![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
|| Republic Commando: Hard Contact || 2004 || Book series || Military, Sci-Fi || 18+ for violence and harrowing themes ||
I still stand on the hill that Etain is a very proactive and competent person who does have good ideas and very much streetsmart, but when it comes to actually implementing them, she encounters obstacles, and these obstacles are mainly her own internal self-harming tendencies.
But in this chapter we get to know another detail about Etain: she is terrified of the thought of working in agriculture field. For her, being in the AgriCorps is equivalent of failure as a Jedi.
I cannot not think about whether Etain's fear of working as a farmer is maybe an allegory for educated middle-class people who think people working in agricultural fields (just doing manual labor in general) are the lowest of lowest. While Etain doesn't despise them, but she is terrified that she will reach that point in her life where she will fail in her profession (Being a Jedi) and ends up being a failure (a farmer).
It's a generational trauma for people who were raised in poverty, they worked hard to get out of the poverty, and then they do everything to prevent their own children to get into that life, even if they have to say things like: You WILL go to college and you WILL STUDY or you will end up serving people.
But right now, Etain doubted even Jinart’s powers of persuasion. She decided to try her own again.
“Birhan, you want me to stay,” she said carefully, concentrating as Master Fulier had taught her. “You want to cooperate with me.”
“I rotten well don’t want to cooperate with you, missy,” he said. “And say please.”
She’d never quite mastered Jedi persuasion when under stress. Unfortunately, that was always the time when she needed it.
(...)
Etain watched the display of rustic logic with growing respect. “We can harness the Force to nurture plants, yes.”
That was all too true: she had heard the stories of Padawans joining the agri corps when they didn’t perform well during training. That was all she needed—life on a backwater planet, talking to fields of grain. It wasn’t just the intelligence data she had hidden in her cloak that made her want to get off the planet as fast as she could. Agriculture spelled failure. She didn’t need further reminding of her inadequacy.
•───────•°•❀•°•───────•
I still stand on the hill that Etain is a very proactive and competent person who does have good ideas and very much streetsmart, but when it comes to actually implementing them, she encounters obstacles, and these obstacles are mainly her own internal self-harming tendencies.
But in this chapter we get to know another detail about Etain: she is terrified of the thought of working in agriculture field. For her, being in the AgriCorps is equivalent of failure as a Jedi.
I cannot not think about whether Etain's fear of working as a farmer is maybe an allegory for educated middle-class people who think people working in agricultural fields (just doing manual labor in general) are the lowest of lowest. While Etain doesn't despise them, but she is terrified that she will reach that point in her life where she will fail in her profession (Being a Jedi) and ends up being a failure (a farmer).
It's a generational trauma for people who were raised in poverty, they worked hard to get out of the poverty, and then they do everything to prevent their own children to get into that life, even if they have to say things like: You WILL go to college and you WILL STUDY or you will end up serving people.
