Back in the Game (COMPLETE)

Author's Goodbye

Hey. Bet you weren't expecting to hear from me again :) Let me tell you a story, a story that has almost nothing to do with Star Wars.

So a few years after I wrote this trilogy, I published it on another site called Archive of Our Own, or AO3 (I'm still writing there, actually). One reader on AO3 read this trilogy, got to the ending, and had very strong words about Ahsoka's death. To be fair, a lot of people have had strong words about Ahsoka's death, but to paraphrase, this person said that it was a bad ending.

It took over a year of thinking, but I think that person was right. 

During the two to three years I was writing this trilogy, I experienced a lot of endings. My grandmother died, a mentor of mine moved away, I graduated from high school, I moved from my childhood home, and lost touch with a lot of friends. It also happened to be the end of a coronavirus-free world. I also lost the blissful ignorance of a few things that I am very aware of now (sometimes painfully aware, but that's neither here nor there). I was not, by any means, becoming an adult at the time (I still don't think of myself as one), but I definitely felt like my childhood was ending.

With that came the ending of my confidence in my relationships, the ending of my trust in academic validation, and the end of a world where I wasn't trying to avoid stigma in one sense or another. I lost my unquestioning certainty in my religion. I thought that I was going to be something grandiose one day, I thought that the alternative was to be nothing, and I thought that my path to a fulfilling life would be special and set on a pedestal and inevitable. Needless to say, that hasn't been the case, and I started to realize all of this and more as this story was coming out. 

I didn't really have someone to talk through this realization with at the time, but it wouldn't have made a difference because I didn't have the words to describe what I was feeling or the context to realize that it was worth saying something about. To be fair, I'm not usually this open or introspective regardless, so I don't blame anyone else for this. I don't think that, even if you had asked me if something was bothering me, that I would have said anything that might have helped. What I did have was a fanfiction narrative with a teenage girl as the protagonist, and I had control over that narrative. 

So I did what we all do: I projected. 

I didn't have a witness or a comforter for the death of all of these things that I now view as the end of my childhood. Neither did Ahsoka. She died on an abandoned planet, at the end of a war she had lost, already marked as 'Killed In Action.' She was a child when she died, only eighteen years old. I wasn't even eighteen when I finished this trilogy. 

But Ahsoka had someone there. She had Anakin and Obi-Wan and Rex and Artoo and Jesse and all the other clone troopers there to pay respects to the good Ahsoka had done and what she meant to them. That message still stands: it matters what we do, even if it doesn't change the ending. Good things are still good things even if they end. To be good and to have been good is enough. Just because Ahsoka died didn't mean that people stopped caring about her. She echoed through that universe through the Naberrie Family, through Caleb, through the clone troopers, and through the Gauges and Gears staff. 

The death of all of these things I was losing didn't get a funeral, or a tear-filled sunset, or a kneeling moment of silence. It got a few nights crying to myself in the dark. It seemed like no one else noticed all of the things that I took for granted that I lost without realizing what was happening. I didn't want to lose those good things. I didn't want to lose those good things, and it seemed like I was the only one who felt that way. It was like standing over an unmarked grave by myself. No one seemed to recognize what I was mourning. 

And to be fair, neither did I. Not until that commenter on AO3 pointed out that this ending didn't make sense for the narrative. It made sense to me, it always made sense to me, which is why I built up to it and prepared for it in advance. I tried to defend my decision, but that comment stayed with me for over a year until tonight when I finally put the pieces together. I had a message to share, but it was in the wrong story. It didn't fit quite right with the rest of the narrative. I don't know what ending would have been a better fit, and I'll never know. Maybe someone else will find it one day. All I know is that this message and this ending could have done more in a different setting, in a different story.