Orockthro

With all the “what-if” Star Wars comics they did, you’d think Luke and Leia being switched at birth would have been done by now.

“We’ll take the boy,” Bail Organa says to Obi-wan Kenobi, “my wife and I have always dreamed of having a little boy.” And Obi-wan nods and gathers the tiny, squalling girl into his arms and heads for his ship.

“Exile for us then, eh?” he says quietly, soothing, but the girl still screams. Her brother was quiet, serious, even moments after birth. But she is full of fire. “Oh, do be quiet, Leia,” Obi-wan says wearily, but he’s smiling. And she suddenly stops crying and stares back at him with a steely gaze as if she’s realizing she’ll get farther with less dramatics. “Your mother was just as brilliant,” he says dryly and sets course for Tatooine.

She grows up loved, yes, but it’s a harsh world, this endless desert, and she soaks some of that into her skin. Luke would have been softer, the sand grinding his harsh edges down, but Leia is ignited by the heat of this world, and she glows like fire. She grows up angry (this does not change), and she grows up ready. For what, she’s not sure, but she’s ready. She takes her speeder into town and gets into bar fights. She flies out to the Jutland Wastes and tangles with sand people and old Ben Kenobi comes in and saves her on more than one occasion–not that she needs saving. She leans on her stun-rifle, self-satisfied grin on her face, sand people unconscious at her feet. “What?” she asks Kenobi, grin tilting over the edge into mischievous, “I can take care of myself.”

“I know,” he says, world-weary, resigned. “Your father was the same.”

He tells her about Anakin, the best fighter pilot in the galaxy–“I always knew he wasn’t a spice merchant, like Uncle Ben said,” Leia crows triumphantly–the fighter, the Jedi, the friend. He hesitates, but can’t bring himself to tell her what happened to him. “Vader killed him,” he says, and it’s not a total lie, but Leia’s eyes narrow and her head tilts to one side. She’s shrewd. She knows it’s not the whole truth. “You’re a lot like him,” Kenobi says sadly. “You share a fire.”

She wants to come to Mos Eisley with him. Her brother would have accepted that he needed to get home, that he was in enough trouble as it is, but Leia wants off this rock. She wants to use her fire, wants to learn how to be a Jedi, wants to change the world (this does not change), and the soft strength of the boy in the hologram begging for aid just stokes her fires. “He needs help,” she says to Kenobi, “and I’m going to help him. It’s my droid, anyway.”

Prince Luke of Alderaan has his own fire, but it’s quiet, a hearth compared to her bonfire (this does not change), but he’s brave and strong and he draws her into his fight for the galaxy as easily as pulling her in for a hug. She’s comfortable around him without explanation, and she can’t help but love him and his adorable hope and optimism. “I’m a senator,” he says, shrugging, “I have to believe there’s a better way. A better galaxy. That there’s still good out there” She laughs, but claps him on the shoulder.

“Okay,” she says, “let’s go find that good.”

She’s still in charge (this does not change), and she’s still the one to save their skins over and over, because no matter what world Leia grows up on, she’s good with a blaster, good at the pilot’s controls, and the only one quick enough to fix the plans that go awry. She’s backed this time by years of back alley scraps in Tashi Station instead of senate floor debates. But they made her just as furious, just as brilliant. She still takes after her father, and Luke still takes after their mother. But it’s more pronounced, more obvious. Kenobi watches and worries.

But he didn’t have to worry. Leia on Degobah is determined, fierce in her studies, desperate to cultivate her control of the Force. Yoda worries–“Much anger, there is in you, much hate for the Empire.”

“What do you expect?” she snaps. “They murdered a planet, and they would have murdered more if we hadn’t stopped them. They’re horrible.”

“Do not let this anger control you,” Obi-wan says from beyond the grave, but she just shrugs. “Vader was consumed by his anger, and it led him to the Dark Side.”

“Well, then, it’s a good thing I’m not him,” she says, gritting her teeth as she lifts the X-Wing from the marsh and sets it on dry land with nothing but the Force. “I will never be him.”

There is more than one way to channel anger. Leia channels hers into love (this does not change), and when she goes to save her friends, when she goes to save her father, it’s her furious love for them, for what she’s protecting, that burns with the fire of Tatooine’s twin suns. She grew up in a blazing desert, soaking in the heat of two stars and all the love her uncle and aunt could muster, and she lets that radiate out of her until she glows.

The news from @organafinn that Lando might not make an appearance in the next series has me fuming.  He was so damn important in Episode 5 and Episode 6.   I wonder if no one understand this.  

Lando Calrissian by the time he got involved was no longer a rogue.  He wasn’t a smuggler.  He was an administrator of a small mining colony.   He was management.   His days were taken up resolving the small bureaucratic snafus that every institution encounters.   The toilets are down on level 12.  The cafe workers want a raise.  Someone keeps feeding the space rats in processing.  It wasn’t glamorous work, but it was important to a little part of the galaxy.  To his part.

Then suddenly, a black-plastic clad nightmare shows up and threatens everything he had worked for for the last five, ten, twenty years?  All the people who look for him to leadership.   He was  not a teen farm boy from Bumfuck, Tatoonie, or a smuggler who runs from the law every other day, or a Space Princess.  He’s a guy who’s biggest problem last year was a failing generator that no one wanted to pay to fix.  He was a bureaucrat with a good smile, a nice handshake, and a desire to just get the work done, because someone had to do it.   He didn’t know how to deal with Sith Lords.   He didn’t want to know how to deal with Sith Lords.  He wanted his mine to turn a profit with no one getting hurt.

Lando Calrissian is me.  Or what I hoped to be.

You know when I knew that?  When he shouted “They told me it was fixed!  It’s not my fault!”   Because I’ve said the same thing before with the same intonation.  I wasn’t running from Stormtroopers, but it certainly felt the same.

And when the Empire, the pumped-up fascist shitkickers who think they have the right to stomp into his little corner of the galaxy and destroy the thing he’d worked on for decades – he went and rescued his friend and then blew up their battle station.  

Fantasy fulfilled.  

I’m not endorsing anything but software here. Just providing some lazy tech support. Feel free to ask if you need any help.

Reduce the amount your browser tells servers about you:

https://www.privacytools.io/

Tor:

https://www.torproject.org/

Secure chat:

Signal (Android)

Signal (iOS)

Tox (pretty much every platform)

VPN: Both of these accept paypal, prepaid credit cards and bitcoin:

NordVPN (My choice)

Windscribe

Others

2FA (two factor authentication):

Noble but worthless, if the government wants to read your email, they will. They don’t log in like you or me, they get access to the server or put a box in the rack that server lives in and listen to everything it sends and receives.

:edit: A great addition about securing the contents of your mail. 

Self destructing email: 10minutemail (recieve only) GuerrillaMail (allows send)

What the fuck are these things?