#chiss off

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Some ko-fi sketch comms for the amazing @lilac-vode, who asked that i draw her design of Samakro (+ Wutroow)!

Please do not tag as ship!! <3

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reunions and the unhappy like

"Thalias," Thrawn rasped, after a while. "Samakro. It's nice to see you again."

The shorter Chiss opened her mouth to reply in kind, but her companion was faster.

"Oh, really?" he sniped, lip curling in obvious disdain, sunlight glancing off of his piercings. "I didn't think we committed enough war crimes for you to feel truly at home here, isn't that why you fucked off to Lesser space?"

"Samakro!" the shorter Chiss - Thalias - hissed, elbowing her unrepentant companion.

"Can you not give him a break for five minutes? He's been- crawling about the wilderness, for who knows how long, and-"

"I don't know, Thalias, did he give the literal war crimes a fucking break at any point over the last few years?"

"I-" Thalias trailed off, biting her lip. "Look, you have a point, but just- lay off for a moment, please."

"Fine," Samakro growled. "A moment. Then he gets what's been coming ever since he decided rampant war crimes were in. Fuck, I knew he was- unorthodox, but this- what he's done, Thalias? It's unforgivable. It's fucking unforgivable."

"I know," Thalias said, soft as ever. "But- please. Not now."

"Fine. But only-" and that was directed at Thrawn, moreso than Thalias- "because you asked. Because, fuck that guy."

Ezra blinked at Samakro, and glanced back at Thrawn, whose face was as pinched as he'd ever seen it, and he suddenly became acutely aware that Thrawn was- upset?

No, that wasn't quite right, he was hurting. Who were these two people, this Samakro, this Thalias, that Thrawn held their opinions in such high regard?

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My sketchy interpretation of Yomie from Thrawn Ascendancy: Greater Good!! When she blushes, it looks like a galaxy :D

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@lilac-vode kharill vs stars-in-my-damn-eyes kharill.... we went "hmm yes this man has an ombre on the right and his head shaved on the right" independently of each other but we r right

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trans!samakro hcs bc im trans and i love him

samakro didn't realise he was trans until he was already almost graduated from the academy, and spent his last few months being extremely anxious about what he should do with this knowledge, and at one point even considered just pretending to be cis indefinitely, until he realised that was only making him miserable

he decided to be very very Extra abt his coming out, so he decided to come out by completely changing his entire look and presenting as masc specifically on the day of his graduation from the academy, he asked the administration to change his gender marker and then just showed up being very obviously Gender as he graduated

he was confident enough in this that people just,,, didn't question it, and he privately considers this his crowning achievement.

before he realised he was trans, he used to have very low self-esteem about his appearance, which he put down to considering himself to be ugly, and he dressed very properly and appropriately, basically presenting as the Model Cadet bc he didn't know what else to do with himself

after he came out, even before any hrt, he realised he actually quite liked his appearance when he was presenting mor masculine, as his correct gender, and started actually finding his style and experimenting with different clothes, and getting the myriad piercings and cool-as-shit haircut that he loopholed his way past the CEDF dress code on several extremely niche technicalities in laws from at latest 150 years ago

despite the fact that he came out as trans very publicly, it's not common knowledge that Samakro Is Trans, and whilst he doesn't actively try to be stealth, he doesn't go out of his way to make his gender identity as a trans man known, so he's like... stealth via apathy :)

also i refuse to believe chiss names are gendered because of how personalised they are . therefore, the chiss have no concept of a deadname, & samakro's sudden coming-out and subsequent transition remain the smoothest fucking thing he's ever done

a lot of his worries abt coming out were alleviated by the fact that he didn't ever have to come out verbally in any official capacity, he just,, transitioned and everyone kind of caught on.

he did get some shit for his gender identity after coming out, especially from one of the ufsa syndics that really seemed to have it out for him, but at that point after the initial coming-out, samakro was confident enough in himself to just shrug it off

due to this experience, however, he's still rather standoffish in all his correspondences with the ufsa, but considering samakro has been known to just Be Like That, it's not much of a deal

most of his COs tended to not give a shit that samakro was trans - in retrospect, most of them probably didn't even know

incidentally, the springhawk has a very high concentration of trans personnel. samakro, for his part, swears down that this was a coincidence.

kharill, his first officer (now the second-officer-to-his-first-officer) is also trans, and he gave samakro a trans-themed mug once, just because. nobody has ever seen this mug just.... around, not even to be washed, and kharill assumed that this was because samakro had gotten rid of it, which- fair, it's his mug, he can do what he wants with it - until one day, kharill ended up bringing some of samakro's paperwork from his office to the break room, just for convenience's sake, and walked in on Samakro hand-washing the now very well-loved trans mug in the sink with a very jealous air about him

kharill maintains it's the cutest thing he's ever seen, and has the holo he snapped of a very startled samakro being protective over his mug as the home screen on his questis to this day.

samakro begrudgingly allows this, and only because kharill got him the mug in the first place

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escher starsinmydamneyes’ multicolour chiss hair hc post

(aka: it’s MY headcanon and that means I get to choose how to liberally abuse the idea of gene codominance in chiss)

Abstract: look, it was never stated that it *wasn’t* a widespread phenotype and i am a proponent of diverse phenotypes (and also of doing whatever the fuck i want)

so. multicolour hair chiss. if, perhaps, you have little to no idea as to what i mean by this, i once decided to draw chiss with multi-colour hair, and have since ran with this idea, and am going to explain it henceforth how the bloody hell it would work in my mind. pictured below are some of my chiss designs to get the gist across. ofc, we’re pretty solidly in AU territory with this considering i just came up with it on the spot and none of it is supported by the actual text, but i have thoughts regardless :D

basically, there are three types of chiss: chiss with monochrome hair (think Thrawn and Ar’alani, who both have a pretty solid blue), chiss with multicolour hair growing in a…. would it be wrong to say roan pattern? you know, like the cows that have patches of two different colours… or more generally, like animals that have patterned coats (basically, the phenotype rather lazily exhibited by my designs of che’ri, wutroow, and ba’kif), and chiss with gradient hair like that of octrimo and yomie (who actually has a double colour-change!! Blue to slightly darker blue to white)

the monochrome hair would can present in a variety of colours, such as blue, red, indigo, silver, and white, though the dominant allele would be the blue, so it would be rarer to see a chiss with, say, white hair, than it would to see a chiss with blue hair - much like it is rarer to see redheads than it is brown-haired people irl :)

unlike in humans, in chiss, the alleles for hair colour can be codominant! this leads to the “roan” multicolour phenotype exhibited in che’ri, ba’kif, and wutroow (who, in my hc, is leucistic!!). this basically manifests as different hair growing in patches, to give a dual- or tri-coloured appearance!

(“escher but if it’s codominance then how can there be three different-” *gunshot* //let’s just suppose that there are some mutations of hair colour genes that code for hair that can present as two different colours being coded for by one gene due to *spins wheel* optical isomerism in the pigment proteins)

codominance in chiss phenotypes is fairly common - it can occur in the skin, too! this is what is occurring in Yomie’s design. It isn’t vitiligo - that would be more regular and less blended, as well as lighter in colour a la irl vitiligo

lastly, the gradient phenotype - this is down to the (*spins wheel again*) denaturing of the dominant pigment proteins after a certain amount of time, leading to the appearance of a gradient in the hair! It is believed that all heterozygous chiss will eventually present with this phenotype if they let their hair grow long enough, however, for most chiss who don’t immediately present with this phenotype, it is likely that by the time the pigment proteins are old enough to start denaturing, that hair would have long been cut off to maintain the health of the ends of the hair - or else, that their particular pigment is stable enough that one would have to wait an ungodly amount of time for the desaturation to occur

it is also theorised that it would present in all homozygous chiss, too eventually, as the pigment proteins in their hair could also denature, leading to unpigmented hair after the area where the desaturation occurred. however, it has been observed that the pigment proteins are more stable in homozygous chiss than heterozygous chiss, and therefore, this phenotype doesn’t present in many homozygous chiss, and thus isn’t considered universal

dyeing your hair!! samakro actually does this - him dying the lower half of his hair in a gradient style is analogous to a brunet dying their hair ginger - imitating a natural phenotype that they don’t have :) of course, with samakro, the giveaway that he does this is the colour of his ombré - blue is the dominant colour in chiss, therefore if it were a natural colour, the blue pigment would be dominant over the burgundy, and samakro’s ombré would be burgundy as the recessive trait is shown when the pigment associated with the dominant gene denatures.

(or, to continue with the obnoxious irl analogue - it’s as if a brunet had dyed their hair a vivid enough shade of red that people would be able to clock it as a dye job rather than a natural hair colour. aka - although samakro is imitating a naturally-occurring phenotype, he is doing it in an unrealistic manner and he isn’t hiding that his hair is dyed)

it’s something of a fad for all chiss - including non with a non-monochrome phenotype - to dye their hair a monochrome white, one of the rarest phenotypes! however, it’s becoming considered increasingly tacky and is falling out of favour :(

the star-like sparkles in octrimo’s hair are a common hair dye!! it’s popular among dark-haired chiss to fleck iridescent dye onto their hair to give the appearance of stars. it’s usually more popular amongst kids and teenagers, but octrimo wears is very well, too :D it imitates the star-like appearance of some chiss freckles (these can appear either bright white or darkly pigmented in colour)

BA’KIF TRIVIA: when he was younger, he had blue hair with sparse, roan silver pigmentation! however, as he grew older and he lost the pigmentation in his hair, it started to be more predominantly silver, and his hair colour ‘reversed’, if you will :) usually, aging chiss simply lose pigmentation in their hair, but in ba’kif’s specific case, it lent itself to a very cool effect.

Thanks for listening to me ramble about chiss hair hcs :D i will love you forever if you read this

[stars-in-my-damn-eyes]

In honour of Greater Good coming out today (!), have some more Chiss Designs By Me :)

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@asteroids-and-tractorbeams your brain is so huge okay