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anghraineAn anon at Tumblr asked:
🌟🌟🌟 I love your writing!! Please tell us more about it😁
I said:
Ahh, I missed this when it was originally sent, for this meme. Let me see. I’m going to do two that sort of go together:
For tolerably well acquainted, an expansion of Elizabeth’s process of falling in love in P&P:
Some people, had they known, might question whether he ever truly loved her, to misunderstand her as he had, propose to her as he had. Elizabeth was not one of them. Though disinclined to overlook either his assumptions or his proposal, she could not doubt that she was dear to him—not with his letter carefully preserved, and so often re-read. The humblest declaration would not have persuaded her of love more than did the final words of that letter.
But was she dear to him even now?
And for Revenge of the Jedi, an AU of Return of the Jedi and (consequently) the prequels that follows the original ideas for ROTJ, particularly a) Luke and Leia not being siblings, and Leia getting drawn into the concerns of the surviving Alderaanians, and b) Anakin getting a gradual, extended redemption arc.
“No! A Jedi you are, nearly. Your duty is to the Force. To defense, not attack. Never attack. Defend your life and others’, you must, yes. Sometimes at a great price. But no more.”
“I understand,” said Luke, meaning it. After the removal from Yavin, he’d discovered that a million Imperial soldiers and officers had died on the Death Star. He’d also discovered that over eight billion Imperial citizens had died on Alderaan.
Any number of star systems would have shared Alderaan’s fate if his aim had faltered. Every pilot in the Rebellion had fought in the defense of billions if not trillions of innocent people that day, and he still couldn’t regret his success.
The first was written a few weeks ago. The second was written eight and a half years ago. But they’re doing something similar, which I do … reasonably often in fanfic.
Okay, so. For me, what I do in lit studies and what I do when I write fanfic are not … the same, but sometimes not all that different either. Because writing characters requires interpreting them—some level of engagement with the source. That’s where concern with IC representation of a character comes from—it’s basically “you’re adhering to a reasonable interpretation.”
Original fiction engages with wider media trends and sometimes specific works, too, but not anywhere near so directly as fanfic and meta. And so it’s pretty easy for my fic to have moments like the two above, which are thinly-disguised meta on popular discussions in fandom.
The first is about the pretty frequent assertion that Darcy didn’t really love Elizabeth at his first proposal but was just sexually attracted to her/wanted to possess her/whatever the fuck, which I think is an extreme oversimplification at best, esp given the second proposal and the complexity of the letter. More importantly, though, it ignores Elizabeth’s own opinion; she unequivocally thinks that he loved her.
So this phase of the story seemed a relatively natural place for her canonical belief in his love to come up, since she thinks about it so much already. But it’s … as natural as I can make SO ABOUT THIS ARGUMENT THAT I REALLY DISAGREE WITH, which is “not very.”
The second passage is about the very weird hang-wringing over how many Imperials Luke killed when he blew up the Death Star, and how terrible it is that he doesn’t feel bad about it, as if it weren’t a valid military target that he attacked to prevent further genocides than the one just perpetrated. As above, I tried to fit the reflection on it into a situation where it might naturally come to mind for him, and I think it probably fits a bit better (the fic as a whole is already very meta-ish), but … eh.
In any case, meta (and especially contrarian meta) transplanted directly into fic is definitely part of the Anghraine™ Brand. And I’m okay with doing it! (lbr, people mostly follow me for meta rather than fic anyway.)
I do have similar drives with original fic—that is, there are things that I bring in because I have Opinions on trends or instances, but I tend to be less direct about it. Maybe because the original fic is more immersive in some ways? There are things like “it’s a matriarchy but neither a utopic or dystopic one, those irritate me” going on at my end, but I don’t actually say so, because it would be very unnatural for the characters to think of it in those terms. Fanfic has a smidgen more distance.
🌟🌟🌟 I love your writing!! Please tell us more about it😁
I said:
Ahh, I missed this when it was originally sent, for this meme. Let me see. I’m going to do two that sort of go together:
For tolerably well acquainted, an expansion of Elizabeth’s process of falling in love in P&P:
Some people, had they known, might question whether he ever truly loved her, to misunderstand her as he had, propose to her as he had. Elizabeth was not one of them. Though disinclined to overlook either his assumptions or his proposal, she could not doubt that she was dear to him—not with his letter carefully preserved, and so often re-read. The humblest declaration would not have persuaded her of love more than did the final words of that letter.
But was she dear to him even now?
And for Revenge of the Jedi, an AU of Return of the Jedi and (consequently) the prequels that follows the original ideas for ROTJ, particularly a) Luke and Leia not being siblings, and Leia getting drawn into the concerns of the surviving Alderaanians, and b) Anakin getting a gradual, extended redemption arc.
“No! A Jedi you are, nearly. Your duty is to the Force. To defense, not attack. Never attack. Defend your life and others’, you must, yes. Sometimes at a great price. But no more.”
“I understand,” said Luke, meaning it. After the removal from Yavin, he’d discovered that a million Imperial soldiers and officers had died on the Death Star. He’d also discovered that over eight billion Imperial citizens had died on Alderaan.
Any number of star systems would have shared Alderaan’s fate if his aim had faltered. Every pilot in the Rebellion had fought in the defense of billions if not trillions of innocent people that day, and he still couldn’t regret his success.
The first was written a few weeks ago. The second was written eight and a half years ago. But they’re doing something similar, which I do … reasonably often in fanfic.
Okay, so. For me, what I do in lit studies and what I do when I write fanfic are not … the same, but sometimes not all that different either. Because writing characters requires interpreting them—some level of engagement with the source. That’s where concern with IC representation of a character comes from—it’s basically “you’re adhering to a reasonable interpretation.”
Original fiction engages with wider media trends and sometimes specific works, too, but not anywhere near so directly as fanfic and meta. And so it’s pretty easy for my fic to have moments like the two above, which are thinly-disguised meta on popular discussions in fandom.
The first is about the pretty frequent assertion that Darcy didn’t really love Elizabeth at his first proposal but was just sexually attracted to her/wanted to possess her/whatever the fuck, which I think is an extreme oversimplification at best, esp given the second proposal and the complexity of the letter. More importantly, though, it ignores Elizabeth’s own opinion; she unequivocally thinks that he loved her.
So this phase of the story seemed a relatively natural place for her canonical belief in his love to come up, since she thinks about it so much already. But it’s … as natural as I can make SO ABOUT THIS ARGUMENT THAT I REALLY DISAGREE WITH, which is “not very.”
The second passage is about the very weird hang-wringing over how many Imperials Luke killed when he blew up the Death Star, and how terrible it is that he doesn’t feel bad about it, as if it weren’t a valid military target that he attacked to prevent further genocides than the one just perpetrated. As above, I tried to fit the reflection on it into a situation where it might naturally come to mind for him, and I think it probably fits a bit better (the fic as a whole is already very meta-ish), but … eh.
In any case, meta (and especially contrarian meta) transplanted directly into fic is definitely part of the Anghraine™ Brand. And I’m okay with doing it! (lbr, people mostly follow me for meta rather than fic anyway.)
I do have similar drives with original fic—that is, there are things that I bring in because I have Opinions on trends or instances, but I tend to be less direct about it. Maybe because the original fic is more immersive in some ways? There are things like “it’s a matriarchy but neither a utopic or dystopic one, those irritate me” going on at my end, but I don’t actually say so, because it would be very unnatural for the characters to think of it in those terms. Fanfic has a smidgen more distance.
no subject
on 2019-02-16 09:17 pm (UTC)Oh, man, you are just hitting all of my Skywalker/Jedi feelings today.
Because this is something I've been playing around with about what went wrong between Ben and Luke--- namely, the difference between the moral rightness of what Luke did, and the nature of doing something like that with the Force--- even though it was the right thing to do, how did Luke not feel those deaths in the Force the way Obi-wan felt the death of Alderaan? And for that matter, how do Jedi use the Force to do violence at all?
Which gets into that issue of how you define "attack" versus "defense" and all the myriad ways that can get weird when you have a farm kid from Tatooine with like six weeks' formal training as a Jedi trying to teach the ethics of Force-based combat to a dozen younglings. (It's also my present headcanon, subject to EpIX, that Ben actually can't use the Force for violence unless he's so angry, scared, or somehow attached to what he's supposed to be defending, that he doesn't feel his opponents' pain--- if he's operating from a Light-side framework he does feel that everyone's one in the Force and even if they're "the enemy" he can't hurt them.) (This is the very very short version so that I don't blow up your inbox.)
no subject
on 2019-02-16 09:47 pm (UTC)I've always assumed Luke simply wasn't attuned enough to the Force to register the casualties (that's how I explained it in Revenge), or that it's not really his way of being attuned to the Force. He's feeling zero pangs when he slices up people in ROTJ, say—unless he feels them and just doesn't care. But I don't think so. I feel like different people experience the Force in different ways, and Luke's inclination to violence is probably fed by his limited sense of the life or death of anyone he doesn't personally care about.
no subject
on 2019-02-16 10:13 pm (UTC)Especially this: . I mean, I think that is shorthand for "everything that went wrong between Ben and Luke." Ben experiences the Force differently from Luke, Luke (who pretty much admitted to wanting a mini-me) doesn't know how to handle that, and. It's v 2.0 of Obi-wan and Anakin.
Also, this reminds me that I haven't reread Revenge in far too long, or I would have remembered that explanation.
no subject
on 2019-02-17 03:05 am (UTC)no subject
on 2019-02-17 05:58 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2019-02-19 05:39 am (UTC)Heh, by definition, fanfiction has to engage in some way with its original source, whether as thinly disguised meta about something in the fic, or interpretation of characters who exist there, etc etc, so I'm not surprised how often headcanon-in-fic or meta-in-fic pops up. At the very least, some of that authorial interpretation bleeds through into a lot of stories, and in some ways I'd say fanfic's indirect way of arguing can be at least as effective as meta.