so i was wondering where rey learned to understand binary (the language of astromech droids) because she’s a lone scavenger living on a desert planet and i was thinking that mabe sometime in the course of her star destroyer spelunking adventures, let’s say she’s 14 years old; she finds part of an astromech droid that’s still functioning just enough to talk. so she decide not to trade it to untar platt for portions and takes it home instead, cleans it up. hooks it up to an old comm screen so she can see what it’s saying while she’s still learning all its beeps and whistles. and then at the end of a long day, when she gets home, she scrubs the sand off her face, pours the sand out of her boots, and just sits and talks to her barely-functioning astromech droid, whose knowledge is thirty years old: coruscant, the seat of the empire (what empire?) updates on the construction of the death star. bounty notices for han solo, smuggler. the imperial senate, disbanded (but what about the new senate?)
the hot, dry air of jakku, making mirages of old memories just outside the shell of her AT-AT. the desert so quiet that you can hear sand sliding down the dunes, in soft silky layers. rey, scraping crumbs off her plate with her fingertips, pressing her droid with more questions. what’s naboo? what’s a forest? how big is a forest? what’s a tree? how many trees are there? (no one else tells her about these things. no one else talks to her.) the droids go everywhere, she realizes. they see everything and keep everything, scavengers of memory and information, of events and people and ideas. she learns binary until she gets good enough to detach the comm screen and just listen; during the day she quietly practices binary to herself, whistling each beep and tone as she hikes the dunes to the star destroyers, her calves aching. when she gets home, the droid greets her with a happy beep. for a few months, it feels nice, strange, hopeful. it feels odd to have someone waiting for her. refreshing, almost.
and then one day rey comes home and the astromech droid doesn’t beep, no whistle of greeting. the light in its glassy round eye is dark. the fuel cells are dead. her heart sinks. she searches the star destroyer endlessly for another working fuel cell, tries to trade for them at nima outpost, but to no avail: the model is too old, any fuel cells that could work are all being used for other things. that night she wears her x-wing helmet and sniffs, watching the stars, wrestling with hope and despair in equal measure; in the morning she drags the droid to untar platt and trades its parts for twelve portions. the first portion is bitter and tasteless, more so than usual, but it’s alright, rey thinks. her friend even fed her.
and now she talks to all the astromech droids that pass through nima outpost. they don’t mind talking to her. they’re happy to tell her how hyperdrives work, what a compressor does, how to fix an acceleration compensator. and every time she hopes that maybe, the droid will end up on a distant planet somewhere else, and it’ll mention a girl on jakku, a girl who polished its casing and oiled its hinges, a girl who’s been waiting for a long time, and someone will look up with a twinge of recognition and realizeit’s time to go back. it’s time for her to come home… it never happens. but rey tries anyway, because the droids go everywhere, see everything, meet everyone… she stays, and waits.
I was going to be like “an AU where all Leia writes all her official dispatched he exact same way that Carrie Fisher tweets,” except I think we all know in our heart of hearts that this is in fact canon, and the first thing you learn in the Resistance is a basic fluency in emoji
One time the First Order manages to intercept a few official communiques and they’re all like “wtf is this code” while Kylo Ren is standing to the side just dying inside because MOM GOD THIS IS SO EMBARRASSING
darth vader would never write like this
THIS IS THE MOST VITALLY IMPORTANT THING I HAVE BEHELD OH MY GOD
the huge dichotomy between what we expect and what we actually see when kylo ren is unmasked is so interesting to me though. like, kylo beneath the mask has freckles. goddamn freckles. let that sink in. a spray of inconsistently placed freckles across his cheeks. the cgi people could easily have removed that detail, but they chose not to.
remove the mask, and suddenly his height doesn’t make him intimidating – it makes him gangly. a little awkward even. like his arms and legs are too long for him to know what to do with them and he wishes he could take up less room.
remove the mask, and suddenly we’re presented with someone who wears his heart on his sleeve. his face is so open – one look and he’s an open book, he couldn’t be stoic if he wanted to.
remove the mask, and we have literally the last person you’d expect kylo ren to be, and goddamn do I eat that up.
every time I see a video or gif of Kylo Ren in his mask all I can think of is that interview with Adam Driver and Oscar Isaac where Oscar says that their first day on set was Poe’s interrogation scene and Adam didn’t take the mask off in between takes and would lean in and be like “don’t worry I’m under here it’s me” and my heart fills with so much love
I saw an interview where John and Daisy said he even stayed in character the whole time he was on set, and sometimes you’d hear random shouting and screaming coming from somewhere, and people would just go “oh Adam must have a scene coming up soon”
Like…the actors playing the nopetroopers probably noped away from several of Adam’s rehersals irl before they filmed the scene for the movie.
NOPETROOPERS.
There are so many things I love about this post I don’t even know where to start.
