Histrionic Dragon

how rogue one probably goes in the rebel padmé/ galaxy's messiest divorce au

I remember an Expanded Universe comic set immediately after RotJ where Leia tells Luke words to the effect of "Vader literally had me tortured and blew up my homeworld. What, am I supposed to feel kinship with him just because I discovered he's my dad yesterday?"

The important thing that happens in Return of the Jedi is that the Emperor dies and the planet-killing superweapon gets blown up. Vader spent the last two hours of his life doing something good after 25 years of genocide, mass murder and torture, and even then, it was partly out of vengeful hatred. Vader fucking hated Palpatine for a quarter century and never had the spine to do anything about it. It was only after his own son was being tortured to death in front of him that he chose to act - and he'd cut off the kid's hand like two years before that! That's not a fucking redemption arc.

So one, yes, absolutely it is entirely correct to take issue with Darth Vader's apparent forgiveness by the Force, there is no need for Leia to accept him as her father or to feel anything for him besides hate and contempt, redemption takes more than turning back for a couple of hours and then getting out of culpability by dying, all fair.

That said: the original trilogy is Luke Skywalker's story and the story of Luke Skywalker, on a meta level, is about being a young adult in the 60s and 70s who did not experience WWII or the depths of fascism personally, but who grew up with gaping familial wounds - family members who you never knew but who older people refer to or talk around, people they compare you to, figures who other children had in their lives but you didn't. Someone who as a child was given fantasies of heroes fighting daring battles, who was told it was all about nationhood and fighting for your people and the course of civilization, someone who internalized those principles as guiding lights for their own morality and who they want to be... and THEN finding out when you become an adult, and are permitted to know about the horrors, that it is not just honor and glory in your heritage, that you, 70s white boy, may have evil and darkness and the corruption of all your values as a potential to fall into just as your father did, the temptation to hate and cruelty and domination and atrocity. And the absences in your family are maybe not just because of death, of noble sacrifice, but perhaps instead because those people who shared your blood became monsters, severed from their family because of their terrible actions, and still live as awful hateful versions of themselves, enslaved to evil, and that could be you.

And what do you do with that? Will you strike your father down with all of your hatred, when the thing that corrupted him by his hate for its own ends is sitting there grinning and laughing, waiting to do the same to you? Is violence the answer against that creature, infinitely better at taking advantage from violence than you are? Or will you just die - and even just walking away here means death, sooner or later - and let the evil persist?

Or will you, privileged young person with ideals and hopes, with a family member who has done terrible unforgivable things but who still holds affection for you, make use of that affection to tempt them to just turn their back on that evil for a moment, the thing it will never expect from the person it made its slave for longer than you've been alive? Neither you nor he can pay back the crimes of those years, but perhaps you can stop the evil, here and now, from going on.

So you do that. And what is your reward? Is it appropriate for Luke, whose whole story has been about becoming the ideal he grew up admiring and defeating the evil that ideal had the potential to become, both halves of it embodied in the being of his father, to come back to his friends and then have the universe say to him 'your father was unredeemable, and had nothing good enough in him to deserve peace in death'? Or to say there was a darkness lifted from him, and a light restored?

It doesn’t mean people will forgive you - hell no. The things Vader did were unforgivable, and he knew that. But because of that, he believed the only path left was to keep committing atrocities, to wallow in self-hatred and anger for decades and take it out on the galaxy. He says it himself: “It’s too late for me, son”.

But what Luke shows Vader is that we ALWAYS have a choice: To be a better person, and to choose compassion. Anakin doesn’t kill the Emperor out of hatred, or even because he thinks it’ll make up for anything he did: He knows nothing ever will. He chooses to save Luke, and break the cycle of violence because it’s the right, kind thing to do.

Vader/Anakin isn’t fully redeemed by the end of Return of the Jedi: He simply takes his first step back into the light. Obi-Wan and Yoda chose to give him that second chance, but that was their decision to make. The people you hurt are by NO means obligated to forgive you - but you should still strive to be better regardless.

Rocky hums. “Close. Skip first note.”

“Why? You always include that.”

“This means… of Rocky, possessive. Of the speaker.”

“My.”

“Correct. But only for names.”

“So you’re calling me…?”

Rocky repeats the word: “My Grace. Yes.” 

"But now its only me"

"Only Us."

Soooooo I've finally gotten to watch Project Hail Mary.

It was great. 100% want to watch it again.

It was a cinematic masterpiece. Stunning visuals. Beautiful scenes. Besutiful chracaters. Beautiful story.

I need to read the book so bad but i am a poor reader.

I dont actually draw fanart for stuff very often. even stuff i absolutly adore and will watch, read, or play a million times over. So how i drew this, I dont even know. I was mid uploading my science homework (that im a little behind in) in the early evening. Next minuete its nearly 11pm and i'm knee deep in a nearly completed drawing (which i havent managed to draw anything other then wips and sketches for the last couple weeks) and now theres this. And the only connecting memory i have in between those two moments was " I hope my friend (whos very into PHM and been waiting for me to watch it) likes this. I should ask them their fav qoute" and suddenly that was my motovation to finish it but i dont think it started out that way but i also have no fathomable idea where i even got the drawing idea from cause my pinterest fyp has been filled with ducklings and nothing else the past few days so. Yeah.

Also that quilt sucks (in a good way) omyword, i didnt even commit to doing it properly and had to scour a bit to find a hood enough refference which you cant ecen see well in the end drawing lol.

...Have to snicker a little when, in order to fit the fifth member of the core marriage into the shot, I have to stick him half a mile away...

Anyway. This is just to let everybody know that for Pride Month of 2026, the Ebooks Direct Pride Package has been really ridiculously discounted.

...From the product page:

This package contains all our Middle Kingdoms material—some of the first LGBTQ-representing epic fantasy in the 20th-century fantasy field, now continuing into the 21st. It also contains the matter-of-fact exit from the (contextual) closet of two of the best-loved characters in the Young Wizards universe—Advisory wizards Tom Swale and Carl Romeo, on their first canonically-"out" venture as a couple. The main part of the collection spans more than forty years, from the publication of Diane Duane's two-time Astounding Award finalist The Door Into Fire, first published in 1979, through its main-sequence sequels (both also Gaylaxic Spectrum Awards Hall of Fame winners) The Door Into Shadow and The Door Into Sunset, to 2018's and 2019's interstitial Tales of the Five novels, The Levin-Gad and The Landlady. The collection also includes such otherwise hard to find short works as Lior and the Sea and the two current volumes of the "Sirronde's World" group, The Span and Parting Gifts.* And finally, it also includes the Middle Kingdoms novelette Overdue (Tales of the Middle Kingdoms #2), and the short Young Wizards work Owl Be Home For Christmas.

All that for $19.99? Seriously, I need my head felt. So please go validate my mental state and go buy the package. ...And happy Pride!

(Meanwhile, a project for the course of the month is to put all the queer, bi, and/or ace characters in my various series into that shot. That bridge should be a little more crowded by the time I'm done...) 😏

Alt versions

compare how they react to remembering they were forced onto the ship:

in the book, he stands around in numb ashamed shock at his cowardice for a minute before deciding, against rocky's better judgement, that they should voluntarily subject the hail mary to a six g force again to get the lab equipment up and running instead of just waiting eleven days to get back to the blip-A, and it hurts him a lot and he ends up passing out from it. he locates the problem in his memory as being that he was too caught up in concern for his own wellbeing, so he tries to counterbalance it by opting to do something bizarrely personally risky so they can get back to work more quickly. his refrain in his memories is "I don't want to die."

it did seem to me like the movie!grace we see who's so so unsure of himself must be pretty different from the him further in the past, a guy we know called out prominent scientists in his field by name to insult them and even declared one a staggering waste of carbon—at a conference, so presumbaly face-to-face, and in front of a crowd. i've been of the belief that the fallout from all that, combined with his already being in a bad place mentally when it happened, ended up just totally shattering his self-esteem/self-confidence.

he says at the meeting after the explosion: "some people are failures," and he was surely thinking about how his stance on non-water-based life forms (and his actions in defense of it) led to his disgraced exit from academia AND seemed to be proven wrong by astrophage, which had seemed to have all the makings of a lifeform that would finally prove him right.

but what i think is extra interesting (especially in relation to this post) is his next line: "some people don't rise to the challenge." i do wonder if he's still thinking a bit about his life in academia there, sitting underneath the obvious and current challenge of giving up his life.

movie!grace has a few moments were we see him express anger externally: something crosses a line and ticks him off and he screams and hits inanimate objects about it. important to note, I think, that he's never screaming at anyone, the objects he smacks around are mostly his own, and that the one time he does it in front of other people and in someone else's space that he keeps the physical stuff confined to a trash bin and cools down a little before taking to anyone and apologizes afterwards, broadly showing that he's not trying to be aggressive and genuinely does just have a short fuse. combined with the lack of any "I was on my way out of the field and wanted to leave with a bang" lines, it reads to me like he just lost his temper in a really bad way in a public professional setting. he wasn't looking for an opportunity to get out, he had a visible acute breakdown and lost his job. and he remembers that whole episode as "I was fired for standing by what I wrote" instead of something like "I was fired for making a scene at a conference and severing all my professional connections," locating the problem as being that he stood up for himself in the first place.

i'm taking my kid to mcm comic con this saturday! so, naturally, i've thrown together a human!Rocky cosplay based off @nakakabaliw's fucking incredible design. it's not perfect but i'm happy considering it's my very first cosplay and i pulled it together in under a week!

tattoos! the constellation is vulpecula (little fox) and there's a red tau under it - i'm headcanoning that Rocky got them for Grace after the mission <3

hand sewn mission patch! bit botchy but i'm super proud of it! i made a name patch and a purple musical note as well!