#te-mon zeyon

[ooops-i-arted]

It's the last day of June but I have one more post in me for @jedijune but it's a little different. The goal of Jedi June is to appreciate the Jedi, but this time I'm appreciating them in a more meta sense.

I saw Attack of the Clones in 2002 as a wee lil preteen and as soon as I laid eyes on the Jedi, I instantly wanted to be one. I wanted a cool lightsaber and space adventures like many a kid, of course. But I was also hitting those awkward teenage years and all that comes with it and I had no words for it, but I knew I was experiencing it different than my peers. I only heard "gay/queer" as an insult or an opportunity to be bullied or even murdered. I wouldn't hear "asexual" until after college. But I knew that more than anything I wanted to imagine being a Jedi because then I would never have to get married. (Also: they had girls. My sister and I watched the AotC VHS over and over and over again and memorized every single frame that had Aayla and Shaak Ti and Bultar Swan and Luminara Unduli and Barriss Offee. Even though you had to be a thin, pretty girl, girls still got to be Jedi.)

And on top of all of that, I was supposed to be too old for toys but I still wanted to make stories. So I took my happy ass and my allowance money to Borders and bought this:

This, here, is Baby's First Fanfiction and Fanart. I wouldn't fall in love with LotR until January 2003. So this is where I got my start as a writer and artist of characters. (I drew all the time since I could hold a pencil, but mostly dinosaurs and animals.) I loved writing and drawing before, but it was the Jedi that first catapulted me into what I've become as a fan artist and fanfic writer now.

So for fun I dug out Baby's First Jedi OCs and decided to draw them with twenty-one more years of art skills:

For a little background, 2002 Preteen Me had a Very Grand Plan of writing a novel, submitting it to Lucasfilm, and getting it published. It would be about Derran Kanis, My Most Wonderful Jedi OC and her life and her adventures, and the very last scene would be choosing her Padawan, whose final line would be "Yoda, my name is." (Preteen Me was confident that since we don't actually see Yoda in action this wouldn't break George Lucas' rule of not revealing Yoda's species or background. The focus would be all on My Wonderful Jedi OC anyway.)

A little Yoda is a lot easier to draw now after all the practice with Grogu! Should I call Favroni and tell them it was my idea first? XD

I was obsessed with the Jedi Apprentice series most of all, so of course there had to be more characters for them to get into Shenanigans with for both generations.

Leronna was Derran's friend, a wise and serious Jedi Master. Derran was the Qui-Gon of the relationship and more of a risk-taker, while Leronna was more solemn to balance her out.

Their other friend was Mukdon, because I thought a Hutt Jedi would be really cool and unique. To contrast Hutt stereotypes, he was rather un-confident and a worrywart.

Of course Yoda needed a friend to get into trouble with, so he had Leronna's Padawan Te-Mon Zeyon. Te-Mon was the serious and play it safe one to contrast Yoda being more reckless (I figured he couldn't be that wise and solemn yet but that cheerfully mischievous side had been there the whole time.) Now that I look at him, I think I accidentally designed a Light Side version of Kylo Ren's TFA outfit.

Last of all my redraws was Tama Ci, a posthumous character and Leronna's first Padawan. Losing her to an illness made Leronna reluctant to take another Padawan and contributed to Te-Mon being more cautious, since he didn't want to risk himself and force his Master to face another loss. I don't remember for sure but I strongly suspect her design was influenced by Aayla Secura, since she's my sister's favorite Jedi and we often tracked down any content or merch of her together.

No I will not post any of the fanfiction... it's baaaaaad. It was written by a preteen and it shows. (No offense to any of you in that age range - just that as an adult, I've learned a lot more since then.) But like favorite dolls you take off the shelf and play with now and then, all these characters hold a special place in my heart. Derran, as my first and most dearest - the core of my first grand plan for a long fic - is very special to me and my oldest "active" OC, now existing as a character in SWTOR.

The Jedi were escapism and a refuge for me as a kid, just like Din Djarin and his friends are for me now. So that's what I really appreciate most. That even as a preteen/teenager, in all those awkward years, I still had a place to mentally escape and pretend I was a badass space monk who never had to get married and could live in a cool building with a huge library.

#jedi june #finished 30 minutes before july starts whoohoo #long post #jedi #oc #derran kanis #leronna #te-mon zeyon #mukdon #tama ci