maskormenace info

[carbonfrozen]

< CHARACTER INFO >
CHARACTER NAME: Han Solo
CHARACTER AGE: 32
SERIES: Star Wars
CHRONOLOGY: ROTJ, before being freed from the carbonite
CLASS: Hero, unfortunately for him. Also, taxi driver.
HOUSING: Heropa #018, at the moment.

BACKGROUND:

First things first, Han hails from a galaxy far, far away. More to the point, he's from Corellia, which is one of the galaxy's Core Worlds and is well-known for its starships and its ace pilots--besides Han, Wedge Antilles (known as part of the legendary Rogue Squadron) also hails from Corellia, and Legends canon has more examples of Corellian ace pilots. Corellia is also well-known for churning out pirates, rebels, and smugglers, much like Han who used to work under a particularly unsavory character before becoming a part of the Rebel Alliance, which probably says something about the Empire that the planet belongs to that so many of Corellia's inhabitants turn to crime to make a living.

Second, at Han's point in time, there are currently two warring factions waging civil war within the galaxy. One is the Galactic Empire, led by Emperor Palpatine, which has been grinding the galaxy's inhabitants under its tyrannical heel since the end of the Clone Wars and the collapse of the Old Republic, and the other is the Alliance to Restore the Republic, also known as the Rebel Alliance or just the Rebellion, which opposes the Empire and strives to free the galaxy from the Empire's yoke. There are other factions within the galaxy, of course--the Hutt Clans, for example, operate within the Outer Rim of the galaxy and are basically Space Mafia Slugs with more slavery--but these two are the most prominent. Currently, the Rebellion is on the run from the Empire after the Empire's forces discovered the Rebellion's secret base.

Third, here is Han's Wookieepedia page. Also, the Legends timeline has mostly been jettisoned, but for the sake of context, here is Han's Legends Wookieepedia page, which is where I may pull some details of his past until we get that Han Solo movie.

PERSONALITY:

"Your friend is quite the mercenary. I wonder if he really cares about anything. Or anyone."

Han Solo is the quintessential scoundrel: cool, collected, cocky, and carefree. Something of a mercenary, in fact, a man who just wants to get paid and get out, easy, and Han himself does (or did) his best to play up that image--the above is an observation made by Leia Organa to Luke Skywalker in A New Hope, after an argument (one of many in the series, Jesus fucking Christ Han) with Han wherein Han makes clear his intentions: "Look, I ain't in this for your revolution, and I'm not in it for you, Princess. I expect to be well paid. I'm in it for the money."

Except that's only the image he projects. Except that Han is, quite famously, full of absolute bullshit, and that applies to his famous image as a scoundrel.

See, Han Solo tries very, very hard to present himself as a scoundrel. For the most part, though, he's a cynical guy who used to believe in no higher power than what he can see, and that cynicism is a product borne out of his upbringing and life as a criminal--everyone is out only for themselves and there's nothing and no one looking out for you, as he's seen before the beginning of ANH. Because of that, he's raised a spiked barrier of sorts around himself: he's aggressively snarky and cocky and tries his damnedest to drive people off, throwing vicious barbs at them and being, generally, an asshole towards them. He even manages to succeed for a little while in ANH, to the point where Luke angrily tells him to go take care of himself when he leaves, as, after all, that's what he's best at.

But the truth about Han is that he cares. And he comes to care for people and lost causes very quickly. When Han cares for people, push comes to shove, he'll have their backs no matter what he says about them, no matter what the cost, even if it means his life. In ANH alone, he turns the Falcon back just in time to save Luke from being shot down during the Death Star run, and even compliments him on making the shot that explodes the Death Star. He still sticks around over three years later into Empire Strikes Back, even risking his life in the freezing cold climate of Hoth to find Luke, and then still sticking around the Rebel base even as he's got his clearance to leave and the Empire comes down on them, getting Princess Leia out of the base just in time. When it comes to his friends, Han will go above and beyond in order to keep them safe, and--when he's opened up enough to let them in--expects that they'd do the same for him. Han, at his core, is a deeply, deeply loyal man, to the people he cares for, and he expects that same loyalty in turn: despite saying that he doesn't trust Lando, he actually does, and is genuinely angry when Lando ends up making a deal with the Empire in order to keep Cloud City safe. Later on, once Lando swings over to the Rebellion's side in Return of the Jedi, Han seems to show him no ill will, even recommending him to the Rebellion and trusting him with the Millennium Falcon, which is a Big Deal when you remember how attached he is to his ship.

As he grows up, Han also goes from (giving the appearance of) looking out only for himself and for the people he cares for to actually caring about the galaxy at large, weirdly enough, hanging around with the Skywalker twins has clearly rubbed off on him. In ROTJ past his canon point, once Jabba is dead and his debt is effectively canceled, Han displays very little desire to take the reward and run, even though his original motivation is allegedly reward-driven. He takes an active role in the council meeting before the Battle of Endor, and takes responsibility for a team to bring down the shield generator protecting the second Death Star--a planet-destroying superweapon--above Endor. He even gives his closest and oldest friend Chewbacca a chance to back out, telling him that "it's gonna be rough, fella, I didn't want to speak for you", which shows that he knows just how hard taking down a heavily-guarded shield generator will be, and has grown from the money-driven smuggler he was three years ago.

Han is pretty cocky and prideful, though. He's confident in his skills as a pilot, in his skills as a smuggler and criminal, and in himself in general. Some of this is just for show, but the rest is actually pretty true--he's proud of being good at what he does, and what he does just happens to be smuggling, which he later says about thirty years after ROTJ in The Force Awakens to be "the only thing I was ever any good at". If someone takes a pot shot at that, or calls him out on something fairly insignificant, ie the amount of scruff he tends to have, chances are he'll take offense (in response to Leia calling him scruffy-looking, among other things: "who's scruffy-looking?!") and go on the defensive with his temper flaring up, even start an argument with someone if he thinks they're Wrong (ie Leia Organa), though the vitriol can vary depending on who he's arguing with. This defensiveness even extends to his beloved Falcon--when Luke calls it a hunk of junk in ANH, Han tells him that "she may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts", which, really, says a lot about Han's tendency to attach himself to his few belongings and friends.

And Han's temper does flare up fairly often. He's something of a hotheaded person--as said before, if someone slights his pride (either by disparaging his flying or his beloved ship), he will go on the defensive. Besides that, though, he has also been seen to lose his temper to a fairly reasonable point: in ESB, just before he risks his life to go find Luke while they're on Hoth, someone points out that the tauntaun he's riding will freeze to death before they reach the first marker. Han's response is to snap back, "then I'll see you in hell!" He also nearly goes after C-3PO on Endor in ROTJ, after C-3PO primly points out that his programming does not allow him to impersonate a deity, even though at that point they are surrounded and held at spearpoint by Ewoks (aliens that look like teddy bears who also have very sharp weapons) that have mistaken the droid for their god and said impersonation could get them out of the sticky situation they've found themselves in. He's only kept back because said Ewoks point spears his way, after which he desists and explains that C-3PO is "an old friend of [his]".

He can be fairly pragmatic, owing to his cynicism and life as a criminal and then rebel. While his pragmatism won't ever override his loyalty to his friends and family, and while indeed he even takes the less pragmatic path if it means keeping said family and friends safe at great personal cost, it does place him in a more morally grey area than others. In ANH (the non-remastered edition, you're a wonderful human being George Lucas /sarcasm), he shoots at the bounty hunter Greedo first as Greedo makes threats towards him, then pays for the damages like nothing happened. In ESB, he's also one of the few people to shoot at Darth Vader himself, even though this doesn't really work beyond a demonstration that Vader can apparently deflect blaster bolts. Sometimes being pragmatic doesn't actually pay off, who knew.

Han can also be something of a reckless person, even into his older years, especially if the lives of people he loves are at stake. In ESB, besides the example where he shoots at Darth Vader, earlier in the film Han also risks his life by going out in subzero temperatures on an ice planet to find Luke, who's unconscious outside of Hoth Base, and later after that he dives into an asteroid field to shake off TIE fighters on the Falcon's tail despite C-3PO's assertion that the odds of surviving such a feat are 3,720 to 1 to which he asks Threepio to "never tell [him] the odds" instead. In TFA, Han's first appearance in the film has him hauling rathtars, who apparently ate most of his crew and are notorious for starting something called the Trillian Massacre. He then breaks out of his freighter's hangar at lightspeed (to which Rey asks, "is that even possible?") and later on breaks past Starkiller Base's shields by dropping out of lightspeed inside the planet's atmosphere, both amazing and incredibly reckless feats, especially for someone of his age. (His response to Rey's question: "I never ask that question until after I've done it.")

Han is also sarcastic, incredibly acerbic, even caustic in his tone. He straight-up tells Luke during ANH that the Force that Luke believes in is nothing but "cheap tricks and nonsense", making fun of pretty much everything, from his upbringing on a farm to the time he manages to deflect blaster shots from a training remote ("I call it luck"), and of course he tells Leia that he's just helping them out for the money, not her and not her revolution and certainly not some higher principles. This trait's still present in ESB, though years running with the Rebellion has toned his caustic tendencies down--he and Leia argue plenty in ESB, and one of their first scenes in the film culminates in Han's response to Leia's assertion that she'd "just as soon kiss a Wookiee": "I can arrange that! You could use a good kiss!"

Around friends, though, he can be surprisingly warm. It's already been said that he cares about people, and he shows it not just by being heroic and saving their lives, he also tones down on the asshole tendencies. In ESB, he throws less actual jabs Luke's way, instead joking around with him ("that's two you owe me, junior"). While his interactions with Leia in ESB often feature a lot of arguing (see: the argument mentioned in the previous paragraph) and really kind of terrible flirting on Han's part, he also displays a more reassuring side, especially on Bespin: he assures Leia that they can trust Lando, and later, even as Han is about to be frozen into carbonite, he reassures Leia after her profession of love for him with an "I know". He's got a soft spot underneath his cocky mercenary exterior that he sometimes even displays to strangers, one that becomes much more evident way later down the line in TFA once he runs into Rey and Finn, proceeding to dispense advice to Finn about women always finding out the truth and offering Rey a job on the Falcon, though by the time of ESB he still at least attempts to cover it up with his typical smuggler bravado.

In summary, Han is an incredibly caring person. He just also covers that up by being--you guessed it--an absolute scoundrel.

POWER: None of these are canon, Han is canonically a completely unpowered person.

Millennium Falconization: Comes in two parts.

What A Piece of Junk: every car that Han gets into, whether it's a brand-new top-of-the-line model or an old one on its last legs, now has: the ability to break the speed limit far too easily and handle tricky turns or insane stunts with ease, various hidden compartments where one can hide any manner of weapons or illegal goods (can come with or without illegal goods), an increased chance of breaking down when you least want it to (say, on the way to work while late or in the middle of a car chase), a decreased chance of the engine starting on the first try (or the second), and also a mini-Millennium Falcon dangling off the rear view mirror like a pair of lucky dice. This now comes with the caveat that the car can return to normal if he doesn't step inside it for two days. The possibility of training in this ability so he only gets one effect or more at a time when he wants it still exists, but he won't be able to take the effects away entirely.

Human GPS: Han knows where he is at all times, whether he's in a city or in the middle of nowhere--if you asked him, he would be able to name the location, even if it's just "a field six miles northwest of Heropa", for example. He also automatically knows one route to get from where he is to where he wants to be, even if he's never been to his destination before. This doesn't mean this is the best route to take, or even the most logical route even to Han himself, mind: if he follows that route, there's a good chance he may just end up driving through a duck pond or stopping at a dead end or getting stuck in traffic. Just like an actual GPS.

Carbon Freezing: Han can freeze anyone with a touch. More to the point, he can trap them in a block of carbonite, but unlike with his previous experience, the amount of time they will spend in carbonite is limited to six hours, so they'll be free in no time without suffering too badly from hibernation sickness as a result. He can also choose to only freeze parts of their body in carbonite. This power will only activate if Han wills it, so he won't be going around accidentally freezing people in carbonite.

Talk Shit, Get Hit: Courtesy of Neb: "This power umbrella gives Han clairaudience and the ability to teleport, but only when it's connected to discussions regarding the Millenium Falcon." This ability works in two parts: first, Han gains the ability to listen in on someone else's conversation, but only if they explicitly bring up the Millennium Falcon, and only if they bring it up in a negative light. So someone talking alone to themselves about Han's ship isn't enough, they have to be actively discussing it and dissing it. Compliments won't work here. Second, Han gains the ability to teleport, but only to the immediate vicinity of the person who dissed his beloved ship, and he is not going to have any choice in the matter. It's a great way to summon him if you need him! Just don't expect him to be happy.