#braid au

trick or treat !! 👻👻

omg the braid au 🧡

ok so we've talked a lot about the braid au and obi-wan and anakin's relationship so i'm gonna take a moment to think about another aspect of it:

anakin gets ahsoka as his padawan and she has the standard bead chain of all padawans who don't have hair...and he's fine with that cause he's wary of ahsoka and the whole obligation of a padawan in the first place

but after a few months, he switches her singular chain of beads out with several strings of beads interwoven together in a fashion that looks maybe....coincidentally familiar. ahsoka loves it cause it's so much cooler than anything her friends have in their stupid hair and she knows it means that her master has fully accepted her <3

and obi-wan squints at it and takes a sneaky picture and sends it to shmi, and shmi is like yeah that's a braid we use for children under our care who aren't ours. it's similar to the style anakin has with elements of the colors of your beads

and obi-wan is like oh! haha ok for a second i thought maybe he was formally adopting her as his child but if she's just under his care, that's alrigh--

and shmi is like no i mean like under his care forever. adopted and part of his family. the green bead at the very end signifies first child too, so he's probably expecting he'll have more.

and obi-wan hangs up the phone lol

AHHHHH THANK YOU!!!! I'm glad I met you too Non!!! 😭😭😭 you're such a cool person and i can't BELIEVE you're one of my friends like!!! FRIENDS AUWHGJDSH!!!! i'm so glad we share brainrot and thank you for being an awesome author and having awesome stories

also maybe here's some art i made today for this ask....

braidinnit standing in the snow angst

ahhh tatooine braid au my beloved….🥺

This would never happen because obi-wan is oblivious but not like a huge idiot and he would feel wrong doing it, but can you imagine how indignant anakin would be if obi-wan tried to pick up a guy or girl for a night while WEARING HIS MARRIAGE BRAIDS!!!!!!

maybe in a scenario where obi-wan has figured out what anakin did and he’s trying to get anakin to admit to it by pushing him to the edge of his sanity, he fakes picking up a dude and anakin is Distraught.

So distraught that Obi-Wan can’t go through with even fake going through with it. He decides it doesn’t matter if anakin doesn’t confess to marrying him. He asks the (crying) boy if he would like him to braid his own good fortune braids into his hair

you know what i do not think about tatooine cultural braids au enough honestly i think i still remember one sentence i wrote for the original ficlet pretty much verbatim lol: "maybe it's different for jedi. maybe they weave the braid and the love comes later." i was pretty proud of that

no but imagine in the braid au, quinlan and obi-wan's friends make fun of him because he's trying really hard to grow his hair out as fast as possible so that his baby padawan can play with it and practice his braids so he's invested all of his monthly stipend on hair care products and now whenever they go out for space coffee someone has to pay for him until next month when he'll get another stipend or something

and they're all like 'oooo you know, obi, attachment to one's hair is very unjedi-like. do you think you'd cry if someone cut it off?'

and obi-wan is like 'that person would lose their hands' very calmly and pleasantly because he wouldn't care and that's the sort of prank they've pulled on each other before but anakin would cry and obi-wan wants to avoid that with everything in him.

anyway tho one day vos drops by unannounced and lets himself in, and he sees obi-wan sitting on the floor, datapad in his lap, with baby padawan anakin kneeling up behind him with his tiny tongue sticking out as he tries to recreate all the braids he can remember.

oh, vos is still gonna make fun of obi-wan (he's the main reason obi-wan gets such a reputation for being so prim and well-manicured), but next undercover mission he goes on, he stops by tatooine and asks if anyone will show him some of the braids so he can take a holo video for a kid he knows who's from here, mos espa, and doesn't remember all of them.

(this picture!)

omg that hair style is perfect for the braid au tbh if general kenobi came blazing towards me looking like that, i'd surrender to him lightning fast

i love the emphasis of the braids on the left side of his head i know wedding rings on the left finger isn't necessarily a star wars thing, but it would be super cool if the same general concept applied so even from afar anyone who knew about the Tatooine braids would know that obi-wan was married

("don't these feel off-balance, dear one? all on one side of my head?"

oooo rip me my b i never expanded but in my head when anakin's like 19/20 and finally allowed to go with obi-wan to fight as a jedi knight, obi-wan leaves anakin on the ship and wanders around a spaceport and someone's like 'oh congratulations on your marriage,' and obi-wan is like '????? im sorry???????' and the stranger is like 'those are marriage braids in your hair--'

and obi-wan is like oh sorry for the miscommunication. you see, my padawan braided these for me. he's from tatooine. they're meant to be braids that bring good fortune to the wearer.'

and the stranger is like 'that's wild i was a slave in mos espa for years and those are definitely marriage braids, meant to tie two souls together forever so that upon death they will be reunited.'

and obi-wan is like. 'huh. alright. i have to go right now immediately. thank you.'

obi-wan's going to ask because it's about anakin and he's very very used to being the prime authority to and around anakin at this point so as soon as something about anakin changes (his naughty child braid) obi-wans there like 'what is this? what is this what is this in my padawan's hair why was i not informed of a change to my padawan's hair what is this'

and then he realizes like a few seconds later that actually when anakin's mom's around maybe like. maybe she's the prime authority over anakin now and also that anakin is probably at the age to be the prime authority over himself (preposterous)

and he's like 'never mind' and shmi finds his backtracking so adorable that she pretends to not even have heard the question which is also the best kindness she could ever give to her naughty child anakin at this point, who wears the braid the entire time they're on tatooine

even though he's the oldest by about a decade to have that braid in AND all the other kids (ages 5-10) are pointing and laughing at him

i feel like obi-wan goes through literally every emotion under the sun on his walk back to their ship. he misses it twice, purely by accident, because he's thinking through all the implications.

by the time he walks up the ramp anakin's like omg master it's been hoooouuurrrrssss where have you been and he reveals he knows about the marriage

and anakins blushing and mortified and he's like .......are you mad?

and obi-wan's like. 'no'

and anakin's like 'are you gonna take the braids out? 🥺'