what was your favorite part of writing Breha in From Which Stars Have We Fallen?
What an excellent question!! And I’m going to apologize in advance, because this might drag on for far longer than need be, but thank you for such a great question!!
OK, so. We all know that Star Wars has a tendency to give us glimpses of fascinating (usually female) characters, and then promptly forgetting about them as soon as their screen-time is done. Of course, the handmaidens are top of this list for me; and until recently, so was Breha Organa. The only glimpse we had was at the end of ROTS! And we could assume that she and Bail did an incredible job of raising Leia to be the competent, fiery leader, Senator, rebel, and General she was. Breha deserves so much more love
@evaceratops and I started working on From Which Stars before the Leia novel was released. She appears in the very first chapter of the fic. I really enjoyed the challenge of writing a space Queen with a distinct voice from the other space Queen, Padmé herself. I also liked giving her some parallels to Leia’s message to Obi-Wan in A New Hope.
Another challenge was politics and systems of government! We knew that Naboo has a electoral monarchy, but Alderaan’s monarchy is bloodline-based. The Organas were the current royal household, but - with some pulling from Legends - other Alderaan Elder Houses had, at one point, ruled as well. The concept of the Elder Houses was definitely fun to play around with. We decided that Core and Inner Rim worlds were the bulk of the Elder Houses; Naboo is sort of a Mid-Rim exception to this rule. One of my favorite headcanons that we developed for this fic is that Naboo was, at one point, a medieval bloodbath as the noble families fought for the crown. Compared to Alderaan and its millennium of peace, Naboo is still medieval, but they’ve calmed down enough to declare the monarchy an elected position to reduce the violence of families seeking power and holding grudges for centuries.
Breha inherited a crown on one of the most affluent worlds in the galaxy, and it was a challenge to give her manner of speaking the weight that a position like that would require. And then the Leia novel came out (I tore through it and marked my copy with every relevant worldbuilding tidbit I could find), and if I can pat myself on the back, I think I did a pretty good job of predicting Breha’s character!
We learned that she’s definitely not one to back down from a challenge. She isn’t afraid to stand up for what’s right, to actively work and rebel against the Empire, using every political maneuver in the book to help those in need. She’s altruistic but realistic; she doesn’t shy away from the possibility that the rebellion will escalate into a full-scale conflict with the Empire (something the Bail doesn’t want to admit to himself). She is level-headed and calculating. She takes care of Alderaan’s accounts herself, by hand, and - quite possibly my favorite character development fact - she has an artificial heart and lungs! And she lets the system lights remain visible in her chest.
As soon as I finished the Leia novel, I immediately went back and snuck in references in the fic: the pulmonodes, the candlewick flowers, how the palace is a strange combination of both modern and very, very ancient; the court systems and Alderaanian landmarks. So on and so forth!
Breha Organa was a challenge, but an exceptionally fun one - and now that we have even more information thanks to the novel, her character is even more of a badass than we originally anticipated! She’s a lovely character to write, and I’m really glad to see that we’re finally getting more canon information for her!
