They Deserved So Much More - Blog Posts

Children who managed to get out of the temple and into safe places by margine, carrying a baby in their arms or clutching another younger child to themselves. Children who learned to fight and protect, not for their people as a whole, but for the baby or smaller child in their arms. Children who made themselves into swords and shields for the younger, more scared, smaller children they barely managed to save.

Having BIG™ feelings about how most of the Jedi that survived Order 66 were literal children.

Children whose brothers turned on them, and whose parental figures were ripped from them for reasons that they would never understand. Children who didn't know how to live in a galaxy who accepted them, much less one that didn't. Children who had to shed the identity they'd had longer than they could remember just to survive. Children who watched as their people were labeled terrorists and the things they held sacred were desecrated to the purpose of hurting the people they were made to protect.

Children who had to pick up the (often literal) sword of those who'd come before them to protect innocents and hold onto what scraps of their culture that were left. That, to their limited knowledge, believed themselves to be the very last of their kind. Children who bore the weight of bringing justice to the deaths of thousands of their kin, not through revenge, but through the restoration of peace. Who in the fight towards peace, had to once again become weapons instead of peacemakers.

Of them training padawans when they were technically still padawans themselves. Who had to teach what broken pieces of their culture that they could still remember, because they were still learners when they stopped learning. Who taught in the middle of surviving in a galaxy that was out to get them on all sides. Whose padawans never got the chance to go to Ilum, or see the Temple on Coruscant, or bond with other padawans, or any other experience that should've been theirs by birthright.

If I think about it for too long my brain stops working and I cry.