Month: March 2016

notbecauseofvictories:

notbecauseofvictories:

I go back and forth on the specific kind of poverty-line midwest americana that works best. Especially because my first instinct is to mash together Michigan (Rey running, a white shape flickering between those artificially-straight rows of pines) with Kentucky (Anakin Skywalker, rawboned and angry and first-generation to get out, dragging coal country and addiction and debt with him when he walks into the University of Louisville) with Indiana (Luke talking about his dad the combat vet while he works on an old junker up on cinderblocks in the front yard) and just not apologize for any of it.

except that there is definitely a scene where Luke, Leia, and Han are sitting on the hood of Han’s beat-up Ford Falcon with a six pack of cheap as shit beer and staring up at the undimmed stars.

Having put more thought into this:

• Anakin Skywalker is a walking statistic, how sad, how fucking pathetic, because he got out, he got out, he stayed clean and budgeted every cent of his student loans he worked the twang out of his voice and didn’t fight the assholes who muttered white trash under their breath when he walked by, he did it all he did it right—
                              —and still he manages to get a girl pregnant at 19, spends his twentieth birthday drowning in medical bills he can’t pay, placental abruption typed up all nice and neat with a dollar amount there beside it, because even dying cost money.
• Contrary to popular belief, Han Solo does not make meth. A meth lab in your basement is a good way to spend some time working off a Level 2 felony charge, and he just doesn’t have time for that. Very busy schedule. (Mostly looking after his ugly-as-shit Ford Falcon. And dealing in whatever you want that isn’t meth.)
• He’s called “Chewie” because he’s always got mouthful of tobacco. No one fucking understands what he’s saying around it, although that might be the accent you could cut with a butter knife.
• Leia Organa, bright and shiny import from Indianapolis, degree on her wall with the ink barely dry, and she believes in the System, she does, the way only a girl adopted out of shitty group homes by a loving pair of social workers could—but it’s hard to love the System from her front row seat in local government, when it’s too easy to see how many people it’s failing.
• Luke wanted to go to school for engineering, but where are they supposed to get that kind of money, Luke? Do you know what the soybean subsidy is these days?
• Finn as one of those kids funneled out of high school and into the army pipeline before anyone bothered to give him another choice—only to have the army ship him right back, with a busted up spine and PTSD rattling around in his head.
• Rey has been dodging CPS for years, she’s gotten good at it, knows exactly which lies to tell her teachers and how to forge a signature, trade her food stamps for cash, because her parents told her they would come back for her, to the little house in the wilds of northern Michigan, with the aluminum siding and the falling-apart tire swing in front. They’re coming. They are.