directors cut on ktl? 🥺 anything you want to talk about (you know my love for that fic)
So much to choose from! But I think I'm gonna talk about this exchange between Obi-Wan and Palpatine during Obi-Wan's captivity:
"That little boy in the temple," Palpatine whispers," who believed in the good of everyone wouldn't know what to make of me, would he? But you're still him, aren't you? A more mature belief, perhaps, this idea that anyone can claw their way back from the dark, but naive nevertheless." "They can," Obi-Wan spots. Tears sting his eyes as Palpatine grasps tighter. "Even me, Pet?" Obi-Wan shudders. The words are duracrete on his tongue. "Even you."
This moment seems small at the time, like maybe just something Obi-Wan snaps back to Palpatine to be contrary, but it actually ends up being a foundational exchange for the rest of the fic. Palpatine is busy trying to make Obi-Wan believe that Quin, having once fallen, never really came back and will be so busy drowning in his own darkness that he won't be able to do any rescuing. He's trying to convince him that there's nothing at all he can do to stop Anakin from falling. That Anakin is damned. And one of Obi-Wan's key things is that he DOES believe anyone can come back. In legends and canon he makes this clear while defending Quinlan and sticking by him. Even in the OG trilogy, I don't think it's that he thinks Anakin can't return to the light--he just knows he won't be the one convincing him, because he already tried. Twice.
So, in this moment, he's deciding, that whatever other parts of himself he loses in the face of his unimaginable trauma, that he will hold onto this core belief.
It's also a pivotal moment for Palpatine that he finds haunts him for the rest of the fic. I read the Darth Plagueis novel near the start of writing this, and it kind of opened my third eye about Palpatine and what his motivations and wounds are, which was interesting when he really is the face of evil in Star Wars as a whole. Obi-Wan is the first person to ever tell him that he has the propensity, the choice, to be good, and that there's no such thing as being evil from birth. Palpatine's father pretty much told him he was evil as a baby. Plagueis saw this boy with daddy issues and said "you have the bloodlust of a serial killer" so, Palpatine took these things and cast off the responsibility of choice. He was bad, and there was nothing to be done about it, so he might as well be "king of the beasts" as he puts it. This is the moment where he goes from being interested only in tormenting Obi-Wan to being interested in Obi-Wan and everything that entails as the fic goes on. It unravels a part of him even if he doesn't admit that for quite a while.
And this echoes through the rest of the fic as Obi-Wan find himself is cursed with this terrible understanding of the man who did horrific things to him, and sees, so, so clearly, the Sith cycle of abuse.
I could go on for ages but, this exchange is something I think about a lot!
