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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2bB7auo:
duh. Also what a good question.
And i was mulling this over on my commute to work, and here’s the thing. They’re so young in this story. And so much has to happen yet.
When Poe meets them they’ll be different people. So much is going to happen before he’s even born. And even more is going to happen before Poe is old enough to remember them. So these sweet innocent babies who think they have problems, well. Poe will never know them, may never even suspect their existence. (That first picture of them as a family, which I think I described in Never Wrote A Letter [did I?], where Shara looks exhausted and Kes is completely absorbed and Poe is a couple months old– Poe never really thinks about what they were like before that, takes it for granted that of course Kes wasn’t around when he was born, thinks his parents must have spent most of their lives busy running around somewhere. There are only a couple of holos older than that of his parents as a couple, and they’re mostly blurry because Norasol wasn’t a great holocorder operator, and mostly, his father is smiling without showing his teeth if he’s smiling at all– he’s always been so aware of holocorders that he’s always looking at them warily– and his mother is brilliantly beautiful and probably pointing at something because that’s what she always did when someone took her picture.)
(Hurt yourself a little more with me: was there an official holocorder person for the Rebellion, who took formal and candid shots of personnel? Do high-quality holos exist of Shara Bey posed stiffly next to her A-Wing with the remnant of Green Squadron that made it through Endor? Is there a shot of Kes looking viciously joyful and spattered in blood and blaster residue after some secret Pathfinder mission or other? Is one or the other or both in the standard textbook about the Rebellion that they study at the Academy?)
By the time Poe meets his father, Kes’s sweetness has been mostly scoured away by loss and terror; by the time he can remember him, Kes is a battle-scarred veteran with little patience for nonsense and a razor focus on protecting the few things left he cares about. By the time Poe knows her, Shara is a lieutenant with more field experience than most pilots, a proud hero, a woman dedicated to service and known for effectiveness. Poe’s earliest memories will be Sento and Norasol, gentle encouragement and loving attention laced with half-hidden worry and a lot of sudden forced relocations and distinct lack of comforting routines, with occasional interludes of having to reacquaint himself with these strange Mama and Papa figures who rush in smelling of space and are gone again as soon as he’s used to them.
And before he can become a man, his mother will be gone, and take what sweetness was left to Kes with her.
But he’ll retain her bravado and cool competence, and her uncanny reflexes. From his father, he’ll think he gets nothing but a stern sense of fairness and unflinching physical courage and, probably, bull-headed stubbornness that he insists isn’t as bad as his father’s at all, he’s really an easygoing guy unlike his father, he always goes with the flow except of course not on this matter where he can’t be moved because it’s important, but he’s overall way more easygoing than Kes what are you even talking about.
But, really, you absorb a lot from people without realizing it, and his sweetness and humor are really mostly Kes’s, along with his sort of compulsive need to take care of people and his inability to ignore someone else’s pain. His ability to bluff is from Sento, and the charm that has gotten him through almost every tight spot he’s ever flown into. His sense of what’s most effective to fuck with a person about comes from Norasol– how to size up a vulnerability and either shore that person up or tear them down. (He also knows a lot about weather magic from her; his greatest renown as a Fleet pilot is from his astonishing feats in-atmo, and his ability to read the wind didn’t come from any Academy instructor.)
And his ability to completely ignore his own emotional needs in favor of working tirelessly and self-sacrificingly toward some greater good? Well, he gets that, imperfectly, from Kes.
And neither of them meant to give him their self-sacrificing stupidity, but he picked that up from both of them. Whether you think Shara was better or worse at it than Kes, for succeeding, is really a matter of perspective.
The Dameron family’s story isn’t really a happy one, is the problem. Thanks for that, canon. But, in the end, maybe Poe will have a chance to know his father as an adult, and maybe he’ll be able to see a little more clearly how they got here.
duh. Also what a good question.
And i was mulling this over on my commute to work, and here’s the thing. They’re so young in this story. And so much has to happen yet.
When Poe meets them they’ll be different people. So much is going to happen before he’s even born. And even more is going to happen before Poe is old enough to remember them. So these sweet innocent babies who think they have problems, well. Poe will never know them, may never even suspect their existence. (That first picture of them as a family, which I think I described in Never Wrote A Letter [did I?], where Shara looks exhausted and Kes is completely absorbed and Poe is a couple months old– Poe never really thinks about what they were like before that, takes it for granted that of course Kes wasn’t around when he was born, thinks his parents must have spent most of their lives busy running around somewhere. There are only a couple of holos older than that of his parents as a couple, and they’re mostly blurry because Norasol wasn’t a great holocorder operator, and mostly, his father is smiling without showing his teeth if he’s smiling at all– he’s always been so aware of holocorders that he’s always looking at them warily– and his mother is brilliantly beautiful and probably pointing at something because that’s what she always did when someone took her picture.)
(Hurt yourself a little more with me: was there an official holocorder person for the Rebellion, who took formal and candid shots of personnel? Do high-quality holos exist of Shara Bey posed stiffly next to her A-Wing with the remnant of Green Squadron that made it through Endor? Is there a shot of Kes looking viciously joyful and spattered in blood and blaster residue after some secret Pathfinder mission or other? Is one or the other or both in the standard textbook about the Rebellion that they study at the Academy?)
By the time Poe meets his father, Kes’s sweetness has been mostly scoured away by loss and terror; by the time he can remember him, Kes is a battle-scarred veteran with little patience for nonsense and a razor focus on protecting the few things left he cares about. By the time Poe knows her, Shara is a lieutenant with more field experience than most pilots, a proud hero, a woman dedicated to service and known for effectiveness. Poe’s earliest memories will be Sento and Norasol, gentle encouragement and loving attention laced with half-hidden worry and a lot of sudden forced relocations and distinct lack of comforting routines, with occasional interludes of having to reacquaint himself with these strange Mama and Papa figures who rush in smelling of space and are gone again as soon as he’s used to them.
And before he can become a man, his mother will be gone, and take what sweetness was left to Kes with her.
But he’ll retain her bravado and cool competence, and her uncanny reflexes. From his father, he’ll think he gets nothing but a stern sense of fairness and unflinching physical courage and, probably, bull-headed stubbornness that he insists isn’t as bad as his father’s at all, he’s really an easygoing guy unlike his father, he always goes with the flow except of course not on this matter where he can’t be moved because it’s important, but he’s overall way more easygoing than Kes what are you even talking about.
But, really, you absorb a lot from people without realizing it, and his sweetness and humor are really mostly Kes’s, along with his sort of compulsive need to take care of people and his inability to ignore someone else’s pain. His ability to bluff is from Sento, and the charm that has gotten him through almost every tight spot he’s ever flown into. His sense of what’s most effective to fuck with a person about comes from Norasol– how to size up a vulnerability and either shore that person up or tear them down. (He also knows a lot about weather magic from her; his greatest renown as a Fleet pilot is from his astonishing feats in-atmo, and his ability to read the wind didn’t come from any Academy instructor.)
And his ability to completely ignore his own emotional needs in favor of working tirelessly and self-sacrificingly toward some greater good? Well, he gets that, imperfectly, from Kes.
And neither of them meant to give him their self-sacrificing stupidity, but he picked that up from both of them. Whether you think Shara was better or worse at it than Kes, for succeeding, is really a matter of perspective.
The Dameron family’s story isn’t really a happy one, is the problem. Thanks for that, canon. But, in the end, maybe Poe will have a chance to know his father as an adult, and maybe he’ll be able to see a little more clearly how they got here.
