Loftwings and Demons

Just re-read the last chapter I've written so far for my Heart of Shadow fic and had a lot of fun reading it. It's Plagueis just being Plagueis (or rather, Hego Damask), and Dooku and Qui-Gon affectionately bickering with each other and not so affectionately bickering with Plagueis.

I love the secret identity aspect of the Sith. It's so fun to play around with that kind of character, and think about how the different facets of their personality, even the ones that are pure artifice, bleed into each other. A person is not their mask, but the kinds of masks a person chooses does say something about them. I actually think Plagueis wears two masks--the mask he shows the world, of a mundane businessman, and the mask he presents to Palpatine and himself, the mask of someone who both desires power and has the wisdom necessary to obtain it. Which is to say, the mask of the dutiful Sith Lord.

I don't think Plagueis, and that includes canon Plagueis, is very good at, or particularly motivated by, the things that are supposed to motivate a 'good' Sith Lord. Which is not to say that I think he doesn't want power or the destruction of the Jedi, because I think he wants both of those things. It's not to say that I think canon Plagueis can't be as cold as the frozen world he grew up on. But I think what Plagueis wants most is the personal freedom to pursue knowledge for the sake of knowledge, and companionship. 

He was slow to kill his own Master and he wanted to rule over the galaxy for eternity with Sidious. If that isn't the essence of 'best friends forever' (forever!) I don't know what is. And of course he botched that up real good because he also never properly learned how to respect someone rather than try to dominate them. Like Sidious would never have accepted that scenario and Plagueis was a fool to think he would. Like thinking that a man that murdered his own father because he resented the authority that was exerted over him was ever ever ever going to accept a situation where someone else could exert power over him for infinity forever is just the height of hubris, but that's part of what I love about Plagueis so much.

And I also love that for Plagueis political power and the destruction of the Jedi are just kind of secondary to what he really cares about, which are his terrible little experiments. Love that the Darth Plagueis novel recontextualizes Palpatine saying that Plagueis could save the ones he cared about from dying into meaning that he could bring his science experiments back to life.

And I love getting to examine the relationship between Dooku and Qui-Gon in my story when Dooku was still a Jedi. Tales of the Jedi was just so boring in how it portrayed Dooku (also in how it portrayed Mace Windu, but that probably deserves its own essay) and particularly his relationship to Qui-Gon. Like he's practically a Sith already in that cartoon. There's no attempt to show, like, any actual significant shift in who he is as a person in his transition from Jedi to Sith. Anyway when I was writing this chapter, I had a lot of fun showing Dooku and Qui-Gon's dynamic with each other, how they're both similarly stubborn but also their very different approaches to problems and to life in general.

Anyway, it was fun to reread the chapter and think about all these characters again.

The Darth Plagueis novel gives a lot of background on the Sith, and one detail we learn from it is how Darth Maul becomes a Sith.  And how that happens is that his mother Kycina gives him away to Palpatine as an infant.  Here's the scene in the novel where this is explained:

“Clearly I am not, as I suspect you have already intuited. But you still haven’t answered my question. Why are trying to rid yourself of the infant?”
“To spare the one for the sake of the other,” she said after a moment. “Half a clan pair, this one is. And I want one to live freely, since the other can’t.”
“Who poses the threat?”
“Talzin is her name.”
“Who is Talzin?”
“The Nightsister Mother.”
Palpatine filed the information away. “Where is the infant’s father?”
“Dead—by tradition.”
He snorted. “Will the infant not be missed?”
“Talzin knows only of the one, not the other.”
“You delude yourself.”
Gently, she pushed the shoulder bag toward him. “Then take him. Please.”
“What would I do with him?”
“This one is strong in the Force. In the right hands, he can become a powerful asset.”
“Servitude of a different sort.”
She ignored the remark. “Take him. Save him.”
Palpatine regarded the newborn again. “Have you named him?”
“Maul, he is called.”

Of course Palpatine is the worst parent ever, so Maul never really gets the life his mother wanted for him.  Maul is unusual in that he's the only known Rule of Two Sith who was explicitly raised to be one from infancy.  Which is a pretty horrific childhood to imagine.  This seems like a pretty tragic situation to me, because it sounds like either way his life was going to be pretty awful.  

One thing I noticed reading this over again is that Maul is supposed to be half of a clan pair.  So is that supposed to mean he has a twin?  Who knows?  That never comes up again in this novel.  I guess if you wanted to tie this into The Clone Wars continuity you could say that the twin was supposed to be Savage, though my understanding is that when that character was first conceived, he wasn't intended to have anything to do with Maul.  At the same time, given when this was written and the fact that Legends EU often tied in things from other stories, I'm guessing that probably was the intent.