Fanfic / The Desert Storm

In Tatooine legend, the sandstorm is Lukka, the Fury, both cleansing and damning. Lukka, the slaves believed, was Justice, was he who remade the world, and remade the soul.

The storm screams at him, and Obi-Wan Kenobi screams back.

— Archive of Our Own summary for The Desert Storm.

An epic-length Star Wars Series Fic by Blue_Sunshine in which a post-Revenge of the Sith Obi-Wan Kenobi travels back in time during his Jedi Apprentice days and trains his younger self in preparation to fight the Sith.

Four years after Order 66, Obi-Wan Kenobi has lost all hope and is just barely scraping by on Tatooine. After his speeder breaks down, he gets trapped inside a mysterious sandstorm. When the dust clears, he suddenly finds himself twenty-three years in the past. Under the alias "Ben Naasade", he rescues Shmi and Anakin from slavery and claims his younger self as his Padawan on the eve of his reassignment to the Agri Corps. Using his knowledge of the future, Ben sets out to fix the past and prevent the Jedi Order's downfall.

The series is known for its long length, large ensemble cast, character focus, and attention to detail. Additionally, various minor characters from the canon EU and Legends are fleshed out more and given expanded roles.

The series can be found on Archive of Our Own. The first installment is called The Desert Storm and can be read here. The second installment is called Rise and Fall and it can be read here.

The author has also set up their own Tumblr page called The Desert Storm and Other Chaotic Things.

The Desert Storm and Rise and Fall are broken down into multiple lengthy story arcs, listed below by the order they were published:

Entries in The Desert Storm

• The Desert Storm: Following an encounter with the supernatural, Obi-Wan Kenobi is given the chance to undo his greatest regrets.
• Ruin: Sequel to The Desert Storm; Ben and Obi-Wan accompany the Republic's delegation to a planet threatened by genocide. They learn all is not what it seems and encounter a familiar figure from Ben's previous life.
• Fallout: Sequel to Ruin; Ben faces accusations of abusing his padawan.
• True Colors: Interquel between The Desert Storm and Ruin; Ben and Obi-Wan go on their first mission together, an investigation of stolen medical supplies, which leads them to an encounter with Jango Fett.
• In Crisis: Sequel to Fallout; The Jedi mobilize for a relief effort after a catastrophic event leaves the planet Rilor 4 on the verge of destruction.
• What is Sown: Sequel to In Crisis; Ben begins to plant the seeds of change in the Jedi Order. Obi-Wan's history project leads him to make a terrible discovery.
• Remembrance: Sequel to What is Sown; Obi-Wan meets the Duke of Mandalore. Shaak Ti takes Shmi and Anakin to Jedha. Meanwhile, Quinlan's curiosity about Ben results in a violent confrontation.
• Remembrance: Part II: Following Quinlan's Fall and Ben's use of the Dark Side, the Council is left questioning Ben's loyalty to the Jedi Order.
• Remembrance: Part III: Ben has his first therapy sessions. Obi-Wan befriends a young Satine Kryze.
• Zodiac: Sequel to the Remembrance trilogy; The main cast visit of their home planets.
• Lineage: Sequel to Zodiac; Jango enlists Ben and Obi-Wan's help to kidnap Bo-Katan from the Mandalorian terrorist group Death Watch. Meanwhile, revelations from the Kenobi Report lead the Jedi to make a historic decision.
• Deliverance: Sequel to Lineage. Delegates from other Jedi Temples arrive at Coruscant to discuss the changes the Order is undergoing. Meanwhile, after Ben's transport is sabotaged, he finds himself stranded on an ice belt with a young Bail Organa.
• Fever: Sequel to Deliverance; A mysterious virus cripples the Jedi Order.
• Night: Sequel to Fever; Ben goes to Rattatak to search for Ky Narec and Narec's padawan, Asajj Ventress. Later, on Dathomir, Ben meets the Nightsisters and has a revelation.
• Ripples: Sequel to Night; Ben returns to Coruscant with new recruits for the Jedi. Life in the Temple moves on as the recent changes to the Order begin to show their results.
• Sa Sarad: Sequel to Ripples; In the aftermath of an assassination, Ben is once again forced to take on the role of a military general. Obi-Wan grows closer to Satine. Meanwhile, the Jedi find themselves dealing with the Yinchorri Uprising.
• Tarot: Sequel to Sa Sarad; When Ben and Obi-Wan are sent to mediate at a trade summit, they discover a secret Sith plot.
• Mirage: Sequel to Tarot; As Obi-Wan completes his training on Tatooine, Ben prepares to finally tell him the truth.
• Passage: Sequel to Mirage; Obi-Wan returns to the Temple as a Jedi Knight.
• Minding the Gap: Sequel to Passage; Ben and Obi-Wan return to Mandalore and discover what has changed in their absence.
• Coronation: Sequel to Minding the Gap; Obi-Wan takes a padawan. Ben finally confronts Darth Sidious; The last part of The Desert Storm arc and the first part of Rise and Fall.

Entries in Rise and Fall

• Into the Fire: A One-Shot Fic showing what became of Ben after Coronation.
• Haunting: Still reeling from Ben's disappearance, Obi-Wan starts training Anakin and Ji-Kest as his Padawans.
• The Master's Project: Another one-shot which checks in on what the Sith have been up to since Into the Fire.
• Deception: Obi-Wan must rely on his guile to survive when he is accidentally kidnapped while protecting an actor with a bounty on his head.
• Rebirth: One-shot. Ben wakes up in a bad way and makes a choice.
• Gauntlet: Obi-Wan and his Padawans are sent on a spiritual journey.
• Aliit: Obi-Wan returns to the Temple as a Jedi Master and decides to take a trip to Mandalore.
• Ante: Tensions continue to rise in galatic politics.
• In Memory: Luminara Unduli and her padawan Barriss Offee investigate a Sith spirit. Meanwhile, Ben endures.
• Flicker: Obi-Wan and Satine get married.
• Flashpoint: Obi-Wan faces the consequences of his marriage.
• Flare: A One-Shot Fic dealing with a squad of clones and their commander.
• Inferno: Shmi enacts her plan to end slavery on Tatooine, while the wider galaxy hangs on the cusp of civil war.

Side Stories and Non-Canon

• Stories Within a Story, Part I: A collection of prompt fics focusing on various characters throughout time.
• Stories Within a Story, Part II: More prompt fics that take place in The Desert Storm series.
• Stories Within a Story, Part III: Even more short prompt fics that take place in The Desert Storm series.
• Hazard Warning: Content Warnings for Rise and Fall disguised as a One-Shot Fic.

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The Desert Storm provides examples of:

Tropes A-C

• Above Good and Evil: This is one reason why Ben is hesitant to trust the Nightsisters. Their lack of a moral code and tendency to act in self-interest makes them unpredictable as allies.
• Absence of Evidence: Basically what Ben relies on when he accuses Palpatine of crimes in public; while he knows that Palpatine has taken care to hide his role in any potential criminal activities, Ben chooses crimes, such as Maul's murders, where Palpatine can't definitively prove that he wasn't involved, so the suspicion alone will be a problem for him.
• Absurdly Huge Population: Inverted with Yoda's species, which consists of only 203,654 people in total. Yaddle explains to Obi-Wan and Tsui that since her people are so Long-Lived, there's never really been a need for more people on her planet.
• Abuse Mistake: Following the mission on Tovarskl, Obi-Wan has nightmares from his experience with the baby-eating Yam'rii. This eventually leads to him breaking down crying in front of his master. Unfortunately, the other Jedi witnessing this believe that Obi-Wan's breakdown was due to the Training from Hell that Ben typically puts him through.
• Accidental Marriage: The planet Gatalenta is (in)famous for inadvertent weddings. Obi-Wan apparently got married twenty seven times as a result of a tea ceremony, taking three days to annul them all.
  Master Adi: I had the good foresight to forbid him from the bath-houses.
• Achievements in Ignorance: Ben actively exploits this trope during Obi-Wan's training. He keeps Obi-Wan's training private so Obi-Wan won't discover that some of the Force techniques he's training for are considered advanced for even full-fledged Jedi Masters.
  • During her time as a slave, Shmi avoided some of Gardulla's cruelty by making herself invisible with the Force. This surprises a few Jedi Masters since the Force technique she used was considered difficult to learn and usually reserved for Jedi Shadows.
• Adaptation Expansion:
  • The Umbara arc from The Clone Wars TV series gets some minor expansion in Remembrance, where the aftermath of the battle is shown from Ben and Cody's perspective during a Flashback Nightmare. Ben and Cody are shown mourning the clones killed by Krell's treachery.
  • Mierme Unill, a one-shot character from Legends, has her backstory expanded upon in Deliverance. She’s established as a member of the Corellian Council, her species is identified as Kalleran, and she is the master of Taria Damsin.
  • The fanfic also explores Yoda’s species, with details on their planet of origin and culture.
• Adaptational Abomination: In Canon, the Sleeper's true nature was left ambiguous. This version is a full-blown Eldritch Abomination with otherworldly powers.
• Adaptational Angst Upgrade: Unlike in canon, Ben is extremely traumatized by the Clone Wars and the ensuing Jedi Purge. Ben's struggle to overcome his PTSD is a major recurring element of the series.
• Adaptational Badass:
  • Shmi Skywalker becomes a full-fledged Jedi Knight under Shaak Ti.
  • In Dark Disciple, the Sleeper was little more than a simple animal and mainly served as a plot device to symbolize Quinlan's acceptance of the Dark Side. Here, it's an Eldritch Abomination capable of influencing the cosmic Force itself and has powers bordering on that of a Physical God.
• Adaptational Context Change: Palpatine’s famous "we shall watch your career with great interest" line to Anakin at the end of The Phantom Menace appears in Lineage. The difference here is that he's saying it to Obi-Wan while congratulating him on the bravery he showed after surviving a previous assassination attempt which Palpatine himself had orchestrated.
• Adaptational Early Appearance: Ahsoka Tano appears as a baby in Tarot and meets a ten-year-old Anakin in Mirage, as opposed to the Battle of Christophsis during the Clone Wars.
• Adaptational Heroism:
  • Because of Ben, Jango Fett becomes much more heroic compared to his canon self. He becomes one of Ben’s closest friends and even a pillar of support for him. He also mentors Obi-Wan and sides against the Sith rather than help them. However, on more than one occasion it is gently pointed out to him that he is still fundamentally the same man — just one now aware (and horrified by) how far he's willing to go to get revenge, pointed at the bad guys, and with several Morality Chains (Ben, Obi-Wan, and Satine).
  • In Legends, Komari Vosa falls to the Dark Side and becomes the leader of the Bando Gora following her banishment from the Temple. Thanks to Ben and Obi-Wan convincing Dooku to take her back as his Padawan, Komari doesn't Fall and ends up becoming a Cool Big Sis for Sian. Chapter 9 of Mirage subverts this, as Lady Livion's POV shows that Komari is being drawn into the Dark Side by Darth Plagueis with the Jedi around her being none the wiser.
  • Because Obi-Wan helped liberate the Kaleesh people, Qymaen Jai Sheelal (Grievous's past self) doesn't develop a hatred of the Jedi and ultimately becomes an enthusiastic ally to Obi-Wan.
  • In Legends, Bruck Chun was a bully who joined Xanatos Du Crion and remained as a villain up to his death. Here, he ultimately rejects Du Crion and deeply regrets spying for him. He ends up joining the Temple Guard to atone for his actions.
• Adaptational Jerkass: In this storyline, Dooku disowned Komari Vosa and expelled her from the Order after she called him out for his actions on Galidraan. This is in contrast to the Legends continuity, where he disowned her when he realized she had an inappropriate attraction to him (inappropriate both because he was her Master and old enough to be her grandfather) and was trying to find her a new Master when she left the Order of her own volition.
• Adaptational Personality Change: Due to Ben's interference, Obi-Wan isn't a stickler for the rules like he was in canon and is generally more accepting of philosophies outside the Jedi Code. He's also more willing to openly disagree with the Jedi Council.
• Adaptational Sexuality:
  • In canon, Obi-Wan Kenobi was straight. Here, Ben is revealed to be bisexual in Zodiac, where it turns out that during his exile, he slept with Bail as a form of Sex for Solace and would have slept with Breha as well.
  • Sian Jeisel is revealed to be a lesbian in Tarot where she’s developed a crush on Bultar Swan, whereas her sexual orientation was never made clear in Legends.
• Adapted Out: In both Canon and Legends, Satine and Bo-Katan had a third unseen sibling who was the parent of Satine's nephew Korkie. Here, Satine and Bo-Katan are confirmed to be only siblings while Korkie is Obi-Wan and Satine's child born out of a teen pregnancy, and it's all but stated that in the original timeline, male Korkie was Ben's son.
• Ain't No Rule: Under the Skywalker Initiative, Masters can take more than one Padawan at a time, in order to get more Jedi into the Order. And then Plo Koon takes five Dathomiri Nightbrothers as padawans at the same time. The only reason he didn't get six is that the sixth Nightbrother was snatched up by one of the temple's healers. For reference, the expected way that the "More than one Padawan" thing was supposed to work was "Get a new Padawan when your current one is older and needs your help less."
• An Aesop: If you're struggling with trauma, don't bottle it up. Instead, acknowledge your pain, seek help, and open up to the people closest to you.
• Affectionate Nickname:
  • After adopting Bo-Katan, Jango starts calling her by the nickname Tukran’ika (Mandalorian for "Little Hellcat") in part because of how difficult she is to work with. Bo-Katan is initially uncertain whether he means it as an affectionate nickname or as an insult (though knowing Jango, it's likely both).
  • Ky Narec addresses his Padawan Asajj with the moniker "Little One". It’s also an indirect way for him to refer to her as his daughter.
• Agri World: Prior to its destruction, Rilor 4 was an agricultural moon whose production was described as being vital to the Corellian system.
• Alternate Universe Fic: Aside from changes caused by time travel, there are several alterations from both Canon and Legends.
  • In Ben's original timeline, Ventress never died and was still active as a bounty hunter after the Clone Wars had ended.
  • Ronderu lij Kummar wasn't killed on Kalee during the Huk War like her Legends counterpart and instead survived long enough to accompany Jai Sheelal to Torvaskl.
  • In Legends, Obi-Wan was Childhood Friends with Taria and they grew up together during their early years in the Jedi Temple. Here, Taria was raised in the Corellian Jedi Temple and she meets Obi-Wan for the first time as teenagers in Deliverance.
  • In Ben's timeline, the Great Clan Wars of Mandalore were started by the assassination of Adonai Kryze, as opposed to Kryze's death happening during the wars like in Legends.
• Always a Bigger Fish: The only reason that the Sleeper doesn't outright Mind Rape and murder Ben is because it doesn't want to risk invoking the wrath of the Force entity responsible for Ben's time travel.
  The Sleeper: I won't interfere with the work of others. There are consequences even for the likes of me.
• Always Someone Better: Thanks to Ben, Obi-Wan eventually becomes one of the most talented and gifted padawans in the Jedi Order. It’s still not enough against a younger Darth Maul. When Obi-Wan finally encounters Maul for the first time, he’s no match for the Sith and only survives because he had Sian to back him up and buy time for Ben to arrive.
• Always with You: Happens twice to Ben in Chapter 58 of Sa Sarad.
  • The first example is when Ben hallucinates a conversation with Commander Cody in his cell. "Cody" assures Ben that he and his troops will always be with him. It then becomes a tearjerker as Ben remembers that Cody no longer exists and the conversation ends with Ben sadly responding "you aren't here either".
  • This is then followed by a hallucination of a Clone Wars-era Anakin Skywalker, who comforts Ben and says this before disappearing:
    "Anakin": You’re not alone, Ben. Even when you are. (smiles) I’m sorry. Thank you. I love you too.
• Ancient Conspiracy: This fic shows the full extent of the Sith's influence over the centuries. For example, the Force-numbing material used to construct the Senate Dome was gradually installed piece-by-piece over the last 700 years, with the combined efforts of numerous companies and groups.
• And Then What?: Ben has devoted his entire life to destroying the Sith. When Kala asks Ben if he sees a future for himself beyond the Sith, Ben admits that he doesn't.
• And This Is for...: In Chapter 21 of Coronation, as Ben overpowers Sidious, he does this while mentally listing off all of Sidious' future victims:
  Ben: [thinking] This is for the galaxy. This is for the Jedi. This is for Anakin and Padmé. This is for me.
• Apocalypse How: In Crisis has the moon of Rilor 4 undergo a Class 6. All three of the moon's supervolcanoes erupt simultaneously, causing the moon to break apart. Even with all their efforts, the Jedi are only able to save less than a third of the colonists living on the moon.
• Arbitrary Skepticism:
  • Despite being able to verify that Ben is a future version of Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Jedi Council still dismisses his claim that the Sith are alive. Ben is initially frustrated but admits to himself that in a similar situation he'd be equally skeptical. This attitude is called out by Quinlan when he gets a number of Ben's memories, bluntly telling Mace Windu that the problem isn't so much the Sith but that the Jedi refuse to listen. Around that point, partly thanks to the evidence of the Kenobi Report, their attitude shifts to "we don't believe it" to "we need proof to convince everybody else."
  • In Night, Obi-Wan's reaction to seeing the Sleeper appear as a Humanoid Abomination in Ben's mindscape was to tell himself that he doesn't believe in gods.
• Arc Villain:
  • Ruin features the Yam’rii, a race of sociopathic colonialists who attempt to trick the Republic into helping them defeat their former Kaleesh slaves.
  • For the first half of Night, a group of warlords who have taken over Rattatak serves as the main antagonists. Both Master Narec and Asajj refuse to follow Ben until he helps liberate the people of Rattatak from the warlords’ tyrannical reign.
  • Sa Sarad features a Big Bad Ensemble between three arc villains. Tor Vizsla, the leader of Death Watch, is waging war against Jango Fett and House Kryze. Xanatos Du Crion is plotting against the Jedi Order using the data given to him by Bruck, and the Yinchorri are staging an uprising that the Jedi are sent to quash.
• Arc Words:
  • "There are a thousand ways to be enslaved."
  • "Jedi are not meant to be soldiers."
  • "Vod."
  • In Mirage: "You are the river."
• An Arm and a Leg: Tarot ends with Ben being forced to have his leg amputated after it was injured by falling debris during his duel with Maul. Maul also loses both his arms and half his face.
• Armor-Piercing Question: After defeating a group of warlords who were terrorizing Rattatak, Ben has this exchange with Obi-Wan.
  Obi-Wan: Master. We freed a world yesterday.
  Ben: We did.
  Obi-Wan: Did we do that only because you had to in order to get Padawan Ventress to go with us, and you needed her to go with us because she’s Dathomiri, and you’re hoping that with her you’ll be able to gain the favor of the Nightsisters?
• Armor-Piercing Response:
  • While debating the flaws of the Jedi Code, Yoda asks Ben if the Sith were winning in the Bad Future he came from. Ben responds by clarifying that the Sith had already won and reveals that nearly the entire Jedi Order was wiped out. Ben’s answer leaves Yoda completely stricken in shock.
  • In Remembrance: Part II, Mace Windu asks Quinlan if there's anything important from Ben's future that he should know about. The latter sums up everything Mace needs to know with three short sentences:
    Quinlan: It never mattered. What he told you. You never listened.
• Artificial Limbs: Ben gets a prosthetic leg after losing it during his duel with Maul in Tarot.
• Ascended Extra: A lot of minor characters from Legends and Canon are given expanded roles.
  • Jax Pavan was a relatively obscure character from Legends. Here, he becomes Anakin's Best Friend and eventually his adopted brother.
  • Adi Gallia becomes one of the Council's leading members and becomes the public face of the Jedi Order's efforts to undo the damage done by the Sith conspiracy.
  • Sian Jeisel becomes Qui-Gon's padawan in Obi-Wan's place and eventually becomes a Secret-Keeper for Ben.
  • Serra Keto, a boss from the Revenge of the Sith video game, is featured as a tertiary character in Ripples and Sa Sarad.
  • Master Fay goes from being a One-Shot Character in the Legends continuity to a recurring character and is eventually promoted to being Ben's love interest.
  • In both Canon and Legends, Darth Plagueis is Palpatine's former master who he killed and usurped in his backstory. Here, instead of simply being an unseen Predecessor Villain, Plagueis plays a more active role as the series' true Big Bad after Palpatine is killed by Ben.
• Attack Hello: When Obi-Wan returns to Mandalore in Minding the Gap, he is welcomed by Bo-Katan who greets him with a forearm clasp before abruptly stepping back and decking him across the face so hard that she breaks his nose. When Obi-Wan asks her why she punched him, her only response is that he'll "figure it out". The reason she punched him was because he unknowingly impregnated her sister Satine during the Sa Sarad arc.
• Badass Normal: Jai Sheelal (a.k.a. Grievous in the original timeline) is one, for a given value of normal. No Force powers or notable abilities, beyond his natural size and strength. He also nearly flattens Maul by hurling a marble bench at him.
• Batman Gambit: The Sith pull a nearly successful one in Fever. Taking advantage of Thyferra's gratitude to the Jedi, the Sith swap out Thyferra's complimentary bacta shipment with a genetically modified version designed to infect the user with a deadly virus. Since bacta usage is prioritized for the elderly (i.e. veteran Jedi masters and most of the Council), the Jedi's leadership is the first to be incapacitated by the virus. This leaves the Jedi under the guidance of inexperienced masters who panic at the sudden outbreak and enact a quarantine. The quarantine completely isolates the Jedi from the rest of the galaxy, making them unable to act when the galaxy needs them, turning public opinion against the Order.
• Battle Couple:
  • Qymaen Jai Sheelal and Ronderu lij Kummar are the Ruling Couple of the Kaleesh and fought alongside each other as fellow warlords during the Huk War.
  • Miraj and Palma Unsee were a pair of Happily Married Jedi Knights who formed one during the Jedi's last war against the Sith. Fay mentions that the two were so closely connected that they were practically inseparable both on and off the battlefield. Palma's death caused Miraj to go off the deep end and fall to the Dark Side.
• Be Careful What You Wish For:
  • Early in the series, Quinlan finds himself intrigued by Obi-Wan's enigmatic new master and becomes determined to learn more about Ben's past. He gets his wish granted in the worst possible way at the end of Remembrance, where he uses his psychometry on Ben's first lightsaber and absorbs all of Ben's most traumatic memories, causing him to fall to the Dark Side.
  • Thanks to Ben and Obi-Wan's (in)famous exploits, Padawan Serra Keto becomes a huge fan of Mandalorian culture and badgers Ben to show her what it's like to be a Mandalorian warrior. At the beginning of Sa Sarad, her wish gets granted when she finds herself on the run with Ben, Obi-Wan, and Satine after witnessing Duke Kryze's assassination.
• Beard of Sorrow: At the start of the series, Ben is shown to have grown a long, unkempt beard in his depressed state. He trims it down after returning to the past.
• "Begone" Bribe: After moving into their temporary new home on Tatooine during the Mirage arc, Obi-Wan gets some Jawas to leave him alone by handing them a piece of cheese. Ben disapproves of this since it only encourages the Jawas to return later.
• Berserk Button: Despite Ben's plans to wait to act against Palpatine until he's sure he can prove the senator's crimes, he is driven to act when he sees Palpatine talking with Obi-Wan and Padme at Padme's coronation, refusing to let the Sith have a chance to corrupt either of them.
• Better the Devil You Know: Basically the reason Ben doesn't do anything about Palpatine/Sidious as soon as he arrives in the past; without knowing more details about Sidious' Sith Master, he's reluctant to move against the known Sith Lord too soon in case it jeopardizes his future knowledge, whereas leaving Palpatine where he is allows Ben to wait for the right moment to act. It's also worth noting that he sees Palpatine as bad enough, and is a little terrified at the thought of someone scary enough that Palpatine would obey them.
• Beware the Nice Ones: While Shmi is a compassionate and kind-hearted individual, her upbringing as a slave means that anytime she's in a fight, her life-or-death survival instincts end up kicking in. During her first spar with a Jedi Knight, Shaak Ti had to put a stop to the fight because Shmi kept going for killing blows.
• Bifurcated Weapon: Shmi uses dual lightsabers that can be attached together to create a double-bladed lightsaber.
• Big Bad: As in both Canon and Legends, Palpatine is the overarching villain of The Desert Storm. He seeks to destroy the Jedi and the Republic with the intent of replacing them with a new empire led by the Sith. Only here, Palpatine is still Plagueis' apprentice and dies before he can overthrow him. Immediately after he's killed by Ben in Coronation, Darth Plagueis is revealed to be the true Sith Master and plans to carry out the Sith's Grand Plan as he envisioned it.
• Big Bad Ensemble: Sa Sarad features one between Tor Vizsla, Xanatos Du Crion, and the Yinchorri. Subverted at the end, where it turns out that all three were secretly working together with the Sith acting as the Man Behind the Man.
• Bittersweet Ending: The series ends on one. Ben has largely come to terms with his traumatic past and has successfully raised Obi-Wan into becoming a Jedi Knight. The Jedi Order as a whole are much better off than where they were before and many characters are given happier endings than their canon counterparts. Most importantly, Palpatine is exposed as a Sith and killed, ensuring that the Bad Future Ben came from will never take place. However, in the process of killing Palpatine, Ben gives in to his desire for vengeance and almost falls to the Dark Side. He is then kidnapped by Darth Plagueis, who intends to make him his next apprentice. Also, with Sidious dead and Ben missing, the Jedi have no more leads on the Sith and are back to square one in their investigation.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: The Huk War in Ruin is an example of this. The Yam'rii are unquestionably evil, being cannibalistic conquerors who enslaved the Kaleesh, wiped out several other innocent species, and were openly backed by the Trade Federation (and the Sith by extension). The Kaleesh represent the gray morality, as they were victims of the Yam'rii's cruelty and have every right to seek justice. They then wound up taking their revenge too far and engaged in a genocide of the whole Yam'rii species. However, the Kaleesh's leaders turned out to be Reasonable Authority Figures who were happy to negotiate once they were promised that the Yam'rii would be punished by the Republic.
• Boisterous Bruiser: Khagan Jai Sheelal, better known as General Grievous in Ben's timeline, instead ends up as a cheerful version of this after Obi-Wan negotiates the end of the Huk War and justice for the Kalee. Obi-Wan finds him friendly, but sometimes a bit (a lot) overwhelming, and Ben finds this both amusing and bemusing by turns.
• Book Ends: The very first fic in the series starts and ends with Ben playing a game of sabacc.
• Break the Believer: Happened to Ben in his backstory.
  • It’s later mentioned that during the Clone Wars, a large number of Padawans had their faith broken after seeing how the Council threw Ahsoka under the bus when Barriss framed her. At least one Padawan was even Driven to Suicide as a result.
• Broad Strokes: The series takes this approach in regards to the original timeline. Events from both Canon and Legends are often directly referenced, with elements from both being used throughout the story. However, the author still takes certain liberties with minor details from both Canon and Legends.
  • A good example of this is in Night, which features the Sleeper, a character taken directly from the canon novel Dark Disciple. However, the events of that novel itself (including Ventress' death) are given the discontinuity treatment as Ben remembers briefly running into Ventress during his exile on Tatooine.
• Breather Episode: Ripples takes place after the Wham Episode Night and generally explores the characters as they take a break from all the action and settle down at the Jedi Temple.
• Broken Ace: Ben Naasade is an Ace Pilot, one of the Jedi's best duellists and most powerful masters, an excellent teacher for Obi-Wan, a brilliant general, has an understanding of the Force that borders on the uncanny, and singlehandedly brought about several major reforms to the Jedi Order. He also struggles with a truly horrible case of PTSD that's apparent to anyone with even the faintest experience of it and constantly feels alienated from his peers, who he both knows and doesn't know, and spends much of the series utterly terrified of being rejected by Obi-Wan and Shmi if they ever find out the truth about him. He gets better about this with time, therapy, and in Mirage Obi-Wan accepting him, and Shmi cutting off his revelation by telling him she doesn't care who he was or what he did, but that she loves the man he is now.
• Broken Pedestal: The Jedi Council becomes one to Ben after he travels into the past. When Ben tries to warn the Council about the Sith's return, the Council's Head-in-the-Sand Management and Not-So-Omniscient Council of Bickering behavior causes Ben to nearly storm out of the room.
  • Personally experiencing the failings of the Jedi's teachings has caused Ben to lose the reverence he once held for the Jedi Code, preferring the Old Code, prefaced with, "Passion, yet Serenity."
• Buried Alive: After Jango blows up the mine where the Death Watch was holding Ben prisoner in Sa Sarad, Ben becomes trapped alone in an underground room for days. Thankfully, he's eventually found and rescued.
• The Bus Came Back: Several characters who went on a bus trip return in Tarot. These include Qymaen jai Sheelal, Taria Damsin, Rudaban Jai Soboc, Trip, and Quinlan.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is referred to as Traumatic Stress Response (TSR) in-universe.
• Call-Back:
  • After Quinlan falls to the Dark Side, he mentions the events of the Mortis arc during the Clone Wars, when Anakin and Ahsoka had their memories of falling to the Dark Side erased. Here, it plays into Ben’s decision to not have Quinlan’s memories erased.
  • In Chapter 8 of Mirage, Shmi’s observation that Ben looks at her "as if she could shatter him with a word" references an earlier moment in Remembrance where she made an almost identical observation.
• The Cameo:
  • Chirrut Îmwe and Baze Malbus from Rogue One, show up in Remembrance and Remembrance: Part II when Shmi and Shaak Ti visit Jedha to build Shmi's lightsaber.
  • Garm Bel Iblis — one of the Rebel Alliance's leaders in the Legends continuity — appears as a senator negotiating for a trade deal between Corellia and Kalee that Obi-Wan is asked to mediate for in Remembrance: Part II. He returns in Tarot as part of Corellia’s delegation at the trade summit on Chandrila.
  • Sha Koon, Plo Koon’s niece from Legends, appears in What is Sown watching Ben’s duel with Plo Koon. She also appears in Remembrance: Part III where she and her uncle discuss Shmi’s appointment to the Council of Reassignment.
  • Kazdan Paratus briefly appears in Zodiac, where he's shown supervising Anakin and Jax as they ride on bumper cars that he built.
  • Merrin, from Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, appears in Night as a little girl in Mother Talzin's Nightsister clan. Additionally, Jaro Tapal has a minor appearance in Ripples as a member of a secret group formed by Yaddle to fight the Sith.
  • Rav Bralor, Vhonte Tervho, and Kal Skirata from the Republic Commando series appear in one chapter of Sa Sarad where Ben assigns them the task of training Jango's army.
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: While facing off against a younger Darth Maul in Tarot, it's clear that Ben would like nothing more than to run him through with his lightsaber, but he needs Maul alive in order to finally provide hard proof to the Jedi Council that the Sith have returned.
• Cathartic Scream: Ben lets out a scream of frustration at the start of the series after his speeder breaks down and he gets trapped in the middle of a sandstorm.
• Cassandra Truth: Even when presented with proof that Ben is an older Obi-Wan from the future, the Jedi Council is still unwilling to believe his claim that the Sith have returned. After his initial fury, Ben grudgingly admits to himself that he can understand their skepticism, and eventually they shift positions from "this isn't happening" to "we need to find proof."
  • Obi-Wan has difficulty convincing people that the rumors about Ben's abusive nature aren't true. Most of Ben's accusers believe that Obi-Wan's trying to cover for his master due to his previous insecurities. Eventually, they come round, partly thanks to Obi-Wan demonstrating just how competent Ben's Training from Hell has made him, and other students taking part in a training session or two and reluctantly admitting that Ben is a hard taskmaster, but a great teacher.
• Central Theme: Slavery Is a Special Kind of Evil. The horrors of slavery are shown through the experiences of various characters. Shmi's entire worldview is shaped by her life as a slave. Ben still has scars from the Zygerrian slave camps. Most of Tatooine is suffering under the brutal reign of the Hutt Cartel. The Kaleesh were enslaved by the Yam'rii and had their eggs eaten as delicacies. When Ben first found Jango, he had been Made a Slave aboard a spice freighter. The Rattataki had their whole planet taken over by Siniteen slavers. The Nightbrothers are treated as slaves and second-class citizens by the Nightsisters. And the list just goes on and on...
• Cerebus Retcon:
  • Qui-Gon's Last Request in The Phantom Menace gets treated with this. The fact that Qui-Gon spent his dying moments talking about how important Anakin was instead of telling Obi-Wan how proud he was of him is something that Ben never really got over.
  • Ahsoka fighting in the Clone Wars is made darker when the reader is reminded that she was fourteen at the time. Looking back, Ben has a My God, What Have I Done? moment since he basically enlisted a Child Soldier.
• Challenging the Chief:
  • In Night, Ben challenges the four Siniteen warlords to a gladiatorial duel over control of Rattatak.
  • Satine ultimately persuades Tor Vizla to face Jango Fett in a duel over leadership of Mandalore.
• Cheerful Child: Young Anakin is shown to be curious, happy, friendly, playful, and very optimistic.
• Chekhov's Skill:
  • During Ben's spar with Plo Koon in What is Sown, Plo Koon demonstrates the ability to generate Emerald lightning. In Remembrance, Plo Koon explains to Ben the basics behind the technique. This ability proves to be extremely useful in Lineage, when Ben generates a storm of Emerald lightning in order to save his Padawan from being executed by the Death Watch.
  • In Night, Obi-Wan's sand exercise comes in very handy when he and Ben are about to be fired upon in a gladiatorial arena. He and Ben use the Force to create a massive sandstorm that not only absorbs all the blaster bolts but completely demolishes the arena itself in the process.
• Chessmaster Sidekick: Ben is this to the Jedi as a whole. Despite being responsible for all the Jedi Order's major changes — such as the Kenobi Report and the Skywalker Initiative — Ben stays hidden on the sidelines while individuals such as Obi-Wan and Adi Gallia are publicly seen at the forefront. Only the Jedi Council, Fay, and Obi-Wan (eventually) really know his full role — and even Obi-Wan's missing a few pieces, like Ben's true identity — and even then, as Mace irritably observes, Ben's still steadily manipulating them from the shadows.
• Child Soldiers: Defied by Ben, who point-blank refuses to train a fourteen-year-old, despite her being an adult in her culture. It brings him into conflict with Jango Fett, but they are able to compromise on a minimum age of sixteen.
  Ben: I am not training any more child soldiers! I have done enough of that for a lifetime.
• Chronic Hero Syndrome: Ben suffers from one, as he admits that he deliberately kept himself ignorant of the galaxy’s events during his exile because he wouldn’t have been able to stand by and do nothing if he knew that there were people who needed his help.
• Cliffhanger: The series ends with Darth Plagueis abducting an injured Ben from the hospital.
• Cluster F-Bomb: Jango Fett is as proficient with these as he is with every other type of bomb (and weapon in general). Sometimes mixed with equivalent words in other languages.
• Combat by Champion: When Mandalore's civil war is at its height, it's abruptly resolved by Tor Vizla formally challenging Jango Fett for the title of Mand'alor — the challenge in this case being single combat to the death. Despite Vizla using Ben's lightsaber, Jango wins.
• Coming of Age Story: The fanfic serves as a coming-of-age story for Obi-Wan. Over the course of the series he learns more about the people of the galaxy, grows from a boy into a young man, experiences his first crush, falls in love, and becomes his own person.
• Conditioned to Accept Horror: One of the reasons that Ben has trouble connecting with other Jedi is due to this trope. Because he spent years fighting in the Clone Wars, he's more used to harsh conditions compared to the Jedi in the past. On the one hand, it means that he's a ludicrously skilled duellist who flattens everyone who challenges him. On the other hand, he's twitchy, ruthless, and has a horrifying case of PTSD.
• The Confidant: Master Fay becomes this for Ben. She's one of the few who knows his secret and is the one person Ben is completely open with about his past.
• Confusion Fu: Defied in Night. When presented with the challenge of fighting someone who can predict your every move, Obi-Wan initially suggests trying to be unpredictable. Ben shoots the idea down, pointing out that his opponent would still be able to see the attack coming and that he's more likely to confuse himself rather than his opponent.
• Continuity Nod:
  • In Sa Sarad, while talking about Order 66 and the clone army's betrayal, Ben verbalizes his thoughts from What is Sown with the phrase "They loved us. That wasn’t a lie, and that made it worse" while referring to his relationship with the clones.
  • When Ben brings Obi-Wan to Tatooine in Mirage, he advises Obi-Wan to double-check the filters of the speeder they just bought and to lock the spare filters in a crate for safety. This references the first chapter of The Desert Storm, where a pack of vermin hiding in Ben’s previous speeder bit through his filter lines.
• Continuity Porn: Given that this is a Star Wars fanfic, this was inevitable. The Desert Storm series is filled with all sorts of Continuity Nods and Call Backs to various movies, novels, comics, and video games from both the Canon EU and Legends. In addition, various minor characters from both canon and Legends are given the Ascended Extra treatment.
• Contrived Coincidence: In True Colors. During an investigation of missing medical supplies, Ben and Obi-Wan end up on a frigate run by spice smugglers. One of the ship's slave workers is none other than Jango Fett, who Ben frees. After they seize control of the spice frigate, it comes under attack from pirates who just happen to be led by a younger Hondo Ohnaka. Ben even lampshades how the Force loves its ironies.
• Cool Starship: Obi-Wan gets his own personal Kom'rk-class fighter in Lineage after stealing it from the Death Watch and being told he could keep it by Jango.
• Cool Sword: The lightsabers that Shmi builds for herself; one has a yellow blade and the other has a white blade. They can also be attached together to form a saberstaff.
• The Corrupter: Lady Livion’s interlude in Mirage reveals that Darth Plagueis is one to Komari Vosa, using the time they’ve spent together since Tarot to manipulate her and seduce her to the Dark Side.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: Most of Ben's Guilt Complex stems from his belief that the entire Clone Wars could have been prevented had he listened to Dooku's warning about Sidious at the start of the war. Ylar Kala points out that he was young and didn't have access to the same knowledge that he has now.
• Creepy Good: Ben, again. He scares the crap out of the vast majority of Jedi—and, indeed, the vast majority of everyone. Bant outright states early on, "Obi-Wan, your Master is terrifying." For some, this is part of his outrageous appeal (to the point where Sian Jeisel writes cheap holo-novel romances based on Ben's thinly-veiled exploits). For others, this is a cause of mistrust, because they find him legitimately terrifying, and not entirely without reason.
• Crippling the Competition: Ben notes that Sidious basically did this in his time as every apprentice he ever taught was limited in some way, ranging from Maul just being an assassin ignorant of the more subtle abilities of the Sith to Vader's artificial limbs crippling his own Force potential. Ben basically observes that Sidious demonstrated only lip service towards the Rule of Two, ensuring that he would remain in power rather than raise an apprentice who would surpass him.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Shaak Ti notes that Shmi's awareness of other beings through the Force and her knowledge of mechanics is on the level of a Master, but her fine control and awareness of how to use it to actually heal others or move other objects has basically atrophied by comparison, speculating that Shmi depended so much on the other aspects of the Force for most of her life that she's never explored other areas.
• Culture Clash: In Ripples, Ben remembers a Noodle Incident where Ahsoka (a carnivore) horked down a piece of raw meat in front of Anakin, Ben, and their troops, much to their collective horror.
  • In Mandalorian culture, fourteen is considered the age of adulthood. This leads to Ben and Jango arguing in Sa Sarad when Ben refuses to allow any Child Soldiers to enlist in Jango's army.
• Culture Justifies Anything: A Trade Federation representative tries to use this argument to defend the Yam'rii's Child Eater practices after the Republic delegation learns that the food they're being served is live Kaleesh eggs. Said delegates call out the representative on his BS and subsequently refuse to give support to the Yam'rii.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: In Chapter 10 of Remembrance: Part II, Ben mentions having hallucinated himself turning into Grievous as he had his organs replaced with synthetic ones.

Tropes D-F

• Day in the Limelight: Chapter 9 of Mirage shows Lady Livion’s point-of-view as she interacts with various Jedi around the Temple and gives readers a glimpse into her thoughts.
• The Dead Have Names: Every Mandalorian who has seen combat has a Litany, a list of the names of every comrade-in-arms of theirs who fell in battle, which they memorize in remembrance and recite in full during certain spiritual rituals. Jango asks Ben about his Litany at one point during Sa Sarad, and he sadly admits that there are simply too many names to even count much less recite, but he does his best to remember them all the same.
• Deadpan Snarker: Ben, compulsively, much like in Clone Wars — though to some degree it's to cover his pain.
• Death by Adaptation: Gardulla the Hutt’s fate following the Clone Wars is left unclear in both Canon and Legends. Here, she was amongst the many crime lords killed by Maul and Savage during the Shadow Collective’s rise to power. Hearing the locals on Tatooine say that Gardulla is coming for a visit is what tips Ben off that he’s somehow in the past.
• A Death in the Limelight: In the first chapter of Sa Sarad, Duke Adonai Kryze returns after being Put on the Bus and the first portion of the chapter is told from his POV. The chapter ends with an unseen Darksider (inferred to be Maul) using the Force to kill Duke Kryze from afar.
• Declining Promotion:
  • Near the beginning of Night, Ben is offered to be given a seat on the Jedi Council after his show of leadership during the Temple’s Bane outbreak. He declines the offer and instead nominates Master Fay to take his intended seat.
  • After Obi-Wan demonstrates the new lightsaber form he created as part of Ben's test for Knighthood to the Jedi Council, Mace is so impressed that he decides to nominate Obi-Wan to be given the rank of Jedi Master. Obi-Wan refuses since he had just been made a Jedi Knight. As of Minding the Gap, Obi-Wan has had to turn down a promotion to Jedi Master on a monthly basis.
• Decon-Recon Switch: The fic starts out by deconstructing Training from Hell by showing how the grueling training that Ben puts his Padawan through on a daily basis regularly leaves him bruised and exhausted to the point where he can barely walk. This is quickly noticed by Obi-Wan's friends, who start to worry about him and pass on their concerns to their masters. This leads to Ben getting a bad rep as a mentor with many Jedi viewing his training to be a form a child abuse and some even going as far as to demand that Obi-Wan be removed from Ben's tutelage entirely. This then gets reconstructed as people realize that Ben is pushing Obi-Wan as far as he can go and no further, that the training is actually working spectacularly well, and that there's a reason he's pushing Obi-Wan.
• Deconstructed Character Archetype:
  • Obi-Wan Kenobi's characterization as the Ideal Hero gets deconstructed. In both Canon and Legends, Obi-Wan was constantly held up by the Jedi as an embodiment of everything a Jedi should strive to be. Here, we learn that Obi-Wan's status as "the perfect Jedi" is a facade he constructed because he Desperately Craves Affection. Qui-Gon's initial rejection of Obi-Wan caused the latter to develop deep insecurities that turned him into a "Well Done, Son" Guy towards the Jedi Council. His characterization of an Ideal Hero was just his desire for approval getting cranked up to eleven. This was also the source of Anakin's resentment towards Obi-Wan, as he became envious that Obi-Wan was constantly being heaped praise upon by the Council, while he was being alienated by them.
  • The fanfic also deconstructs Obi-Wan's Fatal Flaw as a Principles Zealot. Similar to the previous example, Obi-Wan's strict adherence toward the Jedi Code came as the result of being a Yes-Man driven by a fear of rejection. He actually can see the bigger picture and is well aware that the Jedi's teachings can sometimes be wrong. However, he still supported all of the Council's decisions, even when he knew they were wrong.
  • The New Mandalorians deconstruct Actual Pacifists. Given that the Mandalorians are by and large a Proud Warrior Race in the middle of a Civil War, the New Mandalorians' refusal to contribute to the war effort makes them The Load for their allies. Also, because they see any act of violence as evil, they oppose their own allies just as much as their enemies, further weakening Mandalore's already unstable government. Finally, it’s pointed out that while pacifism is a noble principle, it only works if the other side is honorable enough to not strike down an unarmed opponent. Seeing as how the "other side" is the Death Watch, the New Mandalorians’ ideals end up coming across as both ignorant and naïve.
• Deconstruction Fic: The series deconstructs many aspects of the Clone Wars by expanding upon the Fridge Horror moments and depicts it as if it actually happened in Real Life, rather than in a cartoon for kids.
  • Obi-Wan Kenobi's Action Hero status during the Clone Wars gets deconstructed when Healer Hiella's examination shows the extent of the damage that Ben's past adventures have left on his body. Aside from being Covered in Scars from the countless scrapes he's been in, Ben's entire skeletal system is riddled with fracture lines due to breaking his bones so often. It turns out that being regularly involved in life-or-death situations isn't good for one's physical health.
  • In Sa Sarad, Ben finally acknowledges the clone troopers for what they truly were: child slave soldiers. The average clone trooper was six years old chronologically and they were forced to fight with little choice in the matter. Why did the Jedi accept command of the clone army? To protect the clones, who had no rights in a government that saw them as subhuman Cannon Fodder.
  • Jedi are not meant to be soldiers. At the start of the Clone Wars, most Jedi had never seen sustained combat on a galactic scale before. They were given no time to prepare and knew nothing about running a military. The first few battles went exactly as you'd expect, with the clones getting massacred in droves due to the Jedi's inexperienced leadership. It was actually the clone commanders who were responsible for the Republic's victories, yet they never received any credit due to the Senate's Fantastic Racism. Even when the Jedi eventually did get their act together, all the strategies and tactics they used were taught to them by the clones.
  • The Jedi padawans were little more than glorified Child Soldiers who were tossed into the middle of the battlefield and saw the horrors of war firsthand. This was especially horrific considering that the reason many parents give up their children is because of the Jedi's promise to keep them safe.
  • The fic really goes out of its way to show the impact the Clone Wars had on Obi-Wan. Ben Naasade's character shows more or less how Obi-Wan would have actually turned out following the events of Episode III. Rather than a Cool Old Master, you end up with someone who appears to be that (albeit in his mid-thirties to begin with), but who also happens to be a Shell-Shocked Veteran with deep-seated psychological scars underneath the thin facade.
• Déjà Vu: The first time that Obi-Wan visits Tatooine with Ben, he has "an unsettling sense of familiarity about [Tatooine] that he doesn’t understand".
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: For Mandalorians, beskar armor is seen as Serious Business. According to Ben, stealing and wearing armor that doesn't belong to you is a capital crime on Mandalore.
• Delirious Misidentification: After getting stabbed by Pong Krell while trying to protect Quinlan, Ben hallucinates that he's fighting Grievous and is protecting Anakin. This causes Ben to use the Force to remove "Grievous's" limbs, nearly ripping off Krell's arms in the process. Considering who the victim is, Ben isn't that sorry about it, rather to the disturbance of his fellow Jedi.
• Demonic Possession: A semi-benevolent version in Mirage, Obi-Wan has his body temporarily taken over by Lukka after accidentally entering a trance during meditation, with the possessor explaining that he could only do it because Obi-Wan strayed so far from his body, and departs without complaint.
• Dented Iron:
  • Fighting in the Clone Wars has made Ben this. Aside from being Covered in Scars, his bones have numerous fracture lines, his DNA and RNA are severely damaged, his blood has trace amounts of toxic elements, and he has numerous synthetic organs, and he snarks "oh, good, there's enough of me left to identify after all" when a DNA test reveals that he's a 79% match for Obi-Wan. Healer Ni Hiella describes him as a "sock drawer in a trash compactor". He eventually has to have multiple organs grown and replaced, based on samples of Obi-Wan's DNA because Ben's is just too corrupted.
  • Following Sidious' assassination attempt, Obi-Wan's wrist is severely damaged and he has to wear a brace for the remainder of the series and deals with recurring pains.
  • Due to a combination of old age, being stranded on a primitive jungle planet with no access to modern medicine, and physical stress from constantly fighting pirates, Master Ky Narec is this when we finally meet him. When first introduced, he's doesn't have the same endurance or energy as his padawan Asajj.
• De-power: Happens to Qui-Gon at the end of Tarot. After Maul stabs Qui-Gon through the chest, Obi-Wan uses the Nightsisters' magick to keep Qui-Gon alive, unintentionally blinding Qui-Gon's connection to the Force in the process.
• Didn't See That Coming: When Ben killed Palpatine in Coronation, he was acting under the assumption that Palpatine was the Sith Master and that the Sith's Grand Plan would die with him. He is totally blindsided by the discovery that Palpatine was still the apprentice while Darth Plagueis was the real master. The fact that Ben never once considered this is a little surprising given that this was the very reason he originally didn't try to take down Palpatine at the start of the series. Though given his encounter with Maul in Tarot, it's likely that he assumed Palpatine had already usurped his master by then and was training Maul to be his successor.
• Didn't Think This Through: In Night, Ben attempts to enlist Hondo's help in taking down the warlords ruling over Rattatak. Hondo, being Hondo, asks to be given his own lightsaber as payment. Ben quickly dissuades Hondo by laying out exactly what would happen if he did give Hondo a lightsaber. Since only Jedi are permitted to wield lightsabers, any Jedi who happened upon Hondo would assume that his lightsaber was stolen and that the pirate killed the previous owner.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation: In Canon, Palpatine dies on Exegol when Rey deflects his Force lightning back at him and in Legends, he is permanently killed by Han Solo as well as Empatojayos Brand and deceased Jedi spirits who drag him to Chaos (the Star Wars equivalent of Hell). Here, he is decapitated by Ben in Naboo.
• Disability Immunity: When the Sith unleash a virus that targets the hosts' DNA upon the Jedi Temple, Ben's already damaged DNA and RNA protects him from being infected, and helps form the basis for a vaccine and an inoculation — his immune system chewed the virus up and spat a more or less harmless variant back out.
• Disc-One Final Boss: In a shocking twist, Palpatine/Darth Sidious turns out to be this in the Coronation arc. He spends over twenty stories pulling the strings behind every major conflict and seems ready to take the stage as the Big Bad by the end of Act I... only for Ben to expose him as a Sith during Padmé's coronation and after a truly vicious duel, decapitate him with his lightsaber. Immediately after his death, we discover the identity of the true Big Bad: Darth Plagueis.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: After Falling, Quinlan gets violent impulses, has the urge to lash out at others, and suffers from extreme mood swings. During his therapy session with Ni Hiella, Quinlan bemoans that he's not going to "get better" and will have to live with the darkness inside him for the rest of his life. This is all very reminiscent of a person struggling with a violent mental illness.
• Doorstopper: Including side-stories, The Desert Storm series consists of twenty-four entries and is over 1.1 million words long in totality. The sheer amount of stories surpasses even the New Jedi Order series, which had 19 novels.
• Double Meaning: In Night, Obi-Wan experiences a Force vision in the Nightsisters' swamp where he encounters a mythosaur. This encounter is symbolic of Ben's failed relationship with Anakin.
  • Obi-Wan is given a plush doll that suddenly transforms into a baby mythosaur. At first, Obi-Wan is affectionate towards the baby but becomes startled when the mythosaur rapidly grows up. As it grows, the mythosaur is clearly in pain, but Obi-Wan has no idea how to help it. This reflects how Ben was given Anakin as a padawan with no preparation and had no idea how to raise him. Like the mythosaur, Anakin had a very troubled life growing up and Ben didn't know how to help him.
  • As an adult, the mythosaur turns aggressive and lashes out at everything around it. Obi-Wan doesn't want to hurt the creature and tries to calm it down to no avail. When the mythosaur tries to attack the Nightsisters' settlement, Obi-Wan finally resorts to using the Force against it. Likewise, when Anakin turned to the Dark Side, Ben didn't want to fight him and only relented after Anakin harmed Padmé.
  • When the mythosaur starts sinking into the swamp, it panics and mutilated itself, all while Obi-Wan looks on in horror. This is a Continuity Nod to Revenge of the Sith, where Ben watches as Anakin is burnt alive by Mustafar's lava banks. The difference is that while Ben left Anakin to burn, Obi-Wan puts an end to the mythosaur's suffering with a Mercy Kill.
  • This is made even more clear by the following conversation between Obi-Wan and Ghost!Anakin:
    The Knight nods, looking to him. "Remember that, and remember this; Death can be a kindness."
    "I don’t understand." Obi-Wan shakes his head, feeling hollow and shaky and that everything was wrong.
    "Well," The Knight suggests calmly. "you could have just walked away."
    Obi-Wan recoils. "I couldn’t have." He swears. What he had done felt wretched, but that would have been — unmitigably cruel.
• Double Take: Obi-Wan’s reaction to the news that Shmi is pregnant:
  Shmi: I am going to have another child.
  Obi-Wan: (tiredly) Oh. I’ll make tea. [leaves room]
  (10 seconds later)
  Obi-Wan: [stumbles back into room] Wait, okay, what?
• Downer Beginning: The entire series begins four years after Revenge of the Sith. From Ben's POV, nearly everyone he's ever cared about is dead, the Sith have gained total dominance in the galaxy, and all hope has been lost. Later stories reveal that it was at this point where Ben had hit the Despair Event Horizon.
• Dramatic Irony: Aside from the fact that Ben was originally Obi-Wan Kenobi...
  • Shmi observes on more than one occasion that Ben's very fond of children and that young Anakin seems to remind him of someone called Luke and wonders what happened to that other little boy. She also notices that he often steps very lightly around her, terrified that with a word she could somehow destroy him (because in another life he failed her, and failed her son as his teacher and Parental Substitute, leaving him dismembered and roasting to death).
  • After seeing Ben’s artificial leg, Anakin remarks on how cool it would be if he had a mechanical limb. Ben’s response is to suddenly hug Anakin, much to the latter’s confusion. Shmi, meanwhile, wonders why Ben has a look of shame on his face.
• The Dreaded:
  • Palpatine/Darth Sidious is this for Ben. Ben knows that he stands no chance of beating Sidious in a straight-up fight and he admits to his holocron that he’s terrified of him. When Ben visits Bail and Breha, he comes close to telling them that Palpatine was responsible for trying to assassinate Obi-Wan but stops at the last second out of fear that Palpatine will find out somehow and target them as well. When he tries to discuss the subject of Sidious to his holocron, he enters a Thousand-Yard Stare and sits in silence for four hours. When he finally confronts Sidious at the end of Coronation, he finds to his surprise and vicious glee that since Sidious has not had three years of the galactic-scale horror of the Clone Wars to feed off, he's not by any means the powerhouse that he was in Ben's time. He's a frighteningly powerful Sith Lord, a true monster... but he isn't anything more than that. As a result, Ben beats him and kills him.
  • On a more abstract level, he's also terrified of Sidious' master, precisely because a) he knows nothing about them, b) they'd have to be scary enough to control Sidious.
  • The Anzat species are something of a bogeyman to the Jedi. They are a race of space vampires who feed on Force-sensitives. The first time that Bant encounters one, she is paralyzed by fear upon realizing exactly what she is dealing with.
  • The Jedi in general, with outside perspectives such as Jango's showing how scary they can seem to non Force Sensitives. Ben is very aware of this, and points out to both Shmi (who's wondering about the rules of attachment) and Jango (who's exasperated about how the Jedi can be so terrifying one moment and so stupidly kind the next) that this is why the Jedi are so firmly The Fettered, because they know what they could be, and they're terrified of it. Hence attitudes to the Sith, who are not just Jedi off the leash, but far, far worse.
• Dream Walker: Due to a bond between them, Obi-Wan frequently ends up sharing Ben's dreams. This becomes somewhat problematic when Ben has nightmares about the Clone Wars. After Night, this stops thanks to the soul bond between them being severed.
• Dropping the Bombshell: In Ruin, when Obi-Wan asks the Yam'rii the name of the food he's being served, the translation droid's response that they are being served Kaleesh eggs shocks the Republic's delegation and causes them to change their previous decision to help the Yam'rii.
• Drowning My Sorrows: During his exile on Tatooine, Ben took to drinking heavily in order to cope with his depression. By the time he travels to the past, his liver is described by healers as a mess.
• Easy Logistics: Averted. When Ben becomes a general for Jango Fett's army of Mandalorian warriors, the lack of a proper command structure, personnel files, and organization makes running the army extremely difficult for Ben, who is used to having a more organized military like the GAR.
• Eldritch Abomination:
  • The Sleeper is a tentacled monster living in the Water of Life, which is the source of Dathomir's power. It's fully sentient, impossibly ancient, manifests as a giant horned Nightsister covered in flames, can enter a person's mind, has knowledge of the future, and is strong enough to sever the Force bond between Ben and Obi-Wan. The Sleeper also possesses Resurrective Immortality, having already been killed many times by Nightsisters as a Rite of Passage, and feeds off of Dathomir's Life Energy to survive. In addition, the Sleeper is familiar with other powerful Force entities, including the one responsible for Ben's time travel.
  • Lady Livion’s chapter in Mirage reveals the existence of another Force entity tied to the Nightsisters’ book that Ben brought from Dathomir. Whatever it is, it has taken to following Ben around and only a shade like Livion is capable of perceiving it. It’s apparently so powerful that even the ghost of a Dark Jedi is wary of gaining its attention.
  • Lukka also qualifies. It brought Ben back as part of a long-term Batman Gambit to shape Obi-Wan into a Jedi who could train Anakin into who he needed to be, and is powerful enough that even the Sleeper won't risk crossing it, remarking that "there are consequences, even for the likes of me." However, it's more or less benevolent, and is surprisingly polite when it possesses Obi-Wan, only doing so because a) he'd walked out of his body, b) it thought that Ben and Obi-Wan were trying to get its attention, and it leaves without complaint Ben asks it to.
• Emotion Eater: The Sith feed off of negative emotions and draw power from the suffering felt by other people. It's partly why they are so hellbent on causing conflict throughout the galaxy and spreading devastation to as many planets as possible.
• Entertainingly Wrong:
  • Master Tahl initially believes that the reason Ben gives Obi-Wan such Training from Hell was because Obi-Wan became a Padawan later than most and Ben is trying to accelerate his Padawan's training to catch up with the rest.
  • Queen Breha comes to the conclusion that Ben is Obi-Wan's father upon seeing the clear resemblance between the two, leading to a lot of bafflement on Obi-Wan's part when Breha and Bail start treating him not just as their friend's Padawan, but his son. Jango Fett also comes to suspect the same thing until Ben reveals the truth, as do a lot of other Mandalorians, and think they just can't say because of the Jedi's rules about attachment. Ben's attitude is it's "one absurdity to cover another". Obi-Wan's is unclear.
    • At the end of Minding the Gap, Adi Gallia also comes to the same assumption after finally noticing the unmistakable resemblance between Ben, Obi-Wan, and Obi-Wan's daughter Korkie.
  • Likewise, when Healer Essja Chias discovers that Ben and Obi-Wan share the same DNA, he assumes they are Long Lost Siblings.
  • Because there is no record of Ben's existence, many Jedi assume that he's a former Shadow. Since this is simpler than the truth, Ben decides to roll with it.
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: In Night, Hondo attacks a group of rival pirates after one of them insults his mother during his attempt to negotiate safe passage for his Jedi passengers.
  Ben: Hondo, perhaps reconsider this. We were going to handle this discreetly—
  Hondo: This will not stand! They have insulted my mother! How could they do such a thing! Scoundrels!
• Everyone Has Standards: In Remembrance, after Quinlan breaks into Ben and Obi-Wan's room and starts rummaging through Ben's personal belongings with his psychometry in search for answers about Ben's past, he comes across a Padawan braid belonging to canon!Anakin. Despite his curiosity, even Quinlan understands how deeply personal something like a Padawan braid is and makes sure not to use his psychometry on it.
• Evil-Detecting Baby: Downplayed with Jax, who's four years old. He's able to tell that Pong Krell is corrupted by the Dark Side and is only pretending to get better. Due to his age, no one really takes his concern seriously except for Anakin, until both insist — when they do, the Jedi explain that they have actually picked up on it and are keeping a close eye on it.
• Exact Words: Obi-Wan reads Sian's draft holonovel loosely based on his own life, and is mortified by it, as well as finding certain parts ridiculous, like Ben being his time-travelling great grandfather.
  Ben: Well, I promise I'm not your time-travelling great grandfather.
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!:
  • During Quinlan's mental breakdown following his Go Mad from the Revelation moment listed below, he’s reminded of how Ahsoka and Anakin lost their memories of Mortis. At the mention of Anakin's name, he immediately has a major Freak Out at the realization that the toddler Ben brought to the Temple is a future Sith Lord.
  • Obi-Wan mentally goes through one in Coronation after Ben tells him that Senator Palpatine is a Sith Lord.
    But he can’t be…
    The Senator was always so kindly and gracious. Obi-Wan knew that many junior senators considered him a beloved mentor, and much of the senatorial staff agreed that he was far easier to deal with than most, always so considerate. Even Master Adi agreed with that assessment. Senator Palpatine was popular, so much so that he was considered a promising candidate to next be elected to the office of the Chancellor.
    Oh.
    Oh.
• Eye Color Change: Quinlan's eyes change color from brown to a sickly yellow after he falls to the Dark Side.
• Facial Horror: In Chapter 13 of Tarot, Darth Maul gets half of his face carved open by a lightsaber during a duel.
• Fake Defector: In Ripples, the Shadows have Quinlan pretend to leave the Jedi Order to act as bait for the Sith.
• Family of Choice: Anakin Skywalker considers Jax Pavan to be his brother and constantly supports him. They officially become siblings once Shmi decides to adopt Jax.
• Family Theme Naming: Obi-Wan's long-lost sister in Zodiac is named Obi-Vell.
• Fantastic Fighting Style: The Jedi make use of a variety of lightsaber forms, each with its various strengths and weaknesses.
  • Interestingly, Sian wants to master Makashi, Form II (which is basically fencing), with a reverse-grip (and a few Ataru, Form IV, twists). Her grandmaster, Yan Dooku, the master of Makashi, grudgingly notes that she is not terrible. From Dooku, this is high praise.
  • As part of his test for Knighthood, Ben has Obi-Wan create his own lightsaber form.
• Fantastic Racism: Much to Ben’s anger, the Senate didn't consider the clone troopers to be living beings; part of the reason why the Jedi took command was to protect the clones, who had little-to-no rights and would have been used as slaves regardless. The reason for Cody's status as an Almighty Janitor was because he was banned from having a high rank due to being a clone.
• Fantastically Indifferent: Justified with Ylar Kala. The Council specifically chose her to act as Ben's Soul Healer because she was this trope. This was the right call, given the information that Ylar would become privy to.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: The planet Stewjon is explicitly based on Scotland, with the inhabitants wearing kilts, being predominantly redheaded, and very clannish.
• Fantasy-Forbidding Father: During Ben's exile on Tatooine, he told a toddler Luke stories about the Jedi. This immediately led to Owen throwing him out, yelling that Luke will never become a Jedi, and forbidding Ben from ever visiting them again. Given that this was as the Empire was tightening its grip, and considering how Anakin turned out, this is a little more understandable than most examples.
• A Father to His Men: Ben was this to the clones in the 212^th Battalion. He even took to calling them vod (Mandalorian term for "brother") and personally knew every trooper under his command. He holds a serious grudge against Pong Krell after the latter attempted to kill his men during the Umbara campaign, one he carries over into the new timeline—he challenges Krell time after time, knowing that he'll always accept, and always teases him with victory before beating him. He claims to be trying to tease out the Dark Side tendencies before Krell Falls in earnest ( which happens anyway), but others note that Ben was enjoying it too much and it was clearly personal.
• Feeling Their Age:
  • From his debut, Ky Narec is shown to be well past his prime. His age has caused him to slow down and has made him weaker. He’s shown to struggle with physical feats that his padawan Asajj can pull off with ease.
  • Ben's first attempt to teach Obi-Wan how to redirect lightning (something that he could do with ease early in the series) falls flat when he gets overwhelmed by the electricity and is left retching on the ground in pain. This is the first sign that Ben's age is starting to catch up with him.
• Fictional Age of Majority: In Mandalore, fourteen is considered the age of adulthood.
• First-Name Ultimatum: Shaak Ti to Ben in chapter 13 of Remembrance: Part II.
  Ben: I've been handling it.
  Shaak Ti: Not well enough. If your first slip nearly cost a life.
  Ben: Hardly an innocent one.
  Shaak Ti: Ben!
• Flat "What": Tholme has this reaction in Night when, after all the trouble that the Jedi went through to take down the Siniteen warlords terrorizing Rattatak, they discover that Hondo has taken over the warlords' strongholds.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Satine’s pregnancy was hinted at in Tarot when Jango mentions to Ben how Satine and Bo-Katan have been quietly arguing with each other and that they’ve been hiding something from him.
  • In Chapter 2 of Minding the Gap, Fay explains how even being in the mere presence of a Sith is "emotionally and spiritually and psychologically" dangerous for a Jedi since the Darkness radiating off a Sith can easily leech through into a Jedi, twisting their emotions and severely impairing their judgment. In Chapter 16 of Coronation, we see this happen to Ben as he spends more time near Palpatine during Padmé's coronation. As all the stress and frustration from failing to find any evidence that Palpatine is a Sith piles up, a single whisper from the Dark Side is all it takes to push Ben past the Rage Breaking Point as he impulsively decides to do away with the subterfuge and directly confront Palpatine in the middle of a crowded ballroom.
• For Want Of A Nail: As a result of Ben's interference with the past, numerous events diverge from canon. This is also why Ben is hesitant to reveal anything about the future to the Council.
  • Ben's first act upon finding himself in the past was to free Shmi and Anakin from Gardulla the Hutt and bring them both to the Jedi Temple. This leads to Shmi becoming a Jedi herself with Shaak Ti taking her as a padawan. During her Jedi training, Shmi falls in love with Master Tholme and later becomes pregnant with their child, adding another Skywalker to the family.
  • Since Anakin was freed from slavery at an earlier age and had his mother to support him, he doesn't grow up with the same emotional issues he had in canon. Also, since Anakin was brought to the Temple at a younger age, he has an easier time adjusting and making friends with the other younglings. One of these younglings, Jax Pavan, becomes Anakin's Best Friend and later his adopted brother.
  • Because Ben and Obi-Wan help Qymaen Jai Sheelal (General Grievous' past self) liberate his people, Sheelal never develops a hatred for Jedi nor does Kalee experience starvation. Instead, the Kaleesh people become allies with the Jedi, and Kalee later forms a close partnership with Corellia.
  • Since Ronderu lij Kummar was Spared by the Adaptation, Jai Sheelal didn't experience the tragedy that transformed him into his "Grievous" persona. As a result, Sheelal was in a more reasonable mood than his Legends counterpart and was more open to negotiating a compromise with Obi-Wan. Hilariously, they end up in an Odd Friendship, which distinctly bemuses Ben.
  • Ben being the one to free Jango Fett from his enslavement by spice smugglers leads to Jango becoming Obi-Wan's mentor for a month. Jango later "rescues" Bo-Katan from the Death Watch and adopts her as his daughter with the intention of training her as his successor.
  • Ben assigning Obi-Wan to research every Jedi temple leads to Obi-Wan's discovery that the Jedi Order is slowly dying. This is later made public with the Kenobi Report and is the start of a series of major reforms the Jedi Order undertakes. Adults are allowed to join the Order, Jedi masters are permitted to take more than one Padawan learner, and the Jedi Order eventually breaks away from the Republic as a whole and becomes an independent organization.
  • As of chapter 10 of Mirage, Satine is pregnant. By Obi-Wan.
  • In Coronation, Ben kills Palpatine on Naboo leaving Darth Plagueis as the only Sith Lord in the galaxy and the one who will become the Supreme Chancellor of the Republic. It also means that Ben will unwittingly become Plagueis' new apprentice.
• Friend to All Children: Ben, consistently, to the point where it's considered one of his most redeeming features even by Jedi who find him terrifying and/or judgemental. He dotes on Anakin, and later Jax and frequently visits the creches, with Quinlan noting that it's practically the one time that he ever feels even close to at peace. When Ben and Obi-Wan go on a Search for a new Jedi youngling to his and Obi-Wan's homeworld, the candidate they find (who gets renamed Beru Ka'ra) is a six-month-old baby girl and Obi-Wan, who chose her, notes that he can sense his oh-so-stoic Master instantly turn to goo the moment she smiles at them.
• Friendly Enemy: The Tusken Raiders to Ben and Obi-Wan in Mirage. They treat attacking the pair of Jedi as a game and even try to warn them about a massive sandstorm heading their way later on (albeit by shooting at them with a sniper rifle), later scolding the two at length for worrying them.
• Future Badass: From Ben's perspective, Palpatine was this when he killed the Senator; by the end of the Clone Wars, Palpatine had spent years drawing on the despair and pain caused by the Clone Wars to boost his own powers, but when Ben attacks Palpatine hasn't had the chance to draw on such darkness and is more easily defeated.
• Future Me Scares Me: Played With. Obi-Wan doesn’t know that Ben is his future self, but the Council does and they are uncomfortable with just how different Ben is from his past self. Later, Obi-Wan emphasizes that while he deeply respects his Master and loves him dearly, he does not want to turn out like him. Ben, for his part, is perfectly fine with this, as he absolutely does not want Obi-Wan turning out like him, and is both upset and embarrassed that he hadn't made this clear before.

Tropes G–L

• Gender Flip: This fic's version of Korkie Kryze is female, whereas their canon counterpart is a male.
• Genius Bruiser: The first Siniteen warlord that Ben faces in Night is described as "seven feet of solid muscle topped by a large, incredibly dense brain capable of making hyperspace calculations without the use of a computer".
• Genre Savvy: Death Watch's leader, Tor Vizsla, is fully aware of just how deadly a Jedi can be. After Ben joins Jango's army, Vizsla takes to wearing a special armor made from cortosis, a metal that shorts out lightsabers on contact.
• The Ghost: Darth Plagueis gets alluded to a few times by other characters. In Night, Komari offhandedly remarks how Dooku’s meeting with Senator Palpatine was interrupted by a "crusty old Muun from the Banking Guilds". Komari later tells Sian that she formed a friendship of sorts with Plagueis and is learning how to play Shah-tezh from him. Plagueis finally appears in the last chapter of Coronation when he abducts Ben with the intent of training him as his new apprentice after the death of Palpatine.
• The Glomp: As a little girl, Aayla is very prone to this behavior. She gives Quinlan a flying hug in Chapter 33 of Deliverance. Quinlan describes it as feeling like he's been hit by a small speeder bike. She gives another one to Quinlan in Fever after he realizes that she's sick from the Temple's Bane. She also gives Tholme a tackle hug in Night just before Tholme and Quinlan follow Ben and Obi-Wan on their journey to Rattatak.
• Go Back to the Source: Mirage's plot deals with Ben's decision to tell Obi-Wan the truth about himself. To prepare for this, Ben brings Obi-Wan to Tatooine, the place where it all began.
• Go Mad from the Revelation:
  • It's hinted on more than one occasion that Ben's extraordinary understanding of the Force comes from spending several years on the edge of insanity on Tatooine. He eventually manages to replicate the results with Obi-Wan, but without Obi-Wan going insane.
  • Quinlan ends up falling to the Dark Side after he uses his Psychometry on Ben's old lightsaber and gets overwhelmed by Ben's memories from the future. This also causes Quinlan to experience a Loss of Identity since his memories get merged with the memories of his future self, Ben, Anakin, Ahsoka, Ventress, and Maul. Once they're sealed off, he manages much more easily, and eventually, they're erased on Dathomir, though he retains both a loose link to the Dark Side and a vague awareness of what he lost from some of the conversations he remembers.
• Good Cop/Bad Cop: One reason that Ben pushes hard when training padawan classes is that, "It makes them grateful for their crechemasters."
• Greater-Scope Villain: Despite their influence and central role in the story, the Sith themselves barely appear at all since the series takes place years before the Naboo crisis. Most of Ben's efforts are geared towards reforming the Jedi Order and depriving the Sith of their future pawns. Any time the Sith do choose to get involved, it's through proxies such as the Trade Federation, the Senate, and Temple's Bane, the sole exceptions being Palpatine sabotaging Obi-Wan's lightsaber and Maul being dispatched to assassinate Adonai Kryze, among others. Ben internally notes that this is largely because of the Sith's obsessive devotion to their own discretion — hence why Obi-Wan didn't just vanish one day when they had the option to try and Make It Look Like an Accident.
• Guilt-Free Extermination War: Downplayed. The reptilian Kaleesh, under the leadership of Qymaen Jai Sheelal, are engaged in one against the insectoid Yam'rii, because the Yam'rii had previously enslaved the Kaleesh for generations and treated Kaleesh eggs as a delicacy. While their cause is portrayed as righteous, and the Yam'rii are severely punished (being stripped of colony worlds — which they had in fact conquered after exterminating the inhabitants), fleet, and fleet building technology, the Kaleesh are made to hold back from outright genocide.
• Hand on Womb: While the audience finds out at the start of the same chapter, in chapter 10 of Mirage, Satine gives away her pregnancy by Obi-Wan to Jango Fett in this fashion.
• Have We Met Yet?: When Ben encounters Senator Palpatine during the dance being held in celebration of Padme's coronation as Queen of Naboo, Palpatine has this reaction when Ben asks him to be his dance partner.
  Palpatine: Goodness, who can say no to such a charming invitation? Though do remind me, Master Jedi, have we been introduced? You seem terribly… familiar.
• Headbutting Heroes: Early on, Ben often finds himself being confronted by Master Tahl and Knight Adi Gallia, who disagree with Ben's teaching methods of Obi-Wan and constantly question his actions. This culminates in Ben's open challenge for temporary custody of Obi-Wan, which sees him duel both Tahl and Gallia... and over a hundred other knights over the course of the series, many of whom try their luck just to be the one who bet Ben Naasade. Ben being Ben, it turns out that he's exploiting this to get the Jedi to polish their sabre skills.
• Heavy Worlder: Yoda’s species are one, hence their short size, as are the Aleen. When Ben visits Yaddle’s homeworld, he notes that the gravity is higher and finds it a little difficult to breathe.
• Help Mistaken for Attack:
  • In Fever, after Aayla gets infected with Temple's Bane, Quinlan uses the Dark Side to purge the virus from her body. This creates a brief misunderstanding with the other Jedi, who hear Aayla's screaming and—sensing the Dark Side—assume Quinlan is attacking her.
  • Obi-Wan uses emergency Nightsister healing on Qui-Gon Jinn, but Jinn instinctively tries to resist having his body destroyed and remade, which contributes to it only partially working. He survives, but loses his ability to sense the Force.
• Hero with Bad Publicity: Ben gets a bad reputation amongst the Jedi due to rumors that he's abusive towards Obi-Wan. Even the few that don't believe the rumors still find him terrifying. Things don't improve when he becomes indirectly responsible for two Jedi falling to the Dark Side. While this gets better over time, partly thanks to Obi-Wan's insistence that he's not abusive/demonstration that he's turning into a very impressive young Jedi, people still find him terrifying — though Windu does note that after some very public shenanigans with Jango Fett, his image in the Temple has transformed from "terrifying" to "badass".
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: In the original timeline, Ben considered Anakin to be his. He deeply loved Anakin and considered him a part of himself. This made Anakin’s Face–Heel Turn all the more painful for him.
• Hidden Depths: The normally strict Healer Ni Hiella is also an experienced player of sabacc, a skill she picked up from bartering for medical supplies in the Outer Rim. She also enjoys drinking, bringing three different types of liquor to the sabacc game that Ben hosts at the end of The Desert Storm.
• Hidden Elf Village: The planet which Yoda's species live on is one. It's located in a hidden nebula that normally requires the Force to navigate, the people use no technology and are very isolationist, and the planet itself doesn't even have a name.
• Hijacked Destiny: Sian unknowingly steals Obi-Wan's destiny as Maul's Arch-Enemy by being the one to cut off his limbs and get him excommunicated from the Sith in retaliation for nearly killing Qui-Gon. Unlike most examples of this trope, Ben is relieved to learn that Obi-Wan will never have to deal with becoming the target of Maul's undying vengeance.
• History Repeats: In Tarot, Ben once again finds himself duelling a younger Darth Maul alongside Qui-Gon and being forced to watch as Maul impales Qui-Gon with his lightsaber. Fortunately, Obi-Wan saves Qui-Gon's life using the magick he learned from the Nightsisters. Unfortunately, Maul still escapes because of Sian's Unwanted Assistance (also partly because Ben's a little too interested in making him suffer) — though since he ends up on Dathomir, largely dismembered, that's not much of an escape.
  • After several books of hinting, it's eventually revealed in Passage that Ben's scars and unresolved issues with Qui-Gon (in his timeline) are paralleled by Qui-Gon's own issues resulting from his time with his Master, Dooku. While they're noted to have some friction, it's laid bare when Qui-Gon finally reveals why he's so reluctant to push the envelope after the loss of his ability to sense the Force, and, indeed, in general. It is not, as even Ben assumed, a fear of failure. It's not the effort, but the vulnerability — a fear of "disappointment and shame." For someone raised by a taskmaster as rigidly dignified and demanding as Dooku, it is both understandable and heartbreaking, explaining so many of this Qui-Gon's issues with Sian, and the original Qui-Gon's issues with Ben/Ben's issues with Qui-Gon.
• Hope Spot: The entirety of Chapter 22 of Coronation counts as a one for the series. It starts out with things looking overwhelmingly optimistic from Ben's point-of-view. Sure he came perilously close to Falling, but Darth Sidious is dead and his true nature as a Sith has been exposed to the public. Upon confirming the wonderful news, Ben lets out sob of joy and is overwhelmed by sheer relief. Then just as he gives in to a Post-Victory Collapse, Darth Plagueis telepathically congratulates Ben, leaving him with the horrifying realization that Sidious' Sith Master is still alive.
• Horrifying the Horror: In Chapter 23 of Mirage, the entity from the Nightsister's book finds itself on the receiving end of this when it comes face-to-face with Lukka possessing Obi-Wan's body. When Lukka picks up the Nightsisters' book itself, the pages become completely blank and Ben can sense that the book's entity is just as scared of Lukka as he is.
• How Dare You Die on Me!: Ben feels this way towards Qui-Gon from his original timeline. When Quinlan goes through Ben's memories, Ben angrily screamed this to Qui-Gon's ghost on Tatooine:
  Ben: You died! You died, you bastard! And I never forgave you for it! How could you—how could you! [sobs]
• How the Mighty Have Fallen: Ben was once the High General of the GAR and a prominent member of the Jedi Council. Four years after the Clone Wars, he's been reduced to a half-drunk and half-mad recluse living in a hovel on Tatooine, existing on the edge of the Despair Event Horizon with Beru being constantly terrified that he's going to commit suicide.
• Hypocrite: When Qui-Gon questions the wisdom of allowing Obi-Wan to pilot a starfighter, Ben lampshades the hypocrisy of Qui-Gon's statement under his breath, given that he had no issue allowing a nine-year-old Anakin to pilot a Naboo starfighter in the original timeline. No one else present gets it, for understandable reasons.
• I Am Not Left-Handed: During Ben's open challenge for custody of his padawan, it soon becomes clear that he's intentionally holding back since he always wins the matches despite only appearing to be slightly more skilled than his opponents. When Qui-Gon Jinn decides to take up the challenge, Ben — thanks to his issues with Qui-Gon from the original timeline — doesn't hold back and defeats him almost immediately.
• I Am the Noun: The Sleeper says this in response to Ben's What the Hell Are You?:
  The Sleeper: I am the Witch from which all Witches descend. I am the Sleeper. I am Dathomir.
• I Can Live With That: Satine doesn't want to kill, but she recognises that Jango Fett is certain to kill Tor Vizla at the first opportunity, so she won't have to make a decision about Vizla, and she decides she can accept that.
• I Got Bigger: As the series goes on, Obi-Wan undergoes a growth spurt and soon becomes taller than Ben. Humorously, Ben is at first in denial over the fact that Obi-Wan is taller than him.
• I Just Want to Be Badass: Implied with Serra Keto, who admits to Ben that her desire to learn about Mandalore's ways came from hearing about how Mandalorians were supposedly the greatest warriors in the galaxy.
• If Only You Knew:
  • When Tahl first confronts Ben over the Training from Hell he puts Obi-Wan through, she remarks that it's as if he's training Obi-Wan to fight the Sith. The irony of her metaphor isn't lost on Ben, since that's exactly what Ben is trying to prepare Obi-Wan for.
  • In Chapter 20 of Mirage, Obi-Wan confesses to Ben that he wants to adopt him as his father and asks Ben to make it official by changing his last name from Naasade to Kenobi.
• Imagination-Based Superpower: Building "Force Structures" revolves around trusting and expecting the universe to be in the shape you want it to be. Obi-Wan generally teaches it by walking up a staircase that exists only in his own mind. Sian can casually stack items in front of her as if she's carrying a tray.
• Immune to Fate: Mother Talzin discovers that Ben is this as a result of his time travel. Ben's past and future appear as complete voids in the Force and his destiny is nonexistent.
• In Spite of a Nail:
  • The spice freighter Jango was held prisoner on still gets attacked by pirates.
  • The Stark Hyperspace War still takes place.
  • Bruck Chun falls under the influence of Xanatos Du Crion and becomes his apprentice, resulting in the Jedi Temple being bombed.
  • Duke Adonai Kryze is still assassinated, forcing Obi-Wan and his master to take Satine into hiding. This time, he's killed by the Sith during his speech at a political conference. Unlike Legends, Satine is there to witness Adonai's death, and he dies as she holds him in her arms.
  • Obi-Wan becomes Satine’s protector while she’s in hiding during the Great Clan Wars and falls in love with her.
• Innocently Insensitive:
  • After Ben issues his open challenge for custody of Obi-Wan, Yoda asks Ben if he believes he could beat him. Ben’s casual assurance that Yoda could “win the moment [he] wanted to” actually saddens Yoda since he had been waiting to pass away from old age (as he's already well beyond his people's standard lifespan) and didn’t know that he still had a few decades left to live. Ben quickly realizes his mistake and apologizes, telling Yoda that he's got time left.
  • In Remembrance: Part II, Mace’s attempt to protect Obi-Wan from scrutiny by pressuring him into answering the Council’s questions about Ben comes across as this to Obi-Wan since it shows that the Council has already decided that Ben is dangerous and believes that Obi-Wan needs to be protected from him.
• Insectoid Alien: The Yam'rii (called Huk by the Kaleesh) are a race of giant sentient praying mantises that appear during Ruin.
• Internal Reveal:
  • In Chapter 6 of Zodiac, Obi-Wan learns from Ben that the Sith have returned and that they were responsible for sabotaging Obi-Wan's lightsaber.
  • In Ripples, when Obi-Wan visits Healer Kala to inquire about Ben's wellbeing, she notices his physical resemblance to Ben and immediately realizes that Obi-Wan is Ben's past self.
  • Ben tells Jango the truth about himself in Sa Sarad.
  • Sian finally learns that the Sith have returned in Tarot.
  • Chapter 30 and 31 of Mirage has Obi-Wan finally learn the truth about Ben. He also learns that Anakin is the Chosen One and fell to the Dark Side in Ben's timeline.
  • Obi-Wan, Ben, and Fay discover that Master Polkit's ghost is haunting the Jedi Temple in Chapter 9 of Passages, after the reader already learns this in Mirage.
  • In Chapter 14 of Coronation, Ben discovers that Obi-Wan has already met Palpatine, which the reader has known since Remembrance.
  • In Chapter 17 of Coronation, Ben reveals to Obi-Wan that Palpatine is a Sith Lord through their mental link as he is on his way to confront him during Padmé's coronation.
• Intimidating Revenue Service: As part of their attempt to stop the Jedi Order’s separation from the Senate, the Sith invoke this by having the Jedi audited for tax fraud in Chapter 3 of Lineage.
• Invincible Villain: As always, the Sith are one throughout the series. Despite Ben's best efforts and his knowledge of the future, he's only inconvenienced the Sith's Grand Plan. Even with the knowledge that Palpatine is a Sith Lord, Ben is unable to do anything about him and can't even warn the other Jedi without risking the Senate turning against them. When Ben finally exposes Palpatine as a Sith to the public and executes him, he almost immediately discovers that Palpatine's master Plagueis was still alive, meaning that killing Palpatine did nothing to stop the Sith's actual plans and all Ben accomplished was revealing his existence to Plagueis and get himself abducted.
• Irony: Due to Obi-Wan's role in ending the Huk War, Jai Sheelal develops a deep respect for him to the point where he names his children after Obi-Wan, and the two form a very Odd Friendship. This is extremely ironic considering that Sheelal is the past version of General Grievous, one of Obi-Wan's most dangerous enemies and who Ben still has nightmares of. Ben is both amused and bemused by this.
• It's All My Fault: In Ripples, it's revealed that Ben blames himself for Shmi's original death in canon. He's convinced that had he listened to Anakin about his nightmares, Shmi wouldn't have died.
• Jack of All Trades: Ben is noted to be this, on levels that border being Master of All. He's not the most powerful in the Force, he's not the best duelist, nor the best politician, but he's so close to each that he leaves practically everyone but the likes of Yoda, Fay, and Dooku in the dust. Even Mace Windu is barely on par with him, and when he eventually faces a younger Maul, despite the latter's youth and raw power (and Ben's own Dented Iron nature), Ben is practically toying with him. He's also probably the best general, and it's universally accepted that he's a Determinator without equal. This is Justified by the fact that almost none of the Jedi have seen serious, sustained combat in their lives (let alone a war). Ben, meanwhile, duelled several powerful Sith Apprentices and defeated almost all of them, and more generally Had to Be Sharp as a Jedi General during the Clone Wars—and his prowess comes at the cost of being such a bad case of Dented Iron that mere scans of him horrify the healers, and his PTSD is arguably even worse.
• Karma Houdini: Xanatos du Crion bombs the Jedi Temple in Sa Sarad after using Bruck to infiltrate the Jedi Order and steal data from them. Unlike Tor Vizsla and the Yinchorri, he doesn't face any comeuppance for his crimes and goes on the run.
• Klingon Promotion: An unintentional example. After Ben kills Palpatine, Darth Plagueis forces him to become his new Sith apprentice.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia:
  • Harshly defied in Remembrance. After Quinlan falls to the Dark Side, he notes how in the past, the Jedi would treat fallen Padawans by taking away their memories of the Fall. Ben, remembering how erasing Anakin's memories of Mortis turned out, takes Quinlan's side and refuses to allow the Council to make him forget.
  • Defied in Night. After Sian lets it slip that she knows Ben's true identity, he briefly panics before taking her straight to Master Yaddle. Sian asks if they are going to erase her memories, only for Ben to dismiss that idea since she had deduced the truth by herself and would likely figure it out again if her memories were wiped.
• Liar Revealed: Discussed in Chapter 8 of Mirage. One of Ben's greatest fears is that Obi-Wan and Shmi will stop loving him once they learn the truth about his identity. Shmi’s reaction when Ben confides his fears to her is simultaneously tearjerking and heartwarming. She actually believes him when he says that knowing his secret might make her hate him and finds herself unable to offer forgiveness for whatever Ben is hiding from her. Instead, she assures him that she’s willing to wait until he feels he’s ready to tell her the truth, while privately hoping that he never does. Eventually, she tells him that she doesn't care about who he was and what he did, instead that she (platonically) loves the man he is now. As for Obi-Wan, he's mostly baffled, but comes to terms with it remarkably quickly.
• Like an Old Married Couple: In Sa Sarad, some of Jango's warriors compare Ben and Jango's arguing to that of a married couple's.
• Little Miss Badass: An eleven-year-old Serra Keto establishes herself as one in Fever when pirates hijack a transport full of Jedi. While most of the padawans aboard were frozen in fear by the presence of an Anzati, she attacks the Anzati with a vibro-knife. Even Mandalorians double-take when they hear about that.
• Little Stowaway: When Shmi asks Dahvo to bring Anakin to Shili to see her, Anakin helps Jax stowaway aboard Dahvo's ship. Despite Dahvo's experience with transporting and hiding runaway slaves, it takes a full day of traveling through hyperspace until he realizes that he has not one, but two extra passengers — something helped by the fact that both are very good at Shmi's startling vanishing technique. He immediately realises that he'll invokedNever Live It Down.
• Living with the Villain: In Tarot, Komari mentions to Sian that she's befriended an old Muun in the Senate who's teaching her how to play Shah-tezh. It's heavily implied that the "bored, old Muun" in question is none other than Darth Plagueis himself.
• Locked Out of the Loop:
  • Shaak Ti is the only Jedi Councilor to not know about Ben's nature as a time traveller, due to not being present when he told the Council. Yaddle decides to keep her out of the loop in order to get an outsider's perspective.
  • Ben is prone to keeping important or relevant information a secret from the Jedi Council, much to the Council's frustration — especially when he uses it to manipulate them.
• Logical Weakness: In Night, Ben fights four Siniteen warlords in a series of gladiatorial duels. Due to the large brains of the Siniteen species, all of the warlords are capable of predicting Ben's moves, effectively giving them Combat Clairvoyance. Ben beats three of them by simply moving faster than they can react.
• Long Game: The Sith's conspiracy against the Jedi is the culmination of centuries of long-term planning, preparation, contingencies, and political manipulation. After arriving in the past, Ben enacts a Long Game of his own against the Sith to remove their influence and undermine their plans.
• Long Lost Sibling: During the Zodiac arc, Obi-Wan discovers that he has a long-lost older sister named Obi-Vell while visiting his homeworld Stewjon.
• Loophole Abuse:
  • This gets taken advantage of three times during Ben's open challenge for temporary custody of Obi-Wan.
    • It was never stated that the fights had to be one-on-one. One bout has five knights unsuccessfully attempt to gang up on Ben, who finds it almost adorable — as in, he takes one out almost immediately with his sabre, then beats the crap out of the rest with his bare hands.
    • Since there was no rule saying that you had to fight with lightsabers, Ni Hiella defeats Ben by knocking him out with a sedative.
    • Lastly, there was no written rule that the challenger needed to be a Jedi. Jango Fett becomes Obi-Wan's mentor after beating Ben in a street brawl.
  • Sian is surprised to see Quinlan at her door, but Obi-Wan assures her that he had permission to escort Quinlan back to his quarters.
    Sian: These aren’t his quarters.
    Obi-Wan: The route we intended to take was not specified.
• Loss of Identity: Ben's character arc in Night revolves around him undergoing an identity crisis since Obi-Wan has become completely different from his original self. Both the Sleeper and mirror!Obi-Wan tell Ben that while "Obi-Wan Kenobi" was his identity in the original timeline, Ben's presence in the new timeline has effectively made him into a different individual with a separate fate.
• Lost Technology: In The Desert Storm, Ben identifies bacta as a form of lost technology. The substance itself was around for eons, but the system that produced it had stopped exporting it after the Jedi’s last war with the Sith nearly saw it run out. Hence why bacta is initially unavailable when Ben travels to the past. It stops being lost technology later in the series after Thyferra resumes exporting it.
• Love Makes You Evil:
  • Ben explains to Shmi that this isn't necessarily the case for Jedi, regarding the rules of attachment, but it is a risk — not because love is corrupting, but because of what people might do for love, or out of desperation. Who wouldn't kill for those they love, steal to feed them, etcetera? And considering how powerful the Jedi are capable of being, and how much power the Dark Side offers in that regard, it's very easy to go from 'best intentions' to 'fully fledged monster' very quickly. Shmi admits that he has a point, remarking that the Jedi fear what they could be, and notes that if Ben had only been able to free one of them, she'd have let him take Anakin for that reason.
  • Lady Livion was originally a Jedi Knight who was part of a Battle Couple alongside her wife Palma. Palma’s death left Livion grief-stricken and drove her to the Dark Side.

Tropes M–R

• Make It Look Like an Accident: After Obi-Wan interferes with the Sith's plans for Kalee and Corellia, Palpatine tries to assassinate him by sabotaging his lightsaber, causing it to explode in his hands. Obi-Wan only narrowly avoids death thanks to his lightsaber's beskar casing absorbing most of the blast.
• Male Gaze: Obi-Wan was just studying how Sha'me Betoya was able to move so gracefully and silently without the Force, honest, but she makes him sweat regardless. (Though he suspects that she already knew it and was just amused.)
• The Man Behind the Man: In Ben's Bad Future, Palpatine was the Big Bad who took over the galaxy and eradicated the Jedi Order. In the fic proper, he is The Man Behind the Man for many of the series' conflicts. On a more personal level, Ben sees Palpatine as the cataclysm for all his past failures and regrets. Even though this version is a Disc-One Final Boss who never evolves beyond his role as Plagueis' Dragon-in-Chief, his death still leaves an everlasting impact on the story, symbolizing the conclusion of Ben's character arc and signaling that nothing about the future is truly set in stone anymore.
• Manipulative Bastard: While the Sith perform their usual machinations, Ben spends most of the series giving a master-class in this, steadily manipulating the Jedi from the shadows into a force more capable of dealing with the Sith. It gets to the point where even Palpatine doesn't seem to have twigged to anywhere near his significance, instead opting to try and assassinate Obi-Wan (who rather accidentally thwarted several Sith plans) rather than Ben (who is far, far more dangerous). This is not always a good thing, as others are aware of this, and his therapist actually points out that Ben is so prone to doing this that he does it automatically to get what he wants.
• Master Swordsman:
  • Given that he fought in the Clone Wars and has gone toe-to-toe with the likes of Grievous, Dooku, Maul, Ventress, and Vader, Ben is a master lightsaber duellist and easily outclasses most of the other Jedi in the past. During Ben's open challenge for temporary custody of his padawan, he won all but two fights out of a hundred duels—and neither one of those was fought with a lightsaber.
    • Of every duellist seen, only Windu manages to beat Ben onscreen, in a spar set near the start of the series, and that by going all out, when Ben's more or less teasing him. It's also mentioned that Ben sparred with Dooku when he was in the Temple, and while the result was not stated, it was apparently magnificent to watch.
  • Dooku, naturally, is a superb swordsman as a particular master of Makashi and his prowess is occasionally demonstrated as he starts to appear in the series.
  • Obi-Wan spends a long time assuming that he's barely competent with a lightsaber, in part because Ben keeps teaching him Shii-Cho, which is the most basic form of them all, and refuses to let him train with other Padawans. As it turns out, this because he was invoking Achievements in Ignorance, teaching Obi-Wan techniques fit for seasoned Jedi Masters, and Obi-Wan ends up capable of mowing through multiple Senior Padawans, each with most of a decade of experience on him, and later on a par with most Knights before he even reaches the level of Senior Padawan.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: During the time he spent as a prisoner of the Death Watch, Ben hallucinates a conversation with Anakin Skywalker in his canon appearance. However, "Anakin" in this scene has mismatched eyes (one's a Sith yellow, while the other is his normal eye color) indicating that he's the same being that Obi-Wan encountered as a Force illusion on Dathomir. This raises the question of whether Ben was just going crazy from solitary confinement or if he had been visited by some sort of Force entity — given how Ben got his extraordinary understanding of the Force, the two are not mutually exclusive.
• Mayfly–December Romance: Ben and Fay are a straight example of this. By the time they start dating, Ben is around 42 years old, whereas Fay is an ageless immortal, who's 2000 years old and counting.
• Meaningful Echo:
  • When Ben first accepted Obi-Wan as his padawan, he gave Obi-Wan a speech where he admits that while he won't be the type of master Obi-Wan wants, he will teach him the skills he needs for the future. Later in Night, Ben enters a minor Heroic BSoD in response to Obi-Wan's Armor-Piercing Question and tells Obi-Wan that he deserves a better master than himself. Obi-Wan responds by echoing Ben's previous speech to reassure him that he's better than he thinks he is.
  • While speaking with the mirror entity in Night, Ben is asked: "What are you made for?". Ben's answer is a Call-Back to when Anakin asked him a similar question in Labyrinth of Evil.
    Ben: Infinite sadness.
• Meaningful Rename: After traveling into the past, Ben gives himself the last name Naasade, which in the Mandalorian language means "no one".
• Misery Builds Character: Mandalore has a philosophy that can be summed up with this line: "As flowers are grown by rain, so is the soul grown by war." While Mace disagrees with this way of thinking, Ben counters that some things can only truly be understood by experiencing it yourself, and remarks that Mandalore's philosophy is less about death, more an embrace of life, which Mace at least understands (especially in the context of Ben himself). This also serves as the Tag Line for Sa Sarad.
• The Mole: Bruck Chun becomes one for Xanatos Du Crion after the former returns to the Jedi Temple.
• Monster Progenitor: The Sleeper claims to be one for the Nightsisters, referring to itself as "the Witch from which all Witches descend".
• Morality Chain: Jango becomes one to Ben in Chapter 41 of Sa Sarad. After hearing Obi-Wan scream out Satine's name in horror through their mental link, Ben (believing Satine is once again dead) nearly Jumps Off The Slippery Slope and almost Force-chokes some Death Watch commandos that Jango had captured. Jango is able to stop Ben and gets him to calm down.
• More Deadly Than the Male: Out of all the warlords that Ben fights in Night, the lone female of the group ends up being the hardest to beat. Unlike the others, she doesn’t underestimate Ben and uses a mace rather than fight unarmed like Ben’s previous opponents, and while she's the smallest of the group, she's far better at actually using her mass to her advantage. Tellingly, she inflicts the most damage onto Ben out of all four warlords.
• Mundane Object Amazement: Growing up on a desert planet like Tatooine, Shmi had never experienced rain prior to coming to Coruscant. When Ben takes her outside to experience a rainstorm for the first time, she reacts by staring in awe before breaking out into Tears of Joy.
• My Future Self and Me: The main premise is that a post-ROTS Obi-Wan travels back in time and takes his younger self as his apprentice.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Bruck is horrified when he learns that the data he gave to Du Crion was used by the Yinchorri to plant a bomb in the Temple. He's so wracked with guilt that he immediately goes to Master Fay and confesses everything that he's done.
• My Greatest Failure: Out of the many regrets that Ben has about his previous life, his greatest regret was not killing Anakin on Mustafar, mostly because it would have been a Mercy Kill.
  • Mirage explores this further. By leaving Anakin to burn, Ben essentially abandoned Anakin to a life as an enslaved killing machine for Palpatine. This is why Ben believes Shmi will hate him if he tells her the truth about himself. She would never forgive him for making her son into a slave.
• My Greatest Second Chance: Ben sees being sent into the past as the chance to fix and prevent his previous mistakes.
• My Secret Pregnancy:
  • At the start of Ripples, Ben and Obi-Wan discover that Shmi is pregnant and is trying to keep it a secret until she’s Knighted. It quite quickly becomes an Open Secret, however, and a source of fascination for the younglings (particularly non-mammalian ones), as well as a cause for a lot of very attentive Padawans, Knights, even Masters.
  • Satine is revealed to be pregnant and doing her absolute best to hide it in Mirage, in part because she's 18 and under a lot of pressure, in part because the father is Obi-Wan.
• Mysterious Stranger: While visiting Yaddle’s homeworld, Obi-Wan discovers a female Chiss searching through his belongings and scanning his lightsaber. Even after he confronts her, it's never made clear why the Chiss was interested in Obi-Wan (or Ben, for that matter) nor what she was doing on Yaddle’s homeworld.
• Mythology Gag:
  • A lot of the Tatooine slave mythos in the series are taken directly from Fialleril's Double Agent Vader series.
  • In True Colors, Ben mentions that a private mercenary organization called the Nova Guard was responsible for handling the security of Chandrila's medical supplies. The Nova Guard is an actual group from both the canon EU and Legends, having been featured in the RPG sourcebooks.
  • In Lineage, a Death Watch member that Ben and Jango captures and interrogates is named Tam Saxon, a reference to the character Gar Saxon from the canon EU.
  • In Chapter 21 of Coronation, just as Ben is about to finish off a disarmed Palpatine, Obi-Wan steps in and pleads with Ben to let the Sith live. The whole scene mirrors Anakin begging Mace Windu to not kill Palpatine in Revenge of the Sith. Unlike in that film, Ben actually does succeed in killing him here.
• Named by the Adaptation: In both Canon and Legends, Dooku has no first name. In Desert of the Storm, he is informally known as Yan Dooku.
• Nebulous Criminal Conspiracy: In Sa Sarad, it turns out that the Death Watch, Xanatos Du Crion, and the Yinchorri were all working together as part of a conspiracy by the Sith.
• Neutrality Backlash: Duke Adonai Kryze, Mandalore's acting ruler, is dealing with this dilemma as his moderate stance makes him a punching bag for extremists on both sides of the aisle. On one hand, he's fighting a war against the Evil Reactionary Death Watch, who seek to return Mandalore to its Glory Days as savage conquerors. On the other side are the New Mandalorians, Actual Pacifist radicals that want to erase all of Mandalore's culture, who undermine his rule through mass protests and (incorrectly) blame him for starting the war.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • In Remembrance: Part II, Ben admits that he intentionally drove Pong Krell to the Dark Side by exploiting Krell's fear of losing in their sparring matches. Ben's intent was to have Krell eventually lose his temper and expose his vulnerability to the Dark Side. This succeeded too well, since Krell winds up going past the Rage Breaking Point and completely falls to the Dark Side in an effort to kill Ben. Part of the problem, it's noted, is that Ben was enjoying it a bit too much.
  • After Ben is captured by the Death Watch, Jango has their underground base destroyed... only to then learn from a younger Pre Vizla that the base he just blew up was where Ben was being imprisoned, and Ben is now trapped under deep rubble.
  • In Tarot, Sian's attempt to help Ben fight Maul results in Maul escaping and Ben losing his leg in the process.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: During the Temple's Bane outbreak, Jango Fett offers to give aid by housing some of the infected Jedi in Mandalore's medical research station. This infuriates the Death Watch, who declare Jango a Category Traitor for helping the Jedi and bomb the entire station, killing thousands of Innocent Bystanders as well as most of the Jedi onboard.
• Noodle Incident: Satine apparently once gave Obi-Wan's padawans a hoverboard, and it didn't end well.
  Granted, Satine couldn't have predicted what Anakin could do with half an afternoon and a few 'light modifications', but still.
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: In Remembrance: Part II, Ben explains to Mace Windu and Shaak Ti that he nudged Pong Krell towards the Dark Side to expose Krell's darker tendencies and have them dealt with. It quickly becomes clear to both Jedi Masters that Ben was more interested in beating and humiliating Krell. Shaak Ti points out that he could have alerted the Healers that Krell was vulnerable to the Dark Side and Mace can sense the sheer hatred that Ben holds against Krell. This makes Mace realize that Ben wanted Pong Krell to Fall and was motivated by vengeance for Krell's actions in the future.
• Nothing Is the Same Anymore: Coronation ends with Palpatine dead, Ben kidnapped by Darth Plagueis, and the implication that Plagueis is going to force Ben to become his new apprentice.
• O.C. Stand-in: In Legends, Sian Jeisel was characterized as being courageous and opposed to fighting in the Clone Wars, which is given a nod by Ben when he refers to her counterpart in his timeline — while also noting that he only met her once. Here, she's characterized as being somewhat quirky, wanting to learn an unconventional form of lightsaber combat and writing holonovels about her peers in her spare time. Later on, however, she becomes more typically courageous, as in her fight with Maul.
• Odd Friendship:
  • In the original timeline, Ben (then General Obi-Wan Kenobi) and Jai Sheelal (then General Grievous) were arch-enemies, and Ben — who ultimately killed Grievous — is still haunted by nightmares of him. Here, Lij Kummar is Spared by the Adaptation, and Ben's efforts to prevent the tragedies that turned Jai Sheelal into Grievous have the entirely perverse result of young Obi-Wan becoming a Kalee national hero, and having multiple children (including one of Jai Sheelal's) named after him. Ben finds this both oddly amusing and deeply bemusing at the same time.
  • Serra Keto (a Jedi Padawan) forms one with Mavi Var'de (a Force-sensitive Mandalorian girl) in Sa Sarad.
• Off with His Head!: In Coronation, Ben ultimately kills Palpatine by using his lightsaber to cut his head off after besting him in a duel.
• Official Kiss: In Chapter 49 of Sa Sarad, Obi-Wan and Satine seal their Relationship Upgrade with a kiss.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • In The Desert Storm, Obi-Wan and Master Tahl share this reaction when Ben almost cuts down Tahl with his lightsaber due to a Reflexive Response.
  • When Plo Koon uses his Emerald Lightning on Ben during a sparring match, Ben instinctively absorbs the electricity instead of blocking it. Just as he's about to redirect it, he panics when he realizes that he can't release the energy without risking the audience's safety and flings it back towards Plo Koon, who is, fortunately, able to safely ground the electric attack.
  • Ben has this reaction in Remembrance when he senses Quinlan's Fall.
  • Chapter 22 of Coronation ends with Ben having the mother of Oh Crap! moments when he discovers that Palpatine hadn't killed his Sith master yet. And now Darth Plagueis knows who Ben is and wants to make him his new apprentice.
• Oh, Crap, There Are Fanfics of Us!: Upon returning to the Jedi Temple in Passages, Obi-Wan is mortified to learn that Sian had been writing various holonovels starring him. Ben, by contrast, finds it hilarious.
• Oh, My Gods!: Generally, whenever someone uses the expression "Oh my god", it's always "gods" in the plural form.
• Old-School Dogfight:
  • Chapter 20 of Lineage sees Jango and Ben pilot Kom'rk-class fighters in a dogfight against the Death Watch.
  • Chapter 12 of Night is entirely devoted to a sky battle that breaks out between Obi-Wan's Kom'rk fighter, Hondo's saucer, and the ships of the Weequay pirates controlling Rattatak's airspace.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • During Ben's challenge for custody of his padawan, he holds back just enough to give off the impression that he's only slightly better than his opponent. When Qui-Gon decides to challenge Ben, Obi-Wan is shocked when Ben doesn't hold back and curb-stomps Qui-Gon almost instantly. This is what makes Obi-Wan realize that something is troubling his master.
  • Upon being introduced to Ben, Mother Talzin can sense that something is off about him. This is serious enough for her to immediately lose her composure and go from being dismissive towards Ben to nearly hostile.
  • When the Yinchorri are about to bomb the Jedi Temple, the normally Elective Mute Jax runs towards Shmi in terror and screams "Mom!".
• Opportunistic Bastard: When Hondo is asked by Ben for the location of Rattatak, Hondo convinces Ben to allow him and his crew to tag along. Upon arriving at Rattatak, Hondo wastes no time raiding the other pirates in the area and stealing their ships. Then, after Ben asks him to attack the Siniteen warlords, Hondo deliberately makes an unreasonable demand and pretends to leave when Ben turns him down. This forces Ben to resort to Challenging the Chief, causing all of the warlords to leave their strongholds to answer his challenge. With the warlords now distracted, Hondo uses the opportunity to attack each of the now undefended strongholds and seize the Siniteen warlords' hoarded wealth for himself, effectively making him the new ruler of Rattatak. Even though the Jedi pressure Hondo into abdicating his new throne, he still walks away with a horde of treasure and a fleet of stolen starships.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: Lady Livion is a shade, a piece of a Darksider's soul stored within a Sith holocron.
• Our Vampires Are Different: The Anzati pirate that hijacks a transport full of padawans and younglings in Chapter 24 of Fever. The Anzat are a race of immortals who survive by feeding off other Force-sensitives. They also possess a hypnotic power that enables them to enthral their victims.
• Outside-Context Problem: Ben Naasade gradually becomes one for the Sith. The Sith are completely blindsided by the arrival of a time traveller who has full knowledge of their plans. Furthering Ben's nature as an OCP is the fact that the Sith are only barely aware that he even exists since other Jedi are always given credit for his accomplishments — something he's very careful to ensure.
• Papa Wolf: Ben towards Obi-Wan in Lineage. After a squad of Death Watch supercommandos take Obi-Wan hostage, their leader points a blaster at Obi-Wan's head and admits that he will kill him regardless of whether Ben and Jango surrender. Ben responds with a Death Glare (which is scary enough to make Jango run for cover) before unleashing a storm of Emerald Lightning that wipes out most of the kyr'stad present.
• Parental Substitute:
  • Ben gradually ends up becoming one to Obi-Wan over the course of the series. By Mirage, Obi-Wan wants Ben to officially become his adopted father, and even asks Ben to change his last name to Kenobi.
  • Master Ky Narec to Asajj Ventress. The first time Asajj called Narec "master", he panicked (due to the meaning of the title from Asajj’s past as a slave) before realizing that it was her way of calling him "Papa".
• Past Experience Nightmare: As part of his PTSD, Ben frequently has nightmares of his experiences during the Clone Wars.
• Patchwork Fic: The series features characters from both Legends and Canon.
• Peggy Sue: The series is about how a post-ROTS Obi-Wan travels 23 years into the past and all the changes that happen because of it.
• Pet the Dog:
  • In chapter 18 of Zodiac, Luminara offers to spar with Quinlan after seeing how no one else was willing to spar with them due to his corruption by the Dark Side.
  • According to the Sleeper, the Powers That Be — specifically, Lukka — transported Ben into the past out of pity after witnessing Ben's Despair Event Horizon. As it turns out, while this is true, there is more to it than that.
• Platonic Declaration of Love:
  • In Night, Obi-Wan makes one to Ben out of gratitude for everything Ben has done for him. Given that Ben is a future version of Obi-Wan, he's both touched and amused by Obi-Wan's confession.
  • During the Sa Sarad arc, Ben acknowledges that he loved Cody and the rest of the clone troopers after being prodded by Jango.
    Ben: Yes, I loved [Cody]. We loved them, and they loved us. That wasn’t a lie. That wasn’t a lie. It just made it worse.
• Plot-Triggering Death: Duke Adonai Kryze's assassination serves as the Inciting Incident for Sa Sarad and sparks civil war on Mandalore between Jango Fett and the Death Watch.
• Poor Communication Kills: Ben has a tendency of keeping everyone else in the dark whenever he acts. This initially leads to many cases of Headbutting Heroes from Jedi who misunderstood the situation.
  • In Ruin, Ben joins the Republic's delegation to Tovarskl, a Yam'rii colony world being invaded by the genocidal Kaleesh. From his knowledge of the future, Ben knows the Yam'rii are Villains With Good Publicity and that the Kaleesh are Good All Along. Since he didn't bother explaining this to the other Jedi before he left, this nearly leads to a case of Let's You and Him Fight between the Jedi and Kaleesh after the Yam'rii secretly imprison Ben and claim the Kaleesh killed him.
  • Following this, Obi-Wan has nightmares from his traumatizing experience with the Yam'rii. This leads to him having a Heroic BSoD in front of Ben. Unfortunately, the Jedi who witness Obi-Wan's breakdown incorrectly assume that it was caused by Ben's Training from Hell. It doesn't help that during the Tovarskl mission, Ben resorted to destroying Obi-Wan's mental shields in order to stop the Jedi from massacring the Kaleesh. This causes Adi Gallia and Master Tahl to confront Ben over his "abusive" treatment of his padawan.
  • Played with in Sa Sarad. Prior to joining Jango's army, Ben tries to avert this by leaving behind notes for Windu which inform him about how the Yinchorri attacked the Jedi Temple in Ben's timeline. However, Ben disguised his warnings as vague historical reports and was counting on Mace to be able to decipher them. Although Mace does figure out what the true meaning behind his notes, Ben failed to include how and when the Yinchorri would attack. Thus the only thing Windu can really do with this information is have security at the Temple tightened, something he was going to do anyway. Because of this, the Yinchorri successfully plant a bomb in the Temple which causes catastrophic damage.
  • In Tarot, this costs Ben a major victory. While he warned Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon about the Sith and the need to take Maul alive, he neglected to tell Qui-Gon's padawan, Sian, any of this. So when Ben is on the verge of defeating Maul, Sian tries to "help" by going for the killing blow, unaware that Ben wanted Maul alive. Ben then has to draw his attention away from Maul to stop Sian, giving Maul the chance to escape. While Ben is initially furious with Sian, he quickly recognizes that Sian didn't fully understand the situation and was only trying to help.
• Power Incontinence: During Shmi's pregnancy, she experiences mood swings which she then projects onto other people using the Force. It's mostly harmless, and sometimes hilarious.
• Power Of Hate: Shmi Skywalker is an unusually positive example of this. The abusive treatment she faced from her slavers made her hate them so much that she is determined to never be like them. Ben respects her achievement and strength, but doesn't think most Jedi should try to emulate it, as they're more likely to fall into aggression and revenge.
• Promoted to Love Interest:
  • Shmi and Tholme have never even met each other in canon. Here, they fall in love and even give birth to a daughter.
  • Master Fay is promoted to Ben's love interest despite having a platonic relationship with him in Legends.
• Properly Paranoid: After Palpatine's failed attempt to assassinate Obi-Wan, he goes to extensive lengths to erase any proof of his involvement to the point where any recordings of Palpatine's encounter with Obi-Wan in the hallway was burned from the computer's matrix. Even Breha couldn't find any images of Palpatine handing Obi-Wan his lightsaber when she launched her own private investigation after being tipped off by Ben.
• Put on a Bus: Quinlan disappears from the story in Ripples after he leaves the Jedi to join the Sith as a Fake Defector.
  • The Bus Came Back: But does reappear several parts of the series later, in Tarot.
• Rage Against the Mentor: In Remembrance, one of the memories Quinlan sees is Qui-Gon's ghost appearing before Ben on Tatooine. Ben's response to seeing the ghost was to angrily yell at him for abandoning him and spending his dying moments thinking about Anakin instead of his own padawan.
• Reflexive Response:
  • In The Desert Storm, Ben instinctively shoves Obi-Wan behind him and takes out his lightsaber when Master Tahl calls out his name while his back was turned. Ben is mortified when he realizes that he nearly cut down Tahl for no reason other than surprising him.
  • During his time on Tatooine, Ben taught himself to redirect the lightning from the planet's electrical storms. When Plo Koon shoots Emerald Lightning at Ben during their sparring match, he instinctively absorbs the attack, only to then remember that he's inside a crowded arena and has nowhere to safely release the Force lightning to.
• Related Differently in the Adaptation: In Canon and Legends, Korkie Kryze was Satine’s nephew - though there was a lot of fan speculation otherwise. Here, in the original timeline, he was her son born out of a Teen Pregnancy caused by Obi-Wan/Ben. In the changed timeline, Korkie is a girl... born out of a Teen Pregnancy caused by Obi-Wan.
• Related in the Adaptation: Korkie Kryze is Obi-Wan's daughter with Satine, while the Korkie from canon is Ben's son.
• Relationship Upgrade:
  • Shmi and Tholme eventually get together in Deliverance.
  • Obi-Wan and Satine naturally fall in love with each other during the events of Sa Sarad.
  • Ben and Fay become a couple in Chapter 2 of Mirage.
• Replacement Goldfish: When Ben joins Jango’s army, he starts to treat Jango as a substitute for Cody. During one battle, Ben accidentally addresses Jango as "Commander", with Jango’s exasperated reaction indicating that it’s not the first time Ben has done so. This is eventually resolved, once Ben explains who he is and what went down in his timeline to Jango.
• Revenge: As the series goes on, it tragically becomes apparent that Ben is primarily driven by his desire for revenge against the Sith as well as anyone else he deems responsible for destroying his life.
  • Ben humiliated and beat Pong Krell with the intention of making him Fall to the Dark Side, ruining the latter's life as payback for the way his future self treated the clone troopers Ben left under his command.
  • During his fight with a younger Darth Maul, Ben uses his desire for revenge against canon!Maul to fuel his attacks and takes satisfaction from seeing him in pain. Sian sensed that all Ben wanted to do was hurt Maul and one of the first feelings Ben had when Sian interfered in their duel was bitter resentment at the idea of having his Vengeance Denied.
  • Nowhere else is this more clear than during the climax of Coronation, when Ben finally fights Darth Sidious in a no holds barred duel. Throughout the fight, Ben savors the fear in Sidious's eyes as he slowly overpowers him and finishes his mental And This Is for... speech with "This is for me". He then derives pleasure from Force-choking the Sith while watching him writhe around on the floor in pain. When Obi-Wan pleads with Ben to spare Palpatine's life and take him into custody, Ben feels anger at being "pulled away from a vengeance that is rightfully his to take."
• Running Gag: Ben being referred to as a "sock in a trash drawer" by his healers.

Tropes S-Z

• Sacrificial Lion: Adonai Kryze is killed off in Sa Sarad, partially to show that the Sith were very much active and still a major threat.
• Sapient Eat Sapient: The mission to intervene in the Kaleesh's genocide of the Yam'rii takes an abrupt turn when it's discovered that the Yam'rii eat live Kaleesh eggs as a delicacy. And it's not the first time they've done something similar.
• Say My Name:
  • Ben shouts "Quin!" in chapter 12 of Remembrance after accidentally throwing Quinlan into a wall and knocking him out.
  • In Chapters 39 and 40 of Sa Sarad, Obi-Wan screams Satine's name after she is shot by a slugthrower.
• Second Love: Satine is Obi-Wan's second love after his brief fling with Taria Damsin in Deliverance.
• Secret Chaser:
  • Quinlan becomes one in Remembrance. He breaks into Obi-Wan and Ben's quarters in order to find out more about Ben's past, and finds Ben's old lightsaber. The one he used during the Clone Wars. The one everybody and their apprentice picked up at some point. Since Quinlan is a very gifted teenage psychometric, this ends very badly.
  • Master Mierme Unill and Padawan Taria Damsin are introduced as these, having come from the Corellian Jedi Temple to investigate the cause of the Jedi Order's recent reforms. By the end of Deliverance, Shaak Ti convinces them to stop digging for information, partly by nudging them in the right direction, partly by warning them that if she notices, Ben will notice and given that Obi-Wan is involved, he will not be pleased — and more to the point, if they're not discreet enough for Ben, they're not discreet enough for those he is after.
• Secret-Keeper: Initially, only the Jedi High Council knows the truth about Ben. However, over the course of the series, several individuals also discover that Ben is from the future.
  • Following the events of the Remembrance trilogy, Quinlan Vos discovers Ben's true identity after using his Psychometry on Ben's old lightsaber, though it's unclear whether he remembers after his mind is cleansed in Night. After the Council discovers that Ben suffers from TSR (what they call PTSD in-universe) they assign a Soul Healer to him. The Healer, Ylar Kala, is told the truth about Ben in order to properly give him therapy.
  • Master Fay finds out Ben's secret after sensing her future self's Force presence from Ben.
  • Sian Jeisel is initially a Secret Secret-Keeper until Night. She figures out that Ben is from the future after seeing how Ben is familiar with Xanatos Du Crion despite the latter claiming to have never met Ben. She also figures out that Qui-Gon was originally Ben's master based on how well Ben knows him — and his palpable issues with him, combined with the occasional uncomfortable remark that Qui-Gon reminds him very much of his Master.
  • As of Sa Sarad, Jango Fett is also added to the small list of people who know Ben's secret.
  • Sha’me, Bo-Katan, and later Jango are amongst the few who know that Satine is pregnant.
• Secretly Selfish: Ben starts to worry that he is this in Night. Obi-Wan's Armor-Piercing Question leads Ben to doubt himself as he realizes that he had several opportunities to help others, yet only intervened if he had something to gain.
  • Case in point, Ben knew from day one that Master Ky Narec was stranded on Rattatak. Despite this, he waited three years before searching for him and only did so because he needed to find Ventress to use as a bargaining chip with the Nightsisters. He was also willing to let the Rattataki people be enslaved by Sinteen warlords and only took down the warlords because Narec and Ventress refused to leave until Rattatak was liberated.
• Seers: Qymaen Jai Sheelal (Grievous, in the original timeline) reveals in his POV section that he's got a dash of ability as a seer—a possible allusion to how the blood of Sifo-Dyas, a Jedi Seer, was used to revive him in canon—which helped him find his wife. It also gives him the enigmatic message of, "this man is my death, this man is my life", regarding Ben. Considering that Ben killed him in the original timeline, and arranged matters so that he would never become Grievous in this timeline, it seems pretty bang on.
• Selective Obliviousness: The Jedi Council is this in regards to the Sith. Ben notes that the problem is that they don't want the Sith to return and for many, it would be much simpler to pretend that the Sith were still gone. Over time, they come to accept it, and mostly just hold out for proof to definitively convince the rest of the Order.
• Separated by a Common Language: The first time that Master Tholme rescued a young Aayla Secura from slavery and brought her to the Temple, Aayla was scared of Tholme because the people around her addressed Tholme as “Master”. To the Jedi, “Master” is the title used to indicate experience, wisdom, and seniority. To Aayla, the term “master” was associated with the cruel slavemasters she had been enslaved to. Anakin eventually helps clear up the misunderstanding by stomping on Tholme’s foot and getting no reaction beyond puzzled surprise, showing that he wasn’t like Aayla’s previous owner.
• Series Goal: After traveling into the past, Ben's ultimate goal is to defeat the Sith. It's suggested in Mirage, however, that the entity that sent him back ( Lukka) has a different goal in mind, related to Obi-Wan.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Ben intends to do this after finding himself in the past.
• Sex Equals Love: Completely averted and openly defied. Word of God states that there is a world of difference between physical attraction, sexual intimacy, and romantic interest.
  • During his exile, Ben slept with Bail and was even offered to be part of a threesome with Bail and Breha. Bail did this solely as a way to comfort Ben and there was never any actual romance between them.
  • Jango eventually sleeps with Ben in Sa Sarad, but this was more about deep trust rather than romantic love.
• Sex for Solace: At some point during Ben's exile, Bail and Breha tried to convince him to engage in a threesome with them, though Ben only slept with Bail. After seeing Ben's memories, Quinlan notes that it was more about comfort than lust.
• Shadow Archetype: Lady Livion is one to Ben. She is what Ben could have become had he allowed his grief to overtake him and fell to the Dark Side.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: Ben has PTSD from his time in the Clone Wars. While he's fine for the most part, he is prone to having flashbacks, experiences panic attacks, and frequently suffers from nightmares about the war, and when he hits a particular stress point it's apparent to anyone familiar with 'TSR' that he's got it bad. Once this becomes public knowledge among the Jedi, he's actually seen in a more sympathetic light, as it explains much of his behavior.
• Ship Sinking: Obi-Wan/Cody is firmly sunk in Sa Sarad where Ben tells Jango that his love for Cody was purely platonic.
• Ship Tease:
  • Obi-Wan and Satine naturally receive a lot of this. They decide to make it official in Sa Sarad.
  • Ben and Fay get a fair bit, too, though it's mostly light-hearted teasing by Fay. By Ripples, Obi-Wan is firmly a Shipper on Deck. They get together in Mirage, to Obi-Wan's delight.
• Shipper on Deck:
  • Since at least Ripples, Obi-Wan has shipped Ben with Master Fay. During their time on Tatooine, he's delighted when Ben inadvertently confirms that he and Fay are an item.
  • Upon learning that Adi Gallia had started going out with Mace Windu, an excited Obi-Wan blurts out that half of the Jedi Temple had been playing matchmaker with the two of them since Obi-Wan was a youngling.
    Obi-Wan: Master Gallia! Master Gall– you do know that half the Temple has been trying to set the two of you up for longer than I had been a Padawan!
    Adi Gallia: [blandly amused] I do, yes.
• Shock and Awe: The Jedi have their own version of Force lightning called Emerald Lightning. Unlike Sith lightning, which draws upon the desire to inflict pain, Emerald Lightning is generated when a Force-user accepts pain and focuses it outward in an electrical blast. This technique is normally reserved for Kel Dorian Jedi, such as Plo Koon, whose homeworld sees electrical storms on a normal basis.
  • Ben is able to redirect lightning, a skill which he picked up on Tatooine from the lightning storms caused by the static from the planet's sandstorms. He later teaches Obi-Wan to do it.
• Shout-Out: The song that Ben sings to Terena while she gives birth in chapter 26 of Mirage is an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's 1892 poem "Sing me a Song of a Lad that is Gone".
• The Shrink: Ylar Kala is a Soul Healer (the Jedi’s version of a shrink) who has Ben as her patient after his TSR is identified. She’s both patient and open-minded when talking with Ben about his past traumas, and does her best given the circumstances to help him recover.
• Shrouded in Myth: Ben's Mysterious Past and claimed Mandalorian heritage has made him this amongst younger Jedi, as various speculations and rumors are spread about him by younglings and padawans—one of whom starts writing a torrid and trashy holonovel romance about him, to Obi-Wan's mortification. In Deliverance, Taria notes that everyone in the Coruscant Temple has something to say about the mysterious Ben Naasade.
• Sick Episode: Played For Drama in Fever. Following their separation from the Senate, the entire Jedi Order gets crippled by a virus bioengineered by the Sith.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: Jango Fett casually swears and does so more often than the other characters.
• Slaying Mantis: The Yam'rii is a species of giant alien mantises who's bladed arms are capable of slicing through limbs easily and they've committed genocide several times.
• Soldier vs. Warrior: This is the initial problem that Ben and Jango face while training their Mandalorian army in Sa Sarad — the Mando'ade are peerless commandoes and work very well in small groups, but they're not very good at working together on an institutional level as a military, whereas the Death Watch's brutal Drill Sergeant Nasty training has resulted in soldiers who work together. Ben takes steps to resolve this, including enforcing a limited mixing of units rather than just ordering them by clan (if nothing else, different clans specialise in different things), and recruiting the men and women who in his timeline trained the GAR.
• Sore Loser: Pong Krell. He fell to the Dark Side and tried to murder Ben because he was angry that Ben kept defeating him in their sparring matches. Ben was supposedly exploiting this to lure out any Dark tendencies and get them dealt with, but it's transparent both to him and everyone else that It's Personal and he was enjoying it far too much.
• Soul Jar: Sith holocrons are created by separating a piece of one's soul and trapping it within the Holocron.
• Spared by the Adaptation:
  • Master Tahl survives her doomed mission from Legends after Ben advises Yoda to have Qui-Gon accompany her.
  • Ronderu lij Kummar, Grievous's Lost Lenore in Legends, is spared from her original death on Kalee as a result of Ben's scheming and accompanied Jai Sheelal to Tovarskl. She later becomes part of a Ruling Couple alongside Jai Sheelal.
  • Unlike in canon, Ventress survived the Clone Wars in Ben's original timeline. The last time Ben saw her, she was still working as a bounty hunter — though she passed up the chance for the galaxy's biggest bounty (him), buying him a drink as he bought one for her, before they went their separate ways.
  • Master Ky Narec, Ventress's master whose death drove her to the Dark Side, is rescued by Ben and Obi-Wan early on, preventing his canonical death.
  • Because Shmi Skywalker was taken to Coruscant to become a Jedi, she is never killed by the Tusken Raiders on Tatooine.
  • Qui-Gon Jinn survives his duel with Darth Maul thanks to Obi-Wan Kenobi using Nightsister magic to heal his wound but in doing so he loses his connection to the Force.
  • Captain Rozess survives the Yinchorri's attack on the Jedi Temple, albeit heavily injured.
  • Because Ben killed Palpatine before he was able to overthrow his master, Darth Plagueis outlives his apprentice and replaces Sidious as the main antagonist.
• Spell My Name With An S: The author spells the name Vizsla as "Vizla". They’ve also spelled Sidious as "Sideous", though that has gotten better by Tarot.
• Spirit Advisor: Master Polkit becomes one to Lady Livion (who is already a ghost herself) after her death during Fever, with Ben's attempt to teach her last minute apparently having succeeded.
• The Spook: Ben Naasade is this to most of the other Jedi. Since he's a time-traveler, the Jedi obviously have no record of his existence and to many, he seems to have popped up out of nowhere. The natural assumption is that he's an ex-Jedi Shadow, though even they find him mysterious and disturbing.
• The Stations of the Canon: Averted completely, largely because Ben is going out of his way to steadily undo canon. The series starts with Ben rescuing Shmi and a three-year-old Anakin on Tatooine and snowballs from there.
• Stranger in a Familiar Land: Ben finds himself in this situation when he travels to the past. The first time he travels to Coruscant, he’s taken aback by the lax security compared to the tight security he was used to during the war.
• Student–Master Team: For the Jedi, pretty much every Master-Padawan pair is this. Ben and Obi-Wan are one notable example.
• Sudden Downer Ending: The series ends with Ben having exposed Palpatine as a Sith and killed him. Then, as he is recovering from his wounds in Naboo's hospital, Darth Plagueis abducts him with the intention of training Ben to become Sidious' replacement.
• Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome: Adonai Kryze, who was first introduced in Remembrance, is assassinated by the Sith at the start of Sa Sarad.
• Survivor Guilt: Being among the few survivors of Order 66 has worsened Ben's guilt about Anakin's fall and the ensuing Jedi Purge, even when some of the things he blames himself for were completely out of his control.
• Switching P.O.V.: The point-of-view switches between Ben and Obi-Wan, as well as occasionally one of the many side characters like Quinlan, Sian, Shmi, etc.
• Taken During the Ending: Coronation ends on a cliffhanger with Ben being abducted from the hospital by Darth Plagueis after killing Sidious in a duel during Padmé's coronation as Queen of Naboo.
• Tears of Joy:
  • Upon arriving at the Jedi Temple for the first time in four years, Ben is reduced to tears of joy after sensing all the life emitting from the Temple.
  • Shmi has this reaction when she experiences rain for the first time.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Unsurprisingly, Ben Naasade and Qui-Gon Jinn. Ben still has unresolved issues stemming from his time as Qui-Gon's padawan, while Qui-Gon isn't used to having a fellow Jedi who can put up with his maverick attitude and will openly (rather than covertly, like Yoda) call him out for his failings.
• That Man Is Dead: Ben calls himself "Naasade",^note pronounced nah-sah-day Mandalorian for "nobody", in reference to how his past is gone and he has effectively appeared out of nowhere in the new timeline. It's eventually confirmed that due to his influence, Obi-Wan will not grow up to be like him, so he really is cut off from his own history.
• Theme Naming: As part of their culture, the Nightbrothers all have rather ominous-sounding names.
  Quinlan: Howl, Feral, Savage, Ravage, Talon, Wraith. Sensing a theme?
• There Are No Therapists: Averted. They exist but Ben never got around to seeing one during the Clone Wars since he was deemed "too critical to the war effort to keep off the front lines". When the Council learns of Ben's TSR, they immediately assign him a Soul Healer (the Jedi's equivalent of a therapist). When said Soul Healer finds out that reasoning, she's horrified.
  • This gets lampshaded in Ripples. During Ben's therapy session with Ylar Klar, he recounts the events of The Phantom Menace, leading Klar to comment that both he and Anakin definitely should have gotten therapy after what they had gone through.
• This Is Gonna Suck: In True Colors, Ben has this reaction when the spice frigate he and Jango just hijacked is attacked by pirates and again when he recognizes Hondo Ohnaka as their leader.
• Time Skip: Occurs between each story in the series.
  • Ruin, the second fanfic in the series, is set five months after Ben first arrives at the Jedi Temple with Shmi and Anakin in The Desert Storm.
  • Tarot is set about five months after the end of Sa Sarad.
• Token Evil Teammate: After being freed from her holocron, Lady Livion becomes one for the Jedi Temple. Her tendencies to gravitate towards those struggling with the Dark Side becomes useful for the healers, who reach out and treat those she identifies as vulnerable to Falling.
• Token Heroic Orc: Dahvo is a Zygerrian—a species whose hat is slavery—and a Jedi Knight who befriends Shmi and secretly works as part of an Underground Railroad for escaped slaves.
• Took a Level in Badass:
  • As a result of Ben's training, Obi-Wan goes from a mediocre padawan to a prodigy capable of defeating senior padawans in a duel.
  • Shmi also takes a level in badass after being trained by Shaak Ti.
  • Ben himself also grows significantly more powerful than canon!Obi-Wan over the course of the series. Aside from continuing to hone his skills in lightsaber combat, he also acquires new Force powers like emerald lightning and Nightsister magick. As of Coronation, Ben has become stronger than Palpatine and he describes overpowering the latter to be easier than he expected.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: After falling to the Dark Side, Quinlan becomes much more confrontational and aggressive than before.
• Training Boss: When signs of Darth Maul start turning up, Ben has a spar with Qui-Gon where he wields two lightsabers at once and uses a Vaapad style, the closest he can come to imitating Maul, so that Qui-Gon will be better prepared for such a fight.
• Training from Hell: In order to prepare his past self for battle with the Sith, Ben puts Obi-Wan through an intense training regimen which often leaves his padawan exhausted to the point of collapse by the end of the day.
• Trauma Button: Ben has several due to his Dark and Troubled Past.
  • A lot of Ben's trauma is centered around General Grievous.
    • In Ruin, while lying on the ground after being wounded by the Yam'rii, Ben almost panics when he sees Jai Sheelal (Grievous's past self). The idea of being vulnerable and weak with his future Arch-Enemy standing above him nearly triggers him.
    • In Remembrance, after Pong Krell stabs Ben with his lightsaber, Ben's injuries cause him to hallucinate his attacker as Grievous. This triggers Ben into using the Dark Side to nearly kill Krell by attempting a Literal Disarming.
    • In Remembrance: Part II, Ben vehemently refuses to allow the Healers to implant him with artificial organs due to the process reminding him of Grievous's cyborg nature and having a nightmare of transforming into Grievous.
  • At the beginning of Fever, hearing a transmission warning everyone to stay away from the Jedi Temple on Coruscant causes Ben to have a brief panic attack, as it reminds him of the transmission he sent out during Order 66.
  • In Tarot, Ben nearly relives one of the worst moments of his life. He and Qui-Gon duel against Darth Maul and he is once again helpless as Maul impales Qui-Gon with his lightsaber. He finally breaks down into tears when Obi-Wan is able to heal Qui-Gon since it causes Ben to see himself as a failure because he couldn't save his master in his original timeline.
• Trial by Combat: The Siniteen slavers ruling over Rattatak use a system of public challenges as a justice system. Obi-Wan expresses surprise that a species known for their hyperintelligence would utilize such a barbaric and outdated form of law.
• Trickster Mentor: Ben creates a resurgence in battle prowess among the Jedi by challenging various Masters and Knights to a spar and beating them while holding back just enough to give off the appearance that he was only slightly better. This leads to many Jedi training harder in hopes of defeating him.
• A True Story in My Universe: In Sa Sarad, Sian begins to write a holonovel based off Ben's life with his nature as a time traveler even being a major plot point. Upon reading her draft, Bultar (believing the bit about time travel to be something Sian made up) questions whether it's appropriate to publish the novel given the "creative liberties" Sian took with a Jedi Master's personal life.
  • After her first novel becomes an instant bestseller, Sian goes on to author an entire holonovella series which retells Ben and Obi-Wan's various adventures. Obi-Wan is especially mortified to discover that Sian had Padmé draw dramatic artwork for the books, artwork that depicts a red-haired teenage Jedi that is clearly himself with only the barest of cosmetic changes. It seems that the books are especially popular amongst teenage girls, hence why the cover art for the second holonovel features Obi-Wan shirtless. The next time Obi-Wan visits Satine, he's embarrassed to see a poster for Sian's novels hung up in her room. By Coronation, Sian's novels have become so popular that even Adi Gallia is shown listening to an audiobook adaptation in her spare time.
• Tsundere: Shmi becomes one towards Master Tholme, frequently arguing with him despite having feelings for him. Shaak Ti explains to Tholme that as a slave, Shmi couldn't draw attention to herself and wasn't allowed to voice her opinions. The fact that she's willing to openly argue with Tholme means that Shmi trusts him deeply and is willing to express her true feelings to him.
• Underestimating Badassery: When Ben challenges each of the Siniteen warlords terrorizing Rattatak to a gladiatorial duel, his first two opponents brush him off as an arrogant mercenary and don't even bother bringing weapons for their match. After Ben curb-stomps his first Siniteen, the next warlord still underestimates him and attributes his first victory to pure luck. Once the second warlord goes down, the two remaining start to treat him seriously.
• Unequal Pairing: Discussed by Tholme and Shaak Ti after Shmi’s kiss with him. Tholme is understandably hesitant about entering a relationship with Shmi, given that a) she’s younger than him, b) she's still a Padawan while he's a Master, and c) she was a former slave to boot. Shaak Ti counters by pointing out that Shmi is a fully consenting adult and that it was only a kiss.
• Unknown Rival: Ben has devoted the rest of his life to destroying the Sith and undoing their centuries-long Grand Plan. The Sith, however, are almost completely unaware of Ben's existence, identity, or his plans to defeat them. Knowing how much of an advantage this gives him, Ben intends to keep it that way.
• Unscrupulous Hero: In Coronation, Ben resorts to using extremely unethical and illegal methods in order to finally defeat Palpatine. Fed up with the Jedi's inability to find any solid evidence that would allow them to legally arrest Palpatine, Ben decides to take the law into his own hands and illegally arrests Palpatine during Padmé's coronation under the false pretenses of having been authorized to do so by the Republic. He then pressures Palpatine into revealing his Force powers by subtly threatening to kill him once they are alone, and then uses Force illusions to make it seem as though Palpatine attacked first, justifying Ben's use of violent force against the Senator. After defeating the Sith in a duel, Ben Force-chokes Palpatine before decapitating him while ignoring his attempts to surrender.
• Unwanted Rescue: Jango Fett describes his kidnapping of Bo-Katan Kryze as a "rescue". Bo-Katan is evidently not happy with her "rescuers", especially when Jango locks her inside a crate for an entire day. She goes berserk upon being released and repeatedly tries attacking Jango, who unleashes his own No-Holds-Barred Beatdown in retaliation.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid:
  • In-Universe example with the attitude of the Jedi Council, and most others who know, about Ben's true origins. After all, Obi-Wan Kenobi is a hard-working young Initiate/Padawan, with a kind heart that he wears on his sleeve, no pretensions or secrets to him, and the potential to be an exemplary Jedi. Ben Naasade is very secretive, both passively and actively manipulative, a terrifyingly driven master warrior who's unnaturally at home on the battlefield, suffering from horrifying PTSD on his good days and is probably best described by Windu's internal monologue as "a half-mad time-travelling hermit", with an attitude to morality that can kindly be described as 'pragmatic', an eerie understanding of the Force, far too great a knowledge about everyone from Initiates to Masters for anyone's comfort, and a deeply unnerving streak of cold-blooded ruthlessness. As one of them says plainly, "I never imagined we could lose Obi-Wan Kenobi so badly." Sian Jeisel, a friend of Obi-Wan's who figures it out through their mutual connection to Qui-Gon Jinn, observes that there's barely fragments of the boy she knows in Ben.
  • Another In-Universe example when Ben meets a younger Asajj Ventress. He finds it heartbreaking to see that the Sith assassin he fought during the Clone Wars used to be a happy girl with a loving father.
    Truth be told, Padawan Ventress is difficult to look at. Her age falls somewhere between Obi-Wan and Quinlan’s—at least by appearance of her physical development—her skin is soft, unscarred and unmarked, her face still rounded with baby fat, and her eyes are so large and expressive. She’s young, and she’s innocent, headstrong and so very curious. She’s happy. Genuinely, truly happy, and something about it just makes it feel like he’s being stabbed in the gut.
• Villain: Exit, Stage Left: Attempted in Night by the last remaining Siniteen warlord after seeing Ben Curb Stomp the others. He doesn't get far before Obi-Wan intercepts him.
• Villain Forgot to Level Grind: This is how Ben is able to defeat Darth Sidious in Coronation. Since the Clone Wars hadn’t happened yet, Sidious had yet to feed off the galaxy-wide suffering caused by the conflict and the Light Side's presence in the galaxy wasn't being smothered by years of galactic war. This means that Sidious was much weaker than his future counterpart. Meanwhile, Ben has a lifetime of experience fighting the Sith and had spent the past seven years growing in power through constant training. As a result, Ben is actually stronger than Sidious at this point and he overpowers the Sith Lord with surprising ease.
• Villain Takes an Interest: Chapter 22 of Coronation ends with Darth Plagueis revealing his existence to Ben and implying that he intends to make Ben his new apprentice due to how much Ben was able to impress him by killing Sidious.
• Wax On, Wax Off: As part of his training under Ben, Obi-Wan has to use the Force to lift individual grains of sand while keeping track of each grain. This enables Obi-Wan to later lift numerous boulders with the Force by simply imagining them as grains of sand. Later on, in Mirage, it helps him to gain a whole new understanding of the Force, based on the true meaning of the phrase, "I am one with the Force, the Force is with me".
• We ARE Struggling Together: This is the problem that Jango and Ben are having to deal with in Sa Sarad. When Ben takes part in Jango Fett's war against the Death Watch, he is made a general and is placed in charge of overseeing the training for Jango's warriors. Due to Ben's Jedi past, almost none of Jango's warriors respect him and Ben even muses that many of them are probably thinking of ways to kill him in an "accident". It's just as worse amongst the Mandalorians themselves, as Jango's army is a mixing pot consisting of warriors from dozens of different clans, many of whom have long-running feuds with each other. Mercifully, it gets better over time, as Ben proves he's as Mandalorian as anyone else, he's Crazy and Awesome — with emphasis on the 'crazy', even by Mandalorian standards — and that he's genuinely a very good commander.
• We Have Become Complacent: A thousand years of peace has left the Jedi Order at a mere fraction of its former numbers and a shadow of its former glory. Knowing what's to come, Ben is working to undo this.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy:
  • Ben has a significant case of this and other unresolved issues regarding Qui-Gon Jinn (who he both loved and resented for his initial rejection and occasional regrets). Since it was with his timeline's version, this Qui-Gon is puzzled by how Ben blows hot and cold towards him, and is deeply troubled by (after Ben cryptically remarks that Qui-Gon reminds him of his old Master) Obi-Wan's observation that Ben's Master was probably "a great Jedi, but not a good man." This all left Ben with an obsessive drive to be the 'perfect' Jedi, per the Code, which ultimately broke both him and his relationship with Anakin, who became a Well Done Son Guy in his own right. As a result, he's much more flexible and gentler with Obi-Wan.
  • Heartbreakingly, in Passage, Qui-Gon all but reveals this (after several hints across the series of his own issues with the very strict and dignified Master Dooku) when he says that in regard to his reluctance to push his boundaries (regarding his use of the Force after losing the ability to sense it, but also in general) comes not from fear of failure, but "disappointment and shame."
• Wham Episode:
  • At the end of Remembrance: Part I, Quinlan learns Ben’s secret and falls to the Dark Side in the process.
  • Remembrance: Part III ends with one. Obi-Wan is hospitalized after Palpatine attempts to assassinate him by making his lightsaber explode and Ben realizes that the Sith are now targeting Obi-Wan.
  • Sa Sarad starts as one. Duke Adonai Kryze gets assassinated by the Sith and Ben goes on the run with Obi-Wan, Satine, and Serra Keto. Realizing that the Sith were responsible for Kryze's death, Ben decides to take part in Mandalore's civil war and temporarily resigns from the Jedi Order.
  • Where do we begin with Tarot? Ben and Obi-Wan finally encounter Darth Maul for the first time. Ben loses his leg. Qui-Gon survives being impaled by Maul's lightsaber at the cost of his Force abilities. Oh, and Sian ends up taking Obi-Wan's role as Maul's Arch-Enemy.
  • Mirage, Chapter 10: Satine is secretly pregnant with Obi-Wan’s child.
  • Mirage, Chapter 30: At long last, Ben reveals the truth about himself to Obi-Wan.
  • The whole climax of the Coronation arc is, without question, the biggest Wham Episode to date in the series. Obi-Wan and Sian learn that Senator Palpatine is the Sith Lord responsible for destroying the Jedi Order in the Bad Future Ben came from. After an entire series of build-up, Ben exposes Palpatine's true nature as a Sith during Padmé's coronation and engages him in a duel that gets publicly broadcasted to the entire galaxy. The most shocking moment comes in Chapter 21, where Ben kills Palpatine. Finally, it turns out that Palpatine is not the Big Bad of the series. That distinction instead goes to his master Darth Plagueis, who has Ben kidnapped from the hospital with the intention of making him Palpatine's replacement.
• Wham Line:
  • What is Sown ends with Obi-Wan's presenting his findings on the Jedi Order's decline over the millennia to the Jedi Council. This brings Obi-Wan to the conclusion of his research:
    Obi-Wan: Masters, the Jedi Order is dying.
  • In Night, Sian has several as she tries to subtly inform Ben that she knows his secret. She starts by referring to Qui-Gon as "our master" twice. When Ben fails to pick up the hint, she outright addresses him as "Master Obi-Wan''.
  • Tarot ends with Qui-Gon waking up in the hospital after his near-death at the hands of Darth Maul. As he is greeted by Sian, he realizes that he can't sense anything. The fanfic then ends on this line.
    And he is completely Force Blind.
  • Satine's interlude in Mirage starts with one in the narration:
    If she starts moving, she knows her stomach will start churning, her hips will ache, and the baby will likely start kicking, which does her bladder no favors.
  • Mirage: Chapter 23 has one from Ben’s narration as he watches Obi-Wan wake up from his earlier Out Of Body Experience.
    That is ''not'' his padawan.
  • In Stories Within a Story III, the reader learns the name of Obi-Wan and Satine's child: Korkie. Combined with Satine and Bo-Katan's other sibling being Adapted Out, it is all but stated by Ben - who suspected it but did not think about it further - that the Korkie Kryze from canon wasn't Satine's nephew liked he claimed, but rather her and Obi-Wan's son. He reveals this, heartbroken, to Jango, who understandably suggests that they get phenomenally drunk.
  • Chapter 16 of Coronation ends on this line:
    Ben is going to kill Darth Sidious, and he’s going to do it today.
  • Ben delivers one at the end of Chapter 17 of Coronation:
    Ben: Senator Sheev Palpatine of Naboo. By the authority of the Galactic Republic and the Jedi Order under which I serve, I’m afraid I must place you under arrest.
  • Chapter 22 of Coronation ends on one, although the wham mostly comes from who is saying the line rather than what is actually being said. Just as Ben seems to have killed Darth Sidious, the identity of the true Big Bad gets revealed:
    Darth Plagueis: Such theatrics. And what a pity. My apprentice was so very nearly complete. Although I do see much potential in you. How… fortuitous.
• Wham Shot: Chapter 22 of Coronation ends with Ben having a Post-Victory Collapse after killing Sidious. In his last moments of consciousness, he glimpses Darth Plagueis watching him from the opposite end of the room.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Completely averted with the Kaleesh. The Yam'rii's devouring of Kaleesh eggs is treated as the equivalent of child murder and cannibalism. When the Republic's delegates discover the truth, they immediately end their support for the Yam'rii and the experience gives Obi-Wan nightmares of the Yam'rii devouring the Kaleesh eggs.
• What the Hell Are You?: In Coronation, one of the attendees at Padmé's coronation whispers "What is that? What is he?" when everyone in the ballroom sees Palpatine's eyes turn Sith-yellow for the first time. This was actually an illusion created by Ben using Nightsister magick, but Palpatine's eyes later turn yellow for real during his duel with Ben.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • Master Tahl confronts Ben for the harsh training that Obi-Wan is put through.
  • At the beginning of Ruin, both Adi Gallia and Tahl criticize Ben for bringing Obi-Wan on a mission to a planet in the middle of a violent genocide.
  • In True Colors, Jango Fett calls out Ben for bringing a thirteen-year-old Obi-Wan with him on a dangerous mission against spice smugglers (the Super-Commando Code bans combat for anyone under 14). Ben retorts that it wasn't supposed to be dangerous, and as soon as it became dangerous, he sent Obi-Wan to hide in the vents. Obi-Wan was just (un)lucky enough to fall out of the vents head-first into an epic amount of spice, right in front of Fett.
  • In Mirage, Lady Livion criticizes Obi-Wan for feeling guilty about accidentally removing Qui-Gon's Force sensitivity, rather than just being grateful that he was able to prevent Qui-Gon from dying. Obi-Wan counters by pointing out that some would consider being Force blind to be a Fate Worse than Death.
    Lady Livion: Only a Jedi could be sullen for not having done a more miraculous job of saving someone from certain death.
• Who Are You?: The female Siniteen warlord that fights Ben in Night asks him this after seeing him curb-stomp two of her fellow warlords and briefly succeed in using a Jedi Mind Trick on her during their duel. Ben responds by giving her a wolfish grin.
• You Are in Command Now: Ben and Mace temporarily take leadership of the Jedi Order when the Temple’s Bane virus incapacitates the Council.
• You Wouldn't Believe Me If I Told You: Since the Jedi Council dismissed Ben's warnings about the Sith, he believes that they would do the same to anything else he might say. Because of this, he decides to unearth evidence that can support his claims and allow others to come to their own conclusions. Quinlan even points this out to Windu with his Armor-Piercing Response above.

Rise and Fall provides examples of:

Warning! All spoilers for The Desert Storm will be unmarked.

Tropes A – Z

• Accidental Kidnapping: In Deception, Obi-Wan is knocked unconscious after being shot with a sniper rifle while acting as a bodyguard for Vas Yurik, who recently became the target of a dozen bounties. Rako Hardeen — the sniper and a Mandalorian bounty hunter — freaks out upon realizing that he just shot Obi-Wan Kenobi. Believing Obi-Wan to be dead and fearing retribution from Jango, he drags Obi-Wan's "corpse" aboard his starship and flies off with the intention of hiding the evidence in hopes that Jango never finds out. Of course, Obi-Wan is still alive, turning it into this trope. Obi-Wan actually uses this to his advantage and convinces Rako to help him by threatening to inform Jango about his actions.
• Adaptational Species Change: In-Universe. In chapter 9 of Haunting, Obi-Wan learns that a holofilm adaption of one of Sian's holonovellas was being made with the actor playing him being an Echani instead of a human. Sian claims that the change was made because fighting barechested was an "Echani custom" and it would justify the many gratuitous Shirtless Scenes Obi-Wan had in her novel.
• Alone with the Psycho: The first half of Chapter 21 sees Aayla in this situation with Komari Vosa after catching the latter trying to kill a comatose Quinlan. Aayla is a fourteen-year-old Padawan facing off against an adult darksider that outclasses her completely. She's alone and no one else knows where she is since she snuck out of her quarters in the middle of the night. Komari is also holding her lightsaber directly over Quinlan's body, the unspoken threat being that she will kill him if Aayla tries to fight or scream for help. Aayla is told that if she hands over her lightsaber and allows herself to be "put to sleep", then no one will be harmed. Aayla pretends to comply with Komari's demands and tricks her into leaving Quinlan's side. Once Quinlan is no longer in range of Komari's lightsaber, Aayla proceeds to grab Quinlan's lightsaber and immediately attacks Komari while screaming into the Force, alerting Bant and Che to what's happening.
• Ambiguously Evil: It's unclear whose side Lady Livion is truly on. Given her past, it's highly unlikely she would ever truly align with the Sith, but it's also apparent that her alliance with the Jedi is nothing more than a means to an end. Even back in The Desert Storm series, she kept her discovery that Komari was being corrupted by Plagueis a secret from the other Jedi. The Master's Project reveals that she has been hiding her true strength and isn't as powerless as the Jedi believe. She also aided in Komari's escape by knocking out the Temple Guards chasing her. When Komari asks why she helped her, Livion cryptically replies that she believes Komari can lead her to a person of great interest to her.
• Anti-Villain: Ben is technically a Sith Apprentice, and business-like enough in that capacity, providing chillingly accurate and clinical comment about the Sith grand plan. However, the really chilling part is how much he hasn't changed - he plainly hates it and is looking for a way out, whether via a conventional escape or a casket, to the point where he muses that Plagueis immediately moves Komari on when it becomes clear that she's jealous. Plagueis has enough trouble preventing Ben from killing himself without having to worry about assassination attempts too.
• Breather Episode: Deception is definitely this, being much lighthearted in tone than the previous two entries and the plot is fairly comedic with absurdities that result from a trio of Mandalorian bounty hunters trying to assassinate a target without realizing that Obi-Wan is the target's bodyguard.
• Break the Badass: After two years of psychological torture, Plagueis finally succeeds in breaking Ben's will and forces him to acknowledge him as his new master in Rebirth.
• Broken Ace: Ben is even more broken than in Desert Storm, having finally had his sanity comprehensively cracked by Darth Plagueis. However, he still remains formidable, with a mind for strategy that none other than Thrawn himself considers to be 'unparalleled'.
• The Bus Came Back: Xanatos Du Crion returns in The Master's Project after being absent from the story since going into hiding in Sa Sarad.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: Like Palpatine, Darth Plagueis is an elderly Sith Lord who disguises his true nature in public. Whereas Palpatine was a popular senator who used his good reputation to his advantage, Plagueis prefers to slink in the background while keeping a much lower profile. Outside his public persona, Palpatine was a cackling, incredibly hammy psychopath who took a perverse pleasure in inflicting pain and reveled in being Drunk on the Dark Side. In contrast, Plagueis is unemotional to the point where it's uncanny and almost always speaks with a veneer of politeness. While Palpatine (or at least his future self) orchestrated nearly every tragic event in Ben's backstory and is viewed by Ben as his arch-enemy, Plagueis is someone whom Ben shares no prior personal connection with and knows very little about. Furthermore, Palpatine barely acknowledged Ben's existence whereas Plagueis almost immediately became intrigued by Ben and attempted to coerce him into becoming his new apprentice.
• Downer Beginning: The series begins with Ben having been kidnapped by Darth Plagueis with no hope of rescue and Plagueis explaining that he's going to subject Ben to sensory deprivation torture until he snaps and falls to the Dark Side.
• The Dragon: Ben to Plagueis, eventually and extremely reluctantly, after many attempts at suicide (some entirely successful - not that this stops Plagueis).
• Evil All Along: Chapter 20 of Haunting reveals that Komari Vosa had been an ally of Darth Plagueis since day one and was running an illegal drug operation in the Coruscant underworld while also recruiting addicts into the Bando Gora cult to serve as her personal assassins.
• Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humour: Plagueis' sense of humour runs towards the twisted - his servants at the facility where he's keeping Ben are almost exclusively Force-blind clones of Palpatine.
• False Friend: Komari Vosa turns out to have been this to Dooku and the rest of the Jedi. She was never sincere in returning to the Light Side and only became Dooku's Padawan again because she wanted to string him along into believing that he could redeem her, just to make him suffer with the realization that he failed. She secretly relishes being the leader of the Bando Gora and her "rescue" by Dooku and Jango was unwanted, with Dooku being unable to tell how Fallen she truly was due to a combination of her being in a drugged state and Dooku letting his own guilt cloud his judgement. This is played with a little as Komari genuinely has grown fond of Sian and her fear of being rejected by Dooku a second time shows that a part of her still pines for his approval.
• Faux Affably Evil: Darth Plagueis addresses Ben as "Master Jedi" and speaks with a polite tone while fondly recounting how he drove Palpatine to the Dark Side by financially ruining his family and forcing him to murder his wife. He keeps up this facade of politeness even as he explains to Ben how he intends to make him Fall by subjecting him to solitary confinement. It's mentioned in The Master's Project that even while he's psychologically torturing Ben, Plagueis still occasionally treats him to fine dining and plays Shah-tezh with him.
• Foil: Komari Vosa is one to Bruck Chun. Both infiltrated the Jedi Order for the Sith by taking advantage of the Jedi's recent reclamation program. However, Bruck was working for an intermediary and had no idea that he was spying for the Sith. On the other hand, Komari was a willing ally for the Sith from day one and had been personally selected for the task by Darth Plagueis himself. Bruck was horrified when the data he gave Xanatos led to the Temple being bombed and joined the Temple Guard as a way to atone for his actions. Komari expresses no such guilt in her actions and instead fled the Temple to officially join the Sith.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Plagueis explains to Ben that there was nothing particularly special about Palpatine that made him apprentice-worthy material. He was just some random kid that Plagueis chose on a whim because he happened to be standing nearby when he came up with the idea to train a successor.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: Invoked by Darth Plagueis in Into the Fire. He seals Ben in a sensory deprivation chamber knowing that Ben will fall prey to his trauma and hoping that it will make him embrace the Dark Side.
• Hero with Bad Publicity: Ben's reputation amongst the Jedi and the Republic takes a major hit due to his murder of Palpatine and subsequent disappearance. Even after the Jedi Council tries to explain that Palpatine was a Sith, half of the Order still believe that Ben fell to the Dark Side and went into hiding.
• Hope Spot: After Quinlan is put into a coma from the injuries he sustained while fending off a Bando Gora assassin, Aayla sneaks into his hospital room in the middle of the night after sensing that he was in danger. Upon entering the room, she's relieved to find Siri standing over Quinlan's body and calls out to her... only to then realize that the woman isn't Siri, but Komari, who was trying to assassinate Quinlan in his sleep.
• Internal Reveal:
  • During the two year time skip between Coronation and Haunting, the Jedi Council finally made it public that the Sith were alive and likely behind Ben's disappearance. This gets a mixed response from the rest of the Order. Half of them cautiously accept the claims but remain skeptical since they had grown up being taught that the Sith were extinct. The other half (mostly those who've always distrusted or disliked Ben) sided with the Senate and assume that the Council is merely trying to cover up the fact that Ben murdered an innocent senator, fell to the Dark Side, and went on the run to avoid facing justice.
  • Chapter 18 has Quinlan discover Komari Vosa was the leader of the Bando Gora after using his psychometry on one of their assassins sent by Komari to kill him. Chapter 21 sees Aayla, Che, and Bant also make the same discovery when Komari tries to kill Quinlan while he's hospitalized and reveals her Sith-yellow eyes.
• Matriarchy: Eshan, the Echani homeworld, is run by one. Families are headed by matriarchs, women typically inherit everything, and it's said that you need a woman's favor if you want to succeed at anything on Eshan. When Yurik inherits an antique from one of the Echani women he used to act as arm candy for, it becomes a scandal on Eshan and leads to him becoming the target of a dozen bounties.
• Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot: Quinlan's investigation of a drug ring in the lower levels of Coruscant uncovers the existence of a Dark Side cult carrying out contract killings and eventually leads to the discovery that the Sith had infiltrated the Jedi Temple using one of their reclaimed Padawans.
• The Mole: It's revealed in Haunting that Komari Vosa had rejoined the Jedi on behalf of the Sith.
• My Species Doth Protest Too Much: In chapter 11 of Haunting, Aayla complains to Quinlan about how everyone in her Diplomatic Courtesies class expects her to be graceful due to her being a female Twi'lek and the stereotype that Twi'leks are natural dancers.
• Necromancer: Part of what makes Plagueis so terrifying is his ability to not just kill people, but to forcibly bring them back, as Ben finds out to his horror.
• No, Mr. Bond, I Expect You to Dine: During his two-year captivity by Darth Plagueis, Ben would sometimes be brought out of his cell to eat gourmet dinners with the Sith.
• Non-Action Guy: Despite having some training in martial arts, Vas Yurik insists that he is no combatant and his true passion instead lies in acting. Since Echani culture values combat to the point where it's said to be their primary form of communication, this earned him much disdain on his homeworld and made him the target of bullying from his family members.
• Oh, Crap!: Rako Hardeen has this reaction in the first chapter of Deception when he realizes that person he just shot with his sniper rifle was Obi-Wan Kenobi. Being a Mandalorian from Concord Dawn, he knows how much Jango cares about Obi-Wan and is terrified that Jango might come after him for killing him. Luckily for him, Obi-Wan is still alive (if not miffed at being shot and kidnapped).
• Pen Name: Sian Jeisel uses the pen name "Sih Jinsa" while writing her trashy holonovels which dramatically retell Obi-Wan's life.
• Promotion, Not Punishment: Played with in Flashpoint. After Obi-Wan’s marriage, shown in Flicker, Mace summons him to a meeting, where, instead of expelling Obi-Wan from the Order, Mace promotes him to the Council. Of course, Obi-Wan has repeatedly resisted being appointed to the Council, and this new position, created just for Obi-Wan, entails researching and devising new rules for the Order regarding marriage.
• Properly Paranoid: During the Haunting arc, Quinlan and Taria are assigned to investigate an illegal Death Stick operation in the Coruscant underworld. Obi-Wan is convinced that the Sith are responsible for this and tells Quinlan his suspicions. Taria finds the idea of the Sith peddling drugs on the Undercity's streets more than a little ridiculous (though she is careful not to directly express her opinions to him). Only, it turns out that he was right. The one behind the drug operation is none other than Komari Vosa, who had secretly aligned with the Sith and was using her Bando Gora cult to distribute Death Sticks amongst the Undercity's populace.
• Rewatch Bonus: Everything about the scene in Tarot where Komari offhandedly tells Sian about her friendly visits with Hego Damask and playing the game Shah-tezh with him takes a whole new meaning once it's revealed that she was actually allied with the Sith from the very beginning. Rather than Plagueis using their meetings to slowly nudge her into the Dark Side like Livion assumed, Komari was already a willing servant of the Sith. Her learning to play Shah-tezh from Plagueis actually foreshadows her true nature as a Sith acolyte since the game was also favored by Palpatine in the canon EU.
• Time Skip: The Haunting arc is set two years after Ben's abduction by Darth Plagueis in Coronation.
• Villain Episode: The Master's Project is split into two segments, both of which are told from the POV of the series' antagonists. The first half is told from the perspective of one of Darth Plagueis' servants and shows what Plagueis has been doing to Ben over the last two years. The second half is shown from perspective of Komari shortly after Haunting and reveals that Lady Livion helped her escape the Jedi Temple.
• Wham Line: Chapter 17 of Flashpoint ends with the reveal of Ben's Sith identity - General Grievous.

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