Thrawn X Sabine Site - where most of the conceptualization occurs. A lot of it has to be opened by a Patreon membership for the protection of some of the ideas, fanfic, and fan art that are adult in nature. There is an overview and the bulk of the justifications for the ship on this site.
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Thrawn X Sabine Facebook Group - where supporters can have input that we can build upon with the structure and conceptualization of the story that we want to tell.
Thrawn X Sabine Discord Group - for 18+ supporters to discuss ideas about ship based on the structure of the fan-fiction and assistance in the fan-fiction.
The reason for the Discord group opposed to the Facebook group is Facebook AI surveils content restricting it that gets accounts suspended over silliness. It is not economically feasible for us.
We really try to avoid any more major discussions on Tumblr due to reporting and suspensions. It is not economically feasible for us.
After the duel, Trilla, Ahsoka, and Sacher all adjust their missions accordingly. Though in doing so, Omega reveals the truth about why she needed Ahsoka’s help—and Ahsoka is shocked by the news that a friend once thought to be dead is actually alive.
Do the sky-walkers’ Force Sensitivity actually fade? I don’t think so
This is just a theory, but I’ve always found it hard to believe that the Chiss would be the sole exception to all the species in the galaxy when it comes to Force sensitivity, or, as they call it, Third Sight.
I don’t actually think their Third Sight goes away. That wouldn’t make any sense, because Force sensitivity doesn’t just “go away,”that’s just not how it works.Sure, their abilities may fade, but the Force doesn’t just vacate their bodies. I think the Third Sight “fading” is due to their poor treatment, lack of training, and the faults of the sky-walker program.
What really is Third Sight? How is it used?
Obviously, Third Sight is just the Chiss’ name for the Force, but sky-walkers seem to utilize it differently (compared to the other Force users/sects we’ve seen), since they show none of the physical aptitude Force Sensitives have, they’re unable to move anything with their minds, levitate, amplify their physical strength, slow down falls, etc etc. This is probably due to the Ascendancy’s ignorance towards the Force and their Force sensitives, and their lack of proper training.
Force users sense the future, when their instincts warn them of dangerous situations, and while fighting they can (usually) sense where the attack is going to come from.They can also see the future through visions, though this is more of a rare ability.
Sky-walkers sense safe paths and have to navigate entire ships through the Chaos, making sure they don’t crash into things and making sure they get to their set destination safely. They access a meditative, trance-like state to do this, and stay in it for hours, which exhausts them.
Sky-walkers can also experience overload:
“Sometimes sky-walkers come out of Third Sight with sensory overload that presents with aches and sparkle-vision. If it goes into a full-on spell, it can take some time to throw it off.”
They occasionally have trouble getting out of the state, (or ‘Third Sight stages’ as Thalias calls them) since intensive meditation trances are difficult for even the most experienced Force users to come out of, much less an inexperienced child.
Which brings me to my next point
The Ascendancy’s ignorance
They’re largely ignorant towards Force Sensitives and the Force as a whole. In fact, they don’t even seem to care much about gaining knowledge on them at all:
“Not really,” Thalias admitted. “But I suppose there are people who don’t understand how sky-walkers can navigate the Chaos, either.”
Samakro shrugged. “I know they can do it. Do I also have to understand how?”
This is in part due to the lack of force sensitives actually caring for the sky-walkers, as the Ascendancy entrusts them to non-force sensitives who don’t actually understand how any of it works, which makes them unable to properly care for them:
“They didn’t understand.” Che’ri’s throat worked. “None of them understood.”
“Because none of them had ever been a sky-walker,” Thalias said. Though that hadn’t always been the case, if that personnel officer had been right. Fleetingly, she wondered why that policy had been changed. “Once we leave the program, most of us don’t come back.”
Jee, no wonder.
They don’t even know the basics on how the Force actually works (since most of them aren’t Force Sensitive and there’s no education on the subject)
“I don’t know,” Thalias said. “But she seems to think this Beyond is connected somehow to how I used to navigate as a sky-walker.”
“The Force,” Thrawn murmured, his voice thoughtful.
Thalias frowned at him. “The what?”
“A concept from Lesser Space that General Anakin Skywalker told me about when we were working together,” Thrawn said. “He defined it as an energy field created by all living things from which he and others could draw power and guidance.”
“So that’s what sky-walkers do?” Thalias asked.
“Perhaps,” Thrawn said. “The concept seemed somewhat vague. But if living things create the Force, perhaps it can work in reverse, with the Force creating or nurturing living things.”
The actual reason for the sky-walkers “losing” their Third Sight is due to burnout and bad conditions, and not that the Force magically fades away
Sky-walkers are put under constant stress, mentally, emotionally, and physically. They’re treated as valuable resources, rather than actual living beings with actual needs. They’re taken from their families at a young age, presumably when their Force sensitivity is identified.
They undergo literal brainwashing before they’re put on ships, because they missed their families when they were taken away:
“Too many of the girls cried themselves to sleep for weeks at a time. Too many of them were too miserable or frightened or just too distracted to learn how to use their Third Sight. There were never many candidates to begin with, and now the program was losing them like water from a tipped bucket.”
She took a breath, exhaled in a long sigh. “So the decision was made to…remove…that distraction.”
A shiver ran up Thalias’s back. “They wiped our memories?”
“The term they used was faded,” Borika said. “But basically, yes.”
“But I remember the packbulls whinnying,” Thalias protested. “I remember—” She looked around them. “I think maybe I remember this room.”
“The fading process wasn’t perfect,” Borika said. “There were always pieces left. But the family memories, the ones that were getting in the way…those were gone.”
It’s actually quite possible the brainwashing weakens their connection to the Force, like how the Drengir mind-wiping Jedi severed their connection to the Force. But I suppose the two aren’t very similar, since Drengir corrupt Force Sensitives with the dark side.
But compare the Ascendancy’s methods with the Jedi’s-among the Jedi, cultural identity, self-exploration and self-expression are encouraged and varied. The Ascendancy strip sky-walkers of their family name and their memories. I do not think it’s a coincidence that one had their younglings flourishing and their Force connections getting stronger over time, while the Ascendancy’s only gets weaker over time.
The sky-walkers are indoctrinated:
Quickly, Che’ri turned back to her controls, the sudden movement hammering an extra jolt of pain into her head. Never show weakness, she’d been warned over and over again. A sky-walker never shows weakness. She’s always ready to continue on, cheerfully and efficiently, making one more journey, and one more after that, until her captain allows her to rest.
…yeah. Not the most stress-free environment.
Their policies actively hurt the sky-walkers:
“Temporary loss of balance?” Wikivv shrugged.
“It’s not uncommon. Particularly with the younger sky-walkers, those under the age of ten or eleven. They tend to get woozy if they spend more than five or six hours in a row in Third Sight.”
Her lip twitched. “That’s not a criticism of you, Senior Captain,” she added quickly.
“That was also the case on my last two ships. I’ve often felt there’s a serious disconnect between reality and the Council’s manual.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened,” Lakinda said. So five or six hours, a number that presumably included all the mandated breaks, left younger sky-walkers unsteady…yet official regulations permitted a sky-walker to run a full nine hours at a stretch under normal circumstances, and up to twelve in emergencies.
They’re encouraged to "go faster,” by people who don’t understand how the process even works:
A few years ago, on one of Lakinda’s previous ships, the captain had been able to nudge a little more speed out of their sky-walker by giving her extra helpings of the treats that particular girl had loved. Maybe, at Bet’nih’s next break, Lakinda would see if she was similarly open to such bribery. — Bet’nih, it turned out, was extremely partial to a particular type of dark cheese, a blend that Lakinda herself rather enjoyed.
Unfortunately, Lakinda’s promises of an extra bar from her private stockpile, while enthusiastically accepted, made no difference in the seven-year-old’s navigational proficiency. Twenty-nine hours after leaving the Vigilant, twenty-three after the idea of a bribe had first occurred to Lakinda, the Grayshrike came out of hyperspace into the center of a magnificent array of cold-edged stars.
I think that, all in all, sky-walkers are put under immense stress, and their bodies sever their connection to the Force out of self preservation. Kind of like how Cere cut herself off from the Force because of her trauma and fear of accessing the dark side again, or Obi Wan cutting himself off because of his trauma. Or Cal, and Grogu, for the same reasons. The difference between them and sky-walkers is that the sky-walkers are doing it unknowingly.
There’s an exception to this, Vahnya, and she only further proves my theory:
Vah’nya was the exception to all the rules. She was twenty-two years old, and unlike the children who shared her job she felt perfectly comfortable mixing with the rest of the adults aboard. Eli had seen and talked with her on a number of occasions, and had found her congenial company.
Unlike the other sky-walkers, Vah'nya is actually content with her life as a sky-walker, she does not feel isolated from the rest of the crew.
Vah'nya also seemed to come from an abusive home.
Vah’nya gave him a small smile.
“My brothers used to fight that way,” she said. “Neither giving ground, neither admitting defeat.” The smile faded. “Often they worked together against me in the days before the fleet took me from my family and brought me to itself. Those fights often ended with blood.”
“Yours, or theirs?”
“Sometimes both,” she said. “Mostly mine.”
“It’s all right,” she assured him.
“The fleet is my family now, and has treated me well.”
So, it seems she’s content with the Ascendancy because they treat her better than her abusive family did…and that’s why she stayed happy within the sky-walker program. That’s probably the reason why she, unlike the other sky-walkers, did not lose her connection to the Force, because she actually enjoyed her time as a sky-walker. And it seems like she kept her memories, unlike the others.
Why at 14?
Why do so many of their connections get severed at such a young age? I believe it’s because at that age kids (usually) go through puberty. Since Chiss are so close to humans, anatomy-wise, it’s not that big a leap to consider the possibility. Puberty, with the emotional and physical changes that it brings, probably just makes everything so much worse for them, and they just can’t take it anymore.
The Refusal to Reconnect
Sky-walkers, due to the trauma they experience while serving the Ascendancy, actively avoid anything to do with their former lives once their connection the Force is severed. Hardly any sky-walkers ever actually come back to the Ascendancy. They refuse to believe they might still possess the Force, and I think their connection is even further weakened because of it.
For example, one of the main characters of the Thrawn Ascendancy series, Thalias, is still Force sensitive. She somehow sensed that the Magys was talking about a “Guardian of her people” which seems awfully coincidental. But she refused to even consider the possibility that she still possessed Third Sight. Another Force sensitive told her that she’d “touched the Beyond” before (their name for the Force), which she wouldn’t be able to know unless Thalias was still Force sensitive, it’s just that her connection was greatly weakened, and she hadn’t used the Force knowingly in years.
Math will not solve the problem
Eli Vanto, a former Imperial officer now in the service of the Ascendancy, is currently trying to figure out how to prolong the Third Sight in their sky-walkers through mathematical calculations, and how the Third Sight affects people, if there’s some pattern to how it works.
And he’s also been tasked with figuring out how the Force stayed with Vah'nya so long. With math.
Maybe he’ll find out how to create a midichlorian sensing device of some kind. But I doubt it, since blood samples are needed to identify midichlorians in the first place, and the suggestion to take a blood sample from a sky-walker would…not go over well. And since he’s not Force sensitive, he probably won’t ever figure them out, either.
There is (little) Hope
It seems that years after the events of the Ascendancy novels took place, they’ve assigned more sky-walkers to individual ships, which means at least sky-walkers don’t have to bear as much of a burden than they did previously.
Normally, seeing the back of a navigator’s head wouldn’t have given Eli a clue as to who she was. All of the Steadfast’s navigators were girls, nearly all of them between the ages of seven and fourteen, when Third Sight was at its strongest. On top of that, they tended to keep to themselves, and in all his time aboard he’d only met three of the five.
Maybe, just maybe, they’ll eventually figure out that maybe it’s the way they treat the sky-walkers that’s making them “lose” their Third Sight. And they seem to be making changes (however small), so at least there’s some hope for the sky-walkers.
AIE. You caught me. You’re not spose to see this holo.
AIE. You caught me. You’re not spose to see this holo.
They said I had to go this event. It is my event. My-my coronation… *gulps about to cry*
All because I defeated Viceroy Gar Saxon with the Darksaber.
Star Wars Rebels Season 3, Trials of the Darksaber
Okay, look, I gave the Darksaber to Bo-Katan Kryze. She’s the rightful ruler, isn’t she? I-I wasn’t old enough to rule all of Mandalore or Mandalorian Space. Then…the Mandalorian purge happened…
