Sith Flashbacks

I don't even know what I'm going to do with all these flashbacks of Plagueis and Tenebrous, but they sure are fun to write.  I'm fairly sure I can fit some of it into Heart of Shadow, though. Maybe I can do a spin-off story if it doesn't all fit.  Won't spoil the details, but I do want to talk about the generalities a bit.  My headcanon, which I think is reasonably canon compliant, is that Plagueis waited until Tenebrous was super old to kill him, so a fair number of these scenes show Tenebrous trying to get Plagueis to kill him as he gets older and older. I thought about it, and while I'd originally thought of making Tenebrous slightly younger when he died, I think I'm going to make him live to be a little over one hundred and have the average lifespans of biths be like 90.  Plagueis was just really not in a rush, lol.  Tenebrous really wants Plagueis to kill him while he's in the prime of his life because he feels like it's the Sith Way (tm), but Plagueis just bides his time and then...bides even more time.  My headcanon is that muuns have an average lifespan of 500, so he just doesn't feel like that's a terribly long time to wait.

I mean, I definitely have some stuff in my flashbacks for this story that I think are pretty unsettling, but I do find that part somewhat amusing. 

I also have a flashback of Plagueis and Sidious from shortly after Sidious becomes a Sith that I definitely do plan to find a place for somewhere in the story.

Tenebrous and Sith AU's

I've also been thinking a bit about my good Sith AU, which is distinct from the redemption AU I am writing because it's an AU where the Sith were never evil in the first place and are in hiding because the Jedi killed most of them off in the Battle at Ruusan. I've talked about this one before but that was a while back. In my good Sith AU, the Rule of Two doesn't refer to only two Sith existing at any one time, but to only two Sith being in any one place at a time in order to avoid detection by the Jedi.  I definitely want Tenebrous to be in that one quite a bit because I find his character very intriguing.  Part of my work writing the flashbacks in Heart of Shadow is to flesh him out more as a character, which I think will also help me to develop his modified counterpart for this other AU. 

Obviously Tenebrous (and all the other Sith) would be quite different in that AU but I tend to like to reuse ideas across AU's, for example, the idea that Sidious can use his foresight as a way to play life like a videogame and 'die' harmlessly and repeatedly to figure out what he should do next, or that San Hill is allergic to hair.  Those ideas are in both Heart of Shadow and Cut Strings.  And even though these two stories don't take place in the same universe, I find it useful and interesting to reuse elements like this. More importantly, I enjoy reusing personality elements, such as my interpretation that Sidious loves lightsaber fighting and incredibly complicated plans, especially when they involve making it look like someone else is trying to kill or kidnap himself. 

I have my own interpretations of all these characters that is sometimes not at all the interpretation that the canon creators had in mind, but that is based in certain important respects on what we see in the canon.  Because if something about a character interests me, there is something about the original presentation of the character that I want to keep (at least in the context of how I interpret it), because I'm not trying to make a completely new character, but instead to re-examine and re-conceptualize what I've been presented with.  In the case of Tenebrous, this also involves expanding considerably on his character, in much the way I've done with San Hill (especially in Cut Strings). Since Tenebrous is a character with whom the original canon doesn't give us a whole lot to work with, considerable extrapolation is necessary to give him a detailed characterization.

Research Takes So Much Effort

I see so many claims about important things that I wish I could adequately respond to one way or another.  I know that it's technically possible for me to learn about some subset of these things to make what I guess passes for an informed opinion for a single human individual, but what would be required for me to do even that often seems...extremely extensive.  And I have such a terrible attention span.  Truly frustrating.

I will say that if someone's trying to prove something as opposed to just make a statement of their beliefs they should cite thoroughly researched and vetted sources and/or make a logically coherent argument and not just be like 'scientists say' or 'here's a completely unsourced claim I will authoritatively make...'  There is of course a solid place for just saying what one believes without going to the effort of justifying it, but when one is making claims they expect to convince someone who doesn't already believe those claims is...not that place.

Insufficient Justifications

Things that are not actually good indicators of positive evidence for a political belief:
*common sense
*I learned it in school (so it must be right)
*the person telling me this is reliably correct about other, unrelated issues
*the person telling me this is my friend
*everyone else thinks it's true
*everyone else thinks it's false (I'm like Galileo!)
*feeling really strongly like this is correct
*having a super high IQ
*degree of confidence in correctness
But a lot of times...one or more of the above is used as if it is definitive evidence or even proof of such things.