I OWN NOTHING…I guess I have to say that don't I?
10 years Post NJO AU
Author's Note:
I have two main reasons for writing this story. First, I feel that one of the biggest crimes in SW profic is the lack of emotional development, or experience in my favorite characters. It's as though profic writers are given a character summary form the YJK and JJK years and the only thing adjusted in later stories is the character's ages. Please…how many of us still exhibit the same quirks in our 20-'s that we had in our teen and pre-teen years? I could probably rant on this topic all day, and no one who knows me would be surprised, but the bottom line is I'm disgusted by the continued portrayal of Tahiri Veila as either a petulant pre-teen insistent on shunning shoes or as a lobotomized Ta-riina drone of a character. There are no adjectives in the English language that correctly express how stupid I thought that whole plot line was. (Hey…my opinion…it may differ from yours…but there we go.)
Tenel Ka is another character that in most books is so devoid of personality I cringe when I see her name in the 'dramatis personae'. This girl has been through a lot and is the ruler of a gigantic kingdom…why is she relentlessly portrayed as the most one dimensional female in the SW Universe? Surely, having lost her arm, her mother, her unborn sibling, her innocence, her home world (well…one of them anyway) and countless friends she would have at some point gained a little introspection. Maybe stopped using the word 'Fact' in the place of complete sentences and gotten over that whole 'Arms are for wimps and I don't need one' thing. Though Jaina's line to TK in SBS, 'you have the emotional depth of a ronto' was kind of funny, it really does strike at the heart of how she is written and I find that tragic. There is so much potential for Tenel Ka to be great, a character that is actually inspirational, but evidently the folks at LFL are determined to see that she be stunted instead.
The second big reason for this plot bunny that has been a year in the bouncing and has gotten way out of control in my head, is that I have a genuine interest in the idea of what coming of age during the very brutal Yuuzhan Vong war would have done to the surviving members of the 'Strike Team' and how the psychic damage could effect them in their behavior and relationships in the subsequent years. Not during the times when they are called on to save the universe, because clearly they would do just that. But how do they deal with day-to-day stuff. What do psychologically damaged galactic heroes do during their down time?