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Poe (username Poe_Hot_Damn - look, he was sixteen) got into historical RPF after he got drunk with his squadron and round about three in the morning someone said something about the utterly banthashit conspiracy theory that Senator Leia Organa, adoptive daughter of Breha and Bail Organa (blessed be their memories) was the birth daughter of Her Highness Senator Padmé Naberrie Amidala of Naboo. It makes a sort of blurry sense through the booze - if she was a queen’s daughter, it would only make sense for another queen to adopt her, right? - and then in the morning Poe can’t quite forget it. He goes looking for evidence - he even finds some, which is baffling - and then he gets distracted by reading about the Queen’s Handmaidens, and, well…
Poe sort of understands the Handmaidens, though he’ll never say it aloud where his squadron could hear. They’d tease him mercilessly. But that utter devotion, to a cause, to a person, that willingness to be their queen’s shields and blasters and decoys, to kill and die for her, to follow her into hell and back...yeah, Poe gets that. He sometimes thinks if he’d been Nabooian, and there’d been a King of the right age, he’d have kind of wanted to kneel down and lay his blaster at the King’s feet and swear himself, his life and sacred honor, to something larger than himself. Someone bright and burning and good, like Padmé Naberrie was.
So he gets interested in the Handmaidens, and then he gets really interested in Sabé, the Handmaiden who was most often the Queen’s decoy and her voice when she could not be present, who survived Padmé Naberrie’s death and became instrumental in the Rebellion. He intends to write a series of short ficlets about her adventures among the resistance cells, but he makes the cardinal mistake of starting too far back - back before she’s Sabé, before she takes the vows of a Handmaiden, when she was only another daughter of Naboo - and now, well…
Now he’s three hundred thousand words into Adventures of a Handmaiden, which is turning out to actually be a biography of the woman, a pretty damn accurate one if he says so himself, and he’s only barely into Padmé’s first year as Queen. He’s got quite a following, too. He credits his BB-b8a on his profile, because the little droid takes dictation during their long hours in hyperspace, copies everything down for Poe to go through once they’re on the ground again. BB-8 also says he’ll tase Poe if Sabé ends up dead, so once Poe gets to the bits after Padmé Naberrie’s death, the bits that aren’t going to be found in any available files or holobooks, he’s going to have to come up with something good.
In the meantime, he’s doing more research than he ever did at the Academy, trying to make sure that he gets every tiny little detail right. He updates pretty regularly, about once every two weeks, because without a war on, being in the New Republic military is actually sort of boring, and aside from paperwork and training and getting drunk with his squadron, he doesn’t have much else to do but write, and wander the comments and the notice boards looking for other people like him, who are more interested in the history than the possibility of smut.
***
Finn (fn-2187, and his real name isn’t Finn, it’s about eighteen letters long and has more symbolism than he could shake a really big stick at) did a report on Mandalore for his tutors years ago, and got hooked. Mando’a is a fascinating culture, it really is, and he read everything he could on it, including several articles on the life and adventures of Jango Fett. Which led him inexorably to the Kaminoan clones who fought beside the Jedi, and betrayed them, and were betrayed in turn.
Finn has strong feelings about slavery, most of which boil down to a sort of horrified rage, and the clones - created and commanded to be soldiers, controlled by chips in their very brains - are clearly slaves. But he’s fascinated, too, by the way they managed to create a culture, to retain pieces of their Mandalorian heritage, to give themselves names and insist upon their individuality even among ranks of identical brothers. He reads everything he can get his hands on - and a prince can get his hands on a lot, sending away for rare holobooks, pestering distant academies for copies of their vid-records of the war.
His Mess Hall Tales is a collection of short stories, each from the perspective of a different clone. And they are different, it’s obvious in the records he reads so voraciously, so he tries to get it right in his fics: this clone’s dry humor, that clone’s sharp tongue, another’s penchant for melodrama.
But all his fics end in angst, because there’s only two endings for the clones: death in battle, standing beside the Jedi they served and loved - and that’s clear in all the records, the immense affection between the clones and their Jedi commanders, the good ones anyhow - or Order Sixty-Six, and the chips, and the utter betrayal which let the Empire rise.
Finn gets a lot of comments that are nothing but incoherent keysmashing and crying emojis. He tries to post at least once a month, but his actual duties are pretty extensive and time-consuming, and sometimes it’s longer than that. Still, he’s proud of his fics, of the research he does to give each clone their own voice and story, and it’s a very good distraction at the end of a long day of politics and courtly courtesy, to be able to flop down on his bed and scroll through people saying nice things about the words he wrote.
***
Rey (waitingforsomeone) scavenges all sorts of things out of the wrecks of the Star Destroyers on Jakku: mechanical parts that she takes to Unkar Plutt and sells, of course, and ration packs and sometimes water, and old droids and holobooks and anything else she can lift or drag out onto the sand. She has to sell most of it, usually, but she always reads the records first, every scrap of data she can pry out of the hulks. It’s a window into the galaxy, somewhere - somewhen - other than Jakku.
There’s a lot of propaganda on the ships about the Jedi, talking about how dangerous and treacherous and unpredictable they were, but Rey knows the Imps were lying; that’s common knowledge. So clearly if they said the Jedi were bad, the Jedi must have been good. So she rewrites the propaganda, the stories of Jedi treachery and malice, until they’re the way they ought to be: stories about heroes.
She writes really good adventures, actually, full of death-defying stunts and daring last-minute rescues and lightsaber battles along the edges of volcanoes and cliffs, or atop shuttles screaming through the clouds and only just barely missing mountaintops. But she doesn’t know much about the Jedi Code, except that Jedi weren’t allowed to marry for some reason, and she has the vague idea that the Master-Padawan relationship was sort of...like those warriors she read about once, from a planet called Sparta, who were always paired up with their lovers, only angstier and with more pining. Lots of pining. And bedsharing. And huddling for warmth, and hurt/comfort, and maybe a soulbond or two?
She’s actually quite good at the pining, but unfortunately her inspirations for the smut tend to be very bad porn holos and her own overactive imagination. She is getting better, though - especially now that she’s learned to count how many limbs the characters have and not add extra halfway through the scene.
Her update schedule is incredibly erratic, based mostly on when she has enough fuel to connect her battered old console to the holonet. Sometimes she’ll only have a brief little ficlet, sometimes a fifty-thousand-word epic; it all depends on whether she’s found any good propaganda recently. Her grammar isn’t the best and sometimes her spelling is questionable, but the bones of her stories are so good that she’s got a lot of followers.
She’d be a little surprised, really, if she ever found out how close to accurate the adventure parts of her fics are to historical reality.
***
Rose (DurasteelRose) got introduced to fic when her older sister forgot to log off of the shared console, and Paige (nevergiveup) has never quite stopped kicking herself for that. Mostly because Rose tends to ask Paige to beta her work, and Paige likes fluffy soulbonding AUs of her favorite holonet shows, while Rose likes to write incredibly angsty historical RPF set in the early days of the Rebellion. She’s written a lot of Jyn/Cassian, and a long and incredibly painful Baze/Chirrut, The Force Is With Me, that’s on half a dozen recs lists.
The weird thing, for a lot of Rose’s readers, is that while the actual story is usually full of heartbreak and doomed love and heroic self-sacrifice that saves the plans but never saves the people, the background mechanical details are incredibly accurate. Like, Rose knows exactly which part numbers were used to build K-2SO, and how much fuel it takes to fly Rogue One a given distance, and the precise tensile strength of durasteel. It’s really weird for someone writing heavy angst to put that much thought into the mechanics of it, and some of her readers think it’s some sort of odd...social commentary, perhaps? Or something? Regardless, she’s so reliably accurate that her fics are actually used as resource materials by other people in fandom, who skim the horrible tragic deaths to find the useful details buried underneath.
Honestly it’s just that while Rose likes writing angst, what she knows is mechanical engineering, and she doesn’t even usually have to do any research on those parts of her fics. Doesn’t everyone know the tensile strength of durasteel off the top of their heads?
***
Armitage Hux (Tarkinson) failed out of the New Republic Military Academy mostly on account of the eight different papers he wrote arguing that the Empire was right, and is now the head of a small and mostly useless militia on a small and mostly useless planet halfway to nowhere. He’s a little bitter about that. He uses that bitterness to write long, plotty, decently well-researched fics in which Grand Moff Tarkin actually manages to successfully pacify the Rebellion and the glorious Empire continues forever!
Usually with Tarkin’s completely fictional son, Giles, filling his footsteps after he steps down from his position in grand old age. And often with Tarkin - and his loyal, clever, devoted son - seeing to the utter humiliation of that useless relic of a bygone era, Darth Vader. Who needs Force-users when you have a Death Star, after all?
Hux has an ongoing war in the comments of most of his fics with Ben Solo-Organa (KYLO_REN), who, having failed out of Jedi school on account of being too vicious by half, spends his days holed up in the basement of his mother’s house, reading every fic that even mentions Darth Vader and then leaving nasty comments complaining that ‘My Grandfather Darth Vader’ would never act like that. He really doesn’t like Hux’s version of the Sith Lord, and has a particular hatred for Tarkinson, who says such nasty things about the Great Darth Vader. Hux isn’t too fond of him, either.
***
Phasma (chrome_plated_heart) used to be just as enthusiastic about Grand Moff Tarkin as Tarkinson is. Her real love is Palpatine, of course, he of the long-range plans and the incredibly clever backstabbing - she’s modeled herself after him, a bit, what with the convincing Kanjiklub to get her off her birth-planet by beating enough of them up that they adopted her, and then selling them out to the local military detachment in return for the promise of a commission - but she isn’t a Sith Lord, so she can’t precisely become Palpatine. Tarkin, though, seems pretty achievable, and she and Tarkinson write most of the fic for him -
Right up until the day that fn-2187 leaves a cordial, if stilted, note on one of her fics pointing out that while Tarkin was, indeed, a very good Grand Moff, the true master of the art of war was indisputably Admiral Thrawn.
Phasma still isn’t very fond of fn-2187, who is far too concerned with the tender feelings of the clones - clones, really, who cares what they think or feel? - but she has to admit he had a point; Admiral Thrawn is indisputably the master of the art of war. She reads everything she can by and about him, and her next seven fics are all focused entirely on his clever battle strategies. Tarkinson leaves snippy little comments on every fic, and gives her eight kinds of banthashit over their private comm chat, but Phasma ignores him magnificently. If he wants to keep imitating an inferior role model, that’s his problem. Phasma isn’t stupid enough to imitate anyone but the best.
***
Leia (notyourprincess) does actually know about Poe’s fic, though she doesn’t know it’s Poe’s. She has an alert set up to let her know if anyone seems a little too invested in the still-active conspiracy theory that she is Padmé Naberrie’s daughter, and Poe’s space-blog was full of exactly that for weeks before he got hooked on one of Padmé’s Handmaidens. And then of course Leia had to read the fic to make sure it wasn’t full of the same theory, and now she waits with badly concealed impatience for each update. Poe_Hot_Damn is good, and Leia likes learning about this woman who was almost family. She never comments, though. That would be too weird.
Luke, who doesn’t have a username, follows waitingforsomeone’s fics, because years ago Ahsoka (twoblades) forwarded him one with the note, All the bits about romance are banthashit, but how the kriff does this person know the details of that mission? It was classified to hell and back, but they’ve got every detail note-perfect! He’s rather taken aback by how often the adventures are impossibly accurate, and also by the ongoing argument she has in her comments section with Poe_Hot_Damn. It seems waitingforsomeone is of the strong opinion that Luke Skywalker must be the son of Anakin Skywalker, the Hero With No Fear, and she thinks the most obvious choice of a mother would be Padmé Naberrie Amidala. Poe_Hot_Damn is sure Padmé Naberrie is Leia Organa’s mother, and of course they can’t both be right.
Luke’s honestly not sure whether to applaud their deductive reasoning or despair that the secret he and Leia have kept for so long is so very transparently easy to see through.
Han (nerfherder) knows absolutely nothing about historical RPF, or fic, or indeed any of the shenanigans going down. He has a space-blog, ninety percent of which is blurry photos of various planets or the interior of an incredibly beat-up ship, but the other ten percent - and the reason both Poe_Hot_Damn and waitingforsomeone, among many others, follow him - is these long rambling posts about his adventures with Farmboy and the Princess, all of which are utterly improbable - the one about getting stuck in a wampa, on Hoth, for kriff’s sake! - and yet so incredibly detailed and period-accurate that no one can decide if he’s telling the truth or doing some epic trolling.
As it happens, he usually posts those when he’s very drunk and very bored and Chewbacca isn’t around to take his holonet connection away.
Chewbacca (wwanro_oarachuraan) has the most popular space-blog of all of them, even though it’s entirely in Shyriiwook. You don’t need to understand the captions to really enjoy cute kitten pictures, after all.