1. Spark of Rebellion

“We should watch Star Wars Rebels.”

“Hmm.” I don’t look up from my phone. I’m scrolling through Twitter, words and images rolling along without my registering them.

My then-fiancé, now-husband, has made some variation on this request several times in the past few months. It’s 2016, somewhere during the hiatus betweens seasons 2 and 3, and the Star Wars renaissance is building momentum after the enthusiastic response to The Force Awakens and the curiosity surrounding the yet-to-be-released Rogue One. It’s before the election that changes everything, before Carrie Fisher’s death, before my Leia tattoo, before we start our podcast, before, before–

And my greatest problem, in that moment, is that I don’t know how to tell him that I’m not quite ready to let go of The Clone Wars, which we’ve recently binged on Netflix, not ready to make room in my heart for the Ghost crew’s stories yet. I don’t know how to say it because it sounds stupid. What sounds even worse is that I still smart when I think about Ahsoka leaving the order, or Fives’s death, or Obi-Wan’s loss of Satine.

The thing they don’t tell you about fiction is that getting involved with a story–especially formative ones like Star Wars–is like getting involved in any relationship: It engages your capacity for empathy. It asks you to fall in love with characters, however fake they may be, to trust them with a journey into the unknown. And, sometimes, to deal with losing them.

But I don’t say that. Because it sounds stupid. So instead, I make a noncommittal noise.

My fiancé, however, knows me. Knows how, once I sink into the fabric of a story, I can’t help but pick apart the weave of it, to see how it ticks, to, in many cases, make it a part of me.

“Come on,” he says. “Let’s give it a try.”

I sigh and look up at him. I know that it’s not nice to make people keep asking.

Besides, I’ve seen the gifs on Tumblr; Ahsoka is back.

“Okay,” I say. “I’ll try it.”

2. Legacy

Some people are born with families ready-made, a net of arms open to catch them as soon as they fall. Others have to cobble their families together, scraps of fabric in a warm but patternless quilt.

I’m the second kind of person.

When you’ve had, to put it mildly, a rough childhood, it’s nearly impossible to explain to other people. It’s not a sign you wear around your neck, or a line on your resume, or a fun fact you mention during icebreakers. It doesn’t show up in photographs, spectral, hovering above and just behind your left shoulder. No; it comes out in misshapen bits, ugly little puzzle pieces that other people occasionally put together:

Well, my dad worked, like, twelve-hour days.

I saw my mom maybe once last year?

I spent a lot of my time in high school at friends’ houses.

What is fully impossible to explain is how important that last one is. How sleepovers, late-night AIM conversations, sneaking out on weekends–how all of those things kept me alive. How, when I did have to go home, I could see my anxiety reflected in my friends’ faces. And how, when I visit for the holidays now, as an adult, I still see those barely-restrained frowns when I mention my mother. The set of their jaws. The way the corners of their mouths tug. The shape of their concern just one of those silent things that says love.

“We’re a crew, a team–in some ways, a family.”

“What happened to your real family?”

“The Empire. What happened to yours?”

The galaxy is full of orphans of one kind or another–perhaps too many to count. Pieces of the reality of being unparented.

Kanan Jarrus, drowning his trauma and self-hatred in alcohol and sex. Hera Syndulla, who shuts the door on her father as many times as he disappoints her. Sabine Wren, shoulders bowed under expectation and perceived failure. Ezra Bridger, fear and loneliness hidden behind a mask of independence and nonchalance.

All of them, broken.

And I am broken.

But that doesn’t mean that I’m alone.

3. Kindred

“Knew there had to be a way this was my fault!” “And you were right, dear.”

It’s the first of many lines–and gestures, and casual touches, and shared glances–that will, in the coming years, elicit the same reaction from me.

In the dark of our living room, I look over at my fiancé, who is sitting next to me on the couch. In the moment before I catch his eye, the light from the TV plays over his sharp, familiar features, illuminating ridges, darkening shadows. Even in this strange blue filter, his face is as familiar to me as my own.

After six years, it had better be, I suppose.

He blinks and finally looks over at me, curious. I grin as I grab his hand, and I laugh while he gives me one of those small quirks of a smile, just the corner of his mouth. It’s the smile he gives me when he knows what I’m thinking. When he’s reliving shared memories, perhaps superimposing them, as I am, on two cartoon characters whose dynamic will become an echo of our own.

He knows, as I do, that in certain ways, it’s our story that’s on screen. A whole language whose subtext is years of partnership, of learning each other, of fights and misunderstandings and compromises and friendship.

In a few weeks, he’ll give me that same tiny smile while I read my vows. The rings we exchange at the end of the ceremony are a matched pair in more ways than one. Engraved on the insides, in minuscule letters, are the two lines of an old quote: “I love you,” his says. “I know,” mine responds.

Two years later, toward the end of Rebels, another set of lines will ring just as true.

“I must really trust you.” “I know you do.”

4. Idiot’s Array

I know what I’m looking at. All of the evidence is stacked in my favor–and my Tumblr likes are a catalogue of the data, like I’m some kind of fandom private investigator.

Lines of dialogue. Gifs of expressions, of small gestures. The reactions of their crew, their family, the people who know them best.

I’ve got a file on #SpaceMarried, because for me, it’s personal.

It’s personal that Kanan and Hera’s relationship mirrors my own in so many ways, that their partnership is built on trust, communication, and compromise instead of bickering, jealousy, or obsession. It’s personal that Kanan never tries to pull Hera away from her goals, even when he disagrees with them. It’s personal that Hera stands by Kanan’s side as he experiences self-pity, grief, and self-loathing in the aftermath of Malachor, despite how frustrating it can be to watch him wallow in his pain.

And it’s important to me that Hera is a pilot, a leader, a mother–a woman who is as fierce as she is nurturing, as brave as she is empathetic, as smart as she is kind. That she is a woman who contains multitudes instead of being relegated to background entertainment, as many Twi’lek women in Star Wars are.

So, why can Hera be all of those things–yet not depicted, fully and clearly, as Kanan’s romantic partner?

“Okay, kids, make Mom and Dad proud.”

“It’s been a while since we spent some time alone.”

“Kanan, we talked about that. … You know how I feel.”

Rebels is Ezra’s show, of course, but the writers have dropped so many hints that Kanan and Hera are in a long-term relationship that began long before we see them in “Spark of Rebellion.” And yet, the final season leaned hard into the will-they-won’t-they trope.

“Kanan! I know what to say now. I love you.”

“Must be the truth serum talking.”

I want so badly to believe that those lines can be reframed in light of the series epilogue that introduces Kanan and Hera’s son, Jacen Syndulla. That maybe these lines just more banter between the two, that they’d said those three little words to each other countless times before. That this was a clumsy attempt to subvert the expected trope.

But it’s so hard to trust the Rebels writers, the majority of whom are men, because they’ve never written Kanera in a way that makes the nature of their relationship obvious. Because executive producer Dave Filoni has stated many times that Kanan and Hera aren’t “fully together,” that Hera is more focused on the Rebellion than romance. That, essentially, he believes that for women, a career and marriage are not compatible, that they cannot be equally important. That women can’t have it all.

And I’ve never been able to keep myself from taking it personally that a relationship that is so much like my own has been written this way.

That Kanan and Hera were never allowed to plot ways to overthrow the Empire while folding sheets or washing dishes. That we’ve never seen Hera give Kanan a peck on the cheek before one of them heads off to work for the day–a solo mission to raid Imperial supplies, or run a blockade, or make a relief drop. That we’ve never so much as seen Kanan in Hera’s cabin, even though we’ve seen her enter his several times, as if doing so would ruin this pure image we might hold of the Ghost’s captain.

It’s never been hard for other sci-fi epics to include overt, functional romance into their plot lines. Zoe and Wash of Firefly, or Uhura and Spock of the new Star Trek movies, or even Shara and Kes of Star Wars itself–if they can engage in romance and rebellion at the same time, why not Hera and Kanan?

It hurts that I’ll never know what a healthy, fully realized relationship between these two would have looked like on screen. What it might have looked like if Rebels had truly realized its characters’ storytelling potential.

5. The Future of the Force

I don’t like children.

The maternal genes that were supposed to be hard-cooked into my X chromosomes seem to have skipped me, because I’ve never had an overwhelming desire to have children, or even a casual one. I’m far more content with the idea of being the eccentric aunt to my friends’ children–a knitter of lumpy blankets, a teacher of swears, a resource for those later, awkward teenage years.

But sometimes–

Sometimes I’ll have a passing fancy, as most people in long-term relationships must. I’ll catch the wisp of that sister ship, that possible future I still might have, where my husband and I look down at a small creature that is a strange mix of both of us, a miracle of biology and space and time.

And I think, these days, about Jacen Syndulla, the hybrid surprise child of a fallen knight who was never meant to be a father, and a hardened warrior who wouldn’t let herself think about a future where she might live. The most unlikely of parents for the most unlikely of children.

And I think about fat red envelopes for Lunar New Year, about lighting the first candle on a menorah that sits in a foggy window, about my dad’s old recipe for whole steamed fish, about my husband’s mom teaching him how to make cupcakes on a day off from school. About the changing face of the country we live in, about melting pots and dreams and promises that I know aren’t real–but sometimes, I want them to be.

And sometimes, past the disinterest, the outright dislike, I’ll long, a little, for the ghost ship that is slowly passing me by.

Sometimes.

6. –And Farewell

No matter how many times I dive into a new story, convinced it can’t worm its way into my heart the way others have, I’m always surprised to find one that does. That my spirit can bend and stretch to accommodate it, and lose nothing in the process.

In the end, it’s bittersweet.

The missed opportunities. The fulfilled wishes. The losses, some long scarred-over and others biting and fresh.

The places where doors still stand open.

The night of the finale, I can’t sleep. Can’t stop reliving images, imagining futures. Wondering at the degree to which I’ve let this story become a part of me, intertwined with so many of the things I find most important. Struggling, as I watch shadows and slats of light flow across my bedroom ceiling, to put any of it into words.

Because that’s what good stories do, even flawed ones: They break you open, and even when they’re over, they leave you changed.

And Rebels, for me, was a slow-building storm, a flash flood that scoured my insides, lashed all the places of my heart, left me hollow. And because of it, I am different.