It's been a while, but I've decided to try getting back into icontests. It seemed fitting to start with Obidala since, you know, One Path pretty much rules my life at the moment and everything. As such, I'm gonna do a little plugging.

All you graphic-making Obidala shippers out there, go and join obidala_lims. The SW fandom really needs some more talented graphic artists who support this ship!

I'd just like to say hello to everyone who's been reading my fics and promise you all that there will at some point be updates again. July and August were rough months for me personally and my writing has suffered. I've been hard pressed to write, and when I have been able to do so, I've had to focus on my original work, which is a priority. So, my writing schedule has been shot to heck. Over the past week, I've been reading through One Path, Taking The Long Way, and RH, trying to get back in the swing of things. I've even made a few vids and some fanart that will get posted at some point. I have lots of ideas for writing and not a lot of...er...words, if that makes sense. I don't want to make promises about when fic updates will occur, so I won't be fixing the schedule right away, but I hope to have a better grip on things in the next week or so.

One thing that I have to say is that I've also been reading through old commentary as I read the posts. Some of them are hillarious, some are thought provoking, and some make me wonder just how much carpet I was smoking at the time they were made. They also make me very aware of the need to thank (or possibly frying pan) my three biggest plot-enablers, aruna7, teddibear, and polgarawolf. I say this with all sincerity-- my fics wouldn't be the same without you.

Apparently I need to make Vader's Daughter icons. It feels weird using this icon, but it's the closest one I have.

Anyway, I am temporarily returning from my most recent LJ exile because the reviews I've been getting on Vader's Daughter are starting to make me feel like a need to qualify my earlier comments about the motivation for writing the drabble cycle.


I don't hate Luke, at least not now. I didn't like him when I was a child first exposed to the Star Wars universe, however the phrase "active dislike" is not the same as "hatred." I just never cared for his stupidity and disrespect, or his whiny irresponsibility. That said, I think his reaction in wanting to save Vader, being able to see the glimmer of humanity that is left in him, is part of what makes Star Wars more than just a scifi movie (or series of them). That idea, that no one is beyond redemption, has meant a lot to me in my life. In my opinion, it has more to do with hope and the need to remember that no one is beyond the possibility of redemption than it has to do with something that was inherently a father/son dynamic. The relationship happened to be father/son, but I see it as a vehicle for a more universal statement about love and what it means to be fallible. Generally speaking, I love father/son relationships. Anyone who reads One Path will get that idea rather quickly. They're all over the place. With Vader's Daughter, I just wanted to address an obvious problem and give Leia a chance to react to the idea that Vader is her father. I didn't want or mean to insinuate that Luke's relationship to Vader is less important, only to make the observation that Leia is never given on screen time to process or address the identity of her father.

The problem is, with the gap between ESB and ROTJ, there is never any process of adjustment or acceptance shown on film. Vader goes from being the epitome of evil to the idealized father and viewers are just expected to make this big emotional leap. Vader is never asked to atone or be held accountable for the horrible things he's done, and the suffering that he caused to his daughter(along with millions of people on Alderaan and more throughout the galaxy before that) is never acknowledged. The viewer has to just accept that a single, self-sacrificing act--which took him almost the entire battle to make because he couldn't decide whether he loved Luke--settles the debt. I don't mean to minimize the event or imply that Vader wasn't redeemed, but at the very least, more should have been done with Leia's reaction to her father, and the tension between the twins' views of him should have been acknowledged in some way.

As a woman and a writer, I feel a strong deep for and sense of identification with female characters who can be real and compelling rather than being cliched caricatures of "the strong female protagonist." That said, I have nothing against male characters, and I find nothing conspiratorial or misogynistic in the fact that Star Wars gives time to male relationship dynamics, and I had no intention of implying that Luke's relationship with Vader was born of a male-slanted bias in Star Wars. Everyone is welcome to his or her own interpretation, but that's not how I see it. I simply happen to like Leia better than Luke.

I haven't had much inspiration/ability to focus on lengthy pieces, so I decided to try drabbles. What I ended up with was Vader's Daughter. I see quite a bit done about Luke and Vader in the fandom, and since the prequel trilogy came out, I see all kinds of people either making graphics or writing about the rather obvious parallels between Leia and her mother, but I very rarely see anything dealing with Leia and her relationship or reactions to Vader. I'm one of the few (possibly only) Star Wars fans I know who can honestly say that Luke was my least favorite of the OT characters. I had an active dislike of him until I was about twelve. I thought he was whiny and disrespectful in ANH; cocky and rude in ESB; and although my opinion of him softened in RotJ, I really wished that more time had been given to Leia's feelings and such upon learning that Vader was her father. I truly love Padme, and I thoroughly enjoy writing her, especially in One Path, which gives me the opportunity to develop a much more satisfying mother/daughter relationship than is possible in canon. That said, having grown up with a Star Wars where "the twins' mother" was largely a non-entity (meaning that she could have been anyone who was "kind but sad" and had given birth to Luke and Leia) I guess I've always wondered why there is such a heavy focus on the father/son dynamic in Star Wars, writing, either professionally or in fandom. Here's my small contribution. Mission_Insane Prompts: straw, wool, wood, white, metal, stone. 100colors prompts: forest, indigo, copper, straw, scarlet, rose

Title: Vader's Daughter
Chapter Title: 1-6
Author: Lionchilde
Summary: Six connected but separate drabbles dealing with Leia's initial reaction to the revelation she receives from Luke in Return of the Jedi
Rating: PG-13
Genre: General
Pairings/Characters: Focuses on Leia; H/L in the final piece.
A/N:These are connected and very short, but I'm posting them together. I'm much more of an epic fic writer. I have a hard time with short work of any kind, and I really struggle with drabbles, which are not only incredibly short but have a very specific word count. Once in a while, I like to challenge myself, so I set a goal to write exactly six snapshots of Leia's thoughts as Luke walks off to face Vader in ROTJ, and I wanted each one to be a drabble (exactly 100 words). I had the opening line of the first one and the final line of the last one in mind when I began, so my ultimate goal was to communicate everything I envisioned and still get to the last line in the aforementioned number of steps.

( One )

---

( Two )

---

( Three )

---

( Four )

---

( Five )

---

( Six )

---

Title: My Hands Are Open
Chapter Title: N/A
Author: Lionchilde
Summary: Aphrodite is a secret Xena/Ares shipper.
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Fluff/humor
Pairings/Characters: Xena/Ares
A/N:Written for stargatefangurl as a birthday present. This is the first attempt at a Xena fic that I've made since before I got married. (Gosh, almost 10 years ago? Geez...) I've had mixed feelings about Herc/Xenaverse in recent years due to certain experiences associated with my ex, and this used to be a lot easier for me to write. I really loved this show once, though, and I'd like to get over the issues, so I decided to give it a shot. I'm really not 100% sure on my characterizations because it's been so long since I tried to write in the fandom. It's set like late season 2-early season 3, so there is no Eve at this point. Concrit is welcome, but please try to be nice about it. Credit for the idea goes in part to literarylitany.

( My Hands Are Open )