Hey everyone I am incredibly stoned and having a lot of feelings about our like fourth and most explicit canon confirmation that time is non-linear as far the Force is concerned in the Star Wars universe, and what this may actually mean for those who can sense it
Especially when it comes to how Force-sensitives experience memory (premonition as memory of possible future events) and experience their relationships to others (how much can you sense your future feelings about a person before you develop them?) and ESPECIALLY when it comes to attachment and what that implies/means if/when you are able to experience emotion in a non-linear manner.
I mean how many times when we see Force-sensitives fall in love they do it instantly hard and fast, bringing an intensity to the table their non-Force-sensitive partner often does not understand? When that pattern does not manifest, how often in its place do we see the Force-sensitive couching their feelings in terms of restraint or denial, hinting they feel an intensity that has to be held back?
What does it mean if through the Force you can sense the all encompassing love you will one day have for a person you may have only just met, or not met yet at all?
Or to use a truly and fully non-romantic example – when Leia tells Luke she always knew he was her brother somehow, could that have not been her sensing a biological bond, but rather her future relationship with him bleeding through into their past? Much as Padmé – who Leia never knew at all – could bleed through from her past in the form of visions/memories so Leia knew she was kind and beautiful and sad?
THIS IS SUCH A MIND BLOWINGLY FASCINATING THING TO THINK ABOUT.
That time is non-linear in the Star Wars universe, that Force-sensitives are tapping into this thing that is non-linear, which means they can be tapping into everything at once, all across the span of their lives (or possibly greater) and how that affects their (basically psychic) abilities.
How it affects these things that they just “always knew”, how Leia just always felt that connection to Luke, that it’s a little bit some part of her knowing what’s coming (and this puts Force users’ ability to know the future/past into a whole new light, that it’s the Cosmic Force’s non-linear nature brushing up against them) but also that she’s feeling her future feelings and her past feelings.
How it affects someone like Anakin Skywalker, who is already so overloaded with feelings and doesn’t want to do anything less than wholly embrace them–he’s piled on with all of his feelings for Padme over the entire course of his life, that he loves her instantly because he loves her in the future and all of that is jammed into him at once the first time he actually sees her?
What does this mean for Luke, who would be feeling all those terrible things Ben will do, but hasn’t done yet, but he still feels them and they’re still true? What does this mean for all those potential futures that Force-sensitives get a glimpse of, that Force Spirits can see and know would have been true?
I really love how massive and eldritch this makes the Force, how unknowable it can make the Force, because no mortal mind could really understand it, how this explores something new about the Force and yet seems to fit so well with everything else. Emotions in a non-linear manner, no wonder they’re always having to brace themselves, if you’re not only bombarded by what you feel in the moment, but occasionally the entire span of your life, the more you let those feelings run awhile, the more you’re hit with a mac truck of sheer emotions.
Obi-Wan experiencing his ENTIRE LIFE’S WORTH OF GRIEF AT MOMENTS, not knowing what it meant or where it was coming from, only that he sometimes felt this impossibly infinite span of sadness? THANKS, ANON.
Title: The Miskatonic Project Rating: PG-13 for horror themes, death Summary: Abraham Erskine may have invented something new with the Serum – or maybe he re-created something very old. Something…Elder. Notes: I should be working on like three other fanfics but I had a TERRIBLE DREAM this afternoon and anyway this only took about half an hour to write.
***
Steve came out of the Vita-Ray machine…different.
Of course he looked different – taller, thickly muscled, skin gleaming. But it wasn’t the change in his appearance so much as the…sensation people felt around him. Howard claimed not to feel it, and Erskine died before he could weigh in. Peggy felt it, but not in the way others did. To her, he seemed otherworldly, but like an angel or a religious vision – comforting under a layer of unreality. She even liked the strange black pupils he’d developed, so big and dark you could hardly see the whites of his eyes at all.
Others, however….
She didn’t see him pull the Hydra agent out of the submarine after Erskine’s assassination. Only three people did – a cab driver, a little boy, and the boy’s mother. The cab driver wouldn’t say a word, and the boy’s mother stuttered and stammered so badly they finally gave up. The little boy just said, “Well, he got him,” and looked admiringly at Steve.
Steve wasn’t wet, but the submarine lay on the deck of the pier, and the man next to it was dead, a rictus of horror on his face.
Short, I said. Easy, I said. Definitely won’t take long, I said….
Aaaand here we go with part two…
***
On the first night they made camp, Peggy found herself surrounded by men – not in the sense that she was the only women, but in the sense that they actively, intently surrounded her. They weren’t impolite, exactly, but they had just come from a place of desperation and fear, and were happy to be alive, and all that…entailed. Their presence, their willingness to bring her tins of food or start a fire for her, the warring exhaustion and relief and want, pressed in on her insistently.
And then suddenly it was like the sun rose and the air cleared – and she saw why.
“Gentlemen,” Steve Rogers said, appearing from the darkness, lit by the fire and with Sergeant Barnes at one elbow, Sergeant Dugan at the other. The men all took a sort of spiritual step back. “How about you tired soldiers find places to bed down for the night.”
They cleared out fast. Steve looked at her, a question in his bright face, and she nodded. He settled in, others joining him – Dugan, Jones, Morita, Dernier and Falsworth, names she’d learn later. Steve sat on a fallen log one of the men had dragged over earlier; James Barnes sat at his feet. These men were calmer, and she sensed that they, like her, saw angels rather than devils when they looked at Steve and Barnes. They were here with her, not because of her.
“I was capable of looking after myself,” Peggy felt obliged to point out.
“Sure, but why should you have to?” Barnes said. Steve’s eyes still looked, at least in some lights, mostly normal. Barnes, you couldn’t see the whites at all.
Some headcanons because I don’t really have the TIME to write an entire series but I DO have the time to rhapsodize about my Love for this concept.
So the new girl’s name is Chihiro and she’s weird and charming and friendly and fearless. She always wears a lucky purple hairtie and she stops to bow to every shrine she comes across and she takes her time writing her name, every kanji clear and precise and unmistakable. She goes from new to popular in about a week and her teachers tell her parents that their daughter has a natural gift for making friends, open and cheerful with anyone who’s civil to her. She doesn’t have answers for anyone about those two months that her family was just kind of missing, but other than that she’s an open book.
Chihiro is known for being open, even.
So when a girl in a salmon uniform shows up at the school looking for her sister Sen, a year after Chihiro’s arrival, and Chihiro launches herself into the stranger’s arms with a whoop of delight, everyone is…a little lost.
Chihiro’s sister is scary. One of the older boys hit on her and she broke his wrist. Chihiro told her to behave and her sister waved a hand and said, “Relax, Sen, he had it coming.” She moves like a bulldozer–if you’re in her way, your choices are to get out of it or get flattened. Within the day, it’s been firmly established that Lin, whoever the hell she is, is some kind of thug. She comes by every few months and brings Chihiro brief letters from “Young Master Haku” and from “Granny” and “the boilerman” and everyone walks a little warier around Chihiro because her sister is clearly a yanki and not to be toyed with. Chihiro’s an easygoing person, but honestly Lin absolutely radiates “they’ll never find the body” and it handily resolves any issues that Chihiro might otherwise have.
When Chihiro is fifteen she leads an ecological initiative that is…absolutely absurdly successful, largely because she looked around at the other students in her class and said “This is something I really care about, who wants to help me” and every hand went up. Probably half of them actually care about the environment, and half of them are doing it to cover their community service requirement. Half of them are hoping to woo Absurdly Charming Local Student Ogino Chihiro over the next few months. There is some overlap between these groups.
Over one year, they raise an astonishing amount of money to contribute to a campaign to tear down some abandoned apartments in Chihiro’s old town and restore a river, and at the celebration they throw at the end of it all, she gets up and speaks and smiles and about three quarters of her class sighs in unison.
“I never expected to raise this much, thank you all so much for your help,” Absurdly Charming Local Student Ogino Chihiro says, beaming.
“Oh no,” her classmates say, dismayed. Turns out finishing the project means being done with weekly meetings led by Chihiro.
Lin needles Chihiro about Young Master Haku and Chihiro blushes furiously every time and changes the subject to how her grandfather is doing.
The things that are Known about Chihiro’s grandfather are as follows:
Generally known as “the Boilerman”
Has a great many pets, all called “Sootball”
Likes Chihiro very much
Does not like Lin nearly as much
Smuggled Chihiro out of her great aunt’s house once
Does not like blood on his walls
Once hid Young Master Haku for an entire night, possibly related to the blood situation
There are some serious concerns about what the Boilerman does and why he has such strict opinions about blood on his walls.
The next year, Chihiro’s parents are out of town on Parents’ Day, which is how everyone meets the Boilerman and also Granny, who do not seem to be married and bicker constantly about everything except Chihiro and Granny’s sister, who seems to be Lin’s boss and also the great aunt who necessitated the smuggling. Granny mutters about Chihiro’s river fundraiser and Chihiro scolds her for almost killing someone, apparently Young Master Haku, and Granny scoffs that “he was fine” while the Boilerman complains about blood on his walls. Chihiro asks after an old friend and Granny says “Well we almost had bandits but he took care of them and we won’t have to worry about that anymore” and goes on to praise this person’s spinning.
So, everyone concludes, they’re terrifying.
By the time Young Master Haku actually shows up, Chihiro is seventeen and she’s managed to convince the school to send her whole class to see the un-damming of the Kohaku River, and her class has pretty soundly hashed out what’s up. It goes like this:
Chihiro’s great aunt runs a yakuza clan and Young Master Haku is her heir and Lin is one of his direct underlings, and after a falling out Granny and Great-Aunt split the clan and now hate each other, and the Boilerman works for Great-Aunt and saved Young Master Haku’s life after Granny tried to bump him off to put Chihiro in his place.
Chihiro seems pretty well out of the family business, though, and went and fell in love with the guy she was supposed to be replacing, and although Great-Aunt doesn’t care for Chihiro as much as the rest, her son likes her and her heir likes her and so does everyone else, so the two clans play nicely for Chihiro’s sake.
Young Master Haku, once he shows up, is almost as terrifying as Lin in his coolly remote way, but he obviously dotes on Chihiro and she wears river pearl earrings that are probably worth more money than anything else she owns and grins, silly with glee, whenever she sees him.
No one tries to get Absurdly Charming Local Yakuza Daughter Ogino Chihiro to go out with them anymore because can you fucking imagine.
So is that like… a fantasy Homestuck AU except people get better character development
Every generic fantasy HS au on the planet has some sort of fantasy Europe dueling Derse-Prospit kingdoms thing so let’s not do that. I was actually struggling to come up with a generic fantasy idea, but I just finished reading Beneath the Sugar Sky, so let’s do a Wayward Children thing! For those unfamiliar with that, the conceit is kids who wandered into another world Narnia-style and then ended up back on Earth, disoriented and confused.
This one actually stuck with me, so here are a few other thoughts.
I didn’t mention John. John went to a Nonsense world that was all fun and games until it wasn’t, and when he came back he did his best to forget. He’s always been good at that. He was happy to see his father. He slipped easily back in his life at home. Until one day one of those cracks opens up and he slips into a world that is definitely not made for him. That’s not surprising. More of these fractures are opening up. What’s surprising is that he makes it back, not too long after he fell through, and in one piece. He’s got a knack for it, it seems – for knowing where he came from and where he’s been; finding doorways, walking through them, and finding the way home again. So when kids keep disappearing, and they need to find the source of whatever’s breaking the walls between worlds, he gets dragged out of his denial to serve as their guide. As long as everyone’s with him, they can move between worlds without too much trouble.
Until he takes a turn even he wasn’t expecting, and they’re back in what they think is their world… until they get back to the home for wayward children and there are four other children with familiar faces living there. That’s when things start getting really complicated.
Some envision the structure of the worlds as a compass, or a set of axes. Either implies a center. There is a world at the center of all worlds, which inspires all the others. And one day, the most wayward of all children found her way there. Her name is Calliope, and she is telling herself a story.
most of these are pretty valid reasons why it would be premature to expect to encounter aliens now. i think we also tend to forget that even if there were civilizations at our own tech level right next door, astronomically speaking, their radio and television signals would be unreadably attenuated by the time they reached us. there might be music and images in the faint static our radio telescopes pick up, but it’s so scattered and degraded we’d never be able to tell.
just moving along like everyone else 