Sith Shame Shack

absolutely going feral over your mythology series. I cannot stop thinking about Leia joining the rebellion. How did Vader react? How did the Emperor (bastard extraordinare) react?? You absolutely don’t have to answer this, but please know that I have brain rot for your writing once again <3

i really would love to write this!! i'm glad someone else is interested haha, because i think about this time a lot in this AU. so much of this AU exists in my head because my time to write has been eaten up (job, job, more job, local org stuff i'm involved in, i got two concussions right at the start of the year and i've had some ongoing health struggles, it's not fun lol) and this time period explains a lot of the dynamics that inform icarus, i just haven't had time to double back.

vader absolutely did not see leia's defection coming, and not only did this destroy his Evil Dad Plans (more on that later! i haven't written his POV quite yet, but i have reasons to believe a vader in such a universe is not quite as complacent in his position, and PERHAPS he was considering a space coup, perhaps!!) but it was quite a personal blow. i think he took for granted that luke and leia, given the choice, would choose him over anything else, because that's how vader thinks people should relate to their fathers and/or commanders. leia fleeing to the rebellion - because it really is her fleeing - is profoundly gutting, in much the same way luke choosing death over joining him in canon is. it creates a vader that's much more like how we see him in ROTJ - sullen, miserable, keeling to even things he was formerly strongly against. (like, he spends all of ESB desperate to have luke in his grasp, and the second palpatine yoinks him back in line, he's like oh too bad woe is me you're his now etc.)

my goal with this series was, like - to take pieces of canon and just twist them? so it's important to me that the progression feels like the OT. so losing leia renders him ROTJ era level pathetic, because he must go there before he can do the eleventh hour redemption shtick. i think during this time - because luke stays behind - luke develops a clearer picture of this precarious situation he grew up in, both because he's an older teenager now and that's just the age where you realize your parents have problems and now so do you, and because the boat has been rocked. part of the reason that he is the one who goes back for vader - and why the emperor's trap worked on him so well in icarus - is built here i think.

palpatine is..... not happy to say the least lol. weirdly, i think this AU might make vader's life very, very bad for a while, because luke and leia work together to destroy the death star. it represents vader's complete failure to indoctrinate them as either future sith lords or at the least supportive members of the empire, and given that leia's position was heir to the throne this is an embarrassing PR disaster in about every imaginable way. so not only (from palpatine's perspective) does vader fail to keep leia in line, and then later repeats that failure with luke, he failed so bad just generally that they actively chose to become terrorists and destroy palpatine's favorite toy. i am not going to lie i don't think the intervening years are Good (Yet Also Evil!) Fun Time for vader, who takes the brunt of palpatine's anger about anything, much less stuff he actually fucked up on the evil agenda.

i want to hear your hot takes about how leia handles the idea of darth vader as her biological father bc i remember a point you mentioned on a past post about how most depictions are really hard for you to get into (paraphrasing) and boy i could not agree more it is SO HARD for me to imagine any kind of family kinship like luke has w the guy. leia is not here for that. fuck that noise says leia. imo.

i struggle to get into most depictions because a lot of them depict a leia that relies on the weaknesses of her character, rather than the strengths; carrie fisher had a really damning criticism of how lucas wrote leia, where she says that, you know, leia's written to be the ultimate female badass, who is worthy and strong specifically because she takes no shit, but any deeper meaning is far from present. by the time of ROTJ, when she's going to presented as han's final love interest, leia has to be sufficiently separated from her stereotypically masculine traits - her clothes come off to remind you that she has sex appeal, her hair comes down to symbolize that she's unwinding and becoming more feminine and thusly less of the abrasive, bull-headed leia from the first two films.

there are a myriad of ways that people deal with the inherent misogyny of leia's writing, but the most popular one is to double down on that take-no-shit leia, who mouths off through ANH and ESB, as if the gestalt of her personality has to be this abrasiveness. and, like, i appreciate that, and being generally kind of an asshole is absolutely a cornerstone of leia's personality in the films; her first words to the guy here to rescue her are, "lmao, fucking manlet," and she tells tarkin he smells like ass and she calls han some variation of stupid about forty times a minute, and then calls chewbacca a "walking carpet." granted, leia's in pretty extreme circumstances - captured, tortured, and then subjected to the loss of alderaan all at once - but ESB kind of shows you that the more leia cares about someone or something, the more generally unbearable her personality becomes, the one exception being luke. it's really significant that the will-they-won't-they dynamic she has with han is all about leia caving and admitting that she has feelings for han - partially this is inherent misogyny, but as it is the text, i go for the interpretation that leia's abrasiveness and raging bitchmode attitudes are all about protecting her vulnerabilities, and that emotional intimacy intimidates her.

there are exceptions to this rule, naturally, and those exceptions prove that leia is way more compassionate than people really give her credit for. the way she cares for luke in ANH despite having lost not only her whole family but her whole planet is nothing short of awe-inspiring, that maybe she's just had the absolute worst handful of days in her life but her first instinct is to pick up someone else's pieces is nothing less than one of the most tender acts of kindness in the entire saga. the way she's gentle with luke after he loses a hand to vader in ESB, the way she holds him and wraps a blanket around him and resolves to get them the hell out of there, the way she says, "someone who loves you," to han in ROTJ, even the way she's really quite kind and playful with the ewoks in ROTJ, all of that speaks of someone who isn't an inch less compassionate than luke is, the saga just happens to not be about her going before the emperor.

the idea that leia's personality is solely cold as ice just isn't borne out by the way she acts in the films; she's not inherently angry, she's masking. her anger isn't a lack of compassion, but an overabundance of it that she seeks to hide. and a lot of the theories about how she might relate to vader as her biological father tend to rely more on the idea that leia's in some form inherently vengeful, when it's never indicated in the OT that she has any kind of vengeful tendencies; she has just tendencies. she strangles jabba with her own chains and it's the ultimate comeuppance for the crimes against sentient lives jabba has wrought. when she snipes at vader in ANH, all she says is the absolute, unbroken truth - that more people are going to turn to the rebellion the harder the empire tries to keep them in line.

that's not to say that i see leia forming a strong kinship with vader at all - far from it, and while i don't think leia is entirely without curiosity as to how her biological father ended up being darth vader, i don't think she has the same yearning that luke does to know their father, and vader's crimes against her personally are legion. she's not going to be instantly over that just because she shares blood with him. i am definitely not saying that, if i were writing it, leia would instantly want to form any kind of bond with vader. what i am saying is that i've seen a lot of takes that emphasize leia acting out of revenge, or acting inhumanely, or entirely unable to empathize with why luke wants his father so badly - but i think that forgets that leia, too, is an orphan who misses her parents, and that fundamentally she adores luke and is hugely invested in his wellbeing. so i think how she handles it has a name and it's luke, and at the end of the day, leia can't entirely resent something that has connected her so profoundly to her best friend. i think she sits somewhere between, "this is the most fucked up news possible," and then she looks at luke and it's like okay, but it's bearable.

Do you think that when the twins are little they would interrupt Vader on conference holocalls a la babies on Zoom

i honestly started writing up an answer that began with, "it really wouldn't happen," because i was fully prepared to write out a logical argument for why such a thing would never happen. the argument began, "it would be highly unprofessional (and terrible parenting)" and i had to pause, gather my bearings, and quickly realize that vader's idea of being professional is strangling his coworkers, and his idea of parenting is maiming.

that said, i don't think in any universe that vader raises both of the twins that he ever unaware of where they are. a) he has psychic powers, and b) he is batshit insane specifically about people he loves dying, are you kidding? he is not normal at all, and not willing to be. therefore my conclusion is: if the twins interrupt Evil Space Zoom Call, it is, absolutely, because vader deliberately allowed it. and we've established that he meets all conditions for allowing it.

i feel he would allow this in the following circumstances:

would Final Grandma Vader's Palpatine Prepper bunker be designed for trapping and killing the old man, like Laurie Strode's house in the new Halloweens? or would it be a safe house for him to lock himself and his loved ones inside to keep them safe?

GOD my confession is that i think final grandma vader fucking rocks. i'm ludicrously invested in this, it has everything, it has grandpappy vader (the funniest concept in all of star wars! family time with murder grandpa!) and bonding with the grandkids who are naturally trying to save the universe from absolute ruin and vader doing what vader does best, which is breaking shit. like somehow palpatine returned and somewhere in the galaxy vader's murder sub-routine goes [...] and kicks the fuck on in. there is a light in his eyes that hasn't been there since luke gently suggested mood stabilizers 20 years prior. (don't ask me how vader survives to 66. either a stiff wind will kill that man or he'd survive a nuclear winter to murder the younglings of the cockroach race that inherits the earth.)

choosing to believe the Palpatine Prepper Bunker is vader's old castle on mustafar, and 20 years of disuse has given everything a very post-apocalyptic fantastical vibe. and vader has designed naturally insane traps, but at least one of them is a trap door in the floor that leads to a tank of water, because quite frankly i think the idea that palpatine can accidentally electrocute himself with his own sith lightning might be really funny? like full on toaster in the bathtub protocol. the way fire is vader's weakness, water is palpatine's, and there's not even any traumatic backstory attached it's just that in full Unlimited Powahhhhh mode palpatine is reduced to a powerline in a lake. ideally for such a fic the trap that actually works is the fucking tank of water. hell yes

Do you think that when the twins are little they would interrupt Vader on conference holocalls a la babies on Zoom

i honestly started writing up an answer that began with, "it really wouldn't happen," because i was fully prepared to write out a logical argument for why such a thing would never happen. the argument began, "it would be highly unprofessional (and terrible parenting)" and i had to pause, gather my bearings, and quickly realize that vader's idea of being professional is strangling his coworkers, and his idea of parenting is maiming.

that said, i don't think in any universe that vader raises both of the twins that he ever unaware of where they are. a) he has psychic powers, and b) he is batshit insane specifically about people he loves dying, are you kidding? he is not normal at all, and not willing to be. therefore my conclusion is: if the twins interrupt Evil Space Zoom Call, it is, absolutely, because vader deliberately allowed it. and we've established that he meets all conditions for allowing it.

i feel he would allow this in the following circumstances:

in an au where vader lives post-rotj but otherwise things continue in the direction of the sequels, do you think vader would know that Somehow, Palpatine Returned? like would he just be going about whatever his life has become and then suddenly one day his pal friendpatine blips into his head again like I Lived Bitch?

you know that trend slasher reboots keep having, where the Zillenial Victims run to the Grandma Final Girl for help and she reveals her fucking doomsday prepper bunker for The Day She Saw Him Again? in the recent halloweens and the texas chainsaw reboot from last year, i mean. anyway, this ask gave me the idea of 3rd generation skywalkers hunting down grandpa's evil castle to ask him for help in killing palpatine (again) and vader ignites his lightsaber like MY DELUSIONS ARE ALWAYS RIGHT! IT'S NOT PARANOIA IF I AM RIGHT! i would be soooo into that. it would be so funny. vader (old) shows up and palpatine's just like jesus christ how are you still alive

but also sure, why not. palpatine blips in like I Lived, Bitch and vader drops everything to shout into the middle distance about WHY WILL YOU NOT DIE! ARE YOU IMMORTAL! IS THIS HELL! etc etc.