Oh my heart. Imagine young Hux trying on all the uniforms except that one when he’s still a little boy, with the trousers pooling round his ankles and hands lost in flapping sleeves. But not that one, that ones special. And as he grows be tries the various ones on again and again. he’s 11 and over joyed when he fits into Captain (later Admiral) Piett’s uniform.
The day he tries on Moff Jerjerrod’s (weapons architect and his life long hero) old gear and finds it fits he wears it ever night for a week, pacing about his room and theorising how he might have saved the Death Star II. That’s when he first envisions Starkiller.
He finds a uniform that belonged to Grand Moff Tarkin when he was an Admiral and is amazed at 16 that it fits like a glove. He has his own uniforms tailored off that design and wears them with so much pride, not realising that whilst they share the same skinny frame Tarkin had a terrifying presence that Hux still needs to work on.
When he’s accepted to the officers academy he finally tried on the Grand Admirals dress whites. He doesn’t know who they belonged to but they’re wider in the shoulders and he ends up putting his spare epaulettes on the inside to make it sit right. And then he looks in the mirror and STARES because destiny is looking right back out at him. There’s the ghost of a laurel crown above the ears he’s not quite grown into, the white cloak turned Imperial red and the roar of an approving universe in his ears. He has all his uniforms remade, wears shoulder pads every day for the next fifteen years to keep that feeling off power with him every second of every day.
He keeps the uniform in his quarters on the Finalizer, in its own separate closet, and tries it on once a month, practicing his regal stride, the cloak spread wide behind him, murmuring kingly speeches to himself so he doesn’t hear the door open and Kylo Ren enter the room. He has no idea he’s there until he turns and finds him down on one knee, eyes turned to the floor and saber offered up in a promise of fealty to the Emperor before him. Kylo Ren is far smarter than people think, and he knows a truth when he Force shows it to him.
Hello Kylux side of tumblr, I’m here to join in the fun ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) I was going to paint this, but ended up liking the digital color study better. So here’s that…heh.
One of these days I will give this blog a face lift with a cleaner, easier to navigate layout and useful tags you don’t have to squint to read, but I don’t think that day is today. /sigh
You know, with all the language throughout Star Wars about “giving in” to the Dark Side, how the Dark Side makes you more powerful, how the Dark Side makes you age strangely and destroys you, it sure doesn’t sound like an “opposite side of the coin” so much as the “deeper end of the pool,” like it’s actually the true form of the force and being a Jedi is about keeping it tamed so it doesn’t eat you the way it actually wants.
the force is entropy
Eldritch Jedi pls
This is one of the reasons i love the second Knights of the Old Republic game, wherein one of the major characters (who defines herself neither as Jedi nor Sith) actually views the Force this way, saying “I hate the Force. I hate that it seems to have a will, that it would control us to achieve some measure of balance, when countless lives are lost.”
It’s also the game that gave us the two most entropic, eldritch characters in the franchise: Darth Nihilus, whose dark-side-borne ability to feed on the Force and consume life itself has twisted him into a half-living “wound in the Force”, more presence than flesh
and Darth Sion, whose entire body is a ruin, his flesh nothing but ragged scar tissue, every bone and muscle broken and torn, kept animated by will alone as he forces himself, second by agonizing second, to exist
I wish there were more horrifying perspectives on the force like that
This is one of the reasons the term “Light Side” never felt right to me, even before it was used in any official media; The Force always struck me more like an ocean than a binary concept: the deeper you go, the darker and more crushing it gets — at a certain point becoming an effectually consistent darkness — and while light filters down and fades for some distance, if there is a truly light “side” it’d be the surface.
Which isn’t to say “the Force is evil unless you flounder about near the top” — just that it’s a natural force, and as such is something you need to respect and be adequately prepared for. (Take electricity, for example: super awesome and pretty dang useful, but OH HOLY SMOKES don’t try and harness it unless you REALLY know what you’re doing!)
In this sense, being tempted by the Dark Side is less a case of “Hey, I wonder what’s on the other side of this coin it looks pretty cool haha oh whoops I’m Space Walter White now,” and more one of “The deeper into this thing you go, the harder you’ll need to fight to resist the ever-increasing pressure, to remain whole, even to just see whatever the heck you’re actually doing.”
(which is why Jedi training is so important: those padawans gotta build themselves a mental Deepsea Challenger!)
dispatches from the dumpster 