#srg.txt

don’t think about obi-wan standing in the temple he’s known all his life, head bowed, surrounded by broken codes and broken trust and broken bodies. don’t think about him wondering what he could possibly say. if there are even any jedi left to hear it.

don’t think about him saying do not return to the temple, when he knows he is leaving it for the last time; when obi-wan says that time has passed, don’t wonder if he remembers correcting the younglings’ stance, if they beamed at him with awe and chirped thank you, master kenobi! don’t imagine his eyes closing briefly with pain, remembering wry gossip with aayla secura and warm conversations with mace windu over tea.

don’t think about the fact that obi-wan doesn’t even know it’s anakin yet. he hasn’t seen the recording yet. these are the last minutes obi-wan will ever have in a world where anakin skywalker is still good, and he spends those minutes broadcasting hope to an empty sky.

don’t think about the ending. obi-wan says a new hope will emerge, and then he watches his padawan—his brother—his friend, slaughtering children with a lightsaber that has crashed against obi-wan’s a million times.

don’t think about any of this because obi-wan tries not to, either. when he sits underneath the setting suns, sinking into the force, don’t imagine him trying to let go: of his master, his order, his heritage, his lost love, his best friend.

may the force be with you, always, obi-wan said.

i love the sound a blaster makes when it goes off; the fwoosh of a lightsaber being swung; i love the noises x-wings make when they’re flying.

i love the dirty hallways of the millennium falcon, the air traffic on coruscant, the cantina band music playing as someone knocks back a few drinks.

i love the jedi. i just think they’re neat. i love the concept of the sith—passionate, powerful, dark side users who think they’re everything the jedi aren’t. and i love the characters, too?? leia’s fire, finn’s dedication, luke’s determination, obi-wan’s sheer goodness. they’re the type of characters our children’s children will be talking about.

i just also love how much people love star wars. comic readers, thrawn trilogy fans, clone wars and rebels lovers, prequel memers, sequel giffers, original trilogy childhood rememberers, lightsaber spinners, mandalorian watchers; hell, even the people who just went to batuu in disneyworld and had a good time. it’s a big galaxy, and there’s so many different ways to be a fan in it.

and the best part of all? there are still stories to be told, 44 years later.

like. ewan ‘has been a unicef ambassador for 16 years’ mcgregor?

ewan ‘casually wears a BLM shirt and bracelet on different occasions’ mcgregor??

ewan ‘turns down a tv appearance with piers morgan because of his anti-feminist remarks’ mcgregor???

ewan ‘recognizes the subtle, everyday nature of misogyny and says that men need to change’ mcgregor????

yeah, no. he knows what he’s doing.

okay, hear me out—in our world, at least, there are a bunch of different meanings for the colon in mathematics, and I am convinced that all of them are a perfect way to describe the twists and turns of Obi-Wan and Anakin’s immensely complicated relationship.

(preface: I’m no good at math so I’m combining this with my piddling mathematics knowledge, but!)

first of all, the colon can symbolize “ratio or odds, as in 2:1”. and I love thinking about the odds, the ratio, of Obi-Wan to Anakin—explicitly connected in the sense of being pitted against each other, of uncertainty and probabilities. hell, in the Revenge of the Sith novelization there’s a passage about how people love to try and guess who would win in an epic Kenobi v. Skywalker showdown. they’re a team, indubitably, but whether their endgame is being a team is uncertain and something that people, in-universe, would definitely like to know the odds of. (although we, of course, know how that ends...)

the colon can also mean “such that”, as in “the set of numbers x such that x>0”. I also adore this interpretation, because Anakin could 100% be described as the Jedi such that Obi-Wan is greater than zero, and vice versa. they make each other better, they always have. forgive me for pulling from the ROTS novelization again—it’s just too good—but Anakin is described as helping Obi-Wan learn to relax, and of course Obi-Wan is Anakin’s entire impulse control. they’ve learned so much from each other, revolve around the war together like tatooine’s twin suns.

which leads me to probably my favorite segment in this extremely weird meta: that the colon can be “part of the symbol A : = B, sometimes used to mean ‘A is defined as B’.” just—Obi-Wan being defined as Anakin, and Anakin being defined as Obi-Wan. master and padawan, fellow warriors, best friends—not reducing them simply to the sum of the other, but acknowledging that they are so inextricably linked that to an extent they are the other. the Force chose Anakin to bring balance to itself, and it chose Obi-Wan to bring balance to Anakin. if you need me I will be crying in the bathroom about Anakin:Obi-Wan.