The idea that Leia and Han (and to a degree Luke) messed up a kid is not far from probability, given their lives.
Thank you SO MUCH for this. I mean... hell, I've said on here before that I hate Thrawn, who is apparently a character with enough of a fanbase that he got ported into the new EU when Mara Jade got dumped, so I am entirely with the program about people not liking Ben Solo qua Ben Solo. But the idea that Han and Leia would absolutely have been great parents--- like, on the one hand, Zahn's sequel trilogy gives them seven years out from the Battle of Endor to have worked themselves into less "Battle couple whose ability to communicate when they're not in combat all too closely resembles John Gottman's Four Horseman of the [Relationship] Apocalypse" and more "Yes, we still spar verbally with each other but we also understand each other and we can be chill together when we need to be", and that makes good sense! (To say nothing, nothing at all, of all of the larger family and galaxy-wide issues they need to figure out, like the destruction of Leia's entire homeworld and by extension the entire cultural framework into which she'd grown up expecting to bring any kid she might have, and the whole entire "Vader is Luke and Leia's father" and all the baggage that would have for her around parenting. Never mind the larger galactic scene.)
But the new-ST timeline has Ben being born the year after the Battle of Endor... and there is just about no way that was going to end well; there was just not enough time for them to sort themselves out with each other enough. And I said elsethread that I actually kind of love that a major canon, especially one that I love, embraced a storyline of "being popular characters in a beloved pairing does not always and ever make you capable of parenting in every possible situation," because I've been waiting for that storyline for a VERY long time.
And with Luke--- omg, clear back in Zahn's sequel trilogy (I will not call it the Thrawn trilogy, see above) a huge part of his character arc was his concerns about his teaching ability and even his concern that Leia would fall to the Dark side because of it, based on what happened to their father under Obi-wan's teaching. And, NGL, I think that was not just good characterization for Luke as a particular character, but also a really important larger theme: that just being epic-class god-tier mode at a given thing does NOT mean you are equally good at teaching it. (A real-world parallel to one of Luke's own demonstrated god-tier mode skills, namely piloting, is on point: the highest level of license is "instructor", meaning you don't just know how to do the thing, you know how to figure out where other people are relative to being able to do the thing and then help them learn how to do it, or do it better.)
And I think the reason I'm particularly queasy about the one particular fannish narrative that is basically "we love some combination of Han, Luke, and/or Leia, and so they MUST be great parents and/or teachers and so it is basically the fault of their ingrate of a child that he is not X, Y, and Z"... is that Life too often imitates Art about that kind of thing, in various ways, whether it's pushing people into having spouses/children they don't want or blaming kids for their family's problems (and worse).
(I may feel particularly strongly about this in Star Wars, specifically, because I remember reading Zahn's sequel trilogy when it came out and I basically came out of it feeling like I would be terrible at being a Jedi as Luke wanted them to be, like, I would last about five minutes before I went looking for a Sith temple to pledge myself to, and that this was a failing on my part--- and this was even with Luke admitting to his own inadequacies as a teacher! And I kind of feel like Luke's arc with both Ben and Rey in the new-ST is vindication for teenage!me.) (The whole non-emotion thing was what got me... and then I later discovered the real-world concept of positive disintegration and fantasized about setting up a rogue Force order that involved emotional intensity as the key to ethics rather than the root of evil, but I can be really nerdy sometimes.)
As far as the Ben/Rey ship... I have a response that... is sort of adjacent or maybe orthogonal to yours, maybe? Because I walked out of my first viewing of TFA thinking that I had finally gotten the femdom hero/malesub villain canon pairing that I had spent probably about two decades writing AUs of for like every fandom I was in at some point. It's basically the OTP of my heart! And I think I said somewhere else in this comm that the only thing that annoys me more about my OTP than the antis who insist that it's abusive is the subset of my fellow shippers who seem to want to prove them right. (Also, I feel rather strongly that Ben|Kylo/Rey in canon is more on the femdom/malesub side than otherwise, even if fandom has run in other directions with it. ;> ) But the way fandom tends to treat the ship, whether they love it or hate it, is probably one of my biggest hurts, next to the thing I said above about the parenting issue.
(I love your soapbox. I love that you have made this comm a place where this happens--- starwarsfruitbowl was very similar back in the day, and I am so glad you've stepped up to make another place like that for SW fans! Thank you!)
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2021-09-18 04:19 am (UTC)Thank you SO MUCH for this. I mean... hell, I've said on here before that I hate Thrawn, who is apparently a character with enough of a fanbase that he got ported into the new EU when Mara Jade got dumped, so I am entirely with the program about people not liking Ben Solo qua Ben Solo. But the idea that Han and Leia would absolutely have been great parents--- like, on the one hand, Zahn's sequel trilogy gives them seven years out from the Battle of Endor to have worked themselves into less "Battle couple whose ability to communicate when they're not in combat all too closely resembles John Gottman's Four Horseman of the [Relationship] Apocalypse" and more "Yes, we still spar verbally with each other but we also understand each other and we can be chill together when we need to be", and that makes good sense! (To say nothing, nothing at all, of all of the larger family and galaxy-wide issues they need to figure out, like the destruction of Leia's entire homeworld and by extension the entire cultural framework into which she'd grown up expecting to bring any kid she might have, and the whole entire "Vader is Luke and Leia's father" and all the baggage that would have for her around parenting. Never mind the larger galactic scene.)
But the new-ST timeline has Ben being born the year after the Battle of Endor... and there is just about no way that was going to end well; there was just not enough time for them to sort themselves out with each other enough. And I said elsethread that I actually kind of love that a major canon, especially one that I love, embraced a storyline of "being popular characters in a beloved pairing does not always and ever make you capable of parenting in every possible situation," because I've been waiting for that storyline for a VERY long time.
And with Luke--- omg, clear back in Zahn's sequel trilogy (I will not call it the Thrawn trilogy, see above) a huge part of his character arc was his concerns about his teaching ability and even his concern that Leia would fall to the Dark side because of it, based on what happened to their father under Obi-wan's teaching. And, NGL, I think that was not just good characterization for Luke as a particular character, but also a really important larger theme: that just being epic-class god-tier mode at a given thing does NOT mean you are equally good at teaching it. (A real-world parallel to one of Luke's own demonstrated god-tier mode skills, namely piloting, is on point: the highest level of license is "instructor", meaning you don't just know how to do the thing, you know how to figure out where other people are relative to being able to do the thing and then help them learn how to do it, or do it better.)
And I think the reason I'm particularly queasy about the one particular fannish narrative that is basically "we love some combination of Han, Luke, and/or Leia, and so they MUST be great parents and/or teachers and so it is basically the fault of their ingrate of a child that he is not X, Y, and Z"... is that Life too often imitates Art about that kind of thing, in various ways, whether it's pushing people into having spouses/children they don't want or blaming kids for their family's problems (and worse).
(I may feel particularly strongly about this in Star Wars, specifically, because I remember reading Zahn's sequel trilogy when it came out and I basically came out of it feeling like I would be terrible at being a Jedi as Luke wanted them to be, like, I would last about five minutes before I went looking for a Sith temple to pledge myself to, and that this was a failing on my part--- and this was even with Luke admitting to his own inadequacies as a teacher! And I kind of feel like Luke's arc with both Ben and Rey in the new-ST is vindication for teenage!me.) (The whole non-emotion thing was what got me... and then I later discovered the real-world concept of positive disintegration and fantasized about setting up a rogue Force order that involved emotional intensity as the key to ethics rather than the root of evil, but I can be really nerdy sometimes.)
As far as the Ben/Rey ship... I have a response that... is sort of adjacent or maybe orthogonal to yours, maybe? Because I walked out of my first viewing of TFA thinking that I had finally gotten the femdom hero/malesub villain canon pairing that I had spent probably about two decades writing AUs of for like every fandom I was in at some point. It's basically the OTP of my heart! And I think I said somewhere else in this comm that the only thing that annoys me more about my OTP than the antis who insist that it's abusive is the subset of my fellow shippers who seem to want to prove them right. (Also, I feel rather strongly that Ben|Kylo/Rey in canon is more on the femdom/malesub side than otherwise, even if fandom has run in other directions with it. ;> ) But the way fandom tends to treat the ship, whether they love it or hate it, is probably one of my biggest hurts, next to the thing I said above about the parenting issue.
(I love your soapbox. I love that you have made this comm a place where this happens---