Rey stirred at the sound of screaming coming from the other room. A high pitched, desperate shriek that she was convinced was amplified through the Force.
So right out the gate the second sentence is a sentence fragment. Speaking as somebody who's a big fan of artistically using sentence fragments, this really doesn't seem intentional.
Star was awake again. Another nightmare. This was the fifth time this week. The little girl was constantly waking up screaming in the middle of the night, and doctors could only assume it post traumatic stress disorder. For a four year old. That fact alone broke Rey’s heart.
I'd have nightmares if Lily's OC had adopted me, too.
Aliana made a small noise in gratitude as she laid back down, gently squeezing Rey’s hand before her wife slipped out of bed. Aliana had gotten up to tend to Star every night and it was taking its toll on her. Dark circles under her eyes, her braids gaining more and more flyaways and she was exhausted. Seeing all the progress Aliana had made in taking care of herself slowly bleed away the more Star kept her up was another thing that was breaking Rey’s heart.
Seeing the 'progress' she had made bleed away because she's taking care of an emotionally crippled child? Yeah, wow, poor Aliana. It's heartbreaking that a four-year-old child is so damaged at the start of life that she's having constant nightmares but won't you think of how this hurts
Aliana?
She could handle the baby, and let her wife get her much needed rest.
...does Lily...
Does Lily not know what a baby is? Because four years old is
well past being a baby.
The girl’s night terrors stemmed from her time on Nathema, a time of torture and harsh punishments to mold her into a Jedi killer by the First Order.
Does... does the First Order not know what a baby is?
This is always really funny to me. Lily has no concept of relative evil or why somebody being a jerk is worse than somebody being a murderer, narratively. She just assumes that if you pile on all kinds of trauma it just magically turns the character into somebody worth caring about, or if you just give them a high enough body count it immediately makes them irredeemably evil. It's a child way of approaching evil (or at least an edgy teenager's), and there's a point where you push past audience sympathy into audience eye-rolling. Like yes, Lily, the First Order is evil, and I'm sure that if they saw this kind of potential in a child it would be all about physically destroying a delicate creature like a baby -- who is so fragile that shaking them causes massive brain trauma and death -- than propagandizing from a young age to make them loyal to your cause. That kid should've had a Darth Vader plushie.
They’d found her abandoned in a ruined bedroom,
This sentence immediately follows the last one, and because Lily is incompetent she hasn't established a new antecedent for 'they'. I read this initially and found myself assuming the First Order had found Star in a ruined bedroom, not Rey and Aliana. This is something that can trip up new writers who just don't know to be aware of it,
and though she had seemed fine initially, the memories of what had happened to her had been returning ever since Rey and Aliana had adopted the girl.
Again, presumably from proximity to Aliana.
Rey picked up the screaming girl out of her bed and balanced her on her hip, shrouding her in the Dark Side of the Force the same way Alie had done for her on Ahch To three years ago. The shroud was originally a cloaking tactic to hide from Force Sensitives, but the way it almost blocked off the Force entirely proved to have many uses, one of which being a soothing and comforting warmth.
I'm not huge into Star Wars although I can tell that everything about this is, um...
bullshit. But just as somebody who's casually aware of the franchise, with the Force basically representing the collective life energy of the universe... how would cutting off from that bring a soothing warmth? If you wanted to lean into this, why not make it a cooling breeze? Shutting off excess stimulation would be like going into a sensory deprivation tank-- dark, cool.
Then again, 'soothing warmth' is the easy go-to cliche so of course it's the one she'd use.
Being Force sensitive, Star was soothed by the shroud just as she was
...what?
“S’ok,” Rey said sleepily, sitting down on the edge of Star’s bed and running her hand down the girl’s tight curls. “S’alright… you’re okay…”
Stellar parenting there. No pun intended.
I mentioned in some other assessment of Lily's writing that all of these interactions are so generic, and here we see it again. There's nothing personal about how the characters interact with each other. Rey could be literally anyone. There's no pet names, there's no nicknames, this isn't even like a parent actually comforting a child. You pick up a kid and ask
what's wrong, you don't just say
ah you're okay. You're supposed to give reassurances to what they're actually afraid of.
but of course, none of this fic is actually supposed to be about Star. It's all an excuse talk about -- who else! -- Aliana.
Star continued to cry into Rey’s shoulder, her little fingers digging into her tunic. But at least she wasn’t shrieking anymore, which meant it was working.
Or she screamed so much and so hard her throat has been rubbed raw and now she's crying from the pain of it.
When she and Alie decided they were ready to adopt, they had looked toward the rescued Stormtrooper kids. Efforts had been underway for a while to reunite these children with their parents, using a variety of tracking methods. Over eighty percent of the children had been reunited with their families, but others were orphaned. Either their parents were like Finn’s and couldn’t be located, or their parents were confirmed to be dead. The Empire had tried very hard to find those that couldn’t be found, but eventually Tahraya had to accept that for some of them the damage was done.
It's really interesting that she includes Finn is the 'Stormtrooper kids'. Given that Aliana (who is confirmed as 25 now) is considered 'just a kid' when people fawn over how hard her life is, I guess this tracks, but it's still insane. How old are these 'Stormtrooper kids'? By Lily's metric they can be anywhere from newborns to collegiates.
And so they were put up for adoption. Star had been one of them, and Aliana had insisted they take her in.
Which contradicts the implications of 'they found her in a ruined bedroom', unless they found her there, then shunted her off to the orphanage, then thought about it and came back a few weeks later. How must that have felt?
Rey couldn’t help but chuckle at the name. Star. She’d heard her mother call Aliana by that nickname in recordings and their brief conversation on Elom. It was cute that Aliana chose her mother’s old nickname for her as her daughter’s name. It showed how dedicated Aliana was to having a family of her own.
So Aliana named her child after
herself, and it's proof of how much she 'wanted a family'.
As if we needed any further verification she's a raging narcissist. Could have named her after her dead mother, since she was so important and her loss was so catastrophic? Could have made 'Star' what said dead mother would have named another child? Nah. All about Aliana. I wonder if she even discussed it with R--
Wait a fucking minute. Again, Lily?!
Rey's introduction in TFA was to establish that she was
so convinced that her family -- whom she obviously loved and was willing to wait all her life for -- was going to come back that she refused to leave her shitty desert planet in hopes of them showing up. I know her character gets muddy and fucked up pretty quickly but it was initially established that Rey desired her family to return and implied that her journey would guide her to a new one. She was lonely and longed to join a family again. So not only did Lily steal Rey's beef with Kylo and make it so Aliana gets to kill him-- not only did she make the dyad something that Aliana takes personal offense to and personally ends-- she also transferred Rey's desire for a family over to Aliana, thus rendering Rey an absolute doormate with no self-interest unless it's tied up in Aliana.
Do you even
like Rey's character, Lily? I get there are different interpretations but it's pretty clear you're more interested in the
idea of getting to bang Rey than of Rey herself.
Rey recalled the conversation with Empress Tahraya when they chose to adopt. The Empress had been concerned that it was too soon. Aliana was certainly ready, being twenty six and married, but Rey was only twenty one and had been in this relationship with Aliana early in her adulthood. Tahraya had been concerned about the stability of a wartime marriage. Rey had been indignant with the Empress, but it was understandable in hindsight.
So, just to be clear, Rey and Aliana are
so important that the galactic empress is there expressing concerns about whether they're ready to be parents. You'd
think the Empress would have more important things to do than fuss over their personal lives but this involves Aliana so I guess nothing can
be more important.
Rey had gone from scavenging to fighting in a war and getting into a relationship with one of the first people she had any meaningful human contact with, to marrying after less than a year. And their relationship had been very rocky until Aliana was injured and put into a coma.
This is so close to self-awareness...
She was grateful that Tahraya was concerned, honestly. The subsequent proactive couple’s therapy had been very good for the both of them, and once the doctor gave them the green light they had been allowed to begin the process of adopting Star.
Why does this take place in the Star Wars universe? This is basic domestic bullshit with a few alien names thrown in. Why would you latch so hard onto a franchise with so much creative potential as Star Wars and then just sit back and talk about couples therapy and adoption release forms? It's even more maddening that Lily apparently hates coffee shop AUs. What is this but an even more boring coffee shop AU?
[quote[Rey had realized a while ago that she had severely mistreated Aliana early on, but she hadn’t realized just how much it had affected her wife. Aliana was still prone to trying to prove herself to Rey and Rey still had a tendency to let her do it, and it was helpful to have someone else point that out to the both of them.[/quote]
I love it when people do this-- bring in a tertiary character in order to support the leads. It's a way of saying 'See? I'm not biased, other people think the same thing!', absolving the leads of pushing their views and perspectives while still telling the audience what to think of them. In this case, apparently they talked to a therapist about how Rey had been sold into slavery and smuggled
by Aliana's mother, then abandoned as a toddler on a desert planet, then had her significant other
hide this information, and when she finally learned about what had happened and got upset-- even the therapist agrees that it was Rey's fault! See? Aliana is completely blameless in her constant hiding of information with intent to manipulate Rey, it is
entirely Rey's fault that she got mad about it and now she owes Aliana constant, unconditional love and affection, no judgment, no accountability.
Rey made sure that Aliana was pampered incessantly after that. She became quite annoying about it, in fact.
I'm sure this is supposed to be cute but given the circumstances it's just controlling. Rey
must give Aliana all of her attention and love. But she
can't give Aliana too much or it becomes annoying. Always stay in your lane, Rey, or else you're the problem in this relationship.
Oh, right, this was supposed to be about comforting
her child.
She could feel flashes of memories through the Force. Of the torture on Nathema and of the harsh and unforgiving lessons from the overseers.
She did this same fucking thing in Tales of the Val'kyr. She never bothers to actually go into detail so we can understand what the character went through. When Lord Ryder talked about his torture with Ascentia it was this exact same broad-strokes 'it was really terrible dude, trust me', and somehow that reduced Ascentia to blubbering tears and constant apologies. Here, Rey is allegedly getting the direct memories from Star and should be reacting to them appropriately, empathically... but all we're told was it was really rough, dude, trust me. And, of course...
That the First Order did this to children made her all the more satisfied that Ben Solo had died a painful death, having his soul painfully ripped from hers by an angry and vengeful Sith Lord.
...it's
still all about Aliana.
This is actually really disturbing, psychologically. To have somebody sharing their pain with you, to having somebody who is literally a helpless child cling to you and ask you to make the monsters go away, and you're just sitting there grinning about somebody's brutal death. And the thing is, if this were meant to show that Rey was sick in the head, if this were supposed to show how the Dark Side and Aliana twisted her soul so that this was what she took comfort in... great. But it's not. And we can look at Lily's blog to even verify that this is how Lily thinks-- that her response to somebody else's pain is to fantasize about gutting somebody she doesn't like. Kylo wasn't even
involved in what happened to this kid, his death is absolutely no comfort here!
Star, meanwhile, had been a blessing on their lives.
Well it's nice to talk about somebody that isn't Aliana for a few minutes.
Rey had been mistaken for Star’s babysitter several times when she took her out without Aliana. She tried not to be indignant about it. Theed’s population was older and richer and stuck in their ways, and Star looked nothing like Rey. She could vividly recall one time when Star had gotten ahead of her and was being picked on by some older kids. Finding out that not only was the woman watching her Star’s mother, but a Jedi Master as well had terrified them into behaving themselves.
And it always comes down to being a victim, and getting to be violent because of it.
I'll ask again-- why would a universe filled with so many disparate alien species have
any negative views about homosexuality? There are aliens in this galaxy. There are almost
certainly cross-species romances. There's no reason for a taboo to have been developed in this culture (or if it existed during a hypothetical pre-contact era of humanity, it would have long since been discarded). Stop romanticizing victimhood, Lily. And stop having it always end with your OC or your OC's defender scaring the shit out of literal toddlers. The fact that it's happened more than once is... telling.
Rey gently ran her fingers down Star’s curls and smiled. By the Force this girl was adorable. Just like her mother, actually. Right down to the cute little ringlets of tightly coiled hair. Aliana always kept Star’s hair styled in some way, which was especially uplifting to see.
Aliana named their child after herself, and also insists on styling her hair exactly the way hers is styled. Star is going to grow up with a huge rebellious streak and tell her therapists about her mother using her for vicarious fulfillment.
Aliana spent ten years neglecting herself in her grief, and after unlocking her mother’s archive had to relearn a lot of things she lost. Protecting her hair was one of them. For as long as Rey had known her, Aliana just let her hair fall where it did, tidying it with her fingers for five minutes in the morning and sleeping with it splayed out around her.
Aaaand we're back to using Star to talk about how hard Aliana's life was.
For the record this is a lie. Aliana is mentioned as wearing makeup when she speaks to Rey, and having her hair pulled back. Also really weird point about how she sleeps? Does Lily think women go to bed with their hair in curlers like a 1950s mother-in-law? And her mother's on-board archives apparently included all of her Sith training
and also her hair-care routine? Lily, just... is it that fucking hard to just step back and notice when something you've written is really goddamn stupid? (I mean I guess so, otherwise you wouldn't have published anything, ever...)
It had only been after the war when Rey realized that was a sign of Aliana’s worsening depression. After getting her vengeance, getting into therapy and getting into a better place mentally, Aliana started to take better care of herself. She kept her hair in braids, buns, and other tied up styles, and had taken to sleeping in a silk cap. It was such a change from what Rey was used to seeing from her, and she’d applied those habits to their daughter as well.
But not to herself, I see.
Also, sorry... is the galaxy still at war or not? They talked up about about how the Empress was concerned about forming a family during wartime, but this is all post-TSR, post-therapy, and obviously post-war. Again, is it
that hard to maintain even a modicum of continuity? Is it
that hard to just self-edit when you realize the point you were making is no longer applicable?
How interesting, Rey thought, that Alie’s hair was such a barometer for her mental health.
Christ, Rey, can you think of something
other than Aliana for
three minutes?i
But it was only the most noticeable at a glance. Rey hadn’t noticed until they were gone, but Aliana used to have these horrible dark circles under her eyes.
Because she was wearing mascara.
As a reminder, this ficlet is called 'Two Loving Moms'. I went ahead and put this in a word counter and confirmed that 'Rey' is the most commonly used word at 41 instances, with 'Aliana' being second at 33, and 'Star' coming in third at 26. I guess it is accurate in that it is nothing but Rey slobbering over Aliana but for a story with that name there is NOT a lot of actual mothering going on. Really proving me wrong about your maternal instincts, Lily.
They had vanished at some point after the war, and the doctor had to explain to her that it was because Aliana was getting good sleep now. She was spending more time in the sun, which made her skin look brighter and healthier and made that beautiful galaxy of freckles pop.
That's called melanoma.
Rey sighed, feeling a deep and intense joy just thinking about it.
About Aliana slowly dying from cancer? I mean, fair.
About how well her wife was doing and how good all of this had been for her. She could see the signs on her face that her wife was happy. A loving wife, an adorable daughter, a stable home, and vengeance had taken ten years off of it.
...what?
Again, so... Rey is reflecting entirely on Aliana. Not herself, not how much her own life has changed, not about how her circumstances are better, it's 100% Rey just endlessly discussing how much
better Aliana is, how
happy Aliana is, how all of this is so
good for Aliana. Rey's happiness is entirely predicated on Aliana's. I'm sure some people in the thread are passingly familiar with some of the complaints about the Twilight books and how Bella's happiness and sense of self are defined entirely by Edward? Here we are. Rey is nothing but a satellite to Aliana.
“I love you both so much,” she whispered to her daughter.
Star clung tightly to her, still shaking off her nightmares.
AND LITERALLY NOTHING HAS HAPPENED.
Over the next half hour, her crying slowly dwindled down to whimpers. Rey pulled her back to look at her, noticing that her eyes were no longer burning a bright yellow.
This would probably be meaningful if it had ever been established that
this was a thing that was happening.
“There we go,” she cooed, wiping the tears from her face. “There’s those beautiful brown eyes. Just like your Mommy.”
It's... very disconcerting that they found this child, totally orphaned, and she just happens to look exactly like Aliana even before Aliana starts forcing her own style on her. Is that why Aliana was drawn to her? Because she was reminded of herself? Let's not worry about the other Stormtrooper children, we'll adopt this child that looks exactly like
meeeee~!
Aliana’s eyes were beautiful, Rey thought.
It's also disconcerting how many of those 41 instances of Rey's name are actually from her thinking about Aliana.
After killing Kylo Ren, they’d lost their red tint revealing a deep, dark brown underneath. Rey had originally been confused by the change, as she’d grown accustomed to her wife’s ruby red gaze. But after a month or so she’d come to love her natural eyes even more. Yet another sign that Aliana was doing better. She was no longer teeming with rage and grief and pain.
Lily
has to stop jacking off to how wonderful her OC is eventually, right?
Despite her pain, Star’s eyes didn’t tint the way Aliana’s did. Either she wasn’t able to passively channel the Dark Side like her mother was, or Aliana had been in a far worse place than she’d originally thought. Star’s eyes didn’t change. They stayed as they were, and Rey took that as a good sign.
You just--
You
just said they weren't BLAZING YELLOW ANYMORE. It's been a
paragraph.
Star whined and latched onto her neck. Rey sighed and patted her back. Poor little thing, she didn’t deserve to be tormented like this. She deserved to have good dreams of candy and puppies or whatever it was children with normal childhoods dreamed about. The kind Rey didn’t get to have.
Oh, oh, are we actually going to see Rey perform some self-reflection and self-care, outside of Aliana's influence? Are we going to acknowledge that Aliana's mother
ruined her life?
That was another thing that therapy had dragged out of her. That Rey had spent so much of her life on Jakku wasting away for parents who sold her off for beer money, and hadn’t been shown a lick of sympathy from anyone save for a woman who had to choose between taking her in and protecting her own daughter.
Yes, being trafficked and dumped on a desert planet, sold into slavery at the age of five, was definitely being shown 'sympathy'.
Tahleea. She hadn’t hated her mother for the hand she played in what happened to her.
Aww, that's great that Rey forgave her own mother for whatever desperation drove her to sell off her daughter.
If she hadn’t ferried her to Jakku, someone else would have.
Oh, sorry. Lily was just so up her own ass about Aliana that she forgot she was writing a story from Rey's perspective and had Rey refer to Tahleea as 'her mother'. That or she had meant 'Aliana's mother'. This is why pronouns and antecedents are so important, and why you should stick with your schooling and do your homework, kids!
Don't be a Lily.
Learning more about the situation that brought Tahleea and Aliana to the Outer Rim in the first place only made it more understandable why Tahleea didn’t want to take Rey and run. Tahleea was cautious. Overly cautious at times. Something her daughter had learned the hard way not to be. Where Tahleea would make safe decisions, Aliana would jump headlong into danger. Where Tahleea would lobby, Aliana would assassinate politicians. Where Tahleea sought incremental change, Aliana ripped the status quo up by the throat.
Amazing. She alludes to 'the situation' that Tahleea was apparently in, justifies her slave-running, and then instead of actually explaining that situation so maybe we as the audience can try to understand her perspective goes on a tangent about -- what else -- how wonderful Aliana is. Even when Rey is coming to terms with her own shitty childhood, she can't stop talking about how
wonderful Aliana is.
It was hard to hate Tahleea even if she wanted to. When they had spoken on Elom, Tahleea had apologized to her for bringing her to Jakku, but Rey found she didn’t need an apology. That Tahleea informally adopted her filled her with joy. Though it hadn’t lasted, for a few hours she had a mother that loved her. It was a small thing, but something Rey hadn’t realized she desperately needed. She continued to call Tahleea ‘mom’ to this day.
...
w h a t.
That doesn't even... why would she get this...
Is TSR actually just a dream? Did she fall asleep on Aliana's ship and since then Aliana has been using her Force powers to manipulate her memories and emotions in order to turn her into the perfect slave-wife? Has she been subtly re-routing associations to convince Rey of all of this?
It made her want to give Star the same thing. A loving mother. Two loving mothers.
She spent 90% of her time 'comforting her child' by thinking of Aliana, who would rather prioritize her beauty sleep than take care of her weird clone-daughter. Nothing about this was about a loving mother, let alone two of them.
“It’s okay sweetie, you’re alright. I’m here,” Rey said as she stood up, the toddler’s grip only tightening around her neck.
Given how the only thing Star has done is tighten her grip around Rey's neck I'm pretty sure we're at strangulation levels by now.
“C’mon. You can sleep with me and Mommy tonight.
Get bent.
