#terra-7

A Sith Lord’s First Thranta Ride, or: How the Commander Learned About Lana’s Fear of Heights

“This will only take a minute,” said the Commander, consulting her map. “Just a quick jet over to Wardpost Luurdes to drop off this package, then we can head back to the ship.” 

“Very well.” Lana clasped her hands behind her back. “When does the next speeder to Luurdes depart?” 

“Actually…” The Commander motioned with her head toward the shuttle depot. Or what, by all rights, should have been a shuttle depot. “Looks like we’re taking a thranta.” 

The barest frown creased Lana’s forehead. “A what?” 

As though in response, an enormous bird-lizard-whale creature at the depot raised its head, emitting a lowing sound with enough earsplitting vigor to empty every tomb on Korriban. Which was halfway across the galaxy. 

“That?” Lana said. Her face paled to the sickly shade of blue milk. 

“Yep. It’ll be fun!” the Commander said cheerfully. “We might even make better time by thranta than we would by speeder. Look at the wingspan on that thing!”

“But…is that where we’re supposed to sit?” Lana indicated the vaguely saddle-shaped piece of leather strapped to the creature’s back. 

“Looks like. Ready to hop on?” Before she’d even finished the sentence, the Commander sprang gracefully onto the thranta’s back, feet finding the stirrups as though she’d been born in them. 

“Commander, if I may.” Lana cleared her throat, edging several steps back from the depot. “This does not seem to be the wisest course of action.” 

“What do you mean?” The Commander frowned. “It’s a routine package drop-off.” 

“Not the delivery,” Lana said. “The…mode of transport.” 

“Hold on.” The Commander leaned forward, perfectly at ease even as the massive creature shifted beneath her. “Can it be that Lana Beniko, Sith Lord, leading member of the galaxy-saving Alliance, is afraid of flying?”

“Don’t be absurd,” Lana said, but her eye twitched.

“Look,” the Commander said with a smile. “If you can survive everything we’ve been through up to this point, this short thranta ride will be a piece of Kowakian crumb cake. You trust me, right?” 

Lana huffed out a short breath. “You know I do.” 

“Then hop on.” The Commander gathered the reins in one hand and beckoned with the other. “Just one word of advice, though.”

Lana swallowed, swinging her leg over the thranta’s wide girth. “What?”

I have to say Vetra! Her being a squadmate is something of a dream come true for me. In the original trilogy, at least up until ME 3, there were virtually no female aliens aside from the asari and Tali. Every single turian/salarian/krogan/etc that the player encountered were all dudes, which was a little strange to say the least. The writing team tried to come up with cultural or story reasons to explain the lack of female salarians and krogan, but there was never anything that addressed the mysterious absence of all female turians. It was a depressing example of “male is default, female is an afterthought unless existing solely for sex appeal.” Especially when you had BioWare employees saying breathtakingly dense things in interviews like “how do you make a female turian? Slap boobs and lipstick on her?”

So, to finally have female turians populating the Mass Effect universe is exciting enough! To have one as an actual bona fide squadmate is something that I honestly never would have even dreamed possible six or seven years ago. 

Certainly, and thanks for asking! I know other people have already articulated this more eloquently than I could, but to put a bit more of a personal spin on it, all the things implicit in “welcome home” basically summarize the main reason I ship this pairing so hard.

I’m a total sucker for pairings that pull one or both characters out of their comfort zone, so to speak. In other words, a character has an established pattern/belief/behavior/etc, but then they meet someone who completely turns that on its head, who makes them act differently or see the world differently than they did before. “I thought things were this way, but then you came along and you’re the exception.”

That’s essentially what happens with Jyn and especially with Cassian. Cassian is introduced as a hard-edged spy who will make the hard decisions and do whatever it takes to get the job done. He’s been in the Rebellion since childhood, so fighting and shutting out emotions is essentially all he’s ever known. Literally our first introduction to his character shows him murdering another member of the Alliance—one of his own men!—in order to make sure the information about the Death Star isn’t compromised.

And yet, he’s not heartless or dead inside, which would have been a really easy path to take with his character. Immediately after he shoots the other Alliance spy, you can see on his face that he hated having to do it. But he did it anyway, because he believed it was necessary. This is clearly a guy who will leave people behind when he needs to, even if he doesn’t want to.

But then Jyn comes along, and Cassian WILL NOT leave her. Even when he knows he should, even when he would have left anyone else. Jyn essentially exhausted her usefulness to the Alliance on Jedha once they were captured by Saw and his rebels. Her only purpose there was to get them in Saw’s front door; after that, it would have been much more efficient to just leave her there, even if the whole place hadn’t been in the process of being blown to smithereens by the Death Star.

Yet Cassian, entirely contrary to his established pattern of behavior, risks everything including his own life to go back for her. Then on Eadu, he does it again. The Alliance airstrike on the base had the potential to eliminate not only an Imperial weapons engineering facility itself, but also Galen Erso (prominent weapons designer,) and Krennic (weapons director). You’d think that would be a significant win for the Alliance, but Cassian freaks out and tries to call off the strike. And his reason isn’t “Galen Erso might actually be on our side” or “this will draw unwanted Imperial attention to the Alliance” or anything like that. It’s “Jyn’s on that platform.”

Then even after the Alliance hits the base anyway, and for all Cassian knows Jyn is already dead or about to be, he still runs headlong onto the platform to go get her anyway. And it’s not as though he’s abandoning logic and reasoning this entire time, either. In the novelization, even as he rushes toward the platform, he’s thinking, “even if we make it out of here, we’ll probably still be stuck on this planet because our ship is scrap.” But it doesn’t matter. Everything in him has to get to Jyn, regardless.

And then let’s not even get into the third time Cassian fights past everything to get to Jyn, after he’s been shot at least once and fallen like thirty feet and been knocked unconscious. He can’t even walk unsupported, but he somehow climbs up a huge vertical shaft with swinging trap-door things and gets there just in time to keep Jyn from being shot. Like at this point you’re expecting soaring, swelling violin music every time he so much as looks at her. What the heck won’t this guy do in order to get to Jyn?

So, all of that by itself would be enough to make my shippy heart melt, but that’s not even all. Because Cassian is Jyn’s exception, too. Her whole life has been marked by loss and by others not being there for her. People always leave her, one way or another—either through death or through being pressed into Imperial service or through flat-out abandonment. It’s no wonder she’s a little on the bitter, jaded side. She’s learned she has only herself to rely on, because other people aren’t going to come through for her. They’re going to leave her.

But then she meets Cassian, and he doesn’t leave her. Time after time, even when it would be in his better interests to leave her (and in the Rebellion’s better interests to leave her), he refuses to. They’re like two halves of the same coin, or like two pieces of a puzzle snapping together. She was the one who never had anyone to get close to because they all kept leaving her, and he was the one who kept himself locked up for the sake of the cause and wouldn’t let himself get close to anyone besides a reprogrammed Imperial droid. But then they crossed each other’s paths, and that all went out the window.

To me, that’s what “welcome home” means. For them, home isn’t a place, it’s each other. It’s them finally finding their exception.

Is there a ship that makes your skin crawl?

@terra-7 also asked for this one! There have been plenty over the years, yes. Currently, though, I don’t think there’s any one particular ship that’s especially hitting my squick button. I think in recent years I’ve started to get better at curating my fandom experience so that I’m exposed less to the stuff that makes me mad or upset. I’m more selective about the blogs I follow or visit, and I use Tumblr Savior liberally to filter out ships I don’t like. 

More generally speaking, ships that involve things like underage participants or incest definitely make my skin crawl. I know there are fandoms out there--including some I’ve been in--where huge portions of the fandom are massively into incest ships, but that is not my thing at all. 

Name a ship that deserved more content.

I’m greedy and think all my ships deserve more content! But certainly some are far more blessed than others in that area. Off the top of my head, I would have loved to see more content for my two rarest pairings, Kuvira/Baatar and Nathaniel/Velanna. There was some really great Kuvira/Baatar art back in the day, but most of it was produced by a small handful of people. And there was even less fic. Same goes for Nate/Velanna--a fanbase small in number, but big on dedication. ;)

Is there a ship you feel gets undeserved hate in fandom?

All my ships are perfect and any hate any of them get is undeserved. *nods firmly* But in all seriousness, this goes back to my answer for number 10: I try my very hardest to avoid ship hate altogether, because I’m the type of person who will literally spend all day in a funk if I see someone hating on a ship I like, and life’s too short for that. If I see someone posting hate for a ship/character in its tag, I block them right then and there. For me, it’s one strike and you’re out. Now that I’m old and cranky I have a much lower BS tolerance than I did in my younger fandom days. :p

Is there a ship that made you realize something about yourself?

Hi! Thank you so much! Has it really been over a year?! Wow. Sometimes it feels like I’ve been working on this book forever. As far as how the story’s evolved, I don’t want to give away too much, just in case. ;) But it definitely has undergone some significant changes, in both setting and characters. Initially I envisioned the whole story taking place on a near-future Earth, but I eventually changed it so that part of the action happens on a distant colonized planet, to give it more of a sci-fi flair. 

The other big change was that I made my two main characters sisters. I always knew the story was going to be about two young women of similar ages on opposite sides of a core conflict, but originally they weren’t related. But family relationships/expectations/obligations etc is a major theme in the story, so eventually I realized that making the two protagonists estranged sisters would both highlight that theme and amp up the tension. I also gave their mother a much more significant role in the climax than she had originally.