's first solo mission, his first time using telekenisis, and ending with story with his first experience of the dark side makes sense. But it wasn't necessary, which leads to:

2. How to push Luke to touch the dark side without killing someone he has romantic feelings for?

Also, obviously, shite of the bull (or nerf, if you prefer). Even if this brush with the dark side was absolutely necessary for the novel's climax, there's any number of ways it could be achieved. At this point, Luke is fresh from losing important people in his life - Owen and Beru, Ben, and Biggs - lumping another death on top of that a narrative trick for Luke to react not only to losing Nakari, but the others as well. But it's cheap, the first card in the deck, and why not show a bit of imagination? Luke is young and inexperienced enough at this point that any number of things could be the catalyst - the whole book he's struggling with his growing powers, why not try and reach too far in the firefight with the bounty hunters, his anger and frustration with himself in not doing enough trigger the dark side temptation? It would work thematically and doesn't involve a fridging that ultimately has very little payoff.

Because Nakari is killed less than ten pages from the end of the book - afterwards Luke grieves, but ultimately chooses to honour her memory and be grateful for what he learned with her, recommitting to becoming a Jedi. It's all very surface level, and once again a female character's death facilitates a male character's development. Was it so imperative that Luke lost someone he cared about as part of this story? Sure, this was a time of galactic civil war, and it's far from unrealistic that these stories have a high body count, but who to make collateral damage remains an authorial choice, and in this case Nakari Kelen was (a) a female character of color, (b) a love interest of the protagonist - not just of this book, but the entire Original Trilogy.

I don't know to what extent (if any) race had to play in the decision. I'm sure there was a segment of the fandom absolutely livid that Luke Skywalker kissed (and maybe had sex with) a black woman. Was her death LFL hedging its bets, or demonstrative of the general lack of attention/respect they show their characters of colour?

In any case this was a chance to stand out from the old EU and it's fridge full of Luke's dead girlfriends, but instead they chose to introduce and kill off Nakari for the sole purpose of Luke's manpain and character development, and that's gross.

And then there's this:

A grisly yet reliable fact about custom bounty hunter ships is that you can always count on them to have body bags stashed somewhere for the easy transport of their kills. They often have built-in refrigerated storage, too.

NAKARI IS KILLED AND LITERALLY STORED IN THE FUCKING FRIDGE I COULDN'T BELIEVE WHAT I WAS READING.

I really hope this was unintentional on Hearne's part, because yikes. He was halfway there, this book was full of interesting female characters who had agency - Drusil in particular was a delight with her super math and inability to understand human interaction. Nakari was full of life and fun - capable but relatable, showing a different side of the Rebellion and those that suffered under the Empire's rule. Fridging her in her first appearance is considerably more vile, because it reduces her to a footnote of Luke's story, a plot device to Help Him Grow, rather than a springboard to tell more of her own story.

Because Nakari was a compelling character ripe for spinoff potential. I would absolutely have read or watched her continued adventures, juggling missions for her father's Biolabs company and trying to aid the Rebellion, shooting her slug rifle and cracking wise, maybe even finding a way to amplify her mother's song Vader's Many Prosthetic Parts to really stick it to the Empire, or try and free the political prisoners on Kessel.

The old EU was made great by allies and enemies of Our Heroes showing up again to help or hinder them, and/or branching out into their own material. We fell in love with them, and followed their stories even as they diverged from the main saga, eager to read more about their lives.

Nakari Kelen never got that chance. In many ways, she exemplified what Disney Star Wars was to become: an exercise in wasted potential.

#star wars #star wars meta #heir to the jedi #nakari kelen #luke skywalker #fridging #it's cold in that fridge #star wars expanded universe #nucanon