#woswweek

Kanan was happy to get in a bar fight for a stupid reason. But a good reason was always preferred. Hera's honor was a great reason. The subjugation of an entire gender and species was even better.

Inspired by a comment response of @worriedaboutmyfern on Fade to Black and Back (you should go read the comments, she hides great meta there)

Women of Star Wars Appreciation Week

If all you do is fight for your own life then your life is worth nothing.

Women of Star Wars Appreciation Week

Somebody has to save our skins!

Women of Star Wars Appreciation Week

You know, you two have more in common than you think. It’s no wonder you get along so well.

Women of Star Wars Appreciation Week has ended. We want to thank you all for participating with such amazing works that honored ladies from every corner of the galaxy!

We will keep reblogging works posted in the tags #woswaw and #woswweek for the next few weeks.

Cross stitch my sister made for me for Christmas a couple years ago

Allow me to wax eloquent over how much I adore Jaina Solo. When I first started reading Star Wars books, and therefore first started actually really caring about Star Wars, I was 13. My brother owned a bunch of Star Wars books and he recommended them to me. I jumped around a lot at first and basically skipped all of the 90s Bantam stuff and went straight into New Jedi Order. Where practically the first character I’m introduced to is Jaina Solo. She had brief (very very brief) appearances in one or two of the other books I had read (namely the Thrawn books), but Vector Prime was the first time she actually had a substantial role for me. 

Unlike basically every other character in the books, she was only three years older than me. She was smart, witty, confident, friendly, skilled both as a pilot and mechanic and as a Jedi, she was basically everything I aspired to be at that age (except the Jedi part I never cared about that bit). I read through NJO impatiently waiting for Jaina to make another appearance. I loved Balance Point in a heartbreaking kind of way and Dark Journey remains to this day, and will remain until the day I fucking die, my absolute favorite book. 

Jaina was everything I wanted to be, but she also wasn’t perfect. She was brash, often impatient, completely unwilling to ever back down, her guilt and grief consumed her at times, and as time went on she feared intimacy of any kind more and more because of the added grief it might bring her. But she also figured out how to move past her problems. She realized her faults, realized how she had failed, and then figured out how to make up for it. She started to let people back in, to let those that love her help her through her problems. As a teenager, the narratives that always drew me in were the ones where the heroine was able to acknowledge and accept what was happening to her and then figure out how to make her situation work for herself and for everyone around her. Jaina fit that narrative to a tee. 

Of course, my all consuming love of Jaina Solo means that when I read the Dark Nest Trilogy I flipped my ever loving shit with hatred for Troy Denning and everything he chooses to be. Bug sex. Bug sex with Zekk. That’s all I’m gonna say. And then the Legacy of the Force series happened. And Jaina was so thoroughly and disgracefully sidelined for Jacen’s manpain. Even if they were going to do the whole Jacen falls to the Dark Side thing, they should have given Jaina and equal amount of page time to really properly highlight the chooses the made and the path that those chooses brought them to. Wedging Jaina in in the last book or two of a nine book series was BULLSHIT. 

And then I started my Massive Star Wars Reread and baby Jaina is what’s gotten me through a number of truly awful books (Crystal Star and literally anything written by Kevin J. Anderson (who is a fucking MENACE)). From the very beginning, Jaina has been an amazing character. She has always been confident and smart and willing to help everyone around her. She has always been such a bright, cheerful child with an amazing relationship with her brothers (seriously Denning first you kill Anakin then you fuck the twins up in DNT meet me in the fucking pit) and with her father, and a very complicated relationship with her mother. She is determined, resourceful, and so very kind. Even as an adult, she is still everything I want to be. She is, without a doubt, one of the best, most under appreciated (esp by the men in-universe the fuck ups) characters in the entire franchise.