something about augustus condemning eo to death with the phrase "hang the rusty bitch lest she continue to howl" and then darrow's freedom fighters being known as howlers… yeah i think abt that a lot
I have just had the worst, or best, brainwave and I need to share it.
Here is an AU for you.
Vader thinks that he killed his wife and child, right?
Right up until he meets little Leia Organa when she is 10 years old. Like his one brain cell woke the fuck up when he was confronted with a passionate, angry little girl with Padme’s eyes and his chin. This is maybe a month after she was kidnapped and returned to Alderaan. Leia decides that she would need to learn how to be a senator and insists that Bail takes her with him to the next session of the imperial senate.
Bail does not want to bring her to the imperial senate. However he knows very well who her birth parents were, it is either Bail brings Leia to the Imperial Senate or Leia brings Leia to the Imperial Senate, probably bringing with her someone she really shouldn’t (Like actual Obi Wan Kenobi-I just want you to picture for a moment, because Bail certainly did, looking up and realizing that Leia is charging down the halls outside his office, dragging with her a bemused and sandy Obi Wan, both in badly conceived disguises).
Bail is super stressed as he tries to run a rebellion while riding herd on his well meaning but very direct 10 year old daughter on top of his normal duties as an imperial senator. Bail is also very afraid that the moment the Emperor sees Leia, he will make the connection between Leia and Padme Amidala (The emperor does not socialize with the senate any longer, thank the stars). He has no idea that Vader was once Anakin Skywalker, so has no cause to be more careful than normal (because Vader) about Vader seeing Leia. As such Bail does not even notice when Vader stops to consider them from the shadows. Leia is haranguing another planet’s senatorial aide who had chosen the wrong moment to make a bigoted joke.
Vader is very abruptly, though mentally, thrown back to this very hallway 12 years earlier where he watched his wife do the same thing, for the same reason, possibly to this same aide. Though Leia is still a child and Padme was an adult, he can still see his wife in this little girl.
The realization that this is Padme’s child hits him with the force of a Ventanor. Followed immediately, before he even realized that this meant that his child was standing in front of him, by the soul deep knowledge that she must be protected from the Emperor at all costs.
Vader had known for years that his suit had been designed to cause him more pain, he just thought he deserved it. The thought of Palpatine getting ahold of Padme’s daughter was abhorrent. Vader sticks to the shadows and watches, seeing how well Bail loved and protected Leia.
While he is thinking(read Obsessing) about his daughter, the part of him that is always centered on Obi Wan points out that his old master had been one of the last people to see Padme after Vader choked her. But the little voice that spoke in Padme’s tones piped up, the shock of Leia living being enough to finally make this little voice loud enough to be heard, saying that until recently Obi Wan believed that Anakin Skywalker was all the way dead, he was protecting their child as best as he knew how.
And Vader has issues with just about every choice Obi Wan Kenobi ever made. But he will admit that hiding Padme’s daughter was the best option.
As Vader knows that paying too much attention to Leia would draw the Emperor’s attention, he would be willing to wait until the right moment to get his daughter back. His one concession to his need to protect her was taking one of his personal guard, one of the few units still made up almost entirely of clones, and assigning them to be Leia Organa’s bodyguard, her shadow (I also want you to take a moment to consider what that did for Bail’s stress level). And then Vader gets to planning.
With his one brain cell awake and focused on the Organa’s it takes Vader all of 15 minutes to realize that Bail Organa is running the Rebellion (I want it to be clear, this is not a slight on Bail at all, Anakin Skywalker was a war general, well educated through the Jedi on a number of subjects, and does have a fair measure of politics learning from both his former master and his dead wife). However Vader is no more loyal to the Empire than Anakin was to the Republic. In fact, upon realizing that Padme’s daughter had lived Vader firmly decided that he needed to find a way to kill Palpatine to crown Leia. With the realization that Bail, and likely Leia (neither Vader nor Anakin have any idea what activities are appropriate for a 10 year old), are part of the Rebellion, Vader decides that The Rebellion would succeed (or everyone would die trying).
Note: Vader only really gets away with no one realizing that he now supported the Rebellion because, well, no one can quite believe that Darth Vader supports the Rebellion. Most people think there is a new type of Space Madness, and that one of the symptoms is hallucinating Darth Vader giving you intel for the Rebellion.
By the time Leia was a teenager, rumors abound about the odd way that Vader acted around her. By sheer happenstance (and some judicial violence on Vader’s part) these rumors had never reached the Emperor. A good deal of these rumors implied that Vader was looking to the Princess of Alderaan as a wife. The reaction Vader had, the only time it was brought up in front of him, was…impressive, even for the amount of violence he normally dealt out. Still there are members of Vader’s personal guard who watch over Leia whenever she is on Imperial Center, and no one wants to repeat the time when she was 12 when one of Bail enemies tried to kidnap her for ransom. It took an entire corps of engineers to put those levels back to rights (after they scrubbed the blood off).
So we get all the way up to the timeframe of ANH. The Death Star in this does not start out under the control of Darth Vader. It starts out under the control of Tarkin, it is important to note this. Leia still sends out R2D2 and C3P0 to find Obi Wan Kenobi, none of that part changes.
It is after Leia is captured that Darth Vader shows up (does he lurk silently in any system that Leia is due to be in as often as he can get away with…why yes, yes he does). Tarkin had wanted Leia tortured, however no one wanted to find out how many decks Vader would spread their entrails across for touching her. Vader arrives on the bridge just as Tarkin is threatening to blow up Alderaan. Tarkin orders the weapon to begin its charge.
Leia, Leia who is so like her mother in that she will use every weapon in her arsenal, turns to Darth Vader and speaks to him for the first time. ‘Please’ she said, no effort to hide her distress, ‘please save my planet’
Something Leia had no cause to know-An angel who she resembled once thanked Anakin Skywalker for saving her planet.
Tarkin is dead almost before she finishes speaking. Vader orders the DS weapons to power down and disengage, which is done post haste. Then announces that Leia Organa was now in control.
So Leia now owns a Death Star (genuine article-never used). Leia is not sure if that is how this works, but no one is arguing with the tall man in black who has OPINIONS and will enforce them. Leia manages to communicate this to her parents, who take a shuttle up to the space station to figure out what the fuck is going on, and what, if anything, they need to do next.
Two hours later: Obi Wan Kenobi, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, R2D2, C3P0, and Chewbacca have just been caught trying to sneak onto the Death Star. The Organas are still on board, trying to get answers (In that time Vader has said precisely five words to them ‘You have raised her well’). It is to this room that the troopers manning the station (who are deeply confused and a bit conflicted because it seems like they may have all been forcibly defected from the Empire, but no one is willing to disobey Lord Vader) bring Obi Wan and co. and present them to Leia, as she is considered in command. Somehow Luke’s full name (I kind of picture him still dumbly introducing himself to Leia, followed with ‘we’re here to rescue you’) gets used before the situation deteriorates. Which naturally causes everything to deteriorate further and faster than before.
Far away on Imperial Center, the Emperor pauses in the middle of a hallway ‘I feel’ he says to no one ‘a disturbance in the Force.’ another pause ‘like some shit has just hit the fan’
Far away on Dagobah Yoda looks up, ‘weird, shit just got’
listen. padme amidala is a freak, okay. ever since aotc i’ve had to listen to bullshit arguments about how awful the prequel romance is, how anakin’s a red flag, blah blah blah. that’s a smooth brain take. first of all, of course he’s a red flag. that’s the point. you think padme doesn’t know anakin is ten pounds of mommy issues in a five pound bag? you think she looked at soggy weeping anakin begging her to love him and didn’t immediately think “yes i definitely will peg him” ?? you think just because she’s a queen turned senator that she isn’t just as horny and feral as he is? anakin wasn’t even pushy about it. he was just “oh btw i’ve been obsessed with you for a decade and live in a perpetual state of emotional agony but thats okay whatever you want is fine with me haha” and padme goes “yea okay i’m into that.” two minutes after he’s assigned to be her bodyguard she gives an obligatory little “i have a bad feeling about this” and then just fucking marries him. this is a woman who wore white to a blood bath. come on.
It’s always so weird to think that Padmé Amidala was only 14 when she was queen of Naboo. Like she should have been doing geometry proofs not leading an entire planet
Of course, now I can’t stop thinking about where the remains of our Greek class would be today.
The trouble with this exercise is that we’re not sure how old they’d be, because we don’t really know when the events of The Secret History take place. Donna Tartt does a good job of giving us almost no chronological milestones to ground the book in a particular year. Richard is narrating from nine years after Bunny’s death: since TSH was published in 1992, that would put the story’s setting in 1983. But references to certain things in the book would suggest a later time. Richard goes to see a Vietnam War movie starring Charlie Sheen with the fictitious name of Fields of Shame: its real-life counterpart, Platoon, was released in December 1986. Later in the novel, we find mentions of compact discs and laptop computers, which would place the story in the late 1980s or even the early 1990s (part of me thinks that these were editor’s suggestions to make the book feel more up-to-date).
Since Donna Tartt attended Bennington from 1982 to 1986, she would have started her junior year in 1984. Richard transfers to Hampden at the start of his junior year, so I’m going to use that as my benchmark and say that the action of TSH takes place between the fall of 1984 and the spring of 1985. Francis is 21, so he would now be 58. Richard and the Macaulays would be 57.
Francis is the easy one, because Donna Tartt herself told us what became of him. In The Goldfinch, he makes a brief appearance as one of Hobie’s wealthy New York friends/clients. There’s no mention of “Mr. Abernathy” having a wife or children, so we can assume that Priscilla has been out of the picture for quite some time. Francis appears to have a reasonably good life, even if, as Theo Decker says, he seems to have “some ill-articulated scandal or disgrace in his past.” (Such a tease, that Donna Tartt!) This is what Francis was up to in 2013, at least—unless he got very sick or started a relationship with someone, there isn’t any reason to believe that he’d be doing anything different by now.
Richard, I think, predicted his own future when he was speculating about Henry’s: “I had always pictured Henry teaching Greek, in some forlorn but excellent college out in the Midwest.”
(I’ll briefly pause so we can all recover from the terrifying prospect of having Henry Winter as a college professor.)
Whew, okay. Moving on…
I can’t imagine that Richard would have stayed in California, not when he hated it so much. And yet, I can’t see him returning to New England, or anywhere in the Northeast: too many memories. The Midwest would be a perfect place for Richard to have landed…and for some inexplicable reason, I’m specifically thinking Wisconsin. Of course he’s a professor: his education hasn’t really trained him for anything except academia. But not Greek—English literature. He’s rumpled and tweedy and still rather boyishly good-looking. At least a quarter of his class has a crush on him. He may have been married at some point, but no longer. He doesn’t have any children.
I’m probably getting too Sebastian Flyte-ish with Charles, but I’m sorry to say that I think he’d be dead by now. I think he may have committed suicide, or just let himself decline so far into alcoholism and eventual drug addiction that it was basically a slow suicide. Or it may have been the sort of accident that plagues troubled people: a car wreck, a house fire, a bad fall down the stairs. But then again, you never know. If Charles somehow managed to pull himself back from the brink, I think he’d only have been able to do it with the help of some kind of religion—not because of his substance abuse issues, but because of his guilty conscience. I don’t see him getting deep into Christianity, though, maybe something like Buddhism. Perhaps he’s up in the Himalayas, with a shaved head and orange robes. And there we’ll leave him.
Camilla is a novelist. She would have needed to make money somehow, but I don’t see her doing blue-collar work or embarking on a corporate career (for which she would have had to go back to school, anyway). When we last saw her in TSH, she seemed to have committed herself to taking care of her grandmother and eking out a living on whatever was left of the family money (so Southern Gothic!). That would have given her ample time to write.
Funny thing is, I see her being financially successful but not the sort of writer who’s a darling of the critics or a household name (she doesn’t write under her own name at all). Maybe she’s had a career like Andrew Neiderman, who’s been writing as “V.C. Andrews” since the real Andrews died more than 30 years ago. Or maybe she reliably churns out cozy mysteries and romances, the kind that you buy at the drugstore, read at the beach, and then leave for someone else at the laundromat. This is by choice: Camilla doesn’t want to be famous. She wants to be comfortable, and left alone. She still owns the family home in Virginia, which she’s beautifully restored, although she doesn’t spend much time there. Mostly, she lives at the beach, where her well-appointed bungalow is peak Coastal Grandmother aesthetic.
She’s not a grandmother, though, or a mother, and has never been anyone’s wife. She is as solitary in her habits as she ever was…no, more so. She takes long walks on the beach, alone. She goes to mass every Sunday and holy day, but never receives Communion. She reads Greek in the evenings, listening to the waves roll in.
tbh y'all get too caught up in the idea of like. whether someone is ""genuinely"" experiencing a certain -ism or -phobia aimed at them if they are not genuinely part of that group. as if it matters. as if a guy getting attacked for holding another man's hand has actually ever had sex with another man or if he actually is married to a woman like it literally does not make a difference. he is a victim of homophobia in actual reality in the actual world. stop being pedantic and drawing little circles around words and realize that people are getting fucked over regardless.
i fucking love tumblr on new years i scroll past a glittertext gif wishing me a happy 2002 i scroll past my mutual wishing me a happy 2018 i scroll past a gifset wishing me a happy 2013 i scroll p
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