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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2cQDyUV:
sugarspiceandcursewords replied to your post “I finished chapter 7 more or less a week ago, and I have been trying…”
It works. I mean, I can’t say for certain whether it works in the precise place you currently have it in NWaL, but standalone, it hella works. It prompts me to ask, though: how well did Poe and Ben know each other as kids, in your headcanon? I need to reread Before the Awakening, because my vibe there was that Poe only vaguely knew Leia before that – but I love all the fics where they all have history, because it fits better with Kes and Shara. Just curious about your take.
I’ve never been a “canon can go hang” type, I’ve always been super close to canon in all my other ‘verses. But SW was so new, and the peripheral materials so relatively difficult to access, that I sort of… made stuff up.
And so now people post some great excerpts and rundowns of this extra-movie canon stuff, and it’s just too late for me. I’ve already worked out all this backstory stuff, and I just– I made attempts to leave room for all that, but I just can’t reconcile all of BtA etc. with the choices I’ve made, and some of it strikes me as internally inconsistent and written by people with different priorities than I have so I’m not really in as deep a place of mourning over it as I otherwise might be.
I do regret giving Kes and Poe a fraught relationship, because that *is* overdone; I already regretted it before I got to the exposition part. I kind of tucked it in at the beginning on impulse, purely because I needed a reason Kes hadn’t gotten involved as soon as his son had. It would have made more sense for Kes to have held himself back until after Hosnia, out of a sense of duty to his civilian position and so on, and that wouldn’t have contradicted the canon that, f’rex, Poe left Black One at Kes’s place while he went on his secret mission.
But I did what I did and I’m seeing it through. (I actually sort of feel like there *wasn’t* much of Kes being an estranged dad until after one of my early snippets on the topic got popular, and that’s actually a major component of the fanon in that respect, but that might be my overinflated ego. I just know when I wrote that bit, I’d only seen Kes as either inexplicably absentee, or as a kind of puttery old man who didn’t do much, or as conveniently dead offscreen somewhere like Shara.)
I also kind of like the idea that Leia and the Dameron-Beys didn’t know each other all that well, but– I came up with this idea pretty early in my entry to the fandom, and I just didn’t know anybody else, and it seemed fun. So I’m seeing that through, too. I think the canon is that Leia interacted with Shara in a professional manner a couple of times, and so did Luke, and Kes worked with Han Solo and impressed him, and that was that.
I added in anything else. I decided to make a connection between the factions of Space Latinos suggested by the Organa seniors’ actors and, of course, Oscar Isaac, and so I slowly came up with this whole backstory for Kes, and I decided extra tragedy would be cool so I put them on Alderaan etc., and then it was just more satisfying to moosh them together.
Because then I could give the Poe/Leia dynamic some extra angst, and it gave me all kinds of lazy shortcuts to work with emotions-wise.
And I just love the idea that Kes and Leia have known each other so long, and as she’s struggling to build the new Republic, Kes is doing exactly what he set out to do, making a new home for the remnant of his people, and making Yavin 4 a wonderful place to live whether or not the Republic infrastructure is there for them. And for him it’s kind of hollow, because almost all of his people are dead, and Leia kind of… feels him, on that one, because her mentors/parents are dead along with all of her people, and this nation-building is not anything like what she thought it would be, and it’s not going well and she just doesn’t have anyone to turn to. And so she comes to stay sometimes, and it’s one of the few places she likes that Han is comfortable, and her weird son is as happy here as he ever is anywhere, because Poe is a little darling and drags him around everywhere. But Leia can’t spend too much time there, because she’s Political, and the reason Yavin 4 is so successful is that it is Not Political, and she can’t bear to risk warping it with her influence.
And after Shara dies, Kes sort of blames Leia, so she doesn’t come around nearly as much. So Poe doesn’t really know her all that well, not the way an adult would. And so, he was closest with Ben when they were little kids, and knew him less and less well just as shit was getting weirder and weirder in Ben’s head. But in my headcanon, Ben was always weird, and his parents never quite knew what to do with him, and Poe never quite knew what to do with him, but in those early years Poe was so enamored of the Organa-Solos and how important they were that he took his duty to “look after Ben” very, very seriously.
sugarspiceandcursewords replied to your post “I finished chapter 7 more or less a week ago, and I have been trying…”
It works. I mean, I can’t say for certain whether it works in the precise place you currently have it in NWaL, but standalone, it hella works. It prompts me to ask, though: how well did Poe and Ben know each other as kids, in your headcanon? I need to reread Before the Awakening, because my vibe there was that Poe only vaguely knew Leia before that – but I love all the fics where they all have history, because it fits better with Kes and Shara. Just curious about your take.
I’ve never been a “canon can go hang” type, I’ve always been super close to canon in all my other ‘verses. But SW was so new, and the peripheral materials so relatively difficult to access, that I sort of… made stuff up.
And so now people post some great excerpts and rundowns of this extra-movie canon stuff, and it’s just too late for me. I’ve already worked out all this backstory stuff, and I just– I made attempts to leave room for all that, but I just can’t reconcile all of BtA etc. with the choices I’ve made, and some of it strikes me as internally inconsistent and written by people with different priorities than I have so I’m not really in as deep a place of mourning over it as I otherwise might be.
I do regret giving Kes and Poe a fraught relationship, because that *is* overdone; I already regretted it before I got to the exposition part. I kind of tucked it in at the beginning on impulse, purely because I needed a reason Kes hadn’t gotten involved as soon as his son had. It would have made more sense for Kes to have held himself back until after Hosnia, out of a sense of duty to his civilian position and so on, and that wouldn’t have contradicted the canon that, f’rex, Poe left Black One at Kes’s place while he went on his secret mission.
But I did what I did and I’m seeing it through. (I actually sort of feel like there *wasn’t* much of Kes being an estranged dad until after one of my early snippets on the topic got popular, and that’s actually a major component of the fanon in that respect, but that might be my overinflated ego. I just know when I wrote that bit, I’d only seen Kes as either inexplicably absentee, or as a kind of puttery old man who didn’t do much, or as conveniently dead offscreen somewhere like Shara.)
I also kind of like the idea that Leia and the Dameron-Beys didn’t know each other all that well, but– I came up with this idea pretty early in my entry to the fandom, and I just didn’t know anybody else, and it seemed fun. So I’m seeing that through, too. I think the canon is that Leia interacted with Shara in a professional manner a couple of times, and so did Luke, and Kes worked with Han Solo and impressed him, and that was that.
I added in anything else. I decided to make a connection between the factions of Space Latinos suggested by the Organa seniors’ actors and, of course, Oscar Isaac, and so I slowly came up with this whole backstory for Kes, and I decided extra tragedy would be cool so I put them on Alderaan etc., and then it was just more satisfying to moosh them together.
Because then I could give the Poe/Leia dynamic some extra angst, and it gave me all kinds of lazy shortcuts to work with emotions-wise.
And I just love the idea that Kes and Leia have known each other so long, and as she’s struggling to build the new Republic, Kes is doing exactly what he set out to do, making a new home for the remnant of his people, and making Yavin 4 a wonderful place to live whether or not the Republic infrastructure is there for them. And for him it’s kind of hollow, because almost all of his people are dead, and Leia kind of… feels him, on that one, because her mentors/parents are dead along with all of her people, and this nation-building is not anything like what she thought it would be, and it’s not going well and she just doesn’t have anyone to turn to. And so she comes to stay sometimes, and it’s one of the few places she likes that Han is comfortable, and her weird son is as happy here as he ever is anywhere, because Poe is a little darling and drags him around everywhere. But Leia can’t spend too much time there, because she’s Political, and the reason Yavin 4 is so successful is that it is Not Political, and she can’t bear to risk warping it with her influence.
And after Shara dies, Kes sort of blames Leia, so she doesn’t come around nearly as much. So Poe doesn’t really know her all that well, not the way an adult would. And so, he was closest with Ben when they were little kids, and knew him less and less well just as shit was getting weirder and weirder in Ben’s head. But in my headcanon, Ben was always weird, and his parents never quite knew what to do with him, and Poe never quite knew what to do with him, but in those early years Poe was so enamored of the Organa-Solos and how important they were that he took his duty to “look after Ben” very, very seriously.
