JadeDjo

Of course it is happening inside your head.., but why on earth should that mean it's not real? Choose your reality: FF.net or AO3

[knightofbluh]

MOON DAY 20TH JULY WAKE UP EVERYONE WE CELEBRATE THE FACT THAT WE LANDED ON ANOTHER PLANET MORE THAN 50 YEARS AGO!!!

[larimar]

Rest in peace Sam 🕊️ 1947-2026

[palomahasenteredthechat]

Oh no.

[justalurkr]

Truncated text of tweet from MrPitBull, Mar 11, 2026:

She kept finding women in laboratory photographs from the 1800s. Then she read the published papers—and every single woman had vanished. Someone had erased them from history.

Yale University, 1969.

Margaret Rossiter was a graduate student studying the history of science. She was one of very few women in her program.

Every Friday afternoon, students and faculty gathered for beers and informal conversation. One week, Margaret asked a simple question: "Were there ever any women scientists?"

The faculty answered firmly: No.

Someone mentioned Marie Curie. The group dismissed it—her husband Pierre really deserved the credit.

Margaret didn't argue. But she also didn't believe them.

So she started looking.

She found a reference book called "American Men of Science"—essentially a Who's Who of scientific achievement. Despite the title, she was shocked to discover it contained entries about women. Botanists trained at Wellesley. Geologists from Vermont.

There were names. There were credentials. There were careers.

The professors had been wrong.

But Margaret's discovery was just the beginning. Because as she dug deeper into archives across the country, she found something far more disturbing.

Photograph after photograph showed women standing at laboratory benches, working with equipment, listed on research teams.

But when she read the published papers, the award citations, the official histories—those same women had disappeared. Their names were missing. Their contributions erased.

It wasn't random. It was systematic.

Women who designed experiments watched male colleagues publish results without giving them credit. Women whose discoveries were assigned to supervisors. Women listed in acknowledgments instead of as authors. Women passed over for awards that went to male collaborators who contributed far less.

Margaret realized she was witnessing a pattern that stretched across centuries.

Women had always been present in science. The record had simply pushed them aside.

She needed a name for what she was documenting.

In the early 1990s, she found it in the work of Matilda Joslyn Gage—a 19th-century suffragist who had written about this exact phenomenon in 1870.

In 1993, Margaret published a paper formally naming it: The Matilda Effect.

The term captured something that had been hidden in plain sight for generations. Once you knew the term, you saw it everywhere.

Her dissertation became a lifelong mission.

For more than 30 years, Margaret researched and wrote her landmark three-volume series: Women Scientists in America. She examined letters, institutional policies, individual careers. She gathered undeniable evidence that women in science had been consistently under-credited and structurally excluded.

Her work faced resistance. Many dismissed women's history as political rather than academic. Others insisted she was exaggerating.

Margaret didn't argue emotionally. She presented data. Documented cases. Patterns repeated across decades and institutions.

Eventually, the evidence became undeniable.

Her research helped restore recognition to scientists who had been erased:

Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray work revealed DNA's structure—credit went to Watson and Crick.

Lise Meitner, who explained nuclear fission—omitted from the Nobel Prize.

Nettie Stevens, who discovered sex chromosomes—received little credit.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who discovered stars are made of hydrogen—initially dismissed.

And countless others whose names had nearly vanished.

Margaret changed the narrative. Science was no longer just the story of solitary male geniuses. It became a story of collaboration that included women who had been written out.

The Matilda Effect became standard terminology. Scholars used it to examine how credit is assigned, how authors are listed, who receives awards, who gets left out.

[cineshemp]

oops my hand slipped and suddenly some mara and luke appeared ??  inspired by this pic

[elgreytea]

What are you reading rn, why are you reading it, and what format are you reading it in (physical book, ereader, on your phone etc)

[padmestrilogy]

carrie fisher’s accent change halfway through a new hope implies leia becomes british when she’s agitated

[padmestrilogy]

i didn’t know there were many people whose british accent does in fact only emerge when they’re angry . you are all ruining my post

[gabri-jade]

Okay, I really hope I’m not ruining your post further, and I don’t claim that this is a particularly original thought, but hear me out:

In ANH, Leia has a British accent when she’s still trying to bluff her way through Vader and Tarkin by pulling senatorial rank, and drops that accent when she becomes so agitated that the bluff falls apart, and she doesn’t pick it back up again.

I’d argue that this implies that Coruscant’s social elite tend to speak with a crisp British accent, and Leia adopts it when acting as a senator, because when in Rome and beat them at their own game and all that, but it’s not her normal accent.

And since Mara Jade is my fandom speciality, I can’t help but bring her into this by pointing out that she grew up within that Coruscanti elite - the Emperor’s own court, the most elite of elite, even - which would imply that her natural accent is British.

Now, she certainly had speech training that would allow her to speak naturally in any number of accents, because she often acted as an undercover agent where her own natural accent would be a dead giveaway, and she left Coruscant not long after the battle of Endor and then, in her own words, spent nearly five years “sloshing around the rotten underfringes of the galaxy”, surely places where she would want to conceal the upper crust accent that could potentially put a target on her back. Arguably she would continue to do so even after she joined Karrde; she would often be working with people and in places where such a social marker could be to her detriment. So probably by the time of HoT, Mara is so accustomed to speaking without it that her natural accent has effectively been replaced (presumably with the general American accent of the Big Three, which seems to be the accent equivalent of Basic within the GFFA).

But when Mara is really agitated, I’ve always imagined her slipping back into the crisp British accent she was presumably raised with, much the same way that, when she was really angry with her father, Hera Syndulla slipped back into a Ryloth/Twi’leki accent.

That’s my headcanon, anyway.

[mariahjade2]

I am totally on board with Mara having that crisp British accent which she knows how to use and when to lose. I often see people giving Luke a southern accent but that doesn't fit for me. I'd give him more of a Philadelphia accent. A blue collar city in many ways. Think Rocky Balboa yelling YO Adrian. He can also adapt it when he needs to.

[elli-incarnate]

SkyJade fans, our favs are so stinking cute.

All the usual reasons (enemies to allies to friends to lovers, matching levels of stubbornness, the fact that they keep saving each other's lives, etc etc etc) but one of the funniest underappreciated aspects of the pairing is that they grew up in completely different realities.

Mara grew up in a fascist terrarium.

She was raised in a perfectly climate-controlled, ruthlessly curated environment where she was given the best of everything — food, training, weapons, clothes — but was fundamentally kept in a glass box for one man's use. She knows protocol, high-society manners, and how to kill someone with a hairpin, but she doesn't know how to go grocery shopping or what a normal healthy relationship looks like

Luke grew up in feral space Australia.

He grew up on a planet where the suns actively conspire to give you cancer, the wildlife is the size of a Buick and wants to eat you, and the local economy runs on salvaged junk and vibes. He's a hyper-lethal farmboy who knows how to fix a generator with spit and wire, but would have had to have the concept of traffic lanes explained to him in his twenties

Imagine their ribbing:

"Quick, how much does a loaf of bread cost? No cheating." "If you don't shut up, I'm going to stab you with your own datapad." "Just guess. Is it five credits? Fifty? Two womp rat pelts?"

And:

"You never learned galactic civics?" "I learned enough civics to blow up the government." "That is not civics." "It worked pretty well."

And that's one of the reasons I love them, because a lot of romances are built around people who are fundamentally similar.

SkyJade is ALSO built around the fact that they're complementary 🫶

[writerxwren]

Mara's wedding dress in Star Wars: Union is one of the biggest letdowns in Star Wars history and I will die on this hill

Look at this. What in the generic 90s dress catalog is this. This is a CRIME. Mara "I am a fashion icon like my mother-in-law before me" Jade would never choose something so boring and also she looks like a Carvel ice cream cake?????

Like COME ON she canonically has better fashion sense than this 😭

In the interest of correcting this grievous error, here are some more fitting dress designs that would not have her looking like a Carvel ice cream cake (this is an open invitation to fan artists I'm just saying)

You're welcome

[mariahjade2]

Always thought that. Even looked for better dresses on line at the time.

[incorrectstarwarslegendsquotes]

Luke Skywalker: Good morning my sun and moon, my loveliest girl, my baby my sweetheart my darling dearest Mara Jade: Hello, Skywalker

[jadedjo]

Or if she's feeling frisky...

Hello, Farmboy

[elli-incarnate]

Hear me out: the funniest way to read the Emperor's Hand is as Darth Sidious accidentally honoring the traditions of his homeworld.

Because obviously TTT, Mara Jade, and the Emperor's Hand as a concept predate both the PT and Palpatine being from Naboo, but they're all perfectly backwards compatible.

And the Naboo handmaiden system is objectively insane.

I love it! It rules!

It is ALSO insane.

George Lucas was, as always, operating primarily on vibes and mythic imagery rather than asking uncomfortable sociological questions, but if you stop and think about the institution for more than a solid minute, it immediately starts raising eyebrows.

What kind of society elects a teenage queen and then surrounds her with a cadre of teenage noblewomen trained to impersonate her, carry weapons, participate in security operations, keep state secrets, and potentially DIE in her place?? That's not even a hypothetical, that's Cordé.

That's a state security apparatus specifically created from child soldiers wearing silk and makeup.

My favorite headcanon is that the answer lies buried in the institution itself!

Once upon a time, someone kept trying to kill the Queen.

Maybe it was rival houses. Maybe succession disputes. Maybe civil war. Doesn't really matter, the point is that Naboo's history was far uglier than its idyllic image suggests.

Eventually some desperate monarch, cornered by enemies and running out of options, came up with a brilliant solution: every major noble family would send a daughter to court. They would be honored guests publicly ... functionally they would also be hostages. They would be trained to fight, trained to serve, trained to imitate the Queen's speech and mannerisms so thoroughly that no assassin could ever be entirely certain who they were killing.

Viewed through that lens, the institution suddenly starts making a little more sense. What noble is going to sponsor a plot against the throne when the young woman wearing the crown might actually be his own daughter? Every major family now has a personal stake in the monarch's survival. The knives are still there, but now everyone has to think twice before drawing them.

Over centuries, the original purpose becomes obscured. The hostages become companions. The companions become handmaidens. The coercion gets wrapped in honor.

Which is exactly how cultural institutions survive.

And if you accept that premise, Naboo becomes a much more interesting place. Beneath the fountains and beautiful architecture is a society that normalized masks, doubles, hidden identities and carefully managed appearances.

The Queen pretends to be a handmaiden.

The handmaiden pretends to be the Queen.

Political survival depends on controlling appearances.

Which is EXACTLY THE CULTURE that should produce a Sith Lord in the exact flavor of Darth Sidious.

For most Naboo, the culture of masks and doubles becomes a defensive adaptation; for Palpatine, it becomes a worldview. The future Emperor spends decades pretending to be a kindly public servant while secretly engineering galactic catastrophe. He presents himself as a grandfatherly statesman while running the largest conspiracy in galactic history. He doesn't reject Naboo's political culture; he internalizes it and weaponizes it. Which is extremely Sith.

And then we get to the handmaidens themselves.

Because I am convinced that Senator Palpatine watched the events of TPM unfold and took notes.

Imagine him sitting there watching a bunch of fourteen-year-old girls with blasters repeatedly interfere with his plans.

Not just the Jedi or elite soldiers or master spies.

Handmaidens.

Loyal. Adaptable. Good at disguises. Comfortable with deception. Willing to risk their lives for the person they serve. Every time one of Padmé's girls successfully pulls off another switcheroo or security operation, Palpatine's reaction isn't just annoyance but professional admiration.

Somewhere in the back of his mind there has to be a moment of: I want one.

Not a handmaiden, exactly. That's too obviously Naboo. But the concept? The concept is excellent.

Fast forward a few decades!

Palpatine is Emperor now. He takes the idea apart and rebuilds it according to Sith principles.

He keeps the loyalty. He keeps the secrecy. He keeps the personal service and the ability to operate independently. He keeps the willingness to sacrifice everything for the person at the center of the system. Then he strips away the humanity and replaces it with possession. He adds espionage, assassination, manipulation, and dark side conditioning.

Hmm, needs less sisterhood and more murder.

The result of course is Mara Jade.

At some point he absolutely had to workshop the title.

"Emperor's Handmaiden?"

No. Too obvious.

"Emperor's Hand."

Perfect, print it.

Everything gets scaled up, militarized, stripped of its humanity, and rebuilt in obsidian.

Which feels phenomenally appropriate for the dark side. Sith don't invent things from whole cloth. They corrupt, distort, and take something that already exists and twist it into a more selfish, controlling form.

And that's exactly what Palpatine does with Naboo. For all his claims of transcending ordinary beings, for all his efforts to become something greater than human, he never really stops being a product of his homeworld.

He just takes every institution he inherited and asks himself what the most evil possible version would look like.

The final irony is Mara herself.

Because in this reading she's the dark reflection of a Naboo handmaiden. She is the culmination of Palpatine's attempt to recreate and weaponize one of the defining institutions of his youth.

She's like the cultural fusion of Naboo and Sith cultures. Culturally orange chicken.

And after all that effort, after decades of planning and conditioning and control, she eventually defects, marries Luke Skywalker, and gets absorbed into the very family that destroys everything Palpatine built.

That's Star Wars AF.

[padmesthreads]

Quick drawing to work out Mara Jade's "look" post-timeskip/Return of the Jedi for my Mara Jade centered fic I wanna write soon 👀

Not quite sold on her grown up look yet, I love her hair here but I'm not sure I'll keep it like this? It's giving "Dying Centipede" which somehow feels fitting for an emperor's hand who is grappling with the sudden death/absence of the emperor but maybe that's just me lol. Also it has a distinct kinda 80s vibe to me which also fits. But idk still deciding.

I suppose it doesn't quiet matter since it's for a fic but I do want to illustrate this story in parts so it matters to me lol

here's art of her when she was a teen, prior to the events of A New Hope :)c

Fic summary: A few years prior to the events of A New Hope, a young woman named Mara Jade, under the guise of a unimportant Imperial recruit, leads an special operation to Tatooine to hunt down any remaining Jedi that may be hiding on the planet.

While there, she meets and befriends a young man her age named Luke, who sparks the first seed of change in Mara's loyalty towards the Empire.

[micael23]

The Galaxy's Best Love Story💖

Un dibujo de Luke y Mara Skywalker estilo Art Nouveau que hice el año pasado.

Epero que les guste 😊😊😊

[elli-incarnate]

SkyJade fans: we don't talk enough about how absolutely deranged the year 10ABY was for Mara Jade specifically.

Because at the end of the Thrawn campaign (~9.5ABY), Luke gives her his father's lightsaber.

Which he treats as a normal coworker interaction / gentle encouragement to join his Jedi Academy.

This is, for the record, COMPLETELY INSANE behavior.

Sir. This woman VERY recently had an inescapable psychic kill command for you lodged in her skull courtesy of the Emperor. And your response to resolving this situation is apparently:

“Here, take my dead father’s laser sword.”

:)

Luke is operating on spiritually earnest farmboy logic here, but Mara — who is bad at emotions in general and especially bad at affection directed at herself — is nevertheless, like many women, dimly aware of this thing called BOUNDARIES and decides maybe she should not immediately go do Jedi training with the incredibly intense blond man handing her meaningful family heirlooms after one shared military campaign.

Now, the Doylist explanation for all of this is obviously that the EU authors in this era were barely coordinating.

But the Watsonian result is hysterical.

Because while the rest of the cast is dealing with assorted disasters with the Imperial Civil War and Dark Empire Trilogy, Mara quietly kriffs offscreen to pursue Jedi training.

Not with Master Skywalker.

No.

With Kyle Katarn.

And if you know the timeline, this is SO funny because circa 9.5–10ABY Kyle is basically an independent-study self-certified Jedi Master whose primary qualifications are:

surviving

owning a lightsaber

and aggressively tomb raiding Sith ruins

This is peak Jedi Knight era Kyle. His entire educational and life philosophy is basically, “I found this in a crypt and it probably won’t kill me.”

So Mara, in an effort to avoid one emotionally complicated Jedi, accidentally apprentices herself to another Jedi whose emotional range is approximately that of a very honorable brick.

And naturally this culminates in Mysteries of the Sith, where Kyle immediately gets too cocky poking around Sith artifacts on Dromund Kaas and falls to the dark side.

Which means poor Mara spends her gap year dragging THIS IDIOT back from corruption.

(Should this perhaps have given her an early warning sign about the Exar Kun situation brewing at Luke’s Academy in the Jedi Academy Trilogy? You would THINK.)

But WAIT. Because this is ALSO the year of Dark Empire, my very favorite and absolutely deranged year of the Legends timeline.

So imagine this from Mara’s perspective.

You flee the emotionally earnest not-quite-love-interest Jedi by going to study under another Jedi who immediately starts having Sith Artifact Problems.

And then somewhere in the middle of this nonsense you get the news bulletin:

“By the way, Luke Skywalker got yoinked away by some kind of inexplicable Force storm and has apparently resurfaced as the military commander of the Reborn Emperor’s Operation Shadow Hand.”

And Mara’s just standing there like:

“... the REBORN WHAT.”

So during the events of Mysteries of the Sith, Mara successfully drags Kyle back from the dark side through what is, functionally, the Power of Friendship.

Like yes there are Sith artifacts and Force visions and actual mechanics involved, but emotionally the plot is basically:

“Kyle, stop licking cursed tomb walls.”

“No.” *lick*

“Kyle PLEASE.”

And somehow it works.

So Mara presumably exits this experience going:

“Great. Wonderful. Fantastic. I have now personally managed one emotionally constipated Jedi man having Sith Problems. Time to go talk down or put down Skywalker.”

And she’s probably mentally preparing herself for the world’s worst intervention road trip.

Like:

“Apparently if I don’t supervise Jedi personally they start freebasing Sith artifacts within thirty business days.”

Except then she gets back and —

Oh.

Luke already came back with his sister's help.

Apparently it was a phase.

Wonderful.

Excellent.

I DON’T have to solve every problem myself.

But then the VERY NEXT YEAR, 11ABY, the New Republic looks at this man — this VERY RECENTLY RECOVERED FROM A SITH APPRENTICESHIP man — and decides:

“Yes. We should give him government support to found a religious boarding school for Force-sensitive children.”

Insane institutional decision-making.

And Luke, who has learned absolutely nothing about normal interpersonal pacing, immediately circles back around to:

“Hey Mara :)

“do you want to come train at my Jedi Academy :)”

SIR.

From her perspective you vanished into evil hyperspace weather, joined your dead fascist dad’s evil wizard cult, and got government funding to open a school less than a year later.

And maybe the craziest part is that she STILL eventually marries him. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[elli-incarnate]

Poor Mara.

Your emotionally intense situationship platonic friend — who is functionally a golden retriever somehow trapped inside the body of the galaxy’s most powerful Jedi — gives you his father’s lightsaber and goes:

“you should come train with me :)”

Which is already enough to make any emotionally avoidant woman flee into deep space immediately.

So you go find yourself to ANOTHER Jedi to train with instead.

Unfortunately this second Jedi is an unsupervised cryptozoologist with a lightsaber and approximately the impulse control of a raccoon in a haunted antiques store.

So now YOU have to spend your year abroad preventing him from licking cursed Sith tombs.

And while this is happening, civilization apparently loses its ENTIRE mind.

Because Mara comes back from Space Hell Vacation expecting maybe a few of the usual normal military disasters and instead gets hit with:

“Oh yeah while you were gone, Luke got sucked away in some kind of dark side hyperspace anomaly and temporarily joined the REBORN EMPEROR.”

And poor Mara’s just standing there like:

…the WHAT reborn.

THE EMPEROR emperor??

The one I JUST finished evicting from my brain??

That one???

And you know there had to be at least thirty solid seconds where she internally went:

“Did SKYWALKER lick a cursed tomb too? Is that what happened here??”

[vamplire]

HEY that's MY emotional support morally ambiguous misunderstood full of trauma touch starved yearning for love drenched in blood responsible for numerous atrocities comfort character who is TRYING & u will TREAT them with RESPECT

[myevilmouse]

I commissioned @ymirr-art-blog for a Gone With The Wind-inspired Luke/Mara piece and–as expected–I received something magnificent.

[celinamarniss]

[writerxwren]

So unfortunately I found this while scrolling through Pinterest on my phone and ofc the artist wasn't credited 🙄 Google Lens search wasn't helpful either. Does anyone know where this is from so I can credit them????? This has got to be one of the most gorgeous pieces of Lukemara fanart I've ever seen 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭