I feel like a Force-sensitive McCoy would make a poor Jedi but an even worse Sith. He’s 100% run by his emotions, but all his emotions are based in compassion.
He’d surely give a Jedi Master an Anakin-sized headache, but a Sith Master he’d outright send into conniptions.
Sidious, on the look-out for aggressive Jedi to turn into Inquisitors before Order 66, considers this openly angry little man. After all, even just mentioning his name makes the entire Council cringe, a similar reaction to what they give whenever he gives young Skywalker preferential treatment.
So he invites this Jedi Knight McCoy to tea to chat, to get a bead on where his emotions lie, wondering what sort of offer he can make him, what seed he can plant to make McCoy one of his lackeys come Order 66.
When McCoy arrives, his face carries a scowl that would rival even Sidious’ first apprentice. A violent sort, clearly. He’s reminded of Pong Krell and knows exactly how to appeal to this brand of Jedi.
“General McCoy,” Chancellor Palpatine greets his guest with a smile and instantly realizes he’s miscalculated.
It’s like talking to an angrier version of Duchess Satine Kryze, a thing Sidious had not even considered possible until now.
“…and that’s not even getting into the treatment of the clone army we have purchased! Have you – the Chancellor of the Republic – simply forgotten the Republic’s anti-slavery laws? Or has that to been a ‘sacrifice for the security of our people’? Are the clones not our people? They’re certainly dying for us! This war is an abomination on…”
Sidious is seriously considering calling Maul in for pest control by the time McCoy caps it all off with: “I’m a Jedi, dammit, not a general.”
hi i’m kitty i don’t know anything about star wars whoops
“What am I looking at?”
Lando leaned forward and laced his fingers together. “My taxes.” He paused, then gestured to Han. “Our taxes,” he corrected, with an unnecessarily rakish grin.
Leia squinted at the datapad. “Tax fraud.”
“Oh, no no no. Absolutely not. My accounting is impeccable.”
“I don’t see how it could be,” she said. “He’s a smuggler.”
“Hey,” Han began. He shut his mouth when Leia leveled him with a look. He opened it again to persist, but saw that Lando had a shit-eating grin as he watched their argument-in-potentia. Han glowered at Lando, and made him grin wider. Han huffed, hooking his thumbs on his belt.
“Legally, he’s a long-haul transport navigator,” Lando said, and Leia snorted. “Because he has a spouse at home—me—he qualifies for a higher income deduction as well as a few credits unique to the profession.”
“Wait, credits?” Han asked.
“Because he’s my dependent,” Lando continued, ignoring him.
“The hell I am.”
“That puts me in a unique legal position—not many people know about this, but in order to incentivize long-haul transportation, a spouse who claims a long-haul transport navigator as a dependent qualifies as a household caretaker, which is a kind of head of household that’s able to claim significantly more not only for themselves but for any other dependent spouses they may happen to have.”
“But his transport isn’t legal,” Leia said, fascinated. Han was pretending to understand the conversation, which would have been more convincing if he weren’t already fiddling with a kinetic sculpture on one of Lando’s shelves.
“It’s art.”
“What?”
“As far as my taxes are concerned,” Lando said, “Han transports art. They can’t prove that it isn’t. And I’m always careful to get the valuation right.”
“How do you know what I transport?” Han asked, indignant. A piece came off the sculpture in his hands. He looked down at it, then looked at Lando. He made a hasty attempt to reattach the piece. The entire sculpture collapsed. Han took his hands from it, and attempted to lean casually against the shelves with his elbow to block it from view.
“They call me,” Lando said.
“No,” Leia gasped, delighted.
“Yes,” Lando said, grinning again. “They know I’m his partner. They know I can’t be sure I’m getting my fair share unless I know exactly what he’s getting. So they call me.”
“What!” Han stood straighter, his brow furrowed and his face all twisted into an incredulous pout of anger.
“They might have been able to catch him smuggling,” Lando said to Leia, still not addressing Han.
“They would never,” Han sneered.
“But they’re never going to get him on tax evasion. There’s no way he would have been paying taxes on his own.”
“It never even occurred to me that he would,” Leia said.
“I’m right here,” Han reminded them.
“So you can see why I can’t divorce him,” Lando said.
“I don’t follow,” Leia said.
“My household caretaker status is the foundation of all of this,” he said, pointing to the datapad. “I divorce Han and the whole thing collapses.”
“Collapses how?” Leia asked, narrowing her eyes.
“Cloud City goes bankrupt.”
Han choked.
“How many people have you married?” Leia demanded.
“Leia, you know that you’re my favorite wife-in-law,” Lando said, “but I don’t think I’m comfortable discussing that aspect of my personal life.”
The pile of former-sculpture slid from the shelf, and clattered to the floor.
i have to say, i’ve grown a fondness for palpatine. he’s just…. so completely, wholly, and entirely evil. he’s so evil i don’t think, “evil,” covers it. i think in the pit of dead sith lords he exists in, now, the other sith lords stay away from him because He’s Just So Evil. i mean, this guy looked at tiny anakin, “the biggest problem in the galaxy is that no one helps each other,” skywalker and said, that one. i want that one, and i want to destroy him and warp him so utterly he will be unrecognizable.
and it’s not like he particularly needed darth vader or anything, that was just icing on the cake. he was already well on his way to taking the republic down, he had the jedi’s kill switch in place, and then he just decides to corrupt the chosen one because he could. it’s like the blowout sale of democracy, and palpatine is the one clearing out the story. i will take away your FREEDOM, your BASIC HUMAN RIGHTS, i will commit ATROCITIES UNPARALLELED, and i think i’ll take your 9 year old, too. throw him in. everything he does to anakin is so horrifying, but it’s just palpatine taking a victory lap. he’s not only going to crush the jedi and the republic, he’s gonna turn their chosen one into the face of his empire and have him hunt down the last remnants of their order. he did all of that just because he could. palpatine is an unparalleled MONSTER and i kind of love it
As an occasional visitor to Star Wars fandom, here are some things I would like to see come out of Rogue One:
–
the fic about the reactions of the Empire’s IT and records management
departments when they learn that some trigger-happy general just
literally blew up an entire unique archival repository of key bureaucratic data – the comic about the first time some maintenance
technician tries to repair something on the Death Star and the guy’s
like, ‘where’s the documentation?’ and their boss is like ‘um, well,
funny story about that….’ – the in-depth analysis about various
mistakes the Empire makes in the original trilogy and how they operate
in context of an organization that has just, I repeat, LITERALLY BLOWN UP ALL OF
THEIR OWN BACKUP DATA. Of course it’s easy for any random hero to
impersonate a Stormtrooper! THEY DESTROYED ALL THEIR OWN PERSONNEL
FILES.
Rogue One, or, Why All The Empire’s Librarians and Archivists Joined the Rebellion
Rogue 2 plot summary: a bunch of Imperial waste management techs go AWOL and steal the Death Star plans back from the Rebels because how else are we supposed to get the dianoga out of the pipes when we have literally no idea where half of these ducts go or what they’re for
they complete their mission but in the end decide not to delete the plans from the main Alliance computers after they’ve made their copy because ehhhhh what if we never had to fix anything on that piece of shit again, what if that, it’s insured right?
This also explains why none of the bridges or giant pits in the floor have railings: literally no one knows if they’re supposed to be there or not, and once someone tried to drill into the floor to install some and destroyed the main air circulation wiring for half the station, now everyone just has to be real careful all the time
It also means that when they built the second Death Star in ROTJ they had to start entirely from scratch, yikes
in the end they decide not to delete plans from main Alliance computers because their heist crew contains one records manager who’s like ‘look, we’re SUPPOSED to have redundant data backups, this way we’re not even paying for the storage!’
this post has made the rounds amazingly on my dash and now it’s LITERALLY CALLING MY NAME.
pour one out for that tfa fic I was writing about della calrissian, disgruntled member of the new republic capital electoral commission, just trying to do her job and not get involved with the rebellion AGAIN.
never doubt my commitment to space bureaucracy.
I LOVE PEOPLE!
(Seriously, who’s up for a zine/anthology/cooperative AO3 series (group? tag? IDK) around the theme of various public servants sabotaged the Empire, joined the Rebellion, or avenged the besmirchment of their domains. #public servants of the empire, or the like.)
I love the way the glaring fucking design flaw that’s been pointed out since New Hope came out (your flying doom-planet that you’re going to use to subjugate the galaxy will explode entirely into so much space-dust after a love-tap from a single-pilot fighter if it’s in the right place? were you people high when you designed this?) just got shutupshutupohmygodshutuped away with Secret Rebels Sabotaging Things.
And it explains so much else, about everything, doesn’t it?
No guardrails over fucking bottomless pits? Some rebel sympathizer on the allocation committee line-itemed half the safety shit right out of the budget.
Helmets with no peripheral vision because fuck you, that’s why? The woman who designed them got conscripted into the job, and the only thing that makes her smile is watching those douchebag noncoms crash into each other in Y-intersection corridors.
Nobody notices there being extra stormtroopers running around? With the way Lieutenant Bob keeps dicking with the schedule, nobody can say for sure there shouldn’t be purple flying monkeys manning the security checkpoints. He’s run three Emperor Inspection Drills in as many weeks, and just three days ago he put the entire unit on duty at once and left the overnight shift “TBA.” He’s doing more to tank morale than Vader’s temper. Coincidentally, Lieutenant Bob’s homeworld got hit with a punitive tax hike six months ago, and people are literally starving in the streets.
The guy who checks itineraries and rosters for incoming shuttle flights believed the hype about joining up and seeing the Galaxy. Turns out fuck literally every actual thing about this job, from officer infighting to civilian casualties to Vader’s last-minute order to have every surface in his on-board suite kitted out with fucking lava lamps, of all things. Like, they’re in space. He gets that, right? They can’t just stop by SpaceMart and pick up stuff like that. His boss is a dick and he was up all night making lava lamps out of cooking oil and food coloring, and you know what? The last thing he wants to do right now is check the manifest on the next delivery of cooking oil. He’s had enough with cooking oil. He took five showers when he got back to his quarters, and he still smells like fucking canola. The Wookie and the guy who hasn’t shaved in a month and the guy still picking half a tumbleweed out of his hair can blow up the entire fucking station for all he cares–he will help them plant the explosives, if it comes down to it–so long as they don’t make him talk about the cooking oil he’s signing off on as being delivered.
I think we all need to stop and appreciate the fact that, at some point during Anakin’s apprenticeship, there was probably a moment when he and Obi-Wan looked at each other and realized at the exact same time that Anakin was taller than Obi-Wan.
And the funniest thing about this is that Obi-Wan isn’t actually that short. At 5′10″ (1.77m) he’s incredibly average height – slightly above average, actually. But his best friends are always freakishly tall
seriously
it’s a problem
poor boy
Don’t forget Bail Organa, he too is tol.
If Obi-Wan met Ahsoka again she would be taller than he is too (1.88 m.)
Somebody said height comparisons??????
Here, have some.
Side-by-side Obi-Wan and Ahsoka if they met in the Rebels era. She tol. He doesn’t look stoked about it.
(After much googling, I’ve determined that Ahsoka’s height does include her montrals.)
I would
like to personally thank Dave Filoni and his last season of SW Rebels, which
gave me so many hints to create a time travel au.
When she
escaped Malachor temple, Ahsoka learnt that there are other time portals
scattered through the galaxy and yet she can only go back to the last time she
saw Anakin, so she is unsure whether her words will affect him in any way, but
she has to try. I know that this comic is anidala-centric only in the second
part, but to create this story I needed many more characters. And, even if Ahsoka
is the one who sets some things in motion, also in this AU Anakin is the Chosen
One, he is the one who decides the fate of the galaxy – just like at the end of
the OT.
What I like
about this is that, for this AU to happen, the story of the first 6 movies must
still necessarily happen the same way. Enjoy it!
blackash26 