drunk krad @ repcomm

so i’ve been rereading/skimming through repcomm today because i am the type to have .pdf versions on the laptop (shhh) in addition to the 2 hard copies (shhhhhhhh) not to mention the version that’s all of vau’s scenes pasted together in a doc and

i haz thoughts

(mostly belated ‘what tipsy-and-utterly-non-filtered!krad generally thinks of each character’ thoughts because large distinct casts are rad ?? and unsolicited opinions on each are even radder??)

• kal: still a entertaining character to read - i forgot how much he waves around his knife at people and/or straight up throws it at them in a grown man hissy fit lol.  corporate!AU with kal as the ‘WE. ARE. FAMILY!!’ bellowing salesman-y sleezy CEO definitely seems like something that would be lolworthy and incredibly in character because god Now I Have Seen Several Real World Versions and they are both incredibly fun in parties and incredibly un-fun one-on-one.
• distinctly Uninterested in the ’~how Bad of a Bad person is kal~’ discourse ((a) all of the cast being pointedly shades of grey was already p obvious imo…?) (b) that is like literally the least interesting thing about him, tell me about how fucked up his PTSD is from being a literal war orphan and loosing goddamn everything and how clearly that carries over into everything else including his massive class insecurity??? and © especially how it implicitly places vau’s choices as the more morally-correct by default which
  • hahahahhahahahahaha
  • haaaaaaaa
  • h e l l   n o 
• given traviss being British, kal is the most spot on ‘american individualism’ character i’ve seen from a foreigner? which is both the coolest thing and the most damning thing depending on your take (or both).
  

• etain: it took a very long time for me to warm up to her over the years as i am personally the type to hiss at the classic normie-special stand in that a lot of EU stories start with - but honestly?  aside from her being unnecessarily shafted at the end for the manpain, i kinda like how she was thrown way in over her head in a different kind of war; repcomm at its heart was about the tension between black ops asymmetric guerrilla shit (what traviss was clearly more familiar with) and ‘classical’ warfare (what the jedi and the movies showed) - the EU was at its best when authors brought their own specific interests to the table and shook the box up, and it happened to be hella timely what with the iraq war starting at the time (and all the questions about imperialism, how the fuck do you solve for military-industrial-complex problems when you were literally born to be a tool in the system, etc).
• anyway
• etain! 
• the parts i really like about her tie directly to the parts when she rebels against jedi stereotypes - she’s non-judge-y and gets shit done in a very shocking way for a lady jedi protag (shit, she finished vau’s torture-interrogation in the second book without a peep, something i think jusik would’ve balked at - and fascinating considering ladies always get hit with the empathy ‘wah wah i don’t want to hurt peoplez, u manly men deal with it’ card).  her ability to read people’s internal moods(?) was super neat and a refreshing take on that empathy.
• romance with dar was …. e h ?  i skip through those parts every time lol
• (i definitely don’t dig her near total opposite thematic synergy with vau for bias reasons what do you mEAN)
• i could write a whole essay on those parts cough actually fuck i did already
  

• boss: is a really easy character to overlook! (as sadly, niner and omega fill in a very similar archetypal role of ‘the leader’ and ‘the squad of soldiers’ respectively and here in the books we got introduced to omega first, not delta)  but imo repcomm is very anime in the way it plays deliberately with archetypes after it sets them up (kind of like how every anime has something pretentious to say about the pretteh white haired red eyed creepy cutie set to start armegeddon)
• i mean i’m not saying boss is a bishie but-
• (shredded bishie and wow why have i not done pin ups of the entire cast they are all p smokin down to the last one)
• ANYWAY
• wookieepedia quotes temura morrison as saying boss is the closest clone to jango - which i think is a hilarious statement that also perfectly shows that archetypal play - jango is a very dry sort of character once stripped of his twisty past with mandalorians and his need to make boba - so you get a very bare-bones jango whose paternal instincts are slightly warped/redirected to delta as a whole, plus the most blunt period to the whole existentialist question of ‘clones’ - it isn’t tangled up in romance like dar, it isn’t tangled up in unexpected trauma like fi / scorch / atin / sev, it isn’t tangled up in mixed loyalties like niner - he does his duty, end of story.  i think there’s a lot of vau that shows up in the empty spaces of that (what with needing to be used as a tool), which tells you a lot about their dynamic.
• deceptively interesting character, 8/10 would be tempted to write a standalone essay on the above

• atin: i……….. surprisingly, took a while to “get” him?  i read hard contact first after picking up the books on a whim, so he didn’t stand out as having a Rough Past With A Reason until i went back and read them properly, and even then it was a while before he amassed to something beyond ‘oh yeah, screwed over by vau too many times’
• part of me sometimes leans into ‘man KT really needed to give the man more of a personality other than ‘oh yeah screwed over by vau’ and it feels like his arc with Laseema was an attempt at fixing that plus shooing him off-stage to let the wimminz!! and their magic empathy!! solve all manpain!!! (/s)
  • (contrary to the tone of that sentence i actually dig atin/laseema more than etain/dar but more due to him being super chill with her whole story and having real chemistry there - both of them could have on point things to say about being abused by authority figures but i’m not sure if i trust KT to relay that right lmao )
• [ pinches nose ] brutally honest here, it is always slightly awk talking about atin with me being the resident chatterbox vau ‘stan’ as while i do my best to dissect the fuckery that vau unleashed on him, i … am only human and i have a limited amount of time to frankly c a r e about how to dance around that, so….., yeah………
• overall: slightly burnt sinnamon roll that strikes me as someone who has hidden depths that laseema / etain / jusik could pull out, would read fic of that and squee.

• Scorch: i don’t see a lot said about scorch which is UNFORTUNATE because he had a pretty nifty arc what with that missle attac attack that was maybe a little anvilicious but again, brought an interplay of war-on-terror themes mixed with star wars that was impossible not to find … relevant, if not interesting?  I personally liked repcomm’s focus on the different takes on psychological trauma and all the ways folks can shake out -  healthy, unhealthy, oh god-how-are-you-alive, etc - an how it was A Big Deal but not … Too Serious?  like as tasteless as it sounds, it was still entertaining.
• and Scorch other than Sev strikes me as the Entertaining One in Delta - the junkrat that has A Thing for explosives, the unintentional snark, the one they needed to feed all the witty lines to in the game, so he strikes me as a slightly caricaturized fellow that needed more deliberate shaping in the books, and what better way to do that than T R A U M A
• (ahahahah who are we kidding that goes for all of them)
• morbid jokes aside, i think there’s something fun to explore in how quick he was to be defensive when asked about his feelings after that - I think all the troopers would be to an extent, but there’s meat in how quickly he wanted to bounce back and be the ~ heart and soul of the group again ~

• vau: you know, funny thing i think kal was my favorite character for the first 2 full rereads of the series, then somewhere between #3 and #21 (and an affair with Uthan), this bitch started growing me and didn’t stop.   
• t h i s  b i t c h
• that’s a really good summary of him actually
• the pithy way to describe it in <100 words is that he dealt with fucked up shit by lining up Any And Every Care against a cinderblock wall and execution-style shot them in the temple and kept shooting like that for ~50 years until there was no weakness (and demanded no weakness at knife-point from actual traumatized kids) because there was nothing else to keep him from doing the same to himself out of fucking relief
  • and uh, teen!krad falling over at the fact that f i n a l l y there was somebody!!! that reacted to things in the exact same way!!! holy shit this is relatable!!! i have never felt like this about a character!  was maybe ……. a sign…… to think long and hard about skeletons in the closet etc etc
• i have written essays organized in a table of contents on him i do not need to give him moar words (even though his dynamic with literally every character is interesting by default given he’s the perfect charismatic existentialist foil so there’s a lot to say regardless cough)
• mird is cute and problematic like a schrodingers cat with more drool the end
  

• Corr: probably my personal favorite out of the clones - i thought him him being the token wounded/disabled vet was shockingly??? tasteful???? by most standards and actually remarkably embodied the personalities i’ve seen in the same boat - very quick to lol / joke / squick out other folks at their rad titanium limbs as a way of pre-emptively disarming any potential awkward moments becauseohgodthosearetheworst and still has that dual charming but deeply morbid sort of humor that basically serves the same purpose. (hi) (yes yes other than vau he’s probably The Most Relatable #spoiler alert )
• the ‘token thing’ doesn’t bother me as much considering literally every character had Trauma Baggage and he actually had a number of scenes not specifically centric to that, surprise surprise.
  • (his characterization being squashed in 501st was a crime against humanity given how that book shat on everyone but that’s neither here or there)
  • also lol @ the beetle racing that was such a random but … weirdly relatable scene considering how bored kids can get, and digging up insects to compare and coo over is apparently a universal Thing.