Week of Awesome Ladies -- Day 3 (sort of)

I am so far behind on womenlovefest, I can't even tell you. I kind of knew this would happen, but I did have imaginings that I'd be able to sneak in a few posts here and there. Posting from a rock somewhere between the U.S. and Canada, though, has proved a little more challenging than I thought. Fingers crossed, though, that this works. If it does, this will be my post for Day 3 -- followed closely by Day 4.

Day 3 = more Vala. This is from a longer piece that I've never quite managed to finish, but have always wanted to. It's Vala and Adria (both the original and the namesake), and what makes them all tick:

( The child was a lost cause. )

Week of Awesome Ladies -- Day 4 (still playing catch-up)

Going through the content I wanted to play with for womenlovefest, I’m realizing that the lady characters I love enough to want to write about often experience fandom hate or apathy – but it’s often because their characterization never feels quite finished. It’s like they never quite get the character arc I think they should have, and that makes me sad for them. It’s how I feel about Vala, it’s how I feel about Kate Lockley (hopefully more on her soon) – and it’s definitely how I feel about Mara Jade.

Not to get too pop psychology about it all, but it just feels like none of the characters in the Star Wars EU – Mara, in particular – ever get to do the emotional work needed to be fully-functioning human beings after all the truly awful shit that happens to them. Or, if they do, we just don't ever see it, which... why not?

How does Mara get from the angry, self-destructive (arguably a little suicidal – there are extenuating circumstances, but she straight-out asks Luke to kill her at one point) girl she is when we meet her to a complete person, confident in her own abilities and place in the universe? To a woman who feels ready to be a wife and mother? To being comfortable with wielding power and teaching others? We just don't ever really see that transformation, which is just a shame because she's a great character and there should be lots of interesting territory to explore there.

Given that, I usually tend to play with AUs when I write her, but this time around I'm going to try and fill in some of those missing moments – not an easy feat when you realize that even the canon of this particular fandom is wildly inconsistent and often flatly contradicts itself. But, what the hell? I like a challenge.

So I'm going to do a short fic for each of the tracks on the Mara fanmix I posted here, each one a 'missing' character moment or just something I would have liked to see happen. These are a little out of order, but maybe once I have them all done I’ll figure out whether they work best in chronological order, order of the track numbers – or something else altogether.


( #1. Dog Days Are Over )

( #3. Raw Sugar )