Consider: Leia gets deified.
She just mysteriously knows things, and whenever you’re around, even when she’s screaming at you, she makes you feel like you can fight anything.
She has a kind of presence like Darth Vader’s but in the opposite sense. Vader’s like a force of demonic force of nature, but Leia is more like a barely restrained mother wolf, primal, protective, and carrying a legacy of something old.
Defectors getting grilled by Leia for the first time freeze up and have to keep from shitting a brick because she might be a head shorter than you and weigh less than an Artoo unit, but when she talks, you listen, like Vader himself came down from the heaven to growl at your incompetence.
Eventually, the alliance starts treating Leia as almost as a mythic figure in it of herself. But not like Vader’s death cult.
The stormtroopers start realizing this when they first see these insignias here and there, a hastily scrawled “Leia Organa blesses us” in aurabesh on the inside of a crashed X Wing. A decorative woman with a blaster painstakingly painted onto what what used to be a Nebulon B.
But they almost never see Luke’s insignia’s anywhere in these piles of rubble. Or any other form of deity.
Soon, the stormtroopers realize that all of Leia’s insignias are on the dead. And they scoff.
“Our deity keeps us alive, and blesses our fighting skills! Why pray to something that doesn’t bring you glory?”
But the insignias keep showing up. And in fact, it looks like more of them are showing up every day. Still showing up on dead frigates and destroyed X Wings.
Until, one day, a particularly naive and superstitious stormtrooper and a particularly hardy prisoner of war were stuck in a prison block together.
“Out of curiosity, why do you paint that woman on your ship?”
The prisoner of war laughed, and laughed long.
“To get you to shoot at us, boy!”
It wasn’t until that particular prisoner of war died in a breakout saving thirty fellow rebels that the stormtrooper took his meaning, and word spread like wildfire.
The stormtrooper corps, so superstitious, and so wary, began to realize why they see her image so much.
The ones who invoked her name weren’t unlucky, they just chose to die more often than the rest.
When they’re fighting in the trenches, and they have them cornered, the rebel who pulls a grenade on himself to slow them down has “Leia Organa” stitched into the inside of his jacket.
When they’re chasing a supply convoy, the Nebulons that run headfirst into Star Destroyers to buy time for the rest have Leia’s image sprayed onto their hulls.
When the rebels are bullied in the empire’s many prisons, it’s Leia’s name that rebels whisper prayers to before standing in front of the lead guard and saying “It’s my fault, take me instead”.
And still the stormtrooper corps and the Empire scoffs.
“So, this woman is a goddess, is she? But you still die. How will that win a war?”
But…deep in the ranks of the stormtrooper corps. Among the innumerable privates who will always be forgotten, some begin scribbling “Leia Organa” on the insides of helmets, and chest pieces.
Eventually, the rebels begin to win.
And at some point, the rebels begin to realize that some of the stormtroopers have begun to scribble “Leia Organa” onto the inside of their helmets.
They’re confused, and wary. It’s not written anywhere people can see it, so it’s not like they’re defectors. The writing is usually in some easily removable ink, something that can be wiped into obscurity with the quickest of finger rubs. So it’s not any permanent political statement. And it’s very clearly Leia’s name on it. Usually with a second name right beside it.
Once they know what to look for, the rebels begin to see it scribbled more and more. Where once it was only one or two stormtroopers a battle, the farther they push against the Empire, they begin finding whole squads with “Leia Organa” scribbled in the creases and margins of their armor, always followed by a completely different name, or set of names.
It’s not until a particularly brave and naive Rebel guarding Imperial POW’s asks them directly that they get an answer.
He cautiously holds out a helmet, asking the assembled prisoners why his general’s name is scrawled on the inside. In a shaky and uncertain voice, he speaks to the confused group.
“It says ‘Leia Organa, please save’” and he lists off the number written beside it. CT-and some several digit numerical code.
In response, a hardened stormtrooper, with scars gained years before anyone in the group had been born, breaks into tears.
The rebel asks if he knew who this belonged to, and the man nodded.
He tells the rebel that he begged his brother not to do it. They were the last two clones either of them had ever seen. For all they knew, they were the last clones in the entire galaxy.
They had talked before the battle, he had talked about how they were going to bring victory to the Empire together, one last time, and how nothing else mattered to them.
But then, his brother went quiet, and just responded:
“You are the only victory I ever cared about.”
And he scribbled “Leia Organa, please save…” on the inside of his helmet, with his brother’s ID number.
The rebel tells him his brother fought bravely, and the clone thanked him through his tears while the rest of his squad consoles him.
From then on, the quiet, the superstitious, and the grieving would comb the battlefield. Checking the inside of helmets and the edges of pauldrons looking for those telltale aurabesh symbols.
And they would go to the nearest POW camp, holding cell, or brig, reading off “Leia Organa, Please Let Me Save…”
And in every camp, in every cell block, there was always at least one person.
Not always a stormtrooper. Sometimes a technician, sometimes a pilot, occasionally an officer. Some rebels would swear on their life they’d seen it happen to an Imperial Admiral.
But always, there was at least one person who cried when the names were read out.
Some were lovers, some were siblings, some were parents, some were squad mates, and some were friends. The rebels didn’t always find out who it was, they were at war after all, and the rebels were their enemy.
But…something about the tears often made people want to talk.
Because nobody in the Empire invokes Leia Organa’s name to win a campaign.
Nobody invokes Leia Organa’s name to survive a battle.
Nobody invokes Leia Organa’s name to bring glory, or victory, in any military sense.
No. In the stormtrooper corps, you invoke Leia Organa’s name for the only kind of victories that really matter.
Sending her prayers even a rebel goddess would heed.
You only invoke Leia Organa’s name when you have someone you care about more than life itself.
And you only invoke her name if you’re willing to pay the price for her protection.
And the part the rebels found most surprising, through the hundreds and hundreds of names they read out, was that more often than not, that person those invokers paid to protect only found out how much they cared, when a rebel read their own name out in front of a cell block.
Vader was a god of battle.
Luke was a god of cunning.
Leia was the goddess of sacrifice.
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