Starkiller: Supernova Breakdown
Apr. 25th, 2019 09:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ktulaIntro:
Whew, okay. That chapter was a lot.
Let’s get right into it, then, shall we?
Unreliable Narrators: So, Mitaka is definitely an unreliable narrator, in that he’s trying his absolute best, but he’s lying to himself a lot. Specifically, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, he’s lying to himself about Hux’s motives, and the things Hux is and isn’t willing to do. Mitaka’s viewpoint is tricky for that reason—he excuses a lot of shitty shit that Hux is doing, but is also carrying around a lot of unresolved feelings about Hux, and all of that is shading the way he looks at things, and the way he narrates.
As with the other chapters of Starkiller (except for Finn, he had a very mild chapter in comparison), I leaned really heavily on the content notes here, specifically because of the unreliable narrator, and the sheer amount of gross stuff that’s being passed off as totally okay. I think that’s the best way to indicate, at least, even if none of the characters in the story see what’s happening, at least I can acknowledge that I see it and I know it’s not awesome. (Like, yes, I’m writing it. But I’m also warning it, because some of this stuff is ick.)
Timeline: All the stories in Come As You Are are posted in the series in the order that I write them. Chronologically, though, it would be Starkiller (which spans a period of a couple of years), followed immediately by Five Times Poe Dameron Didn’t Cry Over Ben Organa (And The One Time He Did), and then followed, three years later, by Foxtrot (and then by Reconnaissance).
When Aphelion, the Hux-POV prequel-sequel, shows up—which hopefully will be later this year!—it starts immediately after Starkiller, has a couple chapters, and then skips ahead three years, and starts up again in parallel with Foxtrot. (Pending major structural changes, of course—but I have Aphelion pretty extensively outlined through to almost the end of Foxtrot, and I’m hoping that the outline will hold up even though it’s a few years old at this point.)
Five Times/One Time, unfortunately, happens in the very small window between the end of Starkiller, and the beginning of Aphelion. So, you know. This weekend, in story-time.
As with all the pieces in this story, it’s not necessary to read anything prior to reading any of these pieces—I’ve done my best to make sure that they stand alone, and can be read in any order—and, ideally, if you read them in any order, you get different reveals and emotional hits depending on what you do/don’t know about the verse. So the entire buildup for Starkiller, really, was to tease the Finalizer project—and then immediately take it away. So when you’ve made it this far—congrats to you! You get a glimpse at what the Black Sun crew could have been if Hux hadn’t stabbed them all in the back like that, and if you go on to read any of the other stories in the series, you can see all the fucked-up dynamics that we see in Starkiller trickling into everything else, even though there’s been a fair bit of time for those dynamics to start settling out.
Kink, Repression, and Closeting Oneself: So, there isn’t a Hux POV chapter in this fic. And there isn’t a Hux POV chapter in this fic because Hux is in very rough shape. And initially, I was like ‘well, it’s the alcohol. I don’t want to write that’, and then later, I was like ‘ah, the cocaine, I don’t really want to write that either’ and then I was even like ‘ugh, he’s just in such rough shape, I just don’t want to’, but all of those things were avoiding the real reason that there isn’t any Hux POV chapter in this fic—and it’s the kink, y’all. It’s definitely the kink.
The three chapters that make up Starkiller used to be the initial three chapters of Aphelion, and I had to pull them, because—yikes. Hux is so intensely closeted about the kink aspect of his sexuality, and that’s not something that I want to immerse myself in. The scene in the Phasma chapter where Mitaka references Hux flatlining during a session where they’d hired sex workers—that would have been something that would have been extremely painful for me to write, and it was easier to back out of Hux’s head for that, and just mention the scene in passing. (The entire concept of Hux having everything he wants sexually and just completely shutting down is just exquisitely painful to imagine, and I know damn well that after Hux froze up and stormed out that Mitaka would have cut the session short and gone after him, and that's just a lot.) We have imaginations, we can imagine how bad that might have been—but we don’t need to live it, and we don’t need to be in Hux’s head while it happens. (This is also why Five Times/One Time exists as a Poe-POV dialogue-only ficlet, and isn’t a Ben-POV longfic.)
And the closeted kink aspect isn’t something that comes up in the Finn chapter, because how is Finn to know? (Outside, obviously, of Mitaka’s back-of-the-neck tattoo.) And it’s something that comes up vaguely in the Phasma chapter, because Phasma doesn’t care or think about Hux’s sexuality at all, but we get a little bit of hinting from Mitaka here and there. And, then, in the third chapter, we’re in Mitaka’s POV, who is one of the most kink-positive character that we have in this story, and he’s trying to deal with Hux having a breakdown that’s at least partially related to his kink—and then Hux immediately backstabs everyone when he freaks out and retracts everything after basically laying a life dream out there on the table.
It was really important to me to make sure that there were positive examples of kink in Starkiller, to balance the gnarled mess that Hux is making of his life right now. And I’d thought about how I was going to do that, but my options were limited—it’s not appropriate for Finn to be delving into any of that right now, that’s nowhere near a priority for him, and Phasma isn’t pursuing any kind of kink activities right now (though clearly she’s open to them in some capacity), but Mitaka? Mitaka has a lot of opportunity for me, especially because of how I conceptualize the Hitaka in this phase of their lives. Like, obviously, the Hitaka part of things is winding down right now—and maybe has been wound down for some time, or slowly deteriorating for some time—but there’s that sense of a bond between the two of them, an odd sort of intimacy. They’ve shared drugs, they’ve shared sex workers, they’ve used each other for stress relief via not-super-satisfying sex, and I feel like if you looked back further into their lives, you’d see that this sort of odd codependency has kind of always been a thing for them. (I headcanon that Hux and Mitaka likely bonded initially over a tendency to fuck their way through the dancer corps of whatever troupe they were in at the time, although Hux has always kind of been like a wildfire in that sense, and Mitaka more like a comforting slow burn, but that by the time we see them in Starkiller, they’ve slowly stopped relying on other people, and are just relying on each other long past the point where it’s been any good for either of them.)
I knew from writing Reconnaissance what kind of relationship Mitaka ends up in (spoiler, among other things, he’s someone’s platonic daddy dom), so I wanted to explore what that might have looked at in its earlier stages—and landed on this. A man who is precise about the way he dresses, his manicure and his glasses and his vaguely kinky accessories, like the leather bowtie and the sharp-looking suspenders at four am. Someone who is confident enough in their sexual preferences to have a prominent BDSM symbol tattooed on the back of their neck—and confident enough in where he lies on the power exchange spectrum that he’s perfectly comfortable getting that tattoo on the back of his neck, a place that would traditionally be considered more “feminine” or “submissive” (and I have entire essays on that, but I’ll spare you the details). And, in a lot of ways, he’s a perfect foil to Hux here, who is so wound tight and stressed out that he would rather backstab everyone and sell their souls to Snoke than take a chance on a dream that he’s had for a very long time now. A dream that he had to get absolutely shit-tanked to even be able to talk about. A dream that he meticulously documented and sketched and organized and cited, and a dream that he tossed in the trash the very next day, while he was still completely hungover and wanting to die.
I very nearly excerpted part of the original Aphelion draft at the end of Starkiller, but decided against it, because I wanted to end the piece on the agony of Mitaka realizing that Hux has betrayed him. Suffice to say that Hux has a hangover that is intense enough that he would prefer to be dead, Snoke has left multiple messages by the time Hux drags his carcass off the floor and into the vicinity of his cellphone, and the interview Hux did where he was confronted about Starkiller being cancelled live, on air, was Not Good.
Kylo Ren: And, in closing, I’m particularly proud of the number of times that Kylo Ren himself shows up in this fic, even though he isn’t named by name until right at the very end. I wanted that sense of missed connections and wasted opportunities, and I wanted that sense of—weight, of knowing that there’s more story happening around the corners of the set, and I think threading Kylo through here is what was needed.
(For what it’s worth, the orgy on the Sunday doesn’t happen—the bangee is a no-show. I’m sure Mitaka gets an earful about it from Kaplan, but as Mitaka is in transit to Citadel to inspect the dormitories with Hux at the time, I doubt he pays it much attention until later on.)
Whew, okay. That chapter was a lot.
Let’s get right into it, then, shall we?
Unreliable Narrators: So, Mitaka is definitely an unreliable narrator, in that he’s trying his absolute best, but he’s lying to himself a lot. Specifically, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, he’s lying to himself about Hux’s motives, and the things Hux is and isn’t willing to do. Mitaka’s viewpoint is tricky for that reason—he excuses a lot of shitty shit that Hux is doing, but is also carrying around a lot of unresolved feelings about Hux, and all of that is shading the way he looks at things, and the way he narrates.
As with the other chapters of Starkiller (except for Finn, he had a very mild chapter in comparison), I leaned really heavily on the content notes here, specifically because of the unreliable narrator, and the sheer amount of gross stuff that’s being passed off as totally okay. I think that’s the best way to indicate, at least, even if none of the characters in the story see what’s happening, at least I can acknowledge that I see it and I know it’s not awesome. (Like, yes, I’m writing it. But I’m also warning it, because some of this stuff is ick.)
Timeline: All the stories in Come As You Are are posted in the series in the order that I write them. Chronologically, though, it would be Starkiller (which spans a period of a couple of years), followed immediately by Five Times Poe Dameron Didn’t Cry Over Ben Organa (And The One Time He Did), and then followed, three years later, by Foxtrot (and then by Reconnaissance).
When Aphelion, the Hux-POV prequel-sequel, shows up—which hopefully will be later this year!—it starts immediately after Starkiller, has a couple chapters, and then skips ahead three years, and starts up again in parallel with Foxtrot. (Pending major structural changes, of course—but I have Aphelion pretty extensively outlined through to almost the end of Foxtrot, and I’m hoping that the outline will hold up even though it’s a few years old at this point.)
Five Times/One Time, unfortunately, happens in the very small window between the end of Starkiller, and the beginning of Aphelion. So, you know. This weekend, in story-time.
As with all the pieces in this story, it’s not necessary to read anything prior to reading any of these pieces—I’ve done my best to make sure that they stand alone, and can be read in any order—and, ideally, if you read them in any order, you get different reveals and emotional hits depending on what you do/don’t know about the verse. So the entire buildup for Starkiller, really, was to tease the Finalizer project—and then immediately take it away. So when you’ve made it this far—congrats to you! You get a glimpse at what the Black Sun crew could have been if Hux hadn’t stabbed them all in the back like that, and if you go on to read any of the other stories in the series, you can see all the fucked-up dynamics that we see in Starkiller trickling into everything else, even though there’s been a fair bit of time for those dynamics to start settling out.
Story Details:
Kink, Repression, and Closeting Oneself: So, there isn’t a Hux POV chapter in this fic. And there isn’t a Hux POV chapter in this fic because Hux is in very rough shape. And initially, I was like ‘well, it’s the alcohol. I don’t want to write that’, and then later, I was like ‘ah, the cocaine, I don’t really want to write that either’ and then I was even like ‘ugh, he’s just in such rough shape, I just don’t want to’, but all of those things were avoiding the real reason that there isn’t any Hux POV chapter in this fic—and it’s the kink, y’all. It’s definitely the kink.
The three chapters that make up Starkiller used to be the initial three chapters of Aphelion, and I had to pull them, because—yikes. Hux is so intensely closeted about the kink aspect of his sexuality, and that’s not something that I want to immerse myself in. The scene in the Phasma chapter where Mitaka references Hux flatlining during a session where they’d hired sex workers—that would have been something that would have been extremely painful for me to write, and it was easier to back out of Hux’s head for that, and just mention the scene in passing. (The entire concept of Hux having everything he wants sexually and just completely shutting down is just exquisitely painful to imagine, and I know damn well that after Hux froze up and stormed out that Mitaka would have cut the session short and gone after him, and that's just a lot.) We have imaginations, we can imagine how bad that might have been—but we don’t need to live it, and we don’t need to be in Hux’s head while it happens. (This is also why Five Times/One Time exists as a Poe-POV dialogue-only ficlet, and isn’t a Ben-POV longfic.)
And the closeted kink aspect isn’t something that comes up in the Finn chapter, because how is Finn to know? (Outside, obviously, of Mitaka’s back-of-the-neck tattoo.) And it’s something that comes up vaguely in the Phasma chapter, because Phasma doesn’t care or think about Hux’s sexuality at all, but we get a little bit of hinting from Mitaka here and there. And, then, in the third chapter, we’re in Mitaka’s POV, who is one of the most kink-positive character that we have in this story, and he’s trying to deal with Hux having a breakdown that’s at least partially related to his kink—and then Hux immediately backstabs everyone when he freaks out and retracts everything after basically laying a life dream out there on the table.
It was really important to me to make sure that there were positive examples of kink in Starkiller, to balance the gnarled mess that Hux is making of his life right now. And I’d thought about how I was going to do that, but my options were limited—it’s not appropriate for Finn to be delving into any of that right now, that’s nowhere near a priority for him, and Phasma isn’t pursuing any kind of kink activities right now (though clearly she’s open to them in some capacity), but Mitaka? Mitaka has a lot of opportunity for me, especially because of how I conceptualize the Hitaka in this phase of their lives. Like, obviously, the Hitaka part of things is winding down right now—and maybe has been wound down for some time, or slowly deteriorating for some time—but there’s that sense of a bond between the two of them, an odd sort of intimacy. They’ve shared drugs, they’ve shared sex workers, they’ve used each other for stress relief via not-super-satisfying sex, and I feel like if you looked back further into their lives, you’d see that this sort of odd codependency has kind of always been a thing for them. (I headcanon that Hux and Mitaka likely bonded initially over a tendency to fuck their way through the dancer corps of whatever troupe they were in at the time, although Hux has always kind of been like a wildfire in that sense, and Mitaka more like a comforting slow burn, but that by the time we see them in Starkiller, they’ve slowly stopped relying on other people, and are just relying on each other long past the point where it’s been any good for either of them.)
I knew from writing Reconnaissance what kind of relationship Mitaka ends up in (spoiler, among other things, he’s someone’s platonic daddy dom), so I wanted to explore what that might have looked at in its earlier stages—and landed on this. A man who is precise about the way he dresses, his manicure and his glasses and his vaguely kinky accessories, like the leather bowtie and the sharp-looking suspenders at four am. Someone who is confident enough in their sexual preferences to have a prominent BDSM symbol tattooed on the back of their neck—and confident enough in where he lies on the power exchange spectrum that he’s perfectly comfortable getting that tattoo on the back of his neck, a place that would traditionally be considered more “feminine” or “submissive” (and I have entire essays on that, but I’ll spare you the details). And, in a lot of ways, he’s a perfect foil to Hux here, who is so wound tight and stressed out that he would rather backstab everyone and sell their souls to Snoke than take a chance on a dream that he’s had for a very long time now. A dream that he had to get absolutely shit-tanked to even be able to talk about. A dream that he meticulously documented and sketched and organized and cited, and a dream that he tossed in the trash the very next day, while he was still completely hungover and wanting to die.
I very nearly excerpted part of the original Aphelion draft at the end of Starkiller, but decided against it, because I wanted to end the piece on the agony of Mitaka realizing that Hux has betrayed him. Suffice to say that Hux has a hangover that is intense enough that he would prefer to be dead, Snoke has left multiple messages by the time Hux drags his carcass off the floor and into the vicinity of his cellphone, and the interview Hux did where he was confronted about Starkiller being cancelled live, on air, was Not Good.
Kylo Ren: And, in closing, I’m particularly proud of the number of times that Kylo Ren himself shows up in this fic, even though he isn’t named by name until right at the very end. I wanted that sense of missed connections and wasted opportunities, and I wanted that sense of—weight, of knowing that there’s more story happening around the corners of the set, and I think threading Kylo through here is what was needed.
(For what it’s worth, the orgy on the Sunday doesn’t happen—the bangee is a no-show. I’m sure Mitaka gets an earful about it from Kaplan, but as Mitaka is in transit to Citadel to inspect the dormitories with Hux at the time, I doubt he pays it much attention until later on.)
