Chapter 3 is finished if you want to take a look.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/74056936/chapters/193205621
Now onto Chapter 4.
What I like to do when working on my story is getting to a core idea and then thread them with things from Star Wars, History, and recent events.
In this research, I am working with the core idea of love.
Being someone who has worked in theatre for a decade, has stage managed stories from my own culture and others, and being autistic, patterns of why things are the way they are are not something I thought as a problem to solve, but an understanding and a discovery.
Love is one of those things that is the glue of civilisation. Without it, we wouldn't be here. In a world right now where we have to become an academic to be "allowed" to have an opinion on something fundamentally human, I learn what humanity was, but learning the stories told through people, not books... I also had dyslexia in the 90s and parents who were nonexistent, so reading and writing didn't come naturally to me, but listening and observing did. I had to because it was a survival mechanism, because the love I was given was access to things, but not the love of being known.
I am a millennial and had boomer parents, and even though I love a good roast on them, that access was their love and when we would question it or want more or something else, THAT was seen as a problem and not a failure on their part, but ours. If you can't be grateful for letting you live in my house, then you can leave.
Then, as millennials, we had been raised by media that had stories of love where someone sees you and loves you "just the way you are" and that was what a lot of us wanted from our parents. To be known so when we go out and find someone to love we want to give that kind of love back, but... Well, that didn't happen.
From my lived experience, there was a separation of people, of all groups, and they started to mythologise eachother, and a lot of influences of fascist ideas popped out that were subtle at first.
But this sort of attack on what love is, who gets to, and why religion seems to control it or use it. Is because it is something humans NEED to survive.
To me, love was not just romantic, and honestly, I don't even know what romantic love is anymore. For me, having someone care for me and about me is what I deem as love, because I wouldn't love them back if they didn't. Love is unconditonal is, only if maybe your partner was some religious figure in the sky. But they are not. They are human, and you can't love unconditionally because the conditions are you have to love back for anything to work.
The reason why right now people are so divided is that love has been marketed to us, and the practice of it is clinical. So for Chapter 4, I am looking at historical stories from multiple cultures about love, before empires and before colonisation, to get a sense of how love was always within us and we lost the translation of it through modernising into something complicated.
