Yeah, I've always been under the assumption it was 'power corrupts' thing and that utilizing the Dark Side prompts a slippery slope. Most Sith Lords use it because they're ambitious and cruel, but then you can also see how people fall to the Dark Side in Anakin's story. My contention was that she doesn't focus on how Leia sees the situation as something she can save her son from, she just 'blames the Dark Side'.
Like you're just walking down the street being a pure as an innocent Padawan and then the Dark Side just punches you in the nuts and now you're evil.
Not some sentient thing that can literally lure people into itself by going "PSSSSsssst hey kid, wanna buy some Dark Side?"
This was the
other mental image I had.
So I was trying to find something specific on her blog and going back a page I saw
this:
Has it ever crossed your mind that the reason people suggest you change Aliana so drastically is because as she is now she doesn't work well as a character? You want her as both a hardened badass and a perpetual victim of circumstance but those don't mesh well together. Why not choose one or the other or have two characters instead if you want both?
Anonymous
That’s the thing tho: Aliana isn’t a hardened badass. That’s literally a fucking act. At most she’s jaded and nihilistic, but the whole “Fearsome Dark Lady will crush the Republic if they cross her” thing is a big fucking lie.
I would have thought the revalation that her introduction where she swaggers around Jakku coercing a junk dealer, flirting with a scavenger and giving away all the supplies she doesn’t need anymore was actually her looking for the things she needed
to commit suicide would have gotten that point across. But apparently you’re dumber than most.
So the first thing that leapt out of me was, of course, that she's justifying that half of Aliana's split personality is that she's just pretending and she isn't REALLY like that, which is one of the stock explanations that teenage fangirls use when they re-write evil characters to make them good and redeemable. Back when I was following Harry Potter sporkings this was THE thing that always happened with Draco Malfoy-- he's a total dick, but he's hot, so fanfiction authors would just completely re-write his personality and then say the way he behaves in canon was 'just an act'.
It's basically just a shitty excuse to have a wildly inconsistent and bipolar character, especially given that having a character who's actually really decent and kind and just hurting inside pretend to be a badass evil dictator will RIP THEM APART on the inside because it's so at odds with who they actually are. Villains can do the inverse because the 'good guy act' is getting them toward a goal, but when a fundamentally good person has to commit evil as part of a persona they're affecting? It
will drive them insane. Even if that 'evil persona' is committing atrocities for the 'greater good', it's not great for a person's psyche.
And the fact of the matter is, it's a lie that it's a lie. If Lily didn't have so many scenes from Aliana's perspective you could get away with it, but other than those scenes where Leia says mean things to her and then she wanders into the back and cries about how mean she is, you never see her come down off the power high. She threatens the Republic with an inexplicable fleet and there isn't a scene where she walks back into her own ship and collapses in a chair and buries her head in her hands and decompresses from that persona. The whole chapter on the casino planet (where she causes a dozen rich randos to commit suicide) is named for the fact that even though she seems nice there's a reason she has a Sith title. She isn't affecting a persona at that point; it's a random act of mass murder and she's totally justified in it and totally self-assured about her righteousness when she does affect this alleged 'big fucking lie'.
Moreover... why would she need to affect this persona? She's supposed to be lying low and just surviving. Why does she have to pretend to be a big bad Sith Lord? It does her literally no favors. And -- correct me if I'm wrong -- but isn't Aliana's whole thing that she's proud of her Sith lineage? Is her being a Sith Lord an act, or is it part of her proud heritage?
As stated, the answer is obviously that Lily's just making an excuse so she can pass off her shitty writing as intentional. But it's just shitty writing. Minor powerlevel, but I actually wound up writing a character who was just putting on an evil persona when in reality they were a broken mess. It's actually a really fascinating dichotomy to explore, and it also resulted in the character becoming deranged and erratic because she couldn't fully consolidate her actual character with the mask she was wearing.
If this were something Lily had actually intended to explore, it could've been a really interesting character study and actually made Aliana legitimately sympathetic-- you have this broken mess of a human being who's decided to fully embrace the Dark Side heritage in order to mask her insecurities, but it takes a toll on her psyche and it's only through having somebody who's willing to love her (instead of fear her) that she becomes her true, better self.
(I think I just suggested that TSR actually be sci-fi Beauty and the Beast and I don't really have a problem with that. And since it's about lesbians I doubt Lily would either.)
Instead it's just a switch that Lily can flip. Badass Dark Lady of the Sith when necessary, uwu soft lesbian when not.
The second thing that struck me is what I bolded: that apparently Aliana was working up to
committing suicide in the first chapter? What the
actual fuck? When was THAT established?
And could you maybe make it less obviously a retcon? If Aliana was planning on killing herself (which... why would she need to find things to 'prepare'? Why would she not give away ALL of the supply packs? Aliana doesn't have any family or friends at this point so what was stopping her from just jumping out of the airlock of her ship, she didn't have anybody to prepare for or say goodbye to. Also, wait, hadn't she gathered her giant fleet by this point? She must have, there's no other place in the timeline except before the fic even starts. Why would she do that if she didn't even have a motivation to keep living?
It's just such a naked attempt at making Aliana even more sympathetic. If Rey hadn't come into her life she would have taken it instead, isn't that tragic but also testament to how strong their love is?
I hope there's a moment where she slaps a "Who Rescued Who?" bumper sticker on her spaceship.
