#tind updates

One of my favorite Star Wars quotes is from Kenobi. “Jedi cannot help what they are. Their compassion leaves a trail. The Jedi code is like an itch. He cannot help it.” has always really highlighted characters like Obi-Wan and Ahsoka. But you’ve also really shown how it defines Cal too. He can’t help his compassion and desire to do what’s right. He’s so full of love, far more so than he is full of rage, which is what makes Cal extraordinary.

dear reader you have no way of knowing this but i have a section at the end of my word doc which is just my paste bin for anything i think is relevant or might become relevant to TIND and that exact quote is in there. sometimes i would scroll down to stare at it while brainstorming because i loved it that much, at htis point is a load bearing quote upon which my jedi characterisations hinge.

Cal to me is always a tricky character to get right, in part because we have a lot less content to base his character off of compared to characters like Obi-Wan, Anakin, and Ahsoka, but also because he’s always existing in the strange point between rage and serenity.

He has an extremely strong, raw connection to the force and has gained a deep understanding of himself through that connection. But he’s also a character that struggles with his anger and despair over what the Empire has made his life. He’s a soldier and a warrior and traumatized by the blood he’s soaked in. His struggle with the dark side in Survivor is a direct result of that rage and pain. It’s hard to write a character with such deep empathy and compassion but also such visceral rage and capacity for violence.

Anyway yapping aside, I wanted to say I think you do a fantastic job characterizing and understanding a very complex character. Can’t wait to read the rest of your fic!

this is so sweet and thank you so so much for getting in contact with me to tell me what you thought, it means a lot to me <3

i agree so much for what you say about cal's charecterisation, especially since there's also just so much more extended material with ahsoka, anakin and obi-wan to draw from i usually find it easier to write for them than i do cal even though they are all complex characters in their own right.

i'm really glad you liked the way i wrote him! i'm still not completely certain in some of the choices i've made, and i do hope to make his psychometry more important in the future because i really think its something he himself considers a massive part of who he is and at least part of what informs his deep empathy. his control or lack thereof over what he can and can't see means that his understanding of boundaries is probably skewed but at the same time he has a deep awareness of other people's emotional state and dislikes causing discomfort to the poeple he cares about so how he navigates that is something i'm personally really interested in. plus a whole extra sense is almost lovecraftian to me and i think it works really well as a worldbuilding elment for the jedi religion.

and at an emotional level cal can still be remarkably flexible, and i really appreciate the games for making his lighter moments feel just as believable as his darker ones. they handled the story with so much tact that even now i'm still thinking about the bode fight at the end of survivor, that moment of silence before cal shoots bode the second time to execute him where you can feel him thinking about it and still choose to pull the trigger - it wasn't a mistake during a passionate moment, it wasn't self defense, the duel was over by that point and bode was already defeated. it was cal deciding with full awareness that bode was too dangerous to be kept alive and killing him dead. such a powerful moment because you both really feel that cal was justified in doing it and that it was a moment where he crossed over a line he can't step back from, and i think (hope) that's something they'll build upon in the third game.

I'll be honest, I haven't worked on it for months now. I'm really sorry for leaving all my readers in a lurch! but real life issues + the pressure of writing for such a big audience got to me and is still getting to me. I started the story with only a vague plan in mind for how it would go and changed it completely several times while writing, so even i'm not sure how i would wrap it up and it would take an amount of time and effort to continue it now that i just don't have enough of atm.

One thing that became more obvious in my reread that I feel like I neglected last time is how terribly young Cal is. Not just ten year old baby Cal but how young Cal was when he died. Quinlan Vos touched on it briefly but for all Cal amusing over being so young…he was just eighteen. That’s nothing. That’s not even an adult really. Add in the way his development was so stunted from Order 66… It’s just devastating. And it’s even more devastating to think if Cal succeeds and saves Anakin from himself then he’s the only one that experienced a genuinely dystopian future.

Anyway will this to say I’m amazed how you show us time and time again how fucking lonely Cal is without outright saying it. He’s surrounded by people who care for him but he’s utterly alone and that’s never really going to change.

thank you so much for getting in contact again!! you flatter me so much i'm literally blushing reading this <3

I always wanted to strike that balance between making Cal seem young enough to not be immediately suspicious to those around him but also old enough to be genuinely capable, which ironically is also the exact same thing Cal has to balance in the world of the fic. I think Cal probably never thought about his own youth much in the first timeline, which might be why it doesn't come up much in TIND since a lot of it is from his perspective, but i had originally planned to devote a few chapters to fleshing out his childhood on Bracca and how that forced him to grow up faster than he really should have, though it didn't end up working out. taking a massive screaching halt to the already admittedly slow moving story to do a flashback sequence started pissing me off, never mind what the readers would have felt about it lol.

that last part is something i really really wanted to hammer home, and i think i had ideas of it from the very first chapter. Cal will never return to that time and place, and even the people he might have known will never again be those people because of his direct interference. Cal's best case scenario is making sure no one ever experiences what he has experienced, and in doing he ensures that no one else will ever truly understand him. even Quinlan can't ever really 'get it', and that's both a tragedy and a cause for celebration.