The middle panel was done in a rush, as you can probably tell, but I DO love squishy faced Ben. I really do. Look at his determined little face.
In addition to the 17 billion things I already want to write or plan on writing, I really want to write something from Han’s PoV. I have no idea what yet, but I wanna do something. He’s like this total mess of over thinking and impulse. Constantly thinking about what he’s going to do, how he’s going to do it, what Leia is going to think, convincing himself he’s a failure, talking himself up and down and sideways, always worrying 12 steps ahead of the already foregone worst case scenario, completely aware of it but unable to express much of it. He’ll go round and round with himself about why something is or isn’t a certain way, but screw you if you try to tell him how it’s gonna be! He’ll show you! He’ll do it right now, you watch! And of course it’s a surprise when spite or well intended impulsiveness actually pans out.
I just really, really like that. That’s my kind of disaster. I wanna write him.
or, Why there’s actually way more going on in all those parallel edits of Anakin and
Ben kneeling before Palpatine and Snoke respectively than just the kneeling and
looking a hot, tormented mess
@soyeahso asked if I would ever do a bodyswitching story and I said yes but it would probably be stupid, then @flypaper-brain and @kuresoto said they wanted it anyway, so really you have to blame them. I’m actually going to do two. This is the first one; the second one will be smutty and will not involve a porg, thank goodness.
***
Since his defection, the former Supreme Leader has been doing his best to make himself useful to the Resistance. He’s already told them everything he can about the future plans of the First Order, he’s been training with Poe and Finn and working with some of the former stormtroopers who had defected as well, and most importantly he’s been doing his best to stay in the good graces of the Last Jedi.
It turns out that, although he’s physically strong and very strategic when it comes to fighting with a lightsaber or flying a starfighter, when it comes to women (Rey. When it comes to Rey.) he’s not very brave. He can’t even bring himself to try to hold her hand, let alone kiss her, so instead he does everything in his power to be useful to her. This involves mostly two things: One, helping her decipher the ancient Jedi texts, and Two, changing the bedding of her pet porg, Porg.
First off, for those of you not familiar with this particularly juicy bit of canon: as Ben was growing up, no one ever told him that Darth Vader is his grandfather. In fact, no one outside of Luke, Leia, and Han (possibly Chewbacca) knew that Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader were one and the same. Ben was 23 when it became public knowledge – seven years before TFA.
Storytelling wise, this is a huge deal that I don’t think gets brought up enough. It means that Ben never knew that it was Luke’s love for his father, and in turn, Anakin’s for Luke, that helped defeat the Empire. He must have grown up thinking of Luke as the “great warrior” who defeated both Vader and the Emperor, a similar presumption apparently held by many real-life people for some reason. At least Ben has an excuse – he hasn’t seen ROTJ.
We don’t know the specifics, but presumably Ben had been fed a similar story to the one Luke grew up on his whole life. Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader were two entirely different people, and Darth Vader was the one responsible for everything going bad, and he was defeated by Luke. Ben learns the truth eventually, and at some point, Snoke has managed to twist the story to frame it as weakness – Vader and Palpatine, the entire Empire fell because of sentiment. Hell, he may have even been able to twist it into telling Ben that Luke became as powerful as he was because he killed his father, but that’s just me speculating wildly.
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