Plotting Revenge
Mar. 9th, 2011 08:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghraine'cause some puns are too obvious not to use.
When I first started planning out the Revenge of the Jedi universe, I was thrilled at all the possibilities. I still am, really. But it's a lot complicated now that I've given it some more thought.
While Revenge is, on the face of it, simply an AU of ROTJ, the ramifications of those changes reach all the way into the PT (and beyond, technically, but I don't care about that). In fact, I'd originally meant to start with a TPM AU -- where, among other things, Anakin and Owen were brought up together, Shmi was Force-sensitive, Obi-Wan was already an old man, Qui-Gon was a former student of his, Padmé was secretly Force-sensitive and hiding it, Yoda and Obi-Wan both really, really wanted Anakin to be trained (and each wanted to be the one who did it), and Naboo had a normal hereditary, lifelong monarchy, hence the fourteen-year-old queen. Also, the Empire had already been established for awhile, the Jedi Order were operating behind the scenes à la the canon!Sith (only not evil), and Palpatine was an imperial grandson who plotted, manipulated, and occasionally murdered his way up the line of succession.
The early stuff worked easily enough (I even managed to write a bit of it), but afterwards it became pretty much impossible. I couldn't set up the ROTJ AU without knowing what I was setting up. So, back to the original trilogy, and back to looking at some of those original ideas that had inspired the whole thing in the first place. So I did, and they were awesome, and I started planning.
Almost the first thought that occurred to me (besides QUEEN LEIA OMG) was that if Leia isn't Luke's sister, then obviously they don't have the same parents. Vader is consistently identified with Luke, not Leia -- no problem there. However, the few glimpses of Padmé are always as Leia's mother -- Lucas and Co even referred to her as "Leia's mother" before she got a proper name. Even taking the PT into account, Leia is the one who bonds with her, the one upon whose mind she's imprinted. Vader can sense Luke's presence, but not Leia's; Leia can remember Padmé, but Luke can't. Even as AU as this is, it doesn't seem right to disconnect Padmé from Leia.
At first I thought this was actually pretty awesome, too -- no weird retro-incest! No painfully stilted Anakin/Padmé! -- well, not romantically. They could be, like, asskicking platonic best friends, only there's this minor problem of him being secretly a Jedi and Padmé being not-at-all-secretly an Imperial Senator, but somehow it works anyway. Leia's father would be ... some other guy that Padmé could conceivably have married. Um, is she close to any other men?
Palo what's-his-face, but she was like twelve. Obi-Wan? Not really. They're amicable, but they seem to largely treat one another with distant courtesy. Yoda is friendlier -- ack, brain bleach! Oh wait, if Leia isn't the other half of the Skywalker twins, why would she even be hidden at all? Maybe if she's Force-sensitive, but how'd she end up with Bail if -- AHAHAHAHA BAIL ORGANA. Bail is Padmé's only other male buddy. They could be married quite openly. Leia would be born some time before or after Palpatine's accession, and again, there'd be no secret about it -- and no creepy fishtank childbirth scene. Padmé could even live on for a few years after Leia's birth, enough for Leia to vaguely remember her later.
Maybe a few years after that, Bail (who in this verse would obviously be ruler of Alderaan in his own right -- which is what ANH implies anyway) might remarry Breha. Luke could still have his moment of mother-angst and ask Leia about her mother -- not to indirectly find out about his own, but just reaching out in a sort of homeless, motherless solidarity. By saying real mother, he'd be distinguishing between Leia's mother and stepmother. Still a nasty phrase, but potentially less horrifying in this context. Okay, that works, it's looking all right --
So, Luke's mother. She's not Padmé, so as with her, I have to find some other woman Anakin is close to.
...
...
... um. I honestly can't think of anybody except Ahsoka, and that is so many kinds of wrong. (I don't just hate teacher/student slash; I hate it all.) I'm not going to force some random canon female into Padmé's place -- it'd be incredibly creepy to do it with her handmaidens, but squicky enough with anyone, really. This woman would have to be more than a substitute Padmé or an incubator for Luke, and it'd be easy to reduce anyone to that.
Also, I despise the proximity principle -- the idea that visibly appearing in the same work is in itself support for a pairing; e.g., Éowyn/Haldir is an acceptable pairing, while Éowyn/one of the nameless, faceless marshals is much less so, even though she would be much more likely to be able to speak with the latter, to have common interests, to share a rapport, and to, I don't know, ever meet.
By the same logic, Georgiana Darcy is more likely to marry her legal guardian than the young men she would undoubtedly meet in her brother and sister-in-law's social circles; Neville Longbottom is more likely to fall in love with Pansy Parkinson than one of the Gryffindor girls we never see, but with whom he's shared a house for seven years; Susan Pevensie is more likely to enter into a sexual relationship with her brother Peter than with any of her canonically numerous suitors from the canonically human-populated countries that border Narnia; and, of course, Anakin Skywalker is more likely to fall in love with one of the handmaidens to whom he rarely speaks and pays no attention, than, say, the unknown and largely unseen female Jedi who share his lifestyle, a substantial portion of his upbringing, and his experiences as a warrior[-monk-pilot-paladin-sorcerer-ninja].
I think it's part of the general Mary Sue paranoia wrt OCs -- well, of course it is. We often see the rationale is that it's always more worthwhile to explore the canonical characters and settings via the canonical characters and settings, no matter how inconsistent or unrecognisable they may be, or how little they actually appear in canon, than with original anything in any significant role. It then seems to naturally follow that the pairing of a canon character with another canon character, no matter how unlikely or, in some cases, impossible, is more worthwhile than the pairing of a canon character with an original character.
Intellectually, I hate this. Emotionally ... well, the moment I realised that I'd just locked myself into Anakin/OFC, even only in backstory, I went OH SHIT OH SHIT OH SHIT NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
(Disclaimer: I've desperately wanted to write the backstory since way before this turned into a Bail/Padmé, Anakin/OFC, Sith!Jedi, wildly AU extravaganza. At the very beginning, I mostly wanted to write an AOTC AU where Padmé was all gung-ho about entering into the relationship and Anakin was the one declaiming "BUT OUR LOVE CAN NEVER BE." Just because that would make much more sense to me, partly because Anakin is so hardcore Lawful X in the OT and to some degree the PT, partly because he's the who who has dedicated his life to a monastic order that forbids normal human relationships, while there's no reason why a senator can't have a nice discreet affair, and partly because Anakin is such a drama queen. So obviously this was a kind of massive spanner in the works. Or Anakin won that particular argument.)
Now, I have to say that I draw a distinction between canon-compliant fics and AUs here. If a canonical character is in a canonical relationship with another canonical character -- especially if the relationship is the central dynamic of the whole text -- well, adding another, completely unsubstantiated relationship rarely sits well. However, shoehorning canon relationships into an otherwise thoughtful and well-developed AU is no better; it's a particular failing of P&P modern AUs, most often with various Charlottes and Lydias who have many, many other options than marrying their respective Collinses and Wickhams. The whole point of moderns is to see how the modern world affects the characters and plot of P&P, but no, they just go trotting along the same path that you could read in any of the Regency fics, even when it makes no sense at all.
So. For me, the closer a story is to canon, both in compliance and simply in time, the more difficult it is for me to accept the presence of an OC. Well, let me clarify. In canon or near-canon stories, it's difficult to accept the presence of an OC who is tremendously significant to the canon characters. Probably the best example of this iswyncatastrophe's Ryn, since we're happily provided both canon-compliant and AU versions.
At first glance, my reaction was : "some Jedi princess girl who's Anakin's lover and best friend and brilliant and devastatingly beautiful and doomed? Eh, no thanks." But then I kept running across Wyn's awesome meta, so I decided I'd at least give it a try. I read some of the canon-compliant stuff (not all, because ... university), and I liked it well enough, and I liked Ryn well enough, but I kept struggling against the same problem I had with Ahsoka Tano.
Namely, someone that tremendously significant would have left an enormous mark on the canon characters. Anakin having a padawan -- being a master -- is something that I'd think would be tremendously important to his characterisation. But it doesn't show up at all. Anakin having a friend with whom he's on equal, companionate terms and has a genuine, affectionate rapport would be a complete game-changer.
In the films, I think Anakin Skywalker is consistently (--> yes, I just said that) portrayed as someone whose loyalties are simple and absolute. In his world, either you love someone, no matter what, and will do literally anything for them, or you don't really love them. That's what Shmi did and it's what Luke does, continuing to reach out to him in a rather spectacular display of no matter what. And not-at-all coincidentally, from the moment his mother is tortured to death, Anakin is on the fast track to the Dark Side. During those intervening years, there is no one whose loyalty he can trust because there is no one whose loyalty is absolute, until Luke is ... also being tortured to death. (Disclaimer: This is not a criticism of Obi-Wan, Padmé, or Leia, who won't sacrifice their principles for one person -- if anything, the reverse.)
Personally, I think that if Anakin had had Ryn, he wouldn't ever have fallen. He'd have had somewhere to turn, which he clearly doesn't in ROTS, since he tries turning to everyone including frigging Yoda before giving up. The canon certainly offers plenty of cracks to fill, but they aren't big enough for Ryn, or even (IMO) Ahsoka. So even though Ryn is a compelling character and the stories are well-written, they only kind of work for me.
However, the AU ones? Kickass. I think the (ENDLESSLY TRAGIC) happy-ending AU works much better because it's an AU. In a way, it answers my objection to the canon-compliant verse -- what if there was someone between Shmi and Luke? becomes the departure from canon, rather than a difficulty I have to try (and mostly fail) to overlook in something canon-compliant; it provides a space for Ryn, and by extension for Anakin (and Obi-Wan, Padmé, etc) as well. (Personal theory: all great AUs do this -- provide a wider space in which to look at canon, sort of what speculative fiction does for real life.)
Wow, that was needlessly involved. Anyway, the point of all this was to say that I really do think 'canon character is deeply involved [platonically or not] with an original character' can work, and as inwyncatastrophe's AU, does work, and can be infinitely more probable and plausible than canon character/random other canon character. And knowing all of this doesn't make me particularly less leery about the inevitable Anakin/OFC in the distant background of my story.
So far, I've barely managed to pick a name for her -- Arissa Nellith, thanks to the voice in my head going fight the Sue, fight the Sue, fight the Sue: Arissa for Princess Arissa in David Eddings' Elenium, one of the most unlikable and horrifying of a very extensive crew of villains, and Nellith after the name posited for Luke's sister in early drafts of Empire. And she's obviously dead c. Revenge, but I still want to have a clear idea of what she was like, and ... meh. I think I'm going to go back to The Adventures of Lucy Skywalker, where I left Han looking suspiciously at a sixty-five-year-old man who's running around with a seventeen-year-old girl and very keen on avoiding the law.
When I first started planning out the Revenge of the Jedi universe, I was thrilled at all the possibilities. I still am, really. But it's a lot complicated now that I've given it some more thought.
While Revenge is, on the face of it, simply an AU of ROTJ, the ramifications of those changes reach all the way into the PT (and beyond, technically, but I don't care about that). In fact, I'd originally meant to start with a TPM AU -- where, among other things, Anakin and Owen were brought up together, Shmi was Force-sensitive, Obi-Wan was already an old man, Qui-Gon was a former student of his, Padmé was secretly Force-sensitive and hiding it, Yoda and Obi-Wan both really, really wanted Anakin to be trained (and each wanted to be the one who did it), and Naboo had a normal hereditary, lifelong monarchy, hence the fourteen-year-old queen. Also, the Empire had already been established for awhile, the Jedi Order were operating behind the scenes à la the canon!Sith (only not evil), and Palpatine was an imperial grandson who plotted, manipulated, and occasionally murdered his way up the line of succession.
The early stuff worked easily enough (I even managed to write a bit of it), but afterwards it became pretty much impossible. I couldn't set up the ROTJ AU without knowing what I was setting up. So, back to the original trilogy, and back to looking at some of those original ideas that had inspired the whole thing in the first place. So I did, and they were awesome, and I started planning.
Almost the first thought that occurred to me (besides QUEEN LEIA OMG) was that if Leia isn't Luke's sister, then obviously they don't have the same parents. Vader is consistently identified with Luke, not Leia -- no problem there. However, the few glimpses of Padmé are always as Leia's mother -- Lucas and Co even referred to her as "Leia's mother" before she got a proper name. Even taking the PT into account, Leia is the one who bonds with her, the one upon whose mind she's imprinted. Vader can sense Luke's presence, but not Leia's; Leia can remember Padmé, but Luke can't. Even as AU as this is, it doesn't seem right to disconnect Padmé from Leia.
At first I thought this was actually pretty awesome, too -- no weird retro-incest! No painfully stilted Anakin/Padmé! -- well, not romantically. They could be, like, asskicking platonic best friends, only there's this minor problem of him being secretly a Jedi and Padmé being not-at-all-secretly an Imperial Senator, but somehow it works anyway. Leia's father would be ... some other guy that Padmé could conceivably have married. Um, is she close to any other men?
Palo what's-his-face, but she was like twelve. Obi-Wan? Not really. They're amicable, but they seem to largely treat one another with distant courtesy. Yoda is friendlier -- ack, brain bleach! Oh wait, if Leia isn't the other half of the Skywalker twins, why would she even be hidden at all? Maybe if she's Force-sensitive, but how'd she end up with Bail if -- AHAHAHAHA BAIL ORGANA. Bail is Padmé's only other male buddy. They could be married quite openly. Leia would be born some time before or after Palpatine's accession, and again, there'd be no secret about it -- and no creepy fishtank childbirth scene. Padmé could even live on for a few years after Leia's birth, enough for Leia to vaguely remember her later.
Maybe a few years after that, Bail (who in this verse would obviously be ruler of Alderaan in his own right -- which is what ANH implies anyway) might remarry Breha. Luke could still have his moment of mother-angst and ask Leia about her mother -- not to indirectly find out about his own, but just reaching out in a sort of homeless, motherless solidarity. By saying real mother, he'd be distinguishing between Leia's mother and stepmother. Still a nasty phrase, but potentially less horrifying in this context. Okay, that works, it's looking all right --
So, Luke's mother. She's not Padmé, so as with her, I have to find some other woman Anakin is close to.
...
...
... um. I honestly can't think of anybody except Ahsoka, and that is so many kinds of wrong. (I don't just hate teacher/student slash; I hate it all.) I'm not going to force some random canon female into Padmé's place -- it'd be incredibly creepy to do it with her handmaidens, but squicky enough with anyone, really. This woman would have to be more than a substitute Padmé or an incubator for Luke, and it'd be easy to reduce anyone to that.
Also, I despise the proximity principle -- the idea that visibly appearing in the same work is in itself support for a pairing; e.g., Éowyn/Haldir is an acceptable pairing, while Éowyn/one of the nameless, faceless marshals is much less so, even though she would be much more likely to be able to speak with the latter, to have common interests, to share a rapport, and to, I don't know, ever meet.
By the same logic, Georgiana Darcy is more likely to marry her legal guardian than the young men she would undoubtedly meet in her brother and sister-in-law's social circles; Neville Longbottom is more likely to fall in love with Pansy Parkinson than one of the Gryffindor girls we never see, but with whom he's shared a house for seven years; Susan Pevensie is more likely to enter into a sexual relationship with her brother Peter than with any of her canonically numerous suitors from the canonically human-populated countries that border Narnia; and, of course, Anakin Skywalker is more likely to fall in love with one of the handmaidens to whom he rarely speaks and pays no attention, than, say, the unknown and largely unseen female Jedi who share his lifestyle, a substantial portion of his upbringing, and his experiences as a warrior[-monk-pilot-paladin-sorcerer-ninja].
I think it's part of the general Mary Sue paranoia wrt OCs -- well, of course it is. We often see the rationale is that it's always more worthwhile to explore the canonical characters and settings via the canonical characters and settings, no matter how inconsistent or unrecognisable they may be, or how little they actually appear in canon, than with original anything in any significant role. It then seems to naturally follow that the pairing of a canon character with another canon character, no matter how unlikely or, in some cases, impossible, is more worthwhile than the pairing of a canon character with an original character.
Intellectually, I hate this. Emotionally ... well, the moment I realised that I'd just locked myself into Anakin/OFC, even only in backstory, I went OH SHIT OH SHIT OH SHIT NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
(Disclaimer: I've desperately wanted to write the backstory since way before this turned into a Bail/Padmé, Anakin/OFC, Sith!Jedi, wildly AU extravaganza. At the very beginning, I mostly wanted to write an AOTC AU where Padmé was all gung-ho about entering into the relationship and Anakin was the one declaiming "BUT OUR LOVE CAN NEVER BE." Just because that would make much more sense to me, partly because Anakin is so hardcore Lawful X in the OT and to some degree the PT, partly because he's the who who has dedicated his life to a monastic order that forbids normal human relationships, while there's no reason why a senator can't have a nice discreet affair, and partly because Anakin is such a drama queen. So obviously this was a kind of massive spanner in the works. Or Anakin won that particular argument.)
Now, I have to say that I draw a distinction between canon-compliant fics and AUs here. If a canonical character is in a canonical relationship with another canonical character -- especially if the relationship is the central dynamic of the whole text -- well, adding another, completely unsubstantiated relationship rarely sits well. However, shoehorning canon relationships into an otherwise thoughtful and well-developed AU is no better; it's a particular failing of P&P modern AUs, most often with various Charlottes and Lydias who have many, many other options than marrying their respective Collinses and Wickhams. The whole point of moderns is to see how the modern world affects the characters and plot of P&P, but no, they just go trotting along the same path that you could read in any of the Regency fics, even when it makes no sense at all.
So. For me, the closer a story is to canon, both in compliance and simply in time, the more difficult it is for me to accept the presence of an OC. Well, let me clarify. In canon or near-canon stories, it's difficult to accept the presence of an OC who is tremendously significant to the canon characters. Probably the best example of this is
wyncatastrophe's Ryn, since we're happily provided both canon-compliant and AU versions.At first glance, my reaction was : "some Jedi princess girl who's Anakin's lover and best friend and brilliant and devastatingly beautiful and doomed? Eh, no thanks." But then I kept running across Wyn's awesome meta, so I decided I'd at least give it a try. I read some of the canon-compliant stuff (not all, because ... university), and I liked it well enough, and I liked Ryn well enough, but I kept struggling against the same problem I had with Ahsoka Tano.
Namely, someone that tremendously significant would have left an enormous mark on the canon characters. Anakin having a padawan -- being a master -- is something that I'd think would be tremendously important to his characterisation. But it doesn't show up at all. Anakin having a friend with whom he's on equal, companionate terms and has a genuine, affectionate rapport would be a complete game-changer.
In the films, I think Anakin Skywalker is consistently (--> yes, I just said that) portrayed as someone whose loyalties are simple and absolute. In his world, either you love someone, no matter what, and will do literally anything for them, or you don't really love them. That's what Shmi did and it's what Luke does, continuing to reach out to him in a rather spectacular display of no matter what. And not-at-all coincidentally, from the moment his mother is tortured to death, Anakin is on the fast track to the Dark Side. During those intervening years, there is no one whose loyalty he can trust because there is no one whose loyalty is absolute, until Luke is ... also being tortured to death. (Disclaimer: This is not a criticism of Obi-Wan, Padmé, or Leia, who won't sacrifice their principles for one person -- if anything, the reverse.)
Personally, I think that if Anakin had had Ryn, he wouldn't ever have fallen. He'd have had somewhere to turn, which he clearly doesn't in ROTS, since he tries turning to everyone including frigging Yoda before giving up. The canon certainly offers plenty of cracks to fill, but they aren't big enough for Ryn, or even (IMO) Ahsoka. So even though Ryn is a compelling character and the stories are well-written, they only kind of work for me.
However, the AU ones? Kickass. I think the (ENDLESSLY TRAGIC) happy-ending AU works much better because it's an AU. In a way, it answers my objection to the canon-compliant verse -- what if there was someone between Shmi and Luke? becomes the departure from canon, rather than a difficulty I have to try (and mostly fail) to overlook in something canon-compliant; it provides a space for Ryn, and by extension for Anakin (and Obi-Wan, Padmé, etc) as well. (Personal theory: all great AUs do this -- provide a wider space in which to look at canon, sort of what speculative fiction does for real life.)
Wow, that was needlessly involved. Anyway, the point of all this was to say that I really do think 'canon character is deeply involved [platonically or not] with an original character' can work, and as in
wyncatastrophe's AU, does work, and can be infinitely more probable and plausible than canon character/random other canon character. And knowing all of this doesn't make me particularly less leery about the inevitable Anakin/OFC in the distant background of my story.So far, I've barely managed to pick a name for her -- Arissa Nellith, thanks to the voice in my head going fight the Sue, fight the Sue, fight the Sue: Arissa for Princess Arissa in David Eddings' Elenium, one of the most unlikable and horrifying of a very extensive crew of villains, and Nellith after the name posited for Luke's sister in early drafts of Empire. And she's obviously dead c. Revenge, but I still want to have a clear idea of what she was like, and ... meh. I think I'm going to go back to The Adventures of Lucy Skywalker, where I left Han looking suspiciously at a sixty-five-year-old man who's running around with a seventeen-year-old girl and very keen on avoiding the law.