(no subject)

Echo Chamber - duc - Star Wars - All Media Types [Archive of Our Own]
fialleril:
grand-duc:
Hey @fialleril I finally managed to finish the little Double Agent ficlet I was working on!
It’s probably an AU of your AU because I don’t know when Han was clued in and your Dark Side headcanons might not line up with my Dark Side headcanons. But this popped in my head and it was funny enough that I had to share.
So here you go:
Han and Leia pulling each other’s pigtails and Dark Side metaphysics
OMG! Unexpected fic! :D
As someone who’s always been irrationally annoyed by the yellow Sith eyes thing, I am thoroughly enjoying Han’s dubiousness. :D
Also, I love the hints here that Leia is referencing something she learned from Anakin: the image of the echo chamber is fabulous, and she never names it “the Dark Side.” And, of course, most tellingly of all there’s “extracting yourself from that echo chamber takes years of work” instead of “forever will it dominate your destiny.”
That’s honestly such a good character moment, both for Leia (who of course thinks of the Force in terms of healthy engagement with emotions, rather than either purging emotions (the Jedi) or feeding on them (the Sith)), and also for Anakin (who has clearly developed a completely new way of thinking about his own history, as well as the Force). And of course poor Han, the agnostic surrounded by space magicians.
I’m glad you liked it! it’s been sitting in my WIP folder since forever (checks creation date on the file….. yeesh…. yeah, forever) but it finally behaved this weekend! I’m glad you like it.

As someone who’s always been irrationally annoyed by the yellow Sith eyes thing, I am thoroughly enjoying Han’s dubiousness. :D
Lol. I figured by this point, especially since the twins have taken to using his ship as a practice room. He’s willing to admit that there IS something that allows people to have uncanny reflexes, use the glowing blade of no margin of error that are lightsaber safely, levitate stuff, and all the other things that Luke and Leia regularly get up to, he’s even willing to consider the possibility that the Force as the religious/spiritual concept might exist (even through they make it hard sometimes) but turning eyes yellow? That’s bullshit! She’s clearly trying to pull one over on him. (Leia is very proud of herself for that one.)
I’m glad you liked the characterization, both for the Dark side and for all the characters involved :). It IS a good character moment isn’t it? it’s what made me decide to try to write the damn thing in the first place. The last few snatches of dialogue came to me and it fit so perfectly, both as a demonstration of my Dark Side headcanons, and Han and Leia’s pull-push relationship.
An Echo chamber is really the best way I’ve found to describe what I think the Dark Side is, what it does and how it affects Dark Side users. Everything is turned inward, and it stews and simmer and percolate, with periodic explosions.
It explains the grandiosity (having of all that, let’s call it intensity, concentrated into your instead of spread outward, is the mother of all adrenaline and endorphin rush and Dark Side user genuinely *feel* like they’re all powerful*), the paranoia and the projection (they have a hard time getting out of their own head to contemplate a thought process different from theirs), the non-existent/severely impaired empathy (again), the sadism (theirs is the only emotions that count, so making opponent suffer is satisfying and nothing else) and so on and so forth.
The rush is probably addictive too, especially since when/if you come off a dark side episode, empathy and reasonable sense of cause and effect come back online, and you end up like Anakin after the Tusken massacre, curled up somehwere going “OMG what did I do?”, So you start having a vested interest in NOT coming down (that you probably believe you CAN’T doesn’t help)
And Anakin, he’s rejected both the Jedi and the Sith, so he can’t even to himself nevermind to Leia (and you said he never mentioned the light or dark to her), conceptualize the Dark Side through either of their framework, which leaves him with only his own experience and feelings, so it’s very factual, no “this is evil and the path to destruction”, just “this is what it does to you”, “this is what those changes are likely to cause”, “this is something you should avoid but if it does happen it’s fixable”
And Leia, she’s smart, her parents told her about the Sith, might not have been more detailed than “evil, violent Force users” but she can join the dots, so Palpatine is caught in one of those spiral, and Ekkreth obviously was at some point, from that she can extrapolate more things even if Anakin never outright told her. That the echo chamber can lead you to do horrible, horrible things (Ekkreth being a bonafide Imperialist, the Purges and other atrocities) even if it seems like you could never do those things (she had wondered), that extracting yourself is the work of a lifetime (Ekkreth’s psyche is scared and battered and he’S STILL dealing with consequences of his actions). All in all a lot more comprehensive than space DARE.
* It is my headcanon that the most vulnerable time for a Dark Sider is the few months immediately post-turn. Sure they’ve gained some strength, speed etc… but their judgement is also SEVERELY impaired, ironically, in a way that makes them think that they’re invincible. It is well known by the Sith and there are several pedagogic currents that believe new apprentices should be kept on a close leash and away from anything too dangerous until their brain has had a chance to adjust to the echo chamber. Others believe in sink or swim.
So basically the reason Anakin was so over the top in ROTS and lost to Obi-Wan that badly was that he was the Force equivalent of high as fucking kite.