teach me the art of war

Listen. I don't have time to write a proper recap right now, but I need you guys to know as a matter of urgency that Kylo Ren spent the entirety of today's issue frolicking around Fortress Vader in his underpants.

( Cut for frolicking! )

By "it", I mean the Knights of Ren turning on Kylo in the final act of TROS. In this issue, we learn what the knights have been up to all this time and why they've had so little to do with their ostensible leader, and it turns out the answer - like all answers to the every mystery of Kylo Ren's life - is that he's a complete fucking dick. Even by the standards of the proudly self-proclaimed being-a-complete-fucking-dick club.



(Perhaps the legions of loyal followers who await my every update on this series will notice that I've skipped a couple of issues. That's because I had very mixed feelings about the last arc but lacked the stomach to publish my complaints. No stomach is needed for this issue, however! I have zero complaints! None! Zip! Nada! We are back to the good stuff!)

So anyway, today's instalment introduces Tava Ren, the woman who has now taken over leadership of the Knights of Ren. She's gutsy and dangerous, passionate in her worship of the dark side, and clearly a much more natural leader than her predecessor was - because when her knights lose their nerve mid-combat and run off leaving her for dead, instead of demanding their blood, she demands an explanation. At which a hardened band of Force-wielding, black-armoured thugs gather around to shamefacedly (shame-maskedly?) tell her of the trauma that reduced them to their current cowardly state.

Kylo's early days in charge, they tell Tava, were some of the group's best ever. They made a killing both metaphorically and literally, roamed the galaxy, partied it up...until Kylo, who they tactfully describe as "never the life of the party", started turning darker even than they bargained for. Constantly talking to someone no one else could see. Massacring their drinking buddies for no good reason. Leading them on missions that seemed increasingly more about some secret political agenda than personal gain. They were assholes with plastic horns on their heads who accidentally fell under the stewardship of a real devil, and no one dared question the drastic change to their modus operandi for fear of drawing his wrath on themselves. Finally Kylo abandoned them very abruptly one day (the day, by the looks of things, that Rey saw in her vision in Maz's castle!) to go join Snoke, but not before blithely volunteering to kill all his now former comrades - right in front of them, while they looked on in paroxysms of terror and betrayal. ("We're loyal," they pleaded with him. "We're your guys.") Snoke told him not to bother and sent a stormtrooper death squad after them instead, and ever since then the Knights of Ren have been on the run, terrified that one day Kylo will return to finish them off.

I love this for a bunch of reasons. Kylo being awful is always fun, and I'm enjoying all this insight into how truly, coldly evil he can be when the presence of Rey or his parents isn't triggering his inner conflict. It's a really satisfying explanation of Kylo's missing transition from the Knights of Ren to the First Order. Tava is AMAZING and I'm already loving the contrast between her "I'll restore this order to its former dark glory" and Kylo's "I'll use them as a stepping stone then kick them back into the water behind me".

But I'm most especially pleased because it completely fixes one of my quiet, sad, petty complaints about TROS - namely, after all the hype, that it made literally nothing of the Knights of Ren. There was no depth to their relationship with Kylo. They made a couple of appearances behaving more or less like stormtroopers in weird grubby armour, then they ganged up and tried to kill Ben for no obvious reason, then he matter-of-factly killed them all and moved on with his life. The novelisation made that last scene even worse, by having Ben "realise" the knights had been "Palpatine's all along" and so were basically just pretending to be his subordinates while snickering behind his back. (I'm not saying this is a reasonable lens to bring to the text but I AM saying that this development Did Not Please my inner neurotic teen self who was always half-sure any given social invitation was a prank aimed at luring her out to be mocked for the stupidity of thinking she was actually welcome.) I am far, FAR better pleased by the reveal that actually that was just Ben self-victimising again (old habits etc) and that in fact they'd all admired him immensely until he went bonkers and fucked them over.

I'd like to close with a picture of Tava Ren with her helmet off. As you can see, she is an absolute BABE. Flowing red hair! Cool tattoo! Lots of murder! My crush is probably doomed given Kylo's track record with people who annoy him, but I'm going to stan her so hard for as long as she's around.

( See? BABE. )

Here’s what you do when your *cough* well-laid plans inexplicably go wrong, okay? There are four easy steps:

1. Throw an absolute fucking tantrum. You’re an important man! They can’t do this to you!
2. When the tantrum fails, dissolve into angst. Bonus points if you can shoehorn in your feelings about Rey and/or your family.
3. Pull it together and do something spectacularly badass to get out of the situation.
4. Learn entirely the wrong lesson from your ordeal and go charging merrily off with renewed purpose and conviction in the most self-defeating direction possible.

( Many spoilers under the cut  )

Are you not enjoying the consequences of your actions very much? Did your last big decision not go the way you hoped? Try DOUBLING DOWN™. DOUBLING DOWN™ can bring you fast relief from:

• That hollow feeling when power seized for power’s sake fails to make you happy. (Try bullying a junior colleague about it! Really rub your superior strength in his face!)
• The agonies of a broken heart. (You never needed her anyway! You’ve already half forgotten her name! It’s her loss, not yours!)
• Your failure to outrun your own painful past. (Killing your attachments didn’t help? Perhaps you simply need to kill more of them! Kill them even harder this time! It’s bound to work if you give it just one more go!)

Nine out of ten assholes recommend DOUBLING DOWN™ as the best protection on the market from the deleterious effects of self-reflection. Ask your Supreme Leader today if DOUBLING DOWN™ is right for you.



So, yeah, this is the first instalment of a new ongoing series set right after The Last Jedi. Struggling worse than ever after the turmoil that brought him the throne, Kylo Ren goes looking for answers in Vader's life story. Charles Soule is the same author who wrote the Rise of Kylo Ren series, and he has a perspective on the character that I really love. Soule's Kylo deeply feels the weight of his family legacy: he's the son of two heroes, the grandson of a villain, the nephew and prize pupil of a Jedi legend, named after another Jedi legend who he never met. His sense of personal identity is precarious, and he feels as if separating himself from all that baggage is the only way he gets to be a real person instead of just an embodied set of expectations. The methods he chooses are violent, desperate, impulsive, and driven entirely by his emotions - and above all, by self-loathing and fear of inadequacy.

And, yeah, there's a pretty major cascade effect going on in his life. He handles every mistake he ever makes by doubling down on it, which means that the outcomes he ends up fighting tooth and nail for are rarely the ones he had in mind at the start - he goes where the opposition is, basically. (It's an easy way to manipulate him, if you're someone like Snoke or Palpatine who doesn't mind the explosive consequences of winding him up.)

I'm excited for the fun space adventures this first chapter has set up, and even more excited for the promised window into First Order politics. There's a very funny scene in which Kylo more or less openly admits (to Hux, of all people) that he knows next to nothing about the state of the military he just stole; apparently he's spent his whole tenure up till then just doing as Snoke tells him and taking no interest in the bigger picture. (This is very in-character and I absolutely buy it.) But by far the best part of this story is its psychological insight into an absolute mess of a human being who only ever pauses shooting himself in the foot when he wants to fire off a shot at someone else.

And now I have to wait another month for the next one! Life is so hard, you guys. :(

Exchange fic

So, May the Fourth Exchange happened! (This post has been sitting in drafts for a while now. Oops.) Firstly: just look at my gifts. LOOK at them. I have been spoilt rotten and I'm still pinching myself a little that so much rarepair goodness came my way. I really, REALLY do not have time to be doing exchanges at the moment, but Mt4 is my one big do-or-die event of the year and I have zero regrets for the full body push it took to cram the thing into my schedule.

Secondly, I want to blather a bit about the fic I wrote, because it got wildly out of control in a way that was both very fun and very exhausting. (There's also a punchline. Please stick around for the punchline! I'm still screaming about it a little inside.) ( tl;dr is it even Mt4 if I'm not drowning in canon review and >20x over the wordcount? )

Anyway - now we're at the punchline - reveals day came around and it turns out my recip not only wrote for me in return but basically joined me in a surprise round robin! Like, theirs is the get-together, mine is the three-years-later established relationship. Same core cast, same canon divergence, same complicated polyship. If the premise of 'Ben survives Exegol and goes on to have complicated relationships with a whole bunch of Resistance heroes' sounds even a tiny bit appealing to you, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND:

All the Stars in the Sky (7571 words) by ambiguously
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, Star Wars: Rebels
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren & Finn/Rose Tico & Poe Dameron/Jacen Syndulla, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren/Finn/Rose Tico/Poe Dameron/Jacen Syndulla
Characters: Poe Dameron, Jacen Syndulla, Rey (Star Wars), Finn (Star Wars), Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, POV Poe Dameron, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Canonical Character Death
Summary: Poe has a lot of problems left to deal with after the Battle of Exegol.

TV shows

As mentioned above, I've been (re)watching Resistance and enjoying it SO much more than I remember doing last time. It's first and foremost a fun, goofy show aimed at a somewhat younger audience than the other cartoons, but it also has some really thoughtful messages about how far right organisations recruit by exploiting people's natural cravings for belonging and security. The whole cast are pretty much all lovable, but I'm especially taken with Synara and Tam and their glaringly obvious romantic chemistry that deserved so much more screentime than it ended up getting.

I also started The Bad Batch, which until now I'd correctly but misleadingly lumped in with TCW as Clone Stuff(TM). Like yes they're clones, and Clone Stuff(TM) doesn't usually interest me very much, but these clones are living their best Accidental Child Acquisition lives! If Disney wants to milk The Mandalorian's success forever by churning out an endless stream of gruff action heroes adopting and protecting small children, I think I'm actually okay with that. I'm still early in season 1 so no idea where it's all going, but I'm enjoying myself a lot so far.

Comics

I read Crimson Reign and Hidden Empire, in which Qi'ra leads Crimson Dawn and an assortment of other criminals and miscreants (prominently including the Knights of Ren) on a campaign to end the rule of the Sith. The plot revolves a McGuffin that can literally freeze people in time and is a bit silly even by Star Wars standards, but it clips along at a great pace and has some truly heartwrenching Qi'ra moments. It's a fairly large crossover event, and I've grabbed all the other tie-ins that my library had, so I'll be reading those at some point soon. Doctor Aphra is involved!

Video games

I started playing Squadrons, which is the first flight simulator I've ever touched. This experience has taught me that I don't like playing flight simulators, but I do like watching them played, and luckily my husband is not the kind of man you have to pressure very hard to pick up a game controller. It's an enjoyably different perspective on the big Star Wars adventure, since you're playing ordinary pilots on both the Rebel and Imperial side, nobody important. There's also an embarrassingly hot Imperial NPC named Terisa Kerrill, who's portrayed by an Aussie actress, which is nice! It's not Mandatory Star Wars Content by any stretch, but it's a good bit of fun.

This has been a really fun reading project. Historically I've never been much of a western comics reader, but Star Wars has slowly been breaking me down. Most of what I have to say about this series is positive, so I'll get the negativity out of the way first: I'm so, so confused by how it ended??? Maybe this is a normal comics thing that I, a newbie, just don't have my head around yet? But the plotline of the first four collected volumes ends on the mother of all cliffhangers for the main antagonist, and then the entirety of volume five is missing scenes from movie canon with said villain never mentioned again. I had to triple-check the list of published issues because it was so jarring I assumed my digital reader had failed to download the pages where it all gets wrapped up. I'm still lowkey worried maybe that's what happened. I don't know if there was a cancellation or a drastic change of plans or something. It was just a weird dead drop after what up to that point felt like a well paced, well planned story arc.

But anyway: positivity! I'm head over heels for Terex. I already loved him from the bits and pieces of the comics I'd read, and from fic, but reading the whole thing gave me so many new levels of appreciation. He's such an engaging, fun character - morally bankrupt even within his own ethical framework, prone to weird alternating fits of mercy and brutality, so horny for Poe Dameron that his erection juts right off the page. And he mentions Kylo Ren two (2) times so naturally I ship that like burning as well.

I also got properly introduced to Suralinda, who until now has only really registered as a background character in novels and fic. I was missing out. She's GREAT. All of Black Squadron is great. I now understand why people were upset about Snap's death in TROS, and why Jess Pava shows up in a bunch of femslash. Which means there's lots of shiny new-to-me fic to read as well!

I enjoyed the in-depth look at how the Resistance runs, and it added some interesting depth to the movies. (More accurately, it added some interesting depth to the first two movies while drawing attention to just how much the third one didn't do its homework, but I've already made my peace with TROS being a trashfire so w/e.) I'm always a sucker for political worldbuilding, and the First Order cold war stuff was done with much more nuance than I expected given how Good Special Hero Kicks Bad Guy Butt the overall premise is. And the torture buddies scene in the fifth volume gave me more Finn/Poe/Rey feelings than I've had in a while, so that was nice.

In summary: 8/10, a very good star war. Lost me a bit at the end but was good enough along the way to still feel worth it.