i keep it around for luck

Clones in awe at the beauty of the wider galaxy but lacking the vocabulary to describe it. “It’s… it’s beautiful. It’s like… beautiful. Just so beautiful. It’s pretty. Um. It’s beautiful.”

Clones trying on civilian clothes and hating it because they’re so used to the armour being heavy and stiff. Soft stuff almost makes them feel naked, like they’re in their blacks.

Clones who chose to grow out their hair but have no idea how to look after it so it’s a complete frizzy mess that HAS to be tied back lest it go everywhere.

Clones with intensely scathing internal dialogues who are always super polite and compliant because mentally disintegrating their authority figures was the only way they could stave off the urge to go completely off the rails on Kamino.

Clones who have never figured out how to verbalise feelings (worsened by working with Jedi who can just… FEEL their feelings) making up their own terminologies. “I feel like… wet.” “What?” “On the inside.” “ew.” “No! Ok listen, not like that.”

Clones with lingering sun damage from the first time they took their helmets off on a desert world (nobody told them about sunscreen).

Clones having to learn what familial terms mean because what the kriff is an “aunt”?

Newly deployed clones being really awkward in any conversation that isn’t related to war because they’ve never spoken casually with anyone that doesn’t share their exact life experience.

An extension to the previous: clones mirroring the energy of whoever they’re talking to, to an unnerving extent, because they’re trying to learn how to socialise.

Clones in phase 1 armour with rough skin in the spots where it rubs really bad (This is canon btw. It’s not enough they’re at war, the Kaminoans also apparently can’t be arsed to tailor their gear)

Clones after the war being identifiable by the way they walk, because they still move like they have the armour on.

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Then there is the YouTuber talking about Transformers, casually dropping the "Iraq war aesthetic" like it's a color palette. Desert punk. Military core. A vibe. This is what happens when your country hasn't had a war on its own soil in living memory; the violence becomes media, a backdrop for childhood toys. The explosions are no longer the sound of mothers screaming; they are cool action sequences. They are digesting the visual debris of massacre as a nostalgic fashion choice, scraping the trauma off and compressing it into a genre for their retro-futurist fantasies. The apocalypse becomes a mood board.

And finally, the girl recounting celebrity love triangles from her childhood, flippantly mentioning how the U.S. was "busy with the Iraq war or whatever." Or whatever. That single phrase is the thesis statement of American innocence. Over a million dead, a region destabilized for a century, an endless river of grief; and for her, it was the commercial break between pop culture segments. It didn't raise her rent. It didn't stop her Wi-Fi. The violence is geo-locked to brown skin and distant deserts, just background noise like a refrigerator humming. She has the luxury of forgetting because the machine doesn't eat her children, it eats yours.

said this in the tags of another post but i'm still thinking about it. because i think this is what bothers me about a lot of clone and jedi fanon, like plo koon as wolffe's dad or cody and obi-wan as an old married couple. neither the jedi nor the clones have a culture where those roles are A Thing. there is no "this person is like a parent to me," or "i love them so much wish we could be together always and forever."

lol so a month or so ago I went on a... this-adhd-med-I'm-trying-is-actually-making-it-worse?!!-induced fixation rabbit hole and possibly wrote out like 30+ pages about clone culture/worldbuilding. During which I realized the clones would probably have NO sense of amatonormativity, like at all

Why would they be ingrained with the same standards and expectations about relationships/marriage/nuclear family etc that we are familiar with when their exposure is primarily limited to:

1. Jango who requested a clone of himself to raise as a single father

2. Kaminoan scientists who reproduce via cloning

3. Bounty hunter trainers who agreed to cut contact with their families and live on a secret isolated planet for 10+ years

4. Jedi generals who are separated from their birth families, raised communally, and swear off marriage

And that's not even to mention their indoctrination

Chuchi: And what happens when you're too old to fight? Clone: That's not a scenario we're trained to think about

Like the aspects of amatonormativity and compulsory sexuality/romance that come from societal pressures and an idea of "purpose." The belief that "love/marriage and having a family is the most important and fulfilling path" or whatever. That is not something that would show up in an environment like Kamino, which depends on and enforces an entirely unrelated set of expectations. The clones are trained and conditioned to value their singular purpose as expendable soldiers. They'd probably be specifically discouraged from thinking about those things, to the Kaminoans it would just be a distraction, most of them won't live long enough for it to be relevant anyway. (Not to say that none of them would ever end up wanting those things, just I think generally operating from a baseline of disinterest/low-priority)

I think this is part of why idk how I feel about what little of Rep Comm I've read. Like the whole Kal'buir thing, I get it for the nulls whomst he literally adopted but for the others? There's a difference between a father and a trainer, even if he's a nice one. And I guess it just feels like "fixing deficits" rather than letting clone culture be different than ours (same with like transplanting them into Mando culture/heritage, giving them all girlfriends, and curing the accelerated aging)

also pulling this out of the tags because once again, shaking your hand:

#our norms are not their norms#and it's so much more interesting to explore theirs instead of pigeonholing them to conform to ours#(esp when our norms are dumb too anyway)#so yeah more aroallo jedi please!

i think alloaro is/should be the "expected norm" for the jedi honestly.

#I also just love the idea of clones raising younger clones/tubies not as their children but as little brothers -- #like numa was calling waxer and boil “brother” the whole episode yall#and omega always refers to the batch only as her brothers not dads

my hc for clone family structure is based entirely around sibling relationships and military hierarchy. all clones are brothers but big brother = person in charge of keeping you alive = commanding officer. nothing to do with age, a designation based solely on rank and/or the nature of the relationship. to be a big brother means to hold responsibility for someone, either by the choice of making a friend and deciding to take that role in their life or by getting promoted into a position of authority. cody is the big brother of the entire 3rd system army, but also be decided to be a mentor/big brother to rex in particular because he liked rex and wanted to teach him some things to help him survive. (in this way i think they could be an interesting parallel to the jedi, in that mentor type relationships are the most important/form the basis for how people become connected and take care of each other.)

In addition to finding out where in Africa her ancestors were abducted into slavery, Mary Moran discovered the meaning of the Mende song: a processional hymn for the final farewell to the spirit, it was sung in Senehun Ngola by women as they prepared the body of a loved one for burial.