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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2vGl56o:
aimmyarrowshigh:
anyway, i’m always thrilled when i see acknowledgment of shara and kes in canon material outside of poe-centric pieces (like shara being playable in whatever that sw tabletop game is, etc) but it makes me SO happy to see them acknowledged as THE HAPPIEST COUPLE IN STAR WARS CANON, and also pretty far along that Light side-o-meter. I feel like that meter is a little… interesting, since they also have Satine pretty far Light and she’s a dictator who enforced “assimilate-or-die-in-Space-Siberia” policies and was willing to bomb her own populace to get obedience, but whatever.
But it’s so interesting to me that Kes is more “neutral” than Shara. I mean, it could just be that they had to put their names next to each other and Bey comes before Dameron in the alphabet, but I always, always want there to be a real, concrete reason that it was Shara whom Luke trusted to raise the Force tree. There’s so much Light-side Force tree lore tied into the Dameron-Bey family backstory, and I really hope that it matters in TLJ or IX or beyond. Why would you have the only currently surviving Force tree in one of the main trio’s backyards if it wasn’t gonna come up, yk? Why create a canon anecdote about child Poe single-handedly nursing the Force tree back to health if his connection to the Light side of the Force wasn’t going to be explored?
But also, I love that Shara is further into the Light side because we see her wrestle more with her choices than we’ve seen Kes (so far). Shara is more haunted after the war, but she’s also more wrenched during it: she joined the war to protect a son she barely knows, and she doesn’t know whether it’s the better choice to stay with the Rebellion until the last Imperial is gone for good or go home to raise a child who will never have to know the kind of horror of living through the Empire. Her conflict, IMO, is another point towards the idea that the Light in the current era of SW canon isn’t defined by ~uwu purity~ but by the choice to believe in the Light despite pain.
Shara is written – obliquely, tbf, since the Logbook and BFA are Junior Novels – as a veteran whose PTSD manifests in silence and avoidance and self-blame, in comparison to Kes, whose manifests more in paranoia and fear (listen, another post sometime has gotta be about how he made sure his son had survivalist training from the time he was a toddler, OK). But Shara still chooses to believe that helpers want to help, and there will always be helpers. She chooses to do what she can, all the time, to make sure that others are safe – whether that’s the whole planet of Naboo not getting flattened or her son not barfing in his lap on a joyride. We see Shara make a lot of choices, and she doesn’t trust them all, but she trusts herself to know how to choose.
I guess it just seems to me like there’s a lot of statement about the Light and the Dark being about constantly choosing your side, more than being on a side. It isn’t a black-and-white issue of Anger And Fear Must Turn Someone Gray/Dark, it’s about how you choose to live with your anger and fear. Shara chose to settle on an orchard with her husband and son, plant a Force tree, and believe that things would be alright for long enough to call that home.
I can’t manage to invest myself very deeply in a lot of the Star Wars-specific lore, and specific understandings of that universe-specific religious code of the Force and metaphysics and whatnot (and, in the opposite direction, I’m definitely super disinterested in mapping Star Wars politics directly onto Earth politics, I don’t find that at all useful), but I am fascinated at the idea of how combat veterans manage their own morality. You have to follow orders, but “just following orders” isn’t much in the face of deep wrongs.
I don’t understand the original source enough to know whether they truly meant to cast Kes as more neutral, or if (I saw the diagram but couldn’t read the surrounding text, just the names) it’s just that they needed to be next to one another for the diagram to work, but it does seem to me that Kes would have more blood directly on his hands, having been Infantry/special forces– but is that the Force really saying that pilots who kill at a distance are more morally pure than Infantrymen who kill close-up? (???! That’s some shit ain’t it.)
Or is it that Kes is a deeply pragmatic person who has spent more of his life making compromises? That was why I made him the child of refugees; he was raised to have survival skills from a very early age because of the very real possibility that he’d lose everything just like his parents had, and he passed that on to his own son because he’d seen it personally and knew the danger.
I love this kind of hero, who knows exactly how bad things are going to be, has never had time for idealism, and still chooses the right thing, fully-informed, out of all possibilities, knowing it won’t work out but it’s the best choice of a bad lot. He knows there won’t be peace in our time but he’ll die for it anyway.
I put them both in that category, just with different points of origin and slightly different perspectives.
Also LOL that “happily ever after” means less than ten years, but. I mean. I guess. (I’m starting to get to the point where I have to think about that unless I want to A/U and I’m not going to, so I’m a little bitter.)
aimmyarrowshigh:
anyway, i’m always thrilled when i see acknowledgment of shara and kes in canon material outside of poe-centric pieces (like shara being playable in whatever that sw tabletop game is, etc) but it makes me SO happy to see them acknowledged as THE HAPPIEST COUPLE IN STAR WARS CANON, and also pretty far along that Light side-o-meter. I feel like that meter is a little… interesting, since they also have Satine pretty far Light and she’s a dictator who enforced “assimilate-or-die-in-Space-Siberia” policies and was willing to bomb her own populace to get obedience, but whatever.
But it’s so interesting to me that Kes is more “neutral” than Shara. I mean, it could just be that they had to put their names next to each other and Bey comes before Dameron in the alphabet, but I always, always want there to be a real, concrete reason that it was Shara whom Luke trusted to raise the Force tree. There’s so much Light-side Force tree lore tied into the Dameron-Bey family backstory, and I really hope that it matters in TLJ or IX or beyond. Why would you have the only currently surviving Force tree in one of the main trio’s backyards if it wasn’t gonna come up, yk? Why create a canon anecdote about child Poe single-handedly nursing the Force tree back to health if his connection to the Light side of the Force wasn’t going to be explored?
But also, I love that Shara is further into the Light side because we see her wrestle more with her choices than we’ve seen Kes (so far). Shara is more haunted after the war, but she’s also more wrenched during it: she joined the war to protect a son she barely knows, and she doesn’t know whether it’s the better choice to stay with the Rebellion until the last Imperial is gone for good or go home to raise a child who will never have to know the kind of horror of living through the Empire. Her conflict, IMO, is another point towards the idea that the Light in the current era of SW canon isn’t defined by ~uwu purity~ but by the choice to believe in the Light despite pain.
Shara is written – obliquely, tbf, since the Logbook and BFA are Junior Novels – as a veteran whose PTSD manifests in silence and avoidance and self-blame, in comparison to Kes, whose manifests more in paranoia and fear (listen, another post sometime has gotta be about how he made sure his son had survivalist training from the time he was a toddler, OK). But Shara still chooses to believe that helpers want to help, and there will always be helpers. She chooses to do what she can, all the time, to make sure that others are safe – whether that’s the whole planet of Naboo not getting flattened or her son not barfing in his lap on a joyride. We see Shara make a lot of choices, and she doesn’t trust them all, but she trusts herself to know how to choose.
I guess it just seems to me like there’s a lot of statement about the Light and the Dark being about constantly choosing your side, more than being on a side. It isn’t a black-and-white issue of Anger And Fear Must Turn Someone Gray/Dark, it’s about how you choose to live with your anger and fear. Shara chose to settle on an orchard with her husband and son, plant a Force tree, and believe that things would be alright for long enough to call that home.
I can’t manage to invest myself very deeply in a lot of the Star Wars-specific lore, and specific understandings of that universe-specific religious code of the Force and metaphysics and whatnot (and, in the opposite direction, I’m definitely super disinterested in mapping Star Wars politics directly onto Earth politics, I don’t find that at all useful), but I am fascinated at the idea of how combat veterans manage their own morality. You have to follow orders, but “just following orders” isn’t much in the face of deep wrongs.
I don’t understand the original source enough to know whether they truly meant to cast Kes as more neutral, or if (I saw the diagram but couldn’t read the surrounding text, just the names) it’s just that they needed to be next to one another for the diagram to work, but it does seem to me that Kes would have more blood directly on his hands, having been Infantry/special forces– but is that the Force really saying that pilots who kill at a distance are more morally pure than Infantrymen who kill close-up? (???! That’s some shit ain’t it.)
Or is it that Kes is a deeply pragmatic person who has spent more of his life making compromises? That was why I made him the child of refugees; he was raised to have survival skills from a very early age because of the very real possibility that he’d lose everything just like his parents had, and he passed that on to his own son because he’d seen it personally and knew the danger.
I love this kind of hero, who knows exactly how bad things are going to be, has never had time for idealism, and still chooses the right thing, fully-informed, out of all possibilities, knowing it won’t work out but it’s the best choice of a bad lot. He knows there won’t be peace in our time but he’ll die for it anyway.
I put them both in that category, just with different points of origin and slightly different perspectives.
Also LOL that “happily ever after” means less than ten years, but. I mean. I guess. (I’m starting to get to the point where I have to think about that unless I want to A/U and I’m not going to, so I’m a little bitter.)
