Hey! Great To See A New Chapter. Poor Admiral, At Least He Knows The Lay Of The Land Now!

Now playing: III-XIV. A Scathingly Brilliant Idea

In which Ahsoka and Rex head to Christophsis; Luke and Leia begin putting their plan into action and run into an old, uh, family friend; and Padmé has no idea what's coming.

I really do like you capturing that the galaxy is big and that Palpatine is of course wanting to pick every single fight that he can just cause blood suffering pain and death, spread it all around? kill jedi cant leave them to build roots anywhere but still. the not giving you the option to surrender to occupation, forcing a fight on you cause WANT the fight blood and death some of that being less capability to fight later and clean sweeps? but still galaxy is a huge place and Palps wants it all

Thank you! :)

He absolutely wants it all, and he's not going to think twice about a little violence (or a lot of violence, as the case may be) to get it! Plus, with the economic factors at play, that's just all the more reason to go full-on systemwide occupation instead of settling for diplomacy or surrender of the Jedi in the Sevret system.

And, after all, what's the point of having thousands of Star Destroyers at one's disposal if one doesn't intend to use them for a little bit of conquest every now and again? :P

On a more serious note, though, part of the reason that I made up a system outside of the Republic was that, apparently, a great many of the worlds in the GFFA were not part of the Republic, and I wanted to show how Palpatine is a threat, not only to the worlds that were formerly Republic and immediately became Empire, but also to any world with valuable resources or any world that harbors someone who could possibly be a threat to his power and his security.

And although the Jedi on Errece didn't pose much of a threat in and of themselves---allowing that ideology to survive, allowing them to exist anywhere in the galaxy and possibly go on to spread that ideology to future generations who could build up the Jedi? Who could perhaps continue the Jedi in secret, in the manner of the post-Bane Sith? He absolutely cannot allow that to happen.

(Also, just wanted to add that from a writing point of view, this chapter was pretty entertaining to scheme up because of how Palpatine thinks he's getting it all with the Sevret system. Destroy some Jedi? Check. Gain access to valuable raw materials for the Empire? Check. Humiliate his foolish apprentice? Check.)

Lately, I've been procrastinating writing a tricky bit of Fortunate's Rule wanting to draw a scene where Ahsoka has been knighted, and Anakin has taken on Starkiller as his second padawan.

This drawing began as a pencil sketch on a light day at work. (On printer paper. With a crappy eraser. It was painful.) And then I photographed the sketch, loaded the pic in Krita, and colored over it. Then found a Varykino pic to go off of for the background, since the trio seemed to require one.

I'm fairly happy with it! Really pleased with the shading on the clothes, and with Ahsoka's lekku in general. Shading Anakin's face was incredibly trying for some reason, however, and I'm not at all sure that he looks ~10 years older than in TCW.

Oh, and Krita has this cool impasto brush that made filling in the gravel on the patio so easy! There's also a nice sponge brush that made the water similarly simple.

(See below for OG sketch and pose reference credit.)

The OG sketch:

Based off of this pose reference that I found on Pinterest, by mellon_soup.

Hey uh, just a heads up, I'm going to use some of your art in a presentation that I'm doing for my English class. it's about something we are an expert on and I chose to do mine on fanfiction, and one of the questions we have to anwser is what things do you like and not like about the chosen topic, and I wanted to choose your fanfic as something that I like because it is awesome. hope you don't mind?

OMG, I don't mind at all! Thank you so much! 💛💛💛 Also, I think it's really cool that you're doing a presentation on fanfic. Good luck with your presentation, I hope it goes well!

Now playing: III-X. All Tangled Up in This Mortal Coil, pt 1

In which Ahsoka meets the fam, and Obi-Wan and Ventress do a bit of reconnaissance.

All Our Scattered Remnants

Threadbare, oneshot on AO3

Ahsoka stared into her mirror. An old woman stared back at her. “You’ve outlived your usefulness,” she observed to the crone in the mirror. “Outlived your friends, and even your enemies. Why are you still hanging on?” Aged and world-weary, Ahsoka sets out to see the galaxy and rouse herself from her melancholy. At the end of her journey, she heeds the call of the Force and ventures to Jakku, where she encounters a Force-sensitive young girl. Ahsoka is not going to take a padawan. (But then, neither was her master, and look how that turned out.)

Yet another side project, yes. I developed this weird urge to write Ahsoka as a jaded old woman.

I'm planning to make this a short oneshot series.

Haven't seen the ST, maybe shouldn't be writing this under those circumstances, but the degree to which I care is limited, so. We'll see how this goes.

One of the fun things about writing is how, sometimes, you accidentally write things a certain way, and then, weeks later, you realise that what you wrote actually has significance to the story, and it adds a cool little detail to some aspect of the plot or characterisation.

In Fortune's Rule, I've written Starkiller bowing in the presence of his master. Just today, though, I realised that the more proper Sith thing would be to kneel. The true explanation for the bowing instead, of course, is that it was entirely unintentional and in fact carries absolutely no meaning whatsoever. I was a little sloppy and didn't think things through sufficiently.

However, in-world, it looks like some sort of choice on Vader's part. He taught his apprentice to bow (more a Jedi thing, I think?), rather than kneel (a Sith thing, and more subservient). Perhaps Vader's Anakin is showing a little bit, in not wanting to make Starkiller demonstrate the extreme subservience that a Sith master usually expects from their apprentice (i.e. that Sidious expects from him). At the same time, I think it also fits with Vader's character. He's a military leader, not a political one like Sidious, and as such probably prioritizes utility over ceremony. There's no need to bother with the whole kneeling thing, when a bow will do.

I love things like this, because they show how, for all that a lot of planning and intentional symbolism may go into writing, sometimes what the reader sees as significant is just a surprisingly functional mistake. (And it also makes me wonder how much of the stuff we analyzed in high school lit classes was intentional, and how much was coincidental.)

Typical day for Cody and Rex

Based on THIS post

I love that the refinement levels of Obi-Wan and Count Dooku mean that you could definitely imagine both of them simultaneously preparing for a lightsaber duel while also rebuking their teammates who are asking them to do the efficient thing and use a blaster. Maybe they can confide in each other during the duel.

LOL yes, and when they're force ghosts they can bond over hating blasters without having to duel

(commission info // tip jar!)

From a Certain Point of View

Or, how Ben Kenobi’s boldfaced lie prevarication saved the Galaxy (but not in the way he thought it would).

(See Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four)

Part Five: Epilogue

When Sidious dies, Jedi and other Force Sensitives across the galaxy sense it, even if they don’t all know precisely what it is that they’re feeling. The Force reverberates with the death of so powerful a being – with the shattering of so many significant shatterpoints. A heavy, oppressive cloud has lifted. The Force hasn’t felt this way since… longer than some of them even remember. The older among them do remember the days when the Force was lighter and their foresight clearer, but even they hadn’t realized how bad things had gotten until the fog of the Dark was gone.

Padme, with her low midichlorian count, is not particularly attuned to the Force, but she feels it too. Somewhere deep in her bones, she knows that something has changed. And Padme has always trusted her instincts.

So when Anakin bursts into her office in the Senate and announces that he just killed Chancellor Palpatine – oh, and that Palpatine was a Sith Lord who orchestrated the entire war, by the way – she isn’t quite as shocked as she probably should be.

(Which is not, of course, the same thing as not being shocked at all. Because Palpatine? A Sith Lord? She’d been concerned about the executive powers he was accruing and the policies he was putting into place, of course, but…)

“Are you all right?” he asks, dropping to his knees in front of her chair.

“Me?” she says. “I’m fine, Ani. I’m not the one who just fought a Sith! We need to get you to a medic.”

“Only if you get looked over too,” he says. He hesitates then adds, “Is there anything you, uh, wanted to tell me?”

He gestures awkwardly in her direction with his flesh hand.

Padme stares at him.

“I’m sorry?” she says, eyeing him worriedly.

Who knows what kind of damage he might have sustained in his encounter with Palpatine.

“You know,” he says. “Any, um, family news?”

“My family is fine, last I heard,” she says slowly. “Ani, what’s going on?”

He takes a deep breath.

“Padme, how is the baby doing?”

She stares at him. 

“What baby?”

There is a choking sound near the door.

…which, she realizes in retrospect, they never closed after Anakin barged in like a gundark. 

“An excellent question. Is there anything,” a particularly exhausted-looking Obi-Wan Kenobi says dryly, one eyebrow arched, “that the two of you would like to tell me?”

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