throbbing light machine

Only the soldered mouth (12096 words) by lotesse
Chapters: 8/8
Fandom: Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars - All Media Types
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Relationships: Luke Skywalker/Han Solo, Leia Organa/Han Solo, Leia Organa/Luke Skywalker/Han Solo
Characters: Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa
Additional Tags: Torture, Truth Serum, Post-Canon, Eventual Happy Ending, Secrets, Undercover, Threesome - F/M/M, Not Sequel Trilogy Compliant, Hurt/Comfort, Rescue, Sibling Incest
Summary:

So here he was, getting ready to put down on a slick overdeveloped Imperial holdout world, grey ferrocrete stretching as far as the eye could see. Breaking into yet another detention block, this time to haul Luke's idealistic ass out of trouble. Leia had set up the cover identity for him with her own hands, and Han should have been touched, but it wasn't a role he savored.

Only the soldered mouth (8238 words) by lotesse
Chapters: 6/8
Fandom: Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars - All Media Types
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Relationships: Luke Skywalker/Han Solo, Leia Organa/Han Solo, Leia Organa/Luke Skywalker/Han Solo
Characters: Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa
Additional Tags: Torture, Truth Serum, Post-Canon, Eventual Happy Ending, Secrets, Undercover, Threesome - F/M/M, Not Sequel Trilogy Compliant, Hurt/Comfort, Rescue, Sibling Incest
Summary:

So here he was, getting ready to put down on a slick overdeveloped Imperial holdout world, grey ferrocrete stretching as far as the eye could see. Breaking into yet another detention block, this time to haul Luke's idealistic ass out of trouble. Leia had set up the cover identity for him with her own hands, and Han should have been touched, but it wasn't a role he savored.

Only the soldered mouth (5843 words) by lotesse
Chapters: 4/8
Fandom: Star Wars Original Trilogy
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Relationships: Luke Skywalker/Han Solo, Leia Organa/Han Solo, Leia Organa/Luke Skywalker/Han Solo
Characters: Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa
Additional Tags: Torture, Truth Serum, Post-Canon, Eventual Happy Ending, Secrets, Undercover, Threesome - F/M/M, Not Sequel Trilogy Compliant
Summary:

So here he was, getting ready to put down on a slick overdeveloped Imperial holdout world, grey ferrocrete stretching as far as the eye could see. Breaking into yet another detention block, this time to haul Luke's idealistic ass out of trouble. Leia had set up the cover identity for him with her own hands, and Han should have been touched, but it wasn't a role he savored.

Only the soldered mouth (1487 words) by lotesse
Chapters: 1/8
Fandom: Star Wars Original Trilogy
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Relationships: Luke Skywalker/Han Solo, Leia Organa/Han Solo, Leia Organa/Luke Skywalker/Han Solo
Characters: Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa
Additional Tags: Torture, Truth Serum, Post-Canon, Eventual Happy Ending, Secrets, Undercover, Threesome - F/M/M, Not Sequel Trilogy Compliant
Summary:

So here he was, getting ready to put down on a slick overdeveloped overindustrialized Imperial holdout world, grey ferrocrete stretching as far as the eye could see. Breaking into yet another detention block, this time to haul Luke's idealistic ass out of trouble. Leia had set up the cover identity for him with her own hands, and Han should have been touched, but it wasn't a role he savored.

people who have read TFA tie-in materials: do we get any indications about which of the OT secrets have been told, and to whom? Mostly, I'd like to know a. who knows that Luke and Leia are sibs, and b. who knows that they're the children of Darth Vader. Am attempting fic; need to know these sorts of things, and the film itself is completely silent on both subjects.

I'm bummin about TFA. ( lots of spoilers. )

ohhh wow I just had an epiphany about my thing with Star Wars. I was rewatching ESB - it's cool if you start the movie at about the 50-minute mark, which is when Han and Leia are kissing and Vader is discovering that he has a son - and feeling even more impatient with Yoda than usual. Maybe because I'd just been reading afrofuturist theory, but for the first time his chastisement of Luke's looking toward the future rang hollow to me.

Here's the thing: the "philosophical" stuff the Jedi characters say? is what my fucking father is all about. even down to the memetic genealogy of it, the vague eastern spiritualism via white male 60s counterculture. It's what I was brought up to, what I still fundamentally believe but am intent on rebelling against. Daddy chastises me for including anger in my politics, coming from a white-buddhism valuation of peace and inner quiet - and I hear that, I do, but I also hear Audre Lorde enumerating the uses of anger, and her voice is louder to me and more beautiful. After all, dad's also always chastised me for my focus on women's issues; I know that I can't trust him to be my strong ally all the way down. He has his limits.

Why shouldn't Luke Skywalker look to the future? Yoda sounds like Owen Lars. We build a better future than our current shitty present by dreaming it first. And Leia pretty gloriously uses her anger to fuel her rebellion, and I have a problem with anyone who has a problem with that. (i mean tbh i agree with yoda's concern-trolling about luke being reckless, but on reflection i lack confidence that yoda shares my reasons: i worry about bb being a little suicidal, but yoda was planning on eventually sending luke off to commit patricide, i'm not sure his mental health is the guy's first priority.)

Okay, is there a novelization somewhere that parses the tactical situation at the beginning of Return of the Jedi? Cuz - you have Luke insinuating the droids into Jabba's household, which seems to work out well, Jabba never actually catches on to that part, but then again what's up with R2 having Luke's lightsaber by the time you get to the execution scene, did he have it all along or did Luke somehow plant it? Lando's in there too, and seems to be working in tandem with Leia - but how much are they working with Luke? Leia and Lando clearly thought they were going to be able to sneak Han out without getting caught - and how does Jabba get the jump on them, anyway? - so Luke shouldn't have been planning on coming in at all; I always did get the impression that his entry onto the scene was a last-hope kind of deal, when everything's gone wrong Luke comes swooping in. Leia's surprised to see him; did she tell him what she and Lando were doing, or did he only find out once it all went to hell?

The reading that I like best, I think, is the one where the right and left hands are having some trouble communicating with each other - as we know they are, Luke is sitting on some major secrets, there's got to be some tension there, even in that last scene from ESB they're sweet together but there's also this closed-offness to them, a distance; compare the deleted scene from earlier in that film, in the medical center on Hoth, where they're warm and light and shiny with each other.

So. Luke suggests planting the droids as part of a long-span information-gathering project, and Leia knows they're there; but she and Lando, impatient, try to pull their con before the intelligence situation is completely clear, and so are unprepared to evade Jabba's internal spynet, leading to the disastrous expose of their attempt. Chewie's been assigned to the Princess, of course, so he's not an independent factor. Whatever communication system Luke has with - presumably R2? - informs him that his sister's gone and gotten herself sex-enslaved, he should maybe do something about that. I think he must plant his saber on R2 when he goes in, as a sensible precaution; of all of them, Luke the Tatooinian would be the least likely to underestimate the extent of Jabba's power and paranoia. Only I can't think when he could have done it. He's unarmed by the time he's fighting the Rancor, but it seems nonsensical that he would have given R2 his Jedi weapon all the way back when he sent the droids to Jabba's palace, especially if he didn't have concrete, immediate plans to go in himself.

If we could understand Chewie it would help - does he tell Han, down in Jabba's cells, that it's all right because Luke's part of the plan, getting caught is just a minor setback? or does he say that Luke's still out there, he's a Jedi Knight now you know, I'm sure he'll come for us when he finds out?

Either way, one of the things that I really like about Leia's bit with the thermal detonator is that it doesn't seem like girls get to pull those kinds of fucked up heroics that often. The droid stuff and the janked music conceal it a bit, but they're a pretty fucked up set by that point: Leia's suicide bombing and Luke's doing Force chokes with a wave of a finger. I have no doubt that the detonator was real, and that she really would have blown them all to hell if she'd been pushed to it. Girl ain't bluffing.

I was Away From The Internet over the weekend, because driving, and I have to say - I know it's bad to feel gleeful about others' breakdowns, but I am feeling really vindicated by fake male feminist Hugo Schwyzer losing it all over Twitter over the weekend. Partially because Hugo's actually perceptive enough to lay out some of the toxic shit that drives manipulative men, but mostly I think because my Ex left me with a lot of anger about faux-feminist men who manipulate women with redemption narratives.

I had a troubling thought a while back, that I've been turning over and over and trying to figure out what to do about. I've always said that the thing that I like best about Luke Skywalker as a character is the way he wins by practicing nonviolence and nonjudgmental love: he won't kill Vader because he loves him, no matter what, and in the face of that childlike unconditional trust Vader can't hold on to hate or bitterness and the dark side of the Force loses its hold on him, allowing him to die as Anakin, the father to a good son. I always sort of thought of it as being like Gandhian satyagraha, truth-force, confronting the enemy with their own violence and cruelty by accepting it without fighting back and giving violence the pretext to continue; it was a way for me to bring Star Wars, which as Joanna Russ points out has some nasty business what with the One Girl in All The World and the Honky Savior stuff and the thing where the end of ANH is modeled after Nazi propaganda, back in to line with my own personal ethics.

But, the thing is, I'm pretty much having to rethink a lot of my ideas about passive resistance, because truth-force didn't save me from my Ex. Like Hugo, he could take talk of truth and make it immaterial to the real power struggle: most of what Hugo wrote was pretty decent pop-feminist stuff, but it was only the vehicle for the very sexist drama of "Hugo and The Women."

( cut for length and personal stuff about working through abuse; manipulation and suicide triggers )

title: A long time ago in a galaxy
fandom: Star Wars Original Trilogy
music: Ingrid Michaelson
length: 2:31
summary: making movies, making magic: a loveletter to all the wonderful dedicated creative artists who came together to make the original Star Wars trilogy a thing of beauty and joy forever
download: 49.69 MB at Sendspace, 20.93 MB at Sendspace
( streaming behind the cut )

May the fourth be with you!