jt_and_leia | X-Wing: Meta Collection: Close Readings and Exegesis on Aaron Allston's Wraith Squadron by JT

Meta, headcanons, fanons, and canon analysis, mostly mine, collected and re-edited in dialogue with the Legends X-Wing fandom on Tumblr and Discord.

Chapter 1: Beginnings; or, Things That Didn't Fit Elsewhere

This is my first time posting meta or non-fiction on AO3, so I'm a little discombobulated about the shape of it, especially since my draft Google doc is something like 30k words and counting. So I figured a bit of an introduction was in order.

What is this?

Fundamentally, this is what happens when you raise a child to be the next Thomas Aquinas, and then they run as far away from the Catholic Church as possible and wind up at 1990s Star Wars tie-in novels instead.

Um. I keep trying to say more, but that really sums it up.

Why these novels, specifically?

Originally because Wes Janson's PTSD mirrored my own in a lot of ways I didn't even recognize yet. Then there's the found family, and the humor, and the layers, and just Aaron Allston being a really damn good writer. And for the last few years, there's been a fandom of more than one person, which is nice. (Check out the Rogue Squadron Discord if you're reading this sometime before the inevitable fall of Discord and the rise of whatever the next fandom platform is. There are links scattered around the interwebs.)

For fair use purposes, I'll be trying not to quote the entire books, but for analysis purposes, obviously I have to quote the parts I'm talking about. When I have page numbers, they'll be from the mass market paperback editions of the books; I've actually reordered new copies, having given away my previous copies long ago due to homelessness, but it's not like there are multiple editions to choose from, let alone hardbacks.

A few initial headcanon and reference matters:

Most of this work, having been developed sporadically over the last fourteen or so years, is based solely on the "Legends" timeline. Given that the Legends timeline was in many ways a huge clusterfuck, I'll try to make it clear at any time which bits of said canon I'm accepting. By and large, anything that happened onscreen in the Original Trilogy is canon for these purposes, but deleted scenes are treated case-by-case; for example, Hobbie is not squishified. Anything that's explicitly stated in the works under consideration, i.e. Wraith Squadron, Iron Fist, Solo Command, and Starfighters of Adumar, is canon except possibly where it directly conflicts with the OT, in which case the conflict will be discussed. Anything stated in any other sources, I feel no especial obligation to accept but may discuss as it suits me.

There is no reliable canon source for parts of the pilot ages and event timelines I use, so I may as well outline those here. Tycho's age is the most well-established: Alderaan explodes on his twenty-first birthday. Wedge is nine months younger than Tycho, as stated in Rogue Squadron< so he's twenty when the first Death Star is destroyed.

Hobbie is in Biggs Darklighter's graduating class at the Imperial Academy. There is no solid source for Biggs' age, especially if you go through the Wookieepedia changelogs on his page, which cite him as anywhere from 19 to 24 with no sources given. Tycho may or may not have been in the same class, depending on which parts of comics canon you cite; I'll probably start tackling the comics at some point, but reliable image hosting is always an exciting part of comics textual analysis. For convenience, I usually figure Hobbie as being Tycho's age, therefore 21 as of the Battle of Yavin.

As for Wes, there's literally no evidence of his age in any of the sources I've consulted. In order to have something consistent, I actually went back to actor ages; Denis Lawson was about 33 when The Empire Strikes Back premiered, while Ian Liston was about 32, so roughly a year younger. So if we keep the age difference the same, then when Wedge is 20 in ANH, Wes is nineteen, or about the same age as Luke and Leia.

Wedge gets plenty of backstory in the comics, and Tycho in the Stackpole novels. Wes and Hobbie have little more than home planet names. Wes's home planet, Taanab, comes from a throwaway line in ROTJ, Lando's explanation that he's now a general due to "my little maneuver at the Battle of Taanab". One of the Star Wars planetary atlases, if I recall correctly, gives a little more detail, but I don't have the reference handy, so this might be from multiple sources: Taanab is a former jungle planet turned farming world, which supplies some ridiculously high percentage of foodstuffs for the Core and Mid-Rim. The equatorial regions are owned by large conglomerates, while the regions closer to the poles which have to use orbital mirrors for a longer growing season are home to individual family farms. It is usually presumed that the Jansons owned/ran one of those smaller family farms. Taanab also has, according to at least one source I haven't been able to track down again but have adopted wholeheartedly, mini rancors, which run "only" four or five meters long and are not sapient.

(The Dathomir rancors in The Courtship of Princess Leia are ten meters tall and tell their children stories. It is unclear which type of rancor Jabba kept in his palace. Legends is a trip, y'all.)

The only other thing we know about Wes's childhood is that he began practicing marksmanship at a young age. There's nothing on his family, background, education, or how he was treated. I'll probably be coming back to that, because it's something I'm always torn on in my writing -- whether I want to give him parts of my own abusive upbringing, or give him a better childhood that I might wish I could have had. Also, whether we can get any indications about his background from the particular ways he reacts to trauma and other circumstances over the course of the books.

As for Hobbie, we know approximately three things about him: he comes from Ralltiir, which is a banking world; he was sent to the Imperial Academy to become a ship's officer; and he has really strong opinions on dress clothes. Depending on the canon you accept, it's also possible that Ralltiir was blockaded by the Imperial fleet for the whole of the Original Trilogy in retaliation for a Rebel contact mission Princess Leia ran there just before Yavin. We'll get into this more in Solo Command and Starfighters of Adumar, where he has his few moments in the spotlight, but based on those three facts, we can hypothesize that he belongs to a high-ranking family in the Ralltiiri banking hierarchy (one where he would have had to attend a lot of events requiring formal clothing), but that he's a younger son or otherwise not high-ranked within his own household, since he's sent away as a political pawn to strengthen ties with the Imperials rather than being set up to help run the family business.

(Hobbie also has varying numbers of prosthetic limbs depending on what parts of canon you accept. He loses his left arm somewhere above the elbow and his right leg somewhere below the knee in the Darklighter comic, which makes an oblique reference to him possibly having damaged/prosthetic genitals as well. Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor establishes that Hobbie has a prosthetic left foot by the time of that story, post-Endor, but does not give any more specifics on the timeframe or the amount of leg lost. I usually headcanon that he lost this leg on Hoth when he rammed Veers' AT-AT as seen in the ESB deleted scene, but it varies depending on what I'm doing with the setup.)

Not to toot our own horn too much, especially since the main story that was intended to serve as an introduction to this concept is still down for revisions, but my longtime coauthor Camshaft22 has created an incredibly rich and original Ralltiir culture based on the minimal information we have from canon, plus some really fascinating ideas of her own. If and when we get that story polished up and reposted, I'm definitely linking it here.

Which brings us to another fact I need to mention. This thing, by its nature, is going to be in flux. I'll try to post links on the main fannish platforms when I update anything significant, but I'm still deciding how to handle things like chapter breaks.

Wraith Squadron: Chapter 1

"Twelve X-wing snubfighters roared down into the atmosphere." -- God, right from the beginning. I just love Aaron's use of parallelism here and in the next scene, and how that early repetition sets us up to recognize the line later when it's used again for effect. Even writing under a ridiculous time crunch, he was absolutely brilliant.

(I don't want to immediately derail with the story of why Aaron had to draft this book in something like three months, so I'll get to it when it's more relevant, probably in connection with why Hobbie is mostly Sir Not Appearing In This Book.)

"piloting a black fighter with an incongruously cheerful green and gold checkerboard pattern on the bow" -- Oh good, I'm not crazy. (In this context, anyway. ^_^) I get extremely confused trying to sort out all the pilot helmet designs in the Original Trilogy, and it turns out Wedge's canonical helmet actually has a pattern of green and gold V-shaped checkmarks on it. Once I figured that out, I thought I must have misinterpreted "checked" or something, but the text does very clearly say "checkerboard" here.

"Rogue Three ... [a] green X-wing" -- Not having the Dramatis Personae from The Bacta War in front of me, I'm not sure which Rogue this is. A green X-wing sounds like Corran, but he's usually Rogue Nine, at least often enough for me to remember it. Clearly I'm going to need to find my ebook copies of Stackpole's X-Wing books for reference at some point in this project.

"That’s ‘Yes, Wedge’ until we’re formally returned to duty." The commander smiled. "Or perhaps, ‘Yes, Exalted One.’ Or ‘Yes, O envy of all Corellia.’ Or—" -- We don't see this side of Wedge's personality very often, and I find it charming. I'm not sure whether I think it was an artifact of the time crunch and Aaron not being quite sure what he wanted to do with Wedge yet; we know from Aaron's book on writing, Plotting: A Novelist's Workout Guide, that he liked to plot a book out using a great many notecards and then write it basically start to finish, and we know that due to the time crunch on Wraith Squadron there may not have been as much time for editing and polishing as you'd get in a normal book production schedule of the era.

...I keep coming back to the time crunch, don't I? The most comprehensive extant overview of the situation in which Wraith Squadron was written can be found here at AuthorHolocron on Wordpress, referencing other links, most of which are now broken. Here are the parts I've been able to track down, referenced where possible:

From an August 1997 interview with Aaron hosted here on TheForce.net:

"In mid-1996, Bantam asked Mike [Stackpole] to do a new set of four X-Wing novels. Owing to time commitments, he couldn't. He was familiar with my fiction and thought that my style was compatible with his, so he recommended me for the first three novels of the set; he would do the last one, which will be #8 in the series. I'd met the man who was then the Star Wars line editor, Tom Dupree, at CoastCon 96; he arranged to acquire some of my novels and decided to go with Mike's recommendation."

From the AuthorHolocron page, originally sourced to EchoStation.com which is no longer loading:

"[T]he negotiations were not finalized before Tom left Bantam. The new line editor, Pat LoBrutto[,] noticed that Aaron’s name was penciled beside the three X-Wing books. Bantam called Aaron’s agent to find out how he was doing on the X-Wing novels, and the rest is history."

By "history" we mean, at least the way Aaron used to tell it in audio interviews (to which I do not have source links because most SW author interviews don't come with transcripts; no I am not allowed to try to transcribe all of Aaron's extant interviews before I finish this project), that Bantam called the agent, the agent called Aaron, Aaron was like "uhhh they're coming along FINE DEFINITELY", and then Aaron called Mike and may have slightly freaked out.

At some point in the planning process, again as told by Aaron in audio interviews, Mike gave Aaron three pieces of advice about what to put in his X-Wing books, which Aaron liked to boil down as the advice given to him on his first phone call to Mike on the topic but which almost certainly didn't happen in that exact form or context: "Zsinj needs killing, the fans like Wedge... oh, and make it funny".

AuthorHolocron quoting EchoStation again explains how Wedge actually may have gotten involved:

"The biggest change in the book arose out of a miscommunication between Mike Stackpole, Aaron Allston, Bantam, and Lucasfilm. In the early stages of the planning for Aaron’s three books, Mike and Aaron both thought Aaron would be writing the adventures of a training squadron commanded by Lieutenants Hobbie Klivan [sic] and Wes Janson. Those adventures would’ve took [sic] place at the same time as the events of X-Wing #1-4. This confused Lucasfilm, who wanted the entire book series to revolve around Wedge Antilles. When all the miscommunication was cut away, they ended up merging the two concepts. In Wraith Squadron Wedge forms a new X-wing group and temporarily commands it; in the two novels following, he commands both squadrons. All these events take place after the events of #4, The Bacta War."

This part of the story suggests that Hobbie's sidelining for most of the X-Wing novel series is an unfortunate side effect of Aaron's having already planned out a character role for him that was then taken over and adapted for Wedge. We'll probably come back to that concept at various points.

Circling back to where I started this digression, though, we still don't have a solid indication of whether "O envy of all Corellia" is an early bit of Wedge characterization that didn't quite get polished up to match with the eternally-weary least typical of all Corellians, or how and when this first scene took shape at all. Dammit, the wrong people die young.

"Nawara Ven, the squadron’s Twi’lek executive officer" -- At some point during The Bacta War, Nawara loses a leg and has trouble interfacing with his prosthetic, making him no longer fit to fly combat, so he flies the Rogues' shuttle instead (Tycho having conveniently become combat-eligible around the same time and therefore no longer being stuck as a shuttle pilot). He's definitely flying an X-wing in this scene; perhaps fancy demonstration flying has enough margin for error that he can still keep up, unlike combat where any error can be fatal.

"Wrong designations, sir. *We’re* Rogue Squadron. You’re simply a rogue *squadron*." -- Awww, Hobbie, you little shit. God, we deserved more of him. I really wonder how Hobbie's extra snarkiness as a commanding officer would have influenced the development of Ton Phanan as a character, though? I'm not sure whether they'd butt heads or get along horrifyingly well, but I'm suddenly picturing that one Buffy gif where Giles says "We few, we happy few" and Spike finishes off "We band of buggered". It's sort of those two stripes of sarcastic pessimism, is the feel I'm getting.

"Hobbie? Is that you, Lieutenant Klivan?"
"That’s *Captain* Klivan … again, just for the next few minutes." -- I'll get to the "Klivan" thing when Hobbie calls it out in Starfighters of Adumar, but at this point it's fun to note just how mouthy Hobbie is here. Part of that may be the brevet captaincy, putting him closer to Wedge's rank, but he really seems deeply unimpressed by ceremony in general, and it also helps set up their friendship. We never really got much Wedge+Hobbie fic in Legends, which is a shame, because their banter is great.

"fluttering haze that looked like chaff but had to be some sort of celebratory confetti" -- One of the reference phrases that's permanently lodged in my brain, due to how often I have to ask myself the question "is there a space word for confetti" when writing Wes Janson. Thank you for establishing that, Aaron.

"Sloppiest flight group buys drinks." -- You'd think these boys would learn not to poke Wedge Antilles. Tycho knows, but Tycho is a lot closer to Wedge than Wes and Hobbie are in some ways. I'll get back to this topic in Solo Command, when it becomes relevant again.

"Wedge smiled. 'Your Red Squadron looks pretty good, Hobbie. A pity you haven’t had time to teach them anything about precision flying.'" -- Wedge is a little bitch and we love him for it. I actually forget where I first saw this suggested, but Wedge is essentially a Slytherin in his methods and personality, with the ideals of a Gryffindor. People tend to think he's just a standard Gryffindor, which is dangerous.

I'm not going to go into all the jargon of Tumblr's SortingHatChats system, but I probably will be referencing it occasionally, because it has two extremely important concepts for understanding the characters we're working with here. The first is that each person you're trying to classify will actually have two Houses, one for their methods and one for their goals or ideals, which may or may not be the same; Wedge is a perfect example of having Gryffindor ideals and Slytherin methods, in that context. The second concept, which will come up in more detail when we hit Chapter 4 of Wraith Squadron, is that of having a "burned" House: you originally held certain ideals sincerely, but your backstory has put you in a position where you've had to betray or abandon them, and you usually feel conflicted or regretful about having lost them.

"A little wobbly, Hobbie."
"We haven’t been together that long, Wedge, but we still know a few tricks. And *you* started this. Red Group Three, deny Rogue Group One!" -- Wedge may have started it, but Hobbie has been escalating every time he gets a chance. They're both such excellent trolls.

"'Rogue Group Two, deny Red Group One!' Corran Horn, in his green X-wing with the black and white trim..." -- Okay, if Corran's leading Group Two, it seems unlikely that he's either Three or Nine. Presumably I can figure this out by going through the Stackpole books if I ever need to know. Or maybe it's a typo and he should have been leading Group Three. There's definitely at least one other typoed callsign in this book, near the end.

"You mynock." -- Still very much a favorite. I did a spreadsheet once of who addresses whom by what titles in these four books (I need to redo it, because I failed to notice "sir" as part of "yessir", which skewed Wes's numbers pretty badly), and Hobbie is definitely the only one who actually calls Wedge anything insulting, right here. God, I love their banter.

"Wedge managed to get handshakes and backslaps from Hobbie and Red Squadron’s second-in-command, Wes Janson" -- I've contributed my fair share to the fanon of Wes being a very huggy person, because yes, but I think there are only a few pieces of actual evidence for him hugging anybody, of which this is one. I'm probably going to be keeping an eye out for that, both because I'm curious and because I'm still kind of noodling on that Wes/Face piece, which requires me to know things about Wes's body language so Face can observe them.

"[Princess Leia] caught Wedge’s eye and gave him a smile and half shake of the head, acknowledging their mutual dislike of public spectacles such as this, then turned back toward the crowd." -- I love how close Wedge is with both Leia and later Han in these books. It really brings together the sense of... continuity, with them having all been stuck on Hoth for however long and having actual friendships outside of the people they usually appear with. Also, you might have to do something with Han, but Wedge/Leia would be an amazing ship for a slow burn longfic. The sheer amount of tiny fierce idealistic Rebel leadership in one place! Maybe they're too alike for it to work out, but I'd love to see them try.

"Now that you’re back, they all return to their original units. *Except—*"
"Except what?"
"Except me and Wes. We’re back for good. Subject to your approval. That’s the reward we were unofficially promised by High Command."
"Well, I’ll think about it." At Hobbie’s stricken look, Wedge smiled. "I’m kidding you. Welcome home." -- For someone with basically one expression, Hobbie has no sabacc face. That's going to come up at least one more time in the early part of this book, I'm not sure about the other books yet.

(For reference, Wes and Hobbie were appearing as part of Rogue Squadron in the comics Dark Horse was putting out at the same time as these books were being written, which were set within the first year after the Battle of Endor, but were only referenced as being reassigned to a pilot training school in Stackpole's Rogue Squadron books; hence the reason Mike and Aaron originally believed that Aaron's series would follow Wes and Hobbie leading their training squadron contemporaneously with Mike's already-published books. I'm sure Aaron could have done some stellar work tying the timelines together, but honestly I'm glad they wound up separate. Stackpole has this habit of going "And then six months later...", with the result that his four books cover some two to three years while Aaron's first three notionally take place in the space of about three months.)

"Lieutenant Myn Donos. A good pilot, smart—"
Lieutenant Wes Janson, still baby-faced despite his years flying for the Alliance and New Republic, leaned in grinning from Hobbie’s other side. "Smart, egotistical, self-centered, arrogant, insufferable—you know, a typical Corellian." -- Aaron said in Plotting: A Novelist's Workout Guide that a scene should never have just one purpose in a novel. It always needs to do at least double duty, if not more. That philosophy is honestly one of the main reasons these books hold up so well to close reading. This single paragraph is doing at least three jobs: it's establishing Wes's personality, the tone of his relationship with Wedge which is going to be a major linchpin of the book, and what Myn Donos used to be like.

("Baby-faced" is also about as much physical description of Wes as we're going to get until Starfighters of Adumar. The comics usually portray him with black hair and a broad-shouldered build, although the quality of the art in those Dark Horse comics was variable as hell. There was a conversation in the Rogue Squadron Discord a few years back about adding some diversity to the Rogues and Wraiths human cast, which when combined with me living in a desert climate and pondering the likely weather of a deforested jungle planet, wound up with me consistently writing Wes as having brown skin and dark eyes. This is completely non-canonical, but given that the entire Empire and most of the Rebellion was staffed by pale British bit actors, y'know... why not?)

"Just like that? Wave your hand and it appears?"
"Well, I thought I’d tell High Command so they’ll know what they need to give me."
Hobbie shook his head. "Wes, you were right. All Corellians are like that." -- I'm still not sure I'm putting this into words clearly, and I'll definitely want to keep an eye out to see if I'm just imagining things because I haven't read the books cover to cover in so long, but: Wedge in this scene definitely reads a bit more "typical Corellian" than I'm used to seeing him, but almost as if he's putting on an act? Or something. Maybe just feeling more ebullient than usual, given that he's coming back from a wildly successful operation and actually getting as much appreciation as he could possibly want, or probably rather more.

"You looked as though you’d been practicing that formation flying for weeks."
"We were," he said, straight-faced. "Liberating Thyferra didn’t take up much of our time."
"You’re such a liar. Go talk to these people so we can all go home." -- This, on the other hand, is 100% the Wedge we know and love. We'll run into other examples of him just straight-faced lying for fun, not even counting all the undercover work he winds up doing through the series. Unless I'm forgetting something, though, Leia is the only person who actually calls him on it, rather than being caught off guard for at least a moment. God, they'd go together so well.

"Twelve X-wing snubfighters roared down into the atmosphere. This was a dark world with a polluted sky" -- This description has stuck with me so strongly I was honestly surprised to find that the description of Coruscant didn't include the "dark world with a polluted sky" bit. I'm just still not over Aaron's use of repetition up front to make sure this scene came back to mind when it really mattered. I'll have plenty more to say about this, but his whole handling of trauma disorders is just... incredibly solid. I mean, yes, I also found it at a formative period when I really didn't have anything else to work with on the subject, but this man understood how humans break down, on a fundamental level, and how to portray that in writing in ways that work.

"As he hit the cloud he pulled back on the stick, rising straight up the concealing smoke." -- Oh hey, Wedge is going to use this maneuver in Starfighters of Adumar, only because he's Wedge and therefore crazy, he does it without any volcanoes around.

"Five, Five, he’s on your tail!" "Can’t get clear, vape him for me, Six—" "Can’t, I’ve got—I’ve got—" "Nine banked into the volcano wall, she’s gone—" -- There's extremely little information we're actually given about the Talons, not even their names. I may find something I'm forgetting when we get to the flashback scene, but if I remember from the last time I analyzed this scene, the one thing that jumped out to me is the way at least two wing pairs shatter in the ambush. Myn tells his wingmate to join him in the volcanic smokescreen; we don't know whether Two was already dead or just freaking out, but we see Five and Six losing cohesion, and Nine losing her sense of environmental obstacles. It's possible that a squadron better trained in teamwork could have come out of this ambush better. That'd be a stretch based only on the minimal info we have here, but I'll be coming back to this concept when we actually get to the Wraiths doing training sims. My basic hypothesis of why Wes sets some of the particular scenarios he does is that he saw the Talons had needed more instinctive reliance on each other and is trying to train for that.

"Donos almost smiled: It had been a surgical strike, the pilot killed by a beautiful shot straight into the cockpit, leaving the rest of the fighter craft unharmed." -- There's no particular practical reason to try for this type of shot in a planetside situation where the enemy snubfighter will just crash, or really in any setting where you're not actively scrounging enemy ships and parts for repair, but Aaron's very fond of them as indicating a skilled marksman in a space battle. Tycho gets several of these in the later books.

Edit: Camshaft22 pointed out that Tycho and the other early Rebels probably would have made training for this type of shot a habit, since they were in fact constantly in a setting where they were scrounging the Empire's castoffs in order to supply their fighters, and then by the time that generation of pilots became trainers -- specifically Wes and Hobbie here -- it would have been codified as something New Republic pilots focus on. Myn also being a sniper probably reinforces how he thinks about these surgical shots; it's the equivalent of a headshot.

"The oncoming cloud of TIEs spread out and he shot through the gap in the center of their formation." -- Oh, hey, I have specific reasons in an unpublished fic for noting this tactic. Variants of it are also going to come up later in the books, one under the name "Kettch's Drill". I'm always interested in what specific tactics Aaron uses in his space battles; I'd also like to figure out how he makes them reliably so goddamn engaging, but that may be partly down to magic.

"the nonstandard red stripes painted horizontally on the starfighter’s wing arrays" -- Never just one purpose for a scene, right? This is the first of several bits setting up the 181st Squadron arc that's going to run through all three books.

"This was a demonstration of superior flying technique, a show of contempt by one pilot for his enemy" -- Do we know for sure who's in this TIE Interceptor? It does make it out of the battle, Myn doesn't vape it, so I suspect it's... hm. How am I going to handle spoilers like this? I mean, the normal presumption would be if you're reading a meta like this you've read the books, but I also know I have friends who follow me across fandoms with no great consideration for source material. On another hand, at least some of those friends actively appreciate spoilers. It may seem odd that this is where I'm getting finicky about spoilers, but it's the one spoilery thread Aaron keeps running through the whole Wraith trilogy without letting us in on it till the very end. Everything else lasts a book at most.

Dammit. I kind of have to track Face's references to his erstwhile nemesis if I'm going to make the reveal work in a close reading format. Okay. So given that this is definitely one of Zsinj's fake 181st, and given that it has an important solo role in the ambush, it seems likely that the pilot is Fake Baron Soontir Fel, aka Tetran Cowall. It still seems kind of odd to me, frankly, that these two Imperial propaganda child actors just happened to both turn into really good fighter pilots; if anybody has any brainwaves on that front, let me know.

Edit: Camshaft22 pointed out that as propaganda actors, Face and Tetran probably both went on tours of military bases, met elite Imperial pilots, and maybe even got to fly in simulators from an early age. So it's not quite as out of left field as I was reading it.

"Donos watched helplessly as Twelve’s cockpit filled with the fire of an ejection thruster, but the canopy failed to open. The ejector seat smashed Twelve into it. Its transparisteel construction kept the canopy in one piece as the X-wing continued to rotate to port. Under continued pressure from the thrust of the ejection seat, the cockpit finally broke away from the X-wing, but Twelve sat limp in the seat as the ejection seat carried her mere meters from the doomed snubfighter, slamming her into the rift wall to port." -- When Rogue Podron reached this scene, the first on-page death written by Aaron after they'd read four books of Stackpole's death scenes, they commented on how much more visceral it seemed. Aaron's deaths are always serious, and I don't think he uses a fake death once. (There's a point in NJO where he does a fake about-to-die, which he openly admitted to cackling while writing, and Mercy Kill has a fake resurrection I absolutely love, but if Aaron kills someone, he's going to give you feels with it and they're going to stay dead afterwards.)

"He could stay and be killed, or flee and describe his failure to his commanders in cruel, humbling detail." -- I'm not good at noticing unreliable narrators, usually. I blame Tolkien. XD The Lord of the Rings was an extremely formative work for me, to the point that I actually can't read fanfic for it, and it's written entirely in omniscient perspective. Between that and the autism, I tend to take what's written as read, until it's pointed out to me otherwise. But in these books, exactly whose perspective a scene is written from can make all the difference in the world, and it's not always obvious, especially because Aaron's narratorial voice has somebody referring to himself by his own last name in at least one of possibly only two POV scenes in the entire quartet... *stern look into the afterlife*

Ahem. What I was trying to say is, POV and unreliable narration is a huge part of how Aaron does characterization, and I'm going to try to keep an eye on it because he's consistently amazing at it, even if he occasionally makes inexplicable labeling choices. Which I will definitely call out when we get there.

Wraith Squadron: Chapter 2

"I see no signs of hangover on you, Commander. Must I conclude that you did not celebrate adequately?" -- Admiral Ackbar is so fun in these books. He doesn't appear much, but this conversation is going to set up the main premise of Wraith Squadron as a starfighter unit and the initial stakes of the trilogy. Aaron takes care to set the scene, to establish Ackbar's position within the New Republic, the tone of his relationship with Wedge as friendly acquaintances who strongly respect each other's achievements, and his rather dry sense of humor.

"Recommendations for a new type of unit, particularly well suited to the search for Warlord Zsinj." -- We get a fairly solid infodump on Warlord Zsinj here, so this seems like as good a place as any to put some of the history. Warlord Zsinj was originally created as a background villain of The Courtship of Princess Leia, published 1994, which is... a classic Legends head trip, I think is a fair assessment. He didn't get much screen time and even less character development: he was a fat man in a white Grand Admiral's uniform, red-faced and with curly villain mustachios. We were informed that he had been the bogeyman of Han Solo's existence for some time, and when he finally showed up in his Super Star Destroyer, the story made fairly short work of him. I don't think we ever even saw him in person, only over vidcomm.

At some point in the decision-making process while Aaron was being hired to write the Wraith trilogy (see Chapter 2 of this work for that can of worms), he was informed that he needed to write about the timeframe when Zsinj was being the major enemy of the New Republic, leading up to The Courtship of Princess Leia. Aaron, being a goddamn professional and also a genius, took this instruction and ran with it. I'll call out the references to CoPL as we get to them, but he picked up things nobody should have had to pick up and made them actually work. And created a damn good story in the meantime.

"Admiral Ackbar’s mouth bent in an approximation of a smile. A learned behavior—Mon Calamari did not communicate amusement that way." -- I just really love this little detail. Aaron pays so much attention to his alien characters, making them distinctly different from humans in subtle and obvious ways, and making sure we notice. I'll have plenty more on that when we get to Piggy and Runt especially.

"But a commando X-wing unit might develop new tactics. New ways of mounting even ordinary raids and pursuits." -- You asked for it, Wedge. You wanted them to develop new ways of doing things. Every single gray hair you get from the Wraiths is your own fault.

"I can give you a unit like this for free." -- And here's where we're going to get the part of Wedge's plan for creating the Wraiths that goes into fourth-wall-breaking brilliance. Not that he actually breaks the fourth wall in text, but... I mean, we all know the trope of the ragtag group of misfits forced to work together to become found family. The thing that just sends me into incoherent glee about this whole setup is that Wedge is essentially genre-savvy enough to invoke the trope deliberately. He's not going to depend on circumstances to put together his ragtag team: he's going to pull together as many loners and losers as he can find, pick the ones he feels have potential, and put them into a training crucible to turn them into a found family.

I don't know if Wedge has yet decided whether he's going to have Wes or Hobbie as his XO and primary trainer for the Wraiths. I had originally thought he makes that choice later, after getting the news about Talon Squadron. (I'll go into more detail about his potential reasons there.) But he could have made it already, because Hoth alone would have taught him that Wes Janson is an excellent catalyst for turning ragtag misfits into found family.

"That’s blackmail. It’s unbecoming."
"Most unconventional tactics are unbecoming until they succeed, Admiral. I direct your attention to the planet Thyferra..." -- Much of this project consists of trying to turn pointing and cackling at various lines into words about why they're delightful. There's an element of "arson, murder, and jaywalking" to Ackbar's reprimand already, and Wedge's response, casually reminding him that Wedge just got retroactively un-resigned from the New Republic military and received a hero's welcome for making his last "unbecoming" stunt work out, takes to the next level.

"I want pilots no one else wants. Washouts. Pilots staring court-martials in the face. Troublemakers and screwups." -- And this is fundamentally what makes the Wraiths a set of story hooks instead of just a set of roles and skills with names tacked on. I kind of wonder, if it had been the Wes and Hobbie show as originally envisioned, how he would have gotten to the specific concept of a squadron of screwups? Because that seems fundamental enough to the whole setup, and to the kinds of stories Aaron liked to tell, that I'm convinced it was a pretty early part of the concept.

Really, so much of wondering about the might-have-beens boils down to: it's so convincing and obvious and perfect this way, how could anything else have been as good? I'm sure it would have been amazing, because Aaron was that good, but I've never come up with a way to turn the AU from vague but interesting concept into story.

"You’re more likely to get a proton torpedo up your engines than you are to get a functional squadron out of such pilots. The torpedo might be launched accidentally … but that’s no comfort to a widow."
Wedge spread his hands, palms up, and smiled. "Problem solved. I’m not married." -- I absolutely love the way Wedge ignores and dances around Ackbar's objections in this scene. I'm going to want to do some comparison with his later conversation with General Crespin on the same topic, where Crespin gets under his skin in a way that doesn't happen at all here.

... that's also this chapter, isn't it. Aaron, why such long chapters? I do not want to wind up doing a chapter of this work per scene of the books. That seems excessive. But the thought does come to mind.

[Edit: panamdea points out that the pilot who eventually does try to vape Wedge in Solo Command is not a Wraith but a Rogue. Because Aaron could never leave a throwaway line alone, or something. :D]

"I’d return Lieutenant Hobbie Klivan to Rogue Squadron as second-in-command and take Lieutenant Wes Janson as my own second-in-command." -- Okay, he has already picked Wes as his XO / trainer / found family catalyst. Good to note! I guess that means his choice doesn't have anything to do with how he saw Wes and Hobbie reacting to the Talon Squad news, but I'll go into more detail on what my thoughts were when I hit that point anyway.

"But, sir, not all battles call for lightsabers. Some of them are fought with vibroblades in back alleys. The New Republic needs those vibroblades too, and doesn’t have them." -- This is such a Wedge line, and I can't quite articulate why. I think it's something about the Slytherin turn it takes. A Gryffindor perspective would try to make the "lightsaber of the New Republic" be the only weapon needed. But Wedge has a very honest, un-idealized view of the situation: he accepts that the tools of dirty fighting are needed, and wants to provide the New Republic with them.

"If, three months after it goes operational, it has proven its worth—in *my sole estimation*--you can do as you please." -- I'm going to want to track the timeframes we get in this trilogy, because I think the conceit is that the whole trilogy takes place within the three months. Once the timer starts, anyway, which isn't until after the Night Caller mission begins. I think it's right after the pirate ambush where Jesmin dies, but we'll see.

"You’re wagering your career for the good of the New Republic. You’re creating new tactics, new weapons for the New Republic, not just for your squadron. You’re already a general … you just don’t know it yet." -- Ackbar definitely has Wedge's number. I think this is also a good example of something Aaron mentioned several times in interviews. He came from a military family, and when building his characterization of Wedge, one thing he focused on was the sense of military ethics and responsibility he'd heard in his father's and grandfather's stories. I feel like there was more to it than that, but I heard it in an audio interview, so it's lucky I remember that much. Maybe more will come back to me later. I know Wedge was kind of Aaron's ideal military commander character, though. Hell, according to Aaron, in the later days of Legends when everybody was being killed off left and right, there was a sort of unspoken agreement among the writers that Wedge's hypothetical death was in Aaron's hands. If Aaron didn't kill him, nobody else was going to, because he was seen as Aaron's character to that extent.

"Wes turned to Hobbie, extended his hand. 'Sorry to see that you’re stuck with the flying fossils, while I stay with Commander Wedge on the cutting edge of—'
Hobbie batted his hand away. 'Oh, shut up.'" -- Y'know, I have overthought practically every piece of Wes Janson lore there is, but I still feel like there's something I just don't get about this particular interaction. Maybe it's that it's right before Wedge tells them about Talon Squad's death, so it's definitely not the same tone as the rest of the interaction, or maybe it's just early characterization, wanting to show their relationship but not quite having it nailed down yet. It's a little more combative than I usually think of them; the tone is more like two siblings competing for "Dad's" attention than... hm. I think the difference might be that in the settings where I usually write them, a lot of times they're (1) actively seeing combat and (2) in a settled situation with their squadron, so there's a lot of focus on that wingmate bond. Here, they've been in a training-school situation for... what, three years? IrenkaFeralKitty has spreadsheets with exact dates.

Anyway, they've been out of live-fire combat for literal years, seeing a whole lot of each other and nothing of the rest of the Rogues. So there's definitely an element of "we just got 'Dad' back and I'm the one who gets to spend time with him now, neener neener" in there. I wonder if Wes and Hobbie were discussing beforehand which of them might get put with which squadron. I think... I think Wes had this line planned. Like maybe they didn't actually discuss it, but "flying fossils" just comes kind of out of nowhere if it was off the cuff. It would fit Wes's personality if he was planning something smug to say about whichever squadron he got put with. Rogue Squadron is easy, it's just "oh, sorry you're still on training duty while I get to fly with the best squadron in the galaxy again". Wraith Squadron is more of a stretch to be excited about at this point, so maybe this is the best he could come up with?

[Leia says: "I'm not sure where you're getting this. I thought it was more 'ha ha, you're stuck with the old shit, I get to do the new shit'." I mean, it could very much be that I'm just somebody who has never really had that instinct to go "neener neener, I get to do something and you don't", so the more combative angles of Wes+Hobbie throw me off stride a little.]

"Janson leaned against the near wall. Hobbie looked as shocked as though he’d jammed his hand into a power generator." -- This is something I'm going to come back to several times over the course of these four books. Hobbie, for all his resting dour face, shows his feelings. Wes barely ever shows negative feelings on his face; it's his voice that gives him away.

(This is one of the things that makes me wonder whether Wes was abused as a child. I really go back and forth on that concept, but I know I used to have an absolutely perfect sabacc face whenever I needed it. In my own context, I was punished as a child for showing any emotions, especially positive ones -- it took me years of deliberate effort to learn how to smile again -- but it's much more common for victims of child abuse to be punished for showing negative emotions and/or forced to fake positive ones. I never learned very good control over my voice in that setting, though, because saying anything got you in more trouble. If Wes grew up in such a situation, especially if he was punished more for showing negative emotions, well... that would be one route to get to what we see here.)

"Janson’s voice was ragged. 'Eleven pilots we trained. Wiped out by a simple ambush. What a pair of incompetents we must be.'" -- There are so many layers to this. Wes is obviously upset, but deflecting from the actual deaths of the Talons to something he can at least pretend to joke about, his and Hobbie's reputations as trainers. But there's also a truthfulness of self-blame: how could the whole squadron have died so easily, unless they were badly trained? Unless he and Hobbie failed them. And looking at the timeline... much of the Talons' training had to take place while Tycho was on trial for treason and murder, over in Stackpole's books. Wes's memory of training the Talons has to be all mixed through with him and Hobbie worrying about Tycho and waiting for news. He's got to wonder at some point, were they too distracted to train the Talons properly? Or is it worse? Are they fundamentally bad trainers: was there some flaw in their technique that will doom Gauntlet and Corsair Squadrons as well?

(I don't think we actually get much in the way of Wes's reaction to Wraith deaths for comparison, to know how he normally takes losing a duckling. I'll have to keep an eye out. I know there's a scene in Iron Fist where he's fairly philosophical about it, although he's also trying to snap Wedge out of a funk at that point. That's one thing about analyzing Wes; there are always two or three reasons at a time for him being the way he is at any particular moment, and most of them are not "that's just the way he is", although he usually gives a damn good impression of being just the way he is.)

"[D]on't tear yourselves up. Any one of us could have been lured into something like that" -- Aww, Wedge. You tried. Wedge always tries to have the right thing to say, to reassure his people and try to keep them from getting stuck in their heads. Sometimes it even works. :-)

(Writing Wedge is... an experience. The way we write, it's basically RP style,

the_dour_one is usually Hobbie and I'm usually Wes, and we sort of toss Wedge and Tycho back and forth depending on how the scene's going. And Wedge is just so good and sincere and sensible and gives the impression of being not as damaged as he might be. I'll probably come back to that. A lot.)

"authorization to run it against pilot profiles across records of all New Republic armed forces" -- I don't actually know if this mattered at all, but I notice the source pool for potential Wraiths wasn't just Starfighter Command, it was all pilots across the New Republic military. For some reason I never put that together before. Do we actually know if any of the eventual Wraiths came from anywhere besides Starfighter Command? I don't recall ever seeing anything that would indicate they did, but I'll keep an eye out.

"I want you to work up a simulator run based on the mission that destroyed Talon Squad." -- I don't know how much technical know-how it takes to turn a battle recording from an X-wing into a simulator program, but based on this and one other line in Starfighters of Adumar (because that's the life of a Hobbie fan), Leia and I hypothesize that Hobbie is the most technologically inclined of the Fab Four. In that Leverage AU we keep not quite starting, Hobbie is the Hardison, the slicer. (Wes is the hitter, because obviously. Someday we will write this thing. We keep almost starting, but we had to fridge Luke and I keep balking at fridging Luke. It's just that nobody else fits.)

"I think it's a terrible idea" -- I really think there's some kind of editing error going on with this scene. It reads as if the project hasn't started yet, when in fact they're already on the last day of pilot interviews. I wonder if Aaron had originally planned to have this scene at the beginning of the interviews, but then came up with the chapter 3 opening line, which implies that Wedge has come straight to the *last* day of interviews after this meeting. And then just nobody caught the continuity error. It would make sense with the quick turnaround on the book.

"Wedge felt irritation well up within him. Crespin might be his superior, but did not have a grasp of small-unit fighter uses and tactics superior to Wedge’s. Few, if any, officers did." -- Awww, Wedge. He's generally so extremely humble, it's kind of cute to see him bristling a little over his competence as a starfighter commander here. Crespin really seems to get under Wedge's skin for some reason, I'm not sure why.

[Leia suggests: "He's a fucking asshole, that's why." Leia is very direct. XD I don't actually find Crespin especially annoying, but I also have a tendency to be exactly that kind of blunt opinionated hardass if you try to put me in command, so I may be more forgiving of him than most readers.]

[Leia also notes that this passage "really does show the military background Aaron has. This is very common. It's hard being the only one with common sense, especially in a military setting."]

"It was important to meet Crespin reason for reason, fact for fact; if he let emotion dictate his defense he would lose this argument." -- This is one that's been hardwired into me as truth for so long that I don't really know how to word about it. I'll see Tumblr posts talking about how the "you emotion, therefore you lose" thing is used by some category, cis white boys or anti-abortion activists or whatever, but for me growing up it was everybody. It's the whole subculture. And Aaron was from Texas. Part of me feels like, as a Tumblr liberal, I'm... supposed to dismiss this mantra as something you shouldn't have to do? But most of me is like "yes, this is truth, this is a skill you have to have and practice in order to deal with almost anybody". But I'm also aware that for me this skill is inextricably tied to the ability to keep a sabacc face, as part of dealing with abusive authority figures. On the other hand, the sheer number of abusive authority figures there are in the world whom we have to deal with...

"We don’t need misfits representing the New Republic," the general continued. "We need heroes. Men and women with proper character and clean records. Hologenic pilots who’ll look good in the broadcasts, good in the archives."
"With all due respect, General, that’s equivalent to piloting a course right into the dark side of the Force." -- "Why is it that when someone says 'with all due respect', what they really mean is 'kiss my ass'?" -Ashley Williams, Mass Effect

"'[T]his idea that appearance needs to be a factor in the choice of new pilots so they’ll look good on holograms and broadcasts—sir, I understand your reasoning, and I approve'—the lie nearly stuck in Wedge’s throat but he accelerated past it" -- Another angle on Wedge being really good at straight-faced lying. This time he's using it as a tool of persuasion, getting close enough to Crespin's position that he can poke Crespin in the direction Wedge wants him to go. I also love the way Aaron uses "accelerated" here, as if Wedge was in a starfighter; I'm sure that's a deliberate choice, to position this as a combat move.

"If all our pilots have to look a specific way, meet or surpass some arbitrary degree of beauty, we’re exactly the same as the Empire, which kept hundreds of sapient species under its heel because they weren’t human. Because they didn’t meet specific human standards of appearance." -- I feel like I have something to say about this, but it's not quite coalescing. Or perhaps it's just that this is one of those lines where I feel like Aaron is making a point to say something Important. It's a situation where you wouldn't put in the line that led to it unless this, right here, was specifically a thing you wanted to say. I don't know anything about Aaron's politics, since his official stance was "If I told you, I'd have to kill you", but I think about somebody in Texas in 1997 talking about how the Empire was evil because it subjugated people who "didn't meet specific human standards of appearance", and it feels... well, familiar. You can only try to nudge the Overton window, very gently. Otherwise it slams shut on your fingers and leaves you without a family. But sometimes there are things you have to say, so you say them in fiction, and hope they reach willing ears.

"Every pilot who makes it will be a success story, a come-from-behind story, suited to a holodrama or series. Most importantly, they’ll be common-being stories." -- And in classic Aaron fashion, we pivot to some humor. This line is only funny in retrospect, but through that lens it's fucking hilarious. We're going to have the galaxy's only Gamorrean fighter pilot, the galaxy's only Thakwaash fighter pilot, a famous propaganda star, the niece of a famous admiral, the lone survivor of a previous squadron, a doctor who's allergic to bacta, two women who both spent their teen years homeless in different climates, and a guy who has very specific backstory with your XO. Hell, Grinder being a Bothan slicer might be the closest to a #relatable character we have, in terms of species and background.

"Do note that I expect this experiment to be a disaster … and I’ll be on hand to clean it up when it detonates in your face." -- Something I really like about Aaron's writing is the way every single character has their own goals and perspective. I tend to associate this with his having been a D&D writer, and also an experienced DM. Playing even one session of D&D makes you very thoroughly aware that every single person at your table is the star of their own story. DMing for any length of time is approximately like running a birthday party for toddlers: you have to juggle everybody's attention spans, make sure everybody is having fun and nobody is getting ignored, make space for the shy ones to have their moments, and make everything run smoothly behind the scenes so the cake appears at the proper time and the ice cream is the correct degree of thawed.

(I DMed a oneshot once. We had fun, but that was enough DMing for me.)

Anyway, my point is: Crespin exists in this story mainly as an antagonist, but he's not just a cardboard antagonist on a pole. He's a disciplined trainer, Wedge respects his skills, and he has complicated thoughts and feelings of his own. Aaron put so much depth into all his characters, and it makes close-reading his books really rewarding.

(Also, there's a corner of my brain where these books consist of Aaron DMing a gaggle of Wraiths and occasional Rogues in a classic basement setting. We'll come back to that a few times, especially when I talk about the amount of attention he pays to hit points and long rests. Long rests with regard to the pacing of Starfighters of Adumar, that's a special topic in Allston studies all to itself, and one I haven't yet mastered. Hopefully I can hash that out on this go-through.)

"'and with occasional lapses such as your own pilot, Erisi Dlarit, turning out to be a traitor—'
Wedge reined in another flash of anger." -- Crespin really is getting under Wedge's skin in this conversation. I wonder if there's any more to it than that. I don't think Crespin's going out of his way to needle Wedge; he's just a hardass, who holds himself and everyone around him to high standards. Maybe Wedge is a little on edge, considering he's been working on the Wraiths project for weeks, been interviewing pilots for probably about a week straight if my math is right (we'll get to the math when we get to the sources for the numbers), and for some reason is having this conversation with Crespin after interviews are almost complete.

"All your pilots are being brought in without knowing where they are; the washouts will go out the same way." -- See, this line right here, this is why I think this was intended to be set at the beginning of interviews. It doesn't make any sense for Crespin to say the washouts "will" go out the same way if they've already been sending washouts home for most of a week.

"Suddenly Crespin looked inexpressibly weary. Wedge wondered how many officers regularly brought him arguments and back talk—even when it was as polite and well reasoned as Wedge’s." -- Put a pin in this paragraph. We're going to echo it once Wedge is actively commanding the Wraiths.

Wraith Squadron: Chapter 3, Part A

"You look like you’ve fought a few rounds with a rancor."
"Thanks, Wes. I’m sure General Crespin will appreciate that comparison." -- This is a great opening line for the chapter, a great exchange to set the tone of their relationship in their first one-on-one scene. Wes being cheekily sympathetic and a little teasingly flattering about Wedge's hand-to-hand skills, all at once... I think I'd say this is where Wes gets his voice really solidly established. You can practically hear him. (In Aaron's memory, I like to imagine Wes with a Texas accent where it's relevant, even though Aaron himself didn't have much of one. I could hear this line either in Aaron's slow, thoughtfully precise interview voice or in a broader Texan reading.)

[Leia, who has more of a tendency to read things as sarcastic, thinks Wes is being more of a little shit to Wedge and implying that his hand-to-hand skills aren't very good.]

Wedge giving him a sarcastic thank-you and a wryly deadpan comeback; something that strikes me about this comeback specifically, and this feels to me like a very Wedge thing, so I'm going to want to keep an eye on it throughout the series, is the way the reference to General Crespin sort of... tips the humor? Deflects it a bit? Turns it from "yes I do look terrible, thank you" toward "I could tell Crespin you called him a rancor if I wanted", and I feel like there's something there that I'm almost finding words for. Like Wes's line is purely the comment of a friend, nothing respectful or specifically insubordinate about it. Wedge's reply sort of... brings rank into it, reminds Wes that a rank structure exists around here while still being teasing back and without actually pulling Wedge's own rank on him. It's a very delicate balancing act.

It just also happens that this is an exchange that pins this scene directly to the end of the last one and messes up the chronology. :-)

"Wedge sat back in his chair with a sigh, put his booted feet up on his desk." -- You know, I don't think I've ever seen anyone pick this out as a specific thing Wedge does, but we know he's going to use the same posture to great effect in the Myn's Boot scene in Solo Command. I wonder if there are any other examples. I think I'll keep an eye out. Also, Aaron used this sentence construction a lot, where he essentially splices two action phrases together with a comma. It's not quite officially ungrammatical (a comma splice would be two complete clauses with subjects in each), and when I say "a lot" I mean enough that it's something I tend to use in my own X-wing writing because it's part of the rhythm of GFFA narration in my head to that extent.

"His office was a former storeroom" -- This is going to matter later in the scene because it means we know there's no waiting room or receptionist, just a small drab room opening directly on a hallway.

"Janson sat in a similar chair against the wall" -- I don't quite know how to say this, but I like that Wes is sort of out of the line of fire, in almost a referee's position. It makes sense for logistical reasons, because he needs to be getting up repeatedly to bring candidates in, but I think it's also a good character bit. He's not on either "side", not invested in the outcomes, just setting the interviews up and watching them go. At the end of the chapter he's going to come over to Wedge's side of the desk for the first time while talking to Kell, and I think that's some very deliberate blocking on Aaron's part.

"We have pilots, possibly the last group, if some late arrivals make it in." -- We know that one of these late arrivals is going to be Myn. It's implied that Kell, as the very last interviewee, is another. I'm not sure about Piggy. Wes introducing Kettch at the beginning of today's interviews suggests that he has planned for Piggy to be on today's list, although that would probably work just as well if Piggy doesn't make it in today and Wes starts tomorrow off with "His name is Voort and he's a Gamorrean". I suspect, even if Piggy is already on base, that Wes is saving his interview for after Myn's to break some of the tension. I don't think we know if any of the pilots before Myn are also late arrivals; I may as well keep an eye on that.

"Since the first day of evaluations, Wedge had followed a simple interview pattern: Janson kept the data on the pilots, allowing Wedge to meet each one without any foreknowledge. It gave him a better opportunity to consult his gut with respect to each candidate." -- IrenkaFeralKitty pointed out in the comments on last chapter that, due to the recent loss of the Talons, Wes has his defenses up especially high against bonding with the new squadron members, possibly even to the point that he may not realize until the conversation in Iron Fist which brings it up that Wedge isn't doing the same thing. I'm kind of wondering if this fact has any bearing on that: Wes has the opportunity to know every candidate's dossier inside and out, to see the flaws that will make it harder for them to stay alive. Ton and Face already have crashes on their records; Tyria's training scores are barely acceptable, although I don't think he knows they were doctored and she's an even worse pilot than she looks on paper; Falynn has combat experience but she's very much a Rebel-type pilot, driven and mouthy and with not enough self-preservation. Wedge gets the chance to look at their dossiers during interviews, but Wedge is very much a person who prefers to ignore the official records and make his judgments about people in person.

"His name is Kettch, and he’s an Ewok." -- Aww, Kettch! I really love how Aaron takes what could have been a throwaway line here, just something Wes made up because he knew Piggy was on the docket for the day and wanted Wedge suitably pre-kidded, and turns it into a major throughline of the trilogy. This is something Aaron really liked to do in general, spinning out his one-line jokes into foreshadowing that turns into actual memorable scenes and occurrences, so of course we'll be running into a bunch more examples as we go along.

"Oh, yes. Determined to fight. You should hear him say, ‘Yub, yub.’ He makes it a battle cry." -- You know, this would imply, if Wes was telling the truth, that he's already met with Kettch, and Wedge should notice if that's something out of the ordinary. So this implies that for everyone except the "late arrivals", Wes may have already had a preliminary meeting with them, whether he's been the one guiding them from their transportation to their quarters, or just been dropping in on them to say "hey, I'm Lieutenant Janson, you'll be meeting with Commander Antilles tomorrow" and maybe chat a bit. That has relevance for the Wes/Face piece I'm poking at, since it basically follows Face through canon with an emphasis on his interactions with Wes.

"He wears arm and leg extensions, prosthetics built for him by a sympathetic medical droid. And he’s anxious to go, Commander." -- We'll get into this more as it becomes relevant, of course, but I love how much thought Wes has put into the logistics of an Ewok snubfighter pilot. This is such an almost-convincing story to tell Wedge, too, because they were both at Endor: they remember how serious the Ewoks got about killing stormtroopers, they know the Ewoks had considerable mechanical skill... it's honestly a little more credible based on their own prior experiences than a Gamorrean fighter pilot. Which is probably a large part of why Wes made Kettch an Ewok in the first place. It sits right at that edge of barely credible but almost convincing.

(Various parts of the fandom at various times have assumed Wes had a preexisting fondness for Ewoks. This is completely possible, but I don't think we have any especially solid evidence either way.)

[Leia suggests that Wes had previously figured out the logistics of an Ewok pilot, possibly while drunk or high at some point and with Hobbie egging him on. I suggested that a good time for this would have been at the end of Tycho's trial, where "we are going to CELEBRATE" could very easily turn into "we are both sozzled and Wes is rhapsodizing about the Ewoks' mechanical aptitude for some reason".]

"Please tell me you’re kidding." -- This is actually going to be echoed by Wes, way down the line at the climax of the Kettch arc in Solo Command. God, Aaron was such a brilliant writer.

"I’m going to get you, Janson." "Yub, yub, Commander." -- And so a legend begins. :D I will also note that they've shifted into "on-duty" forms of address by this point, Janson and Commander rather than the "Wes" and unmarked "you" we got at the beginning of the scene. Even when horsing around, Wes has a certain sense of the minimal amount of professionalism Wedge requires in a particular context.

(The narration is going to refer to Wes as "Janson" almost exclusively throughout, even at points where it's in his own POV. This gets very confusing at times. I can't promise not to get confused, but I'll do my best.)

"Wedge wondered how badly this would have affected [Falynn Sandskimmer's] record a few years ago, when the New Republic was the Rebel Alliance" -- I think this premise of Falynn's character is a really clever one. The New Republic has effectively fossilized pretty far in the three or four years since Endor, becoming much more enamored with things like military discipline. They've even managed to teach Wes to follow parade-ground commands at some point, as we'll see in... one of the other books, I think it's Solo Command. We hear Wedge telling Ackbar that the NR needs new ways of doing things before it becomes "as fossilized as the Empire", but we also see the problem very distinctly demonstrated by Falynn, a young Rebel-type pilot trapped in the New Republic's era.

I get tetchy as hell about "show don't tell" as a maxim, having encountered and sometimes betaed for way too many different writers who would say, "oh, the thing I want to do is showing, and the thing I don't want to do is telling!" It's all words, you can't actually say with 100% certainty, "This is showing and that is telling." But I feel like Aaron does a good job, in this and various other contexts, of showing and telling us the same thing.

"the two demotions that had canceled her two promotions" -- Wow, Falynn's been around the block for, what is she, eighteen, nineteen? I don't think we get solid ages for any of the Wraiths, except we know that Ton is older than twenty-eight, Myn has to be at least twenty-one, and rough calculations on what little data we have about the others put most of them around nineteenish. (I'll get into those details when we hit the exact data we have on each.) We know Falynn is quite young, anyway, because we'll find out later that she thinks twenty-eight is ancient. So she has some serious talent to have gotten two promotions already. As a Rebel, she'd probably have been a general before long.

"Can you imagine being compared to him all your adult life just because you’re another pilot from Tatooine? No, I’ve never met Luke Skywalker. In fact, I wish I’d never *heard* of him." -- I wonder... I feel like this sort of feeds into Falynn's "second best at everything" brainweasel. Like no matter how badass she gets, even if she was a General and all the rest of it, she'll only ever be the second-best and second most famous pilot from Tatooine.

This is also... I'm having trouble putting words together, exactly, but it's another great example of how Aaron did character creation. Some of his characters are pretty much centered around one concept, like Kell is mainly designed as "guy whose dad Wes killed, okay he has to have a history of running away like his dad, he needs to be large and dangerous and very necessary to the team, maybe demolitions?", but even then Kell gets the secondary arc of learning to treat Tyria like a person instead of a fantasy. Similarly, Falynn gets multiple angles of character development, with learning to respect Wedge, starting to open up to Myn, and trying to be the best there is at something.

"Her worth was in her performance, not her lack of appreciation of one good man." -- This is something I come back to every so often as a defining feature of Wedge's personality. He knows that, to quote Terry Pratchett, "personal is not the same as important". When he's selecting Wraiths, or when he's doing any of the things he does where he's focused on the good of the New Republic, he sets all personal considerations strictly aside. This line isn't actually echoed during the conversations with and about Kell later, but I think it's significant that it's in this chapter, which will end with Kell's big reveal. Kell's worth is also in his performance, not in his lack of appreciation for one of Wedge's friends, although Wedge never actually describes Wes as a "good man" to the best of my memory. (There's a line in Starfighters of Adumar where he calls Wes "a man who does good things", which gives me So Many Feelings about Wes and Wedge and their relative morals and the ways they feel about each other. Anyway. We'll get there.)

"a human male from Etti IV" -- The first books in what became the Legends continuity of Star Wars were Brian Daley's "Han Solo Adventures" trilogy, from which Timothy Zahn and Aaron both borrowed a great many worldbuilding details; I remember Z-95 Headhunters specifically, for whatever reason. Etti IV is one of the worlds from that trilogy, although not very much happened on it. Other, more relevant references that will come up as we go along include Rudrig, Ton Phanan's home planet, and Lorrd, where Face Loran spent his teenage years.

"He sent Janson after the compulsive thief" -- I kind of picture Wes just grabbing this guy by the collar and being like "Give it back". We have six pilot interviews today and four of them produce Wraiths, so it's a pretty good ratio, and the back to back failures demonstrate fairly effectively the range of reasons people don't get selected for the Wraiths.

"[H]e’d learned to pilot freighters for the Rebel Alliance and had transferred to fighters when the deadly pilot attrition of the year before the Emperor’s death had put a premium on good fliers." -- WraithFourteen suggested that this Talz might have been one of the pilot candidates potentially pulled from other parts of the New Republic military, whoever handles freighter pilots, instead of Starfighter Command, but it turns out from this quote that he'd already been in starfighters for several years. He would have wound up in the Wraith candidates' "washout" category due to the increasing probability of stress breakdowns, see below. Still, it's a good thought, definitely worth adding a line item here.

"[H]is record showed a history of psychosomatic illnesses and the possibility of mental breakdown increasing in the last several years. His mental evaluations suggested" -- This is one of a very few lines in the Star War that confirm the existence of psych evals or anything resembling mental health training for GFFA medics. I can think of one other example right now, Wedge asking Myn if he's talked to the medics about his psychological condition in Solo Command. Neither line suggests much, if anything, in the way of dedicated psychiatric care. Everyone in this galaxy needs a lot more mental health care than just Wedge being sensible at them.

"Number four today," said Janson, "is Lieutenant Myn Donos." -- We see Wes sticking to formality here, using Myn's rank. He knows it's going to be rough seeing Myn again, even though he doesn't yet know about Myn's damaged psychological state. This is basically why I think he scheduled Piggy's interview for right after Myn's on purpose, so he'd have something funny lined up to break the tension.

"Wedge gave his second-in-command a sympathetic look. 'Have you had a chance to talk to him?'" -- Wedge also knows this is going to be rough on Wes. However, he's Wedge, and even though he may be asking a friendly question, he's also looking for information. He wants to know whether Wes has already been through the roughest part of it, seeing Myn again for the first time, and he also wants to know what Wes's early impression of Myn was if so.

"No, he’s just arrived on base. I read Hobbie’s report, though. New Republic Military Intelligence has cleared him of error or wrongdoing." -- Wes knows exactly what Wedge is looking for, and he gives him what intel he has. Incidentally, I wonder why it would be Hobbie's report specifically? Wouldn't Intel have filed a report of their own findings that Wes and Wedge could access? Was Hobbie directly involved in Myn's inquiry? Is his report more detailed or comprehensive somehow?

[Leia suggests that because the NR is still pretty small and not as bureaucratic as it might be, maybe Intel doesn't have their own department for investigating incidents like this, so it might have been a joint investigation. It still feels a bit odd to me for Hobbie, as Myn's former trainer, to be involved in a capacity other than "being questioned about Myn as a character witness", but I guess I might have a stronger sense of potential conflicts of interest than NR Intel necessarily does.]

"Janson spoke into his comlink and a moment later a lean man in the standard orange New Republic flight suit entered." -- Now, Wedge has been saying "show them in" all day, we saw it with Falynn as well, but here we see that Wes isn't actually hopping up and down to escort people in. Is there someone waiting outside in the hall to let the interviewees in? We know there's nothing as esoteric as a waiting room, because Wedge will later tell Kell to "wait in the hall". Or is Wes just talking to, like, the intercom outside the office, so Myn has been standing awkwardly at attention in the hall for however long since somebody dropped him off there, and then the intercom goes off and is like "Lieutenant Myn Donos, come in, please" in Wes's voice?

"'Thank you, sir.' Donos’s expression did not change. Wedge glanced at Janson, who wore a puzzled look as he watched Donos." -- I really like how Wedge is paying attention to Wes's reactions as part of evaluating Myn. It's very... I tend to say that you can trace pretty much every part of Aaron's characterization of Wes back to Wes's ten seconds of canon screentime, to him being Wedge's gunner. This isn't quite that, but it's related. This is Wedge using all the information he has available, including Wes's specialized knowledge of what Myn used to be like.

"Wedge again checked Janson’s reaction; Janson was now leaning back in his chair, studying Donos curiously." -- So here we have Wes watching Myn be interviewed by Wedge, and Wedge watching Wes watching Myn be interviewed. :D And Wedge knows Wes so well that he can just read him, and not have to ask him any questions until Myn is out of the room. Granted, the main thing he's reading right now is that Wes is confused as fuck, but that's still information. This Myn is very much not the "typical Corellian" Wes knew.

"Wes tells me that before joining the Alliance, you belonged to the Corellian armed forces. Sniper for an elite counterinsurgency unit." -- This and an upcoming line are basically the only indicators we get of Myn's age. He has to have been at least eighteen when he joined the Corellian armed forces, he has to have had time to work his way up into the position of elite sniper, and we'll learn in a minute that he left that position three years ago. So he has to be at the very least twenty-one, and possibly several years older.

It's also interesting to me that Wedge goes with the "Wes tells me" here, informal first-name use and all, instead of "your dossier says" or even "Lieutenant Janson tells me". Do we think he's trying to get a reaction out of Myn? See if a little informality will crack the ice, since Myn is being so extremely formal?

"Do you think you can train up to your previous standard?"
"Yes, sir." There was no pride, no enthusiasm in his tone.
"Do you have a problem with the role of sniper?"
"No, sir. Whatever my role, my task is the elimination of the enemy." -- I think Wedge is definitely testing Myn's reactions here, trying to figure out why he's such a complete blank.

This seems like a good place to start talking about how the two PTSD narrative arcs in this book are interwoven. Myn's is going to continue for the entire trilogy, of course, while Wes's gets less emphasis once Kell becomes more of a background character, but there are going to be points throughout where their juxtaposition will give us insights on both of them.

That said -- we don't canonically know how Wes reacted after shooting down Kissek Doran, whether he went into a shutdown mode like this, but I don't think so, for a couple of reasons. One is that the little reaction shots we get on Wes here, and his commentary to Wedge after Myn is out of the room, don't read like he's seeing his younger self. Obviously, if he was, he'd be masking it like hell, but he doesn't seem to be masking to me, just curious and confused about the massive change in Myn's personality. I... I think if Wes recognized this as a PTSD reaction from his own experience, I think his desire to be helpful to Wedge would override his desire to not talk about it at all, and he'd at least hint something. I could honestly see that going either way, though.

The other reason, and I'll get into this more when we hit the evidence for it, because it's kind of complicated to lay out without the quotes handy, but there's at least one place in this book where we see an indication that Wes probably prefers to deal with negative feelings by burying himself in work, rather than going near-catatonic like Myn. I could see him spending the days after the Doran incident (for some reason that's what I always call it in my head) obsessively replaying the situation in the simulators, trying to find an angle to take the shot that wouldn't crack the cockpit, trying to find something else he could have done differently. I tackled that perspective in the first chapter of my fic Life, Death, Life, which was meant to be a "five times" fic and has been stuck at two things for a while now, but those two chapters are complete.

"[Y]ou were decorated on Corellia for conspicuous gallantry. This entitles you to wear the Corellian Bloodstripes. Yet you don’t. Why?" -- We find out a little later that Wes didn't notice this. Wedge may be more prone to noticing small details than Wes, I've never quite settled on an opinion about that, but he also notices this specifically because he's Corellian.

"Donos took a while to answer. 'It just seems a bit silly, sir. I could also wear a sign saying "I’m a wonderful person and I give money to the needy." What’s the point?'" -- This line has always kind of stumped me. I mean, it seems logical that Myn is lying, that the real reason he's not wearing the Bloodstripes is that he feels guilty for letting the Talons die, but this specific choice of excuse... the sort of sarcastic tone, seems a bit offset from the rest of his presentation in this scene, even though he's still got that completely flat affect.

So I ran this by Leia, and she pointed out that Myn, the former "typical Corellian", is both rejecting a central part of his own identity and, while speaking to another Corellian, dismissing their shared culture's highest honor as "silly". He doesn't want any part of what the old Myn was, and it's also very possible that he's trying to make Wedge hate him. He hates himself, after all. He's not trying to actually get thrown out of the military -- he wants revenge, as much as he wants anything at this point -- but this isn't technically insubordination, he's not disrespecting any part of NR protocol, he's just being blandly offensive about something that... if Wedge was any other Corellian, would put Myn permanently in the doghouse.

"Wedge tried to discern some hint of anger, pride, regret, *anything* in the pilot’s expression or attitude, but he could not." -- Myn's character arc is going to go several different ways over this trilogy. Aaron wants to make sure we have a good solid impression of where he begins: here, blank, a dead man walking. Everything else will build on this.

"He used to wear the Bloodstripes," Janson said. "I didn’t notice until you mentioned it. This isn’t the Myn Donos I trained." -- Something that really jumps out at me in this conversation is that neither Wes nor Wedge seem to recognize Myn as having one fairly classic presentation of PTSD. I really don't know what the cultural gestalt around PTSD was in 1998; I was a pre-teen, and one with absolutely no connection to pop culture. Aaron himself obviously understood it well enough to write two extremely good depictions of it in Myn and Wes, and I have a pretty damn thorough understanding of it now because I had to be my own sole mental health support for the first fifteen years I had it.

(*writes and deletes several paragraphs attempting to expand on that* There's a reason I latched onto these books so hard when I finally ran across them around age twenty.)

Um. Anyway. Trying to get away from that topic. No, I'm not looking forward to chapter four. My point here is, has the Rebel Alliance / New Republic really managed not to produce any of these cases of blank dead-inside PTSD in contexts where Wedge or Wes would have encountered them?

Leia suggested several hypotheses. (1) People in the GFFA obviously have way less familiarity with psychological issues than we do, and they haven't been through three or more protracted land wars inside of the last century, so they may not have the mental category "oh yeah, that guy has PTSD / shell shock / battle fatigue" like we do. (2) PTSD doesn't always affect people immediately; the Rogues may not be used to seeing it, or this presentation of it, because they're still in the middle of their war and people are trying to hide it. (3) During the Rebellion, it would have been very easy for suicidal but halfway functional-seeming pilots to get put back in the cockpit and drift into getting vaped. Outside of their closest friends, nobody might have noticed the difference before they managed to get themselves killed. (4) Rogue Squadron, as an elite active-duty squadron, isn't usually in the same place as wherever they send nonfunctional pilots who need an off-duty rest (a hypothetical location Leia and I have nicknamed "nap camp"). (5) Maybe what's puzzling Wes and Wedge isn't the "shell shock", but the fact that Myn seems so relatively functional. He doesn't have the classic thousand-yard stare. He seems alert. He's just not himself.

"Was there enough time for him to have been grabbed by the enemy, to have been programmed?” -- Of course, because Aaron couldn't leave a throwaway line alone, this is a timeframe that's going to come into question in Solo Command, but for now, it's a valid question. Especially valid since Wedge has fairly recently come back from dealing with Isard, who really liked to program people to do unpleasant things like try to assassinate you and then possibly explode. (Isard had a definite thing for making people explode.)

"No, there’s not enough time unaccounted for in his report for him to have stopped into a cantina for a drink." -- This is... Wes has a very distinctive voice in Aaron's writing, and I struggle to describe exactly what makes it stand out, but this is a good example. It's not quite the "long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs" thing that appears in some depictions of Southern dialect, it's not a folksy simile or description, but it's... chatty. I'm thinking of a Tumblr post that discusses how in a small town it's polite to stop and chat with everyone you meet about their day, while in a big city "people just polite different, suitable for city life" by getting things done as efficiently as possible so as not to hold up the line. Wes isn't folksy, but he uses more words than his Coreworld squadmates, and uses them differently. The rephrasing of "not enough time to have stopped into a cantina for a drink" isn't linguistically necessary, but it adds emphasis and... memorability?

I feel like there's a name for what I'm trying to describe. It's not exclusively a Southern or small-town thing, it's also a thing he does because he's an extrovert (I drove one of my call center supervisors crazy with the ways I'd ramble on and not even notice I was doing it) and usually trying to work some humor into his sentences, which he's definitely doing here -- tossing out the mental image of srs bsnss Myn, in his flightsuit, sitting ramrod-straight in a cantina with his srs bsnss cup of black coffee or whatever. Wes is pretty much always trying to lighten the mood, wherever he is. This is going to make his flashback to the Doran incident next chapter hit hard, because for a time he stops doing that.

"No sign he ever left his cockpit." -- Seriously, I feel like there's a word for this. Where you say something one way that's more illustrative first, and then summarize it another way that clarifies and simplifies what you were trying to say. It feels really familiar and I have no idea if it's primarily an extrovert thing, a Southern thing, or at this point that it's just a Wes/Aaron thing and I've been reading these books for fourteen years.

"It’s him, but it’s not him. He wouldn’t even meet my eyes." -- We don't get any hint, other than possibly this (depending on how you interpret it), that Myn has even looked in Wes's direction. I think it makes a lot of sense if he doesn't. He's so thoroughly rejecting everything of his old identity that there's no reason for him to acknowledge his old trainer, and every reason for him to try to subtly antagonize Wes by completely ignoring him, similar to the way he tried to antagonize Wedge with his comment about the Bloodstripes. He's not flouting military protocol; he salutes Wedge properly, and Wes is positioned off to the side in an explicitly "I'm not formally here" sort of situation. He's just taking an opportunity to give offense and try to make Wes hate him more without getting in official trouble. Maybe not even consciously.

Obviously, it's not going to work, because far from hating Myn for the deaths of the other Talons, Wes has a definite "last Talon" protectiveness of his own towards Myn that's going to parallel with Myn's toward Shiner. Wes may be going into this project with his defenses on full, but Myn is already inside those defenses.

"If he shows the slightest sign of cracking up, or of needing a protracted off-duty rest for psychological reasons, I’m going to scrub him." -- No you're not, Wedge. You just don't know that yet. :-) I'll get more into this when we get there, but between this line and what actually happens, we can pretty much say for certain that it was Wes who saved Myn's career. Not without the help of Face, Kell, and Tyria actually snapping Myn out of it, of course, but I am convinced at least half the reason Wedge was willing to give Myn the chance to recover was that Wes was so invested in it.

"Understood." -- Wes is so terse here. That doesn't happen much, and only when he's feeling especially subdued. I don't know for sure, but I think he thinks at this point that he'd accept Wedge's decision if Myn does crack up. But he's probably also imagining the situation would be a lot more clear-cut than what eventually happens. I'm sure he's already determined that he's going to fight to give Myn every chance possible, but he's also not the type to go soft on him. I don't remember if we get any special insight into how he treats Myn in training. I could see him choosing some specific training partners and scenarios, like how I believe he does with Kell (we'll get to that in detail), trying to give him the opportunity to break down in training if he's going to, instead of out in the live-fire world where snapping or breaking down at the wrong time gets people dead.