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anghraine#that moment when you troll your entire English class
#what do you mean The Monk isn't about constitutional monarchy
#it COULD BE
#damn it, I don't waaaaant to write about it and I have to finish my paper by tomorrow evening and I've hardly started baaaaaaw
#there was a post about acesecrets that was completely awful but now I can't find it
#not that I want to
#but I'd kind of like to see everybody else bawl the OP out. jerk.
#oh, it's so embarrassing that so many other asexuals are afraid of dying alone
#and living alone
#how humiliating for you, poor dear
#maybe they came to their senses. or someone else did.
#queersecrets = awesome
#nearly done with Ch 9
#an elaborate sixty part outline and my only guideline for the whole chapter was awkwardtiemz
#dear past self: you suck
#my therapist describes my conversations with myself as the psychological equivalent of figuring out where I'm going by repeatedly hitting myself over the head with a 2x4
#I really have no business being in religion, at all
#I'm like "I actually try not to think about miracles, because if I do I come up with perfectly rational reasons for them"
#I'm also like die in a fire plz (when it comes to teaching "modesty" to a room full of four to eight-year-olds)
#ooh, sesame chicken. yummy!
#Darths and Droids rocks
So I've been rewatching A New Hope (slooooowly), keeping an eye on the re-reading of Pride and Prejudice at AHA (irritably), and of course, lurking at Mark Does Stuff. One of the features of the latter two (especially Mark Reads/Mark Watches) is that they do not talk about what happens later. Mark, of course, doesn't even know what happens later.
With my quasi-close reading-things, I'm not really doing that. I'll try to keep an eye on what the story looks like at this point (Anakin Skywalker is still hanging around in Darth Vader's death toll!), but the original idea was to see what the story looked like in conjunction with the knowledge we have from Empire. I've sort of done that. Mostly I take ESB canon for a given, and apply varying degrees of discontinuity to the rest. That is, one moment I'll be saying that an event can be interpreted one way in the context of ROTJ, but if we ignore ROTJ it looks like this, and the prequels indicate this totally different thing, and if you put all that together with the EU then you can only assume something else entirely.
It's like continuity whiplash. But it got me thinking less about SW continuity specifically than about something that comes up a lot in Austen fandom. It's when a character exhibits a trait, or just does something, fairly late in the story, and that retroactively alters our understanding of something that happened in the beginning, and what the character was like all along. Now, I expect this happens all the time, but P&P is in many ways the quintessential model.
First you've got the letter which shows that Darcy may be an unpleasant person but he's never been a bad one. Then, we find out from the people who depend on him that he's an actively good one -- and has always been so. Then he shows up in person, and is exactly as he's been described in this part, but is dramatically different from how we see him before. Debatably. And then we hear that he's continuing to act in that "new" way even when Elizabeth isn't there. But they meet up again, and he acts basically how he acted at the beginning, with only some minor adjustments.
So if you're discussing Darcy's character in the context of, say, the piano conversation at Hunsford, there's this kind of odd thing where you also take into account things we don't find out yet, some of which are revealed when he's (debatably!) undergone a significant change. And it's not always clear how much of his later character you can apply to the earlier stages (people argue a lot about this), except things like Mrs Reynolds' testimony that obviously applies for the last twenty-four years. (Though it doesn't keep people from insisting that Elizabeth turned the jerkass into the kind-hearted landlord and Mrs Reynolds doesn't really mean he's been like that since the age of four.)
So it's messy enough when it's a single character in one rather short book. But going back to SW, it becomes this mammoth thing. That's a danger of prequels in general (the moment that little kid said "my name is Anakin," I'm pretty sure everyone went OMG DARTH VADER!11!!), but in particular when the story is . . . let's say, dynamic. For instance, the multitude of retcons that followed in every single movie after A New Hope retroactively altered almost everyone's characterization, but weigh the most heavily on Obi-Wan's, because he was the primary source of exposition (I think I talked more about this here).
I ran across some meta recently(ish) that got me thinking about it, too -- I don't remember what it was exactly, just that I agreed right up until the end, when the OP mentioned in passing that Anakin is obviously not religious. As an OT fangirl -- who pretty much always gives supremacy to the OT when it comes time for fanwank -- my general reaction to the meta was "right ... okay ... yeah, I can see that ... hm, that makes sense...yes, of course...huh?!" Because in the very first Star Wars movie, the character who turns out to be Anakin Skywalker criticizes the giant superweapon he stands on out of some twisted piety, is insulted for his "ancient" religion, and promptly flies into a homicidal rage, while delivering the immortal line:
I find your lack of faith disturbing.
While it could be argued that worshipping the Force does not follow from using it -- it could be regarded more as tool than deity -- it's quite clear that Anakin conceptualizes it as a matter of religious faith.
And by "Anakin," I mean Darth Vader, c. 1977. I can't think of the slightest indication in the prequels that Anakin feels any serious devotion to either the Jedi or the Force. The only point at which he seemed particularly invested in his status as a Jedi is when he felt he needed it to get some information about something to do with Padmé or ... something. Taken by themselves, agnostic!Anakin or whatever is a perfectly valid interpretation. Buuuuuut his eventual zealotry (which I don't think is Palpatine's influence; at no point does he show any trace of devotion to anything other than himself) modifies his chronologically earlier character for me; I assume that he is dedicated to the Force, his identity as a Jedi is deeply important to him, even though there's no sign of it, because these qualities exist later on and seem unlikely to have originated from anything else.
But probably the most significant backwards-characterization when it comes both to meta-interpretation and fic, is confined to the OT itself. About a year ago, I think, I ran across a fanfic-rants ... thing that complained about Fernwithy's Vader. She's largely out of the fandom now, so you may not be familiar with her fics, but they were very popular and personally, I think her stories are probably the best in the fandom, even now.
To summarize, her Vader is very far from pure evil -- he thinks of himself as a sort of crusader who has to do some unpleasant things for an ultimately good end. He has plenty of good impulses and even acts on them occasionally. In his creepy Darth Vader way.
So, the complaint was that her Vader was too fluffy because in one of the stories he runs across a little girl being beaten by her father and promptly slices the father up before the little girl's horrified eyes. You know, fluff! And then there ended up being some kind of wank, or ... something else. Anyway, at some point in the wank, Fernwithy pointed out that we know there's good in Vader from ROTJ, but it's not like it springs into being the moment Luke realizes it's there. He's sensing good that was there all along, and so it would make sense for that to manifest at other times -- but because, you know, Darth Vader, it'd be awful and warped by his being a tyrannical Dark Side-using mostly-villain.
And you can interpret earlier behaviour in light of what we discover later -- like, his complaining about the Death Star (... because it's not as cool as the Force?). His fascist joking (...) looks different knowing that he becomes a member of a tyrannical dictatorship. But at the same time, it can be difficult to balance the different pieces of characterization.
You can't ignore that Anakin becomes Darth Vader -- there's no way I can see that as irrelevant to his characterization at, pretty much, any point; something about Anakin makes it possible for him to become Darth Vader later, and something about Darth Vader makes it possible for him to die heroically. But it's ... you know, I hate The Phantom Menace as much as any PT-bashing OT fangirl, but people talking about baby!Anakin being a little psychopath make me go "whaaaaaat?" The fact that he becomes Darth Vader does not make him secretly evil as a child, or anything other than a restless, good-natured little boy. It's relevant, but I'm not quite sure in what way.
In AUs, of course, you get an extra layer of confusion, because the later characterization that retroactively alters the initial characterization is different -- but at the same time, what did happen in the canonical future is still part and parcel of the AU characterization. Like, if I (or someone else *whistles*) write a fic where Luke runs off to the Academy, is promptly discovered by Vader and goes to the Dark Side without really knowing any better and they overthrow the Emperor together, I've still got to consider what we know about them from ROTJ, even though they're not the same people and they're not really going to end up there.
But then, the fic that I'm actually writing is an alternate canon AU; it's not a for-what-of-a-nail type thing, it's a reimagining of ROTJ based on ideas that weren't used. So I feel free to actually dismiss ROTJ (or PT) characterizations as actually irrelevant -- but only somewhat.No matter how many times I tell myself that Revengeverse!Luke and Leia aren't related, it's still awkward.
So ... I don't know. Future characterization does modify present characterization, I think. Somewhat. Depending on the case. And especially when the case is something completely game changing like Vader's redemption or (on a muuuuch smaller scale) Darcy's affection for the Gardiners. Unless it's an alternate canon, then everything's out the window (kind of). I am clearly an exemplar of clarity and neat conclusions.
Asexuality meme
Day 17: What's your favourite asexual movie?
SW is only borderline, so. Um. Murder on the Orient Express?
Fanfic meme
Day 18: Titles -- are they the bane of your existence, or the easiest part of the fic? Also, if you do chaptered fic, do you give each chapter a title, or not?
Baaaaaaane. The only titles I've come up with easily are the ones that I wrote the fic around in the first place. Otherwise I hunt around for relevant pithy quotes, or something to parallel the original (as I'm doing for both au_bigbang stories this year -- but last year, I didn't title First Impressions until the day I posted it, and hele and I laughed about how weird it was to refer to it as FI instead of 'the genderswap'). I do not title chapters -- it's hard enough to think of a title for the whole story!
#what do you mean The Monk isn't about constitutional monarchy
#it COULD BE
#damn it, I don't waaaaant to write about it and I have to finish my paper by tomorrow evening and I've hardly started baaaaaaw
#there was a post about acesecrets that was completely awful but now I can't find it
#not that I want to
#but I'd kind of like to see everybody else bawl the OP out. jerk.
#oh, it's so embarrassing that so many other asexuals are afraid of dying alone
#and living alone
#how humiliating for you, poor dear
#maybe they came to their senses. or someone else did.
#queersecrets = awesome
#nearly done with Ch 9
#an elaborate sixty part outline and my only guideline for the whole chapter was awkwardtiemz
#dear past self: you suck
#my therapist describes my conversations with myself as the psychological equivalent of figuring out where I'm going by repeatedly hitting myself over the head with a 2x4
#I really have no business being in religion, at all
#I'm like "I actually try not to think about miracles, because if I do I come up with perfectly rational reasons for them"
#I'm also like die in a fire plz (when it comes to teaching "modesty" to a room full of four to eight-year-olds)
#ooh, sesame chicken. yummy!
#Darths and Droids rocks
So I've been rewatching A New Hope (slooooowly), keeping an eye on the re-reading of Pride and Prejudice at AHA (irritably), and of course, lurking at Mark Does Stuff. One of the features of the latter two (especially Mark Reads/Mark Watches) is that they do not talk about what happens later. Mark, of course, doesn't even know what happens later.
With my quasi-close reading-things, I'm not really doing that. I'll try to keep an eye on what the story looks like at this point (Anakin Skywalker is still hanging around in Darth Vader's death toll!), but the original idea was to see what the story looked like in conjunction with the knowledge we have from Empire. I've sort of done that. Mostly I take ESB canon for a given, and apply varying degrees of discontinuity to the rest. That is, one moment I'll be saying that an event can be interpreted one way in the context of ROTJ, but if we ignore ROTJ it looks like this, and the prequels indicate this totally different thing, and if you put all that together with the EU then you can only assume something else entirely.
It's like continuity whiplash. But it got me thinking less about SW continuity specifically than about something that comes up a lot in Austen fandom. It's when a character exhibits a trait, or just does something, fairly late in the story, and that retroactively alters our understanding of something that happened in the beginning, and what the character was like all along. Now, I expect this happens all the time, but P&P is in many ways the quintessential model.
First you've got the letter which shows that Darcy may be an unpleasant person but he's never been a bad one. Then, we find out from the people who depend on him that he's an actively good one -- and has always been so. Then he shows up in person, and is exactly as he's been described in this part, but is dramatically different from how we see him before. Debatably. And then we hear that he's continuing to act in that "new" way even when Elizabeth isn't there. But they meet up again, and he acts basically how he acted at the beginning, with only some minor adjustments.
So if you're discussing Darcy's character in the context of, say, the piano conversation at Hunsford, there's this kind of odd thing where you also take into account things we don't find out yet, some of which are revealed when he's (debatably!) undergone a significant change. And it's not always clear how much of his later character you can apply to the earlier stages (people argue a lot about this), except things like Mrs Reynolds' testimony that obviously applies for the last twenty-four years. (Though it doesn't keep people from insisting that Elizabeth turned the jerkass into the kind-hearted landlord and Mrs Reynolds doesn't really mean he's been like that since the age of four.)
So it's messy enough when it's a single character in one rather short book. But going back to SW, it becomes this mammoth thing. That's a danger of prequels in general (the moment that little kid said "my name is Anakin," I'm pretty sure everyone went OMG DARTH VADER!11!!), but in particular when the story is . . . let's say, dynamic. For instance, the multitude of retcons that followed in every single movie after A New Hope retroactively altered almost everyone's characterization, but weigh the most heavily on Obi-Wan's, because he was the primary source of exposition (I think I talked more about this here).
I ran across some meta recently(ish) that got me thinking about it, too -- I don't remember what it was exactly, just that I agreed right up until the end, when the OP mentioned in passing that Anakin is obviously not religious. As an OT fangirl -- who pretty much always gives supremacy to the OT when it comes time for fanwank -- my general reaction to the meta was "right ... okay ... yeah, I can see that ... hm, that makes sense...yes, of course...huh?!" Because in the very first Star Wars movie, the character who turns out to be Anakin Skywalker criticizes the giant superweapon he stands on out of some twisted piety, is insulted for his "ancient" religion, and promptly flies into a homicidal rage, while delivering the immortal line:
I find your lack of faith disturbing.
While it could be argued that worshipping the Force does not follow from using it -- it could be regarded more as tool than deity -- it's quite clear that Anakin conceptualizes it as a matter of religious faith.
And by "Anakin," I mean Darth Vader, c. 1977. I can't think of the slightest indication in the prequels that Anakin feels any serious devotion to either the Jedi or the Force. The only point at which he seemed particularly invested in his status as a Jedi is when he felt he needed it to get some information about something to do with Padmé or ... something. Taken by themselves, agnostic!Anakin or whatever is a perfectly valid interpretation. Buuuuuut his eventual zealotry (which I don't think is Palpatine's influence; at no point does he show any trace of devotion to anything other than himself) modifies his chronologically earlier character for me; I assume that he is dedicated to the Force, his identity as a Jedi is deeply important to him, even though there's no sign of it, because these qualities exist later on and seem unlikely to have originated from anything else.
But probably the most significant backwards-characterization when it comes both to meta-interpretation and fic, is confined to the OT itself. About a year ago, I think, I ran across a fanfic-rants ... thing that complained about Fernwithy's Vader. She's largely out of the fandom now, so you may not be familiar with her fics, but they were very popular and personally, I think her stories are probably the best in the fandom, even now.
To summarize, her Vader is very far from pure evil -- he thinks of himself as a sort of crusader who has to do some unpleasant things for an ultimately good end. He has plenty of good impulses and even acts on them occasionally. In his creepy Darth Vader way.
So, the complaint was that her Vader was too fluffy because in one of the stories he runs across a little girl being beaten by her father and promptly slices the father up before the little girl's horrified eyes. You know, fluff! And then there ended up being some kind of wank, or ... something else. Anyway, at some point in the wank, Fernwithy pointed out that we know there's good in Vader from ROTJ, but it's not like it springs into being the moment Luke realizes it's there. He's sensing good that was there all along, and so it would make sense for that to manifest at other times -- but because, you know, Darth Vader, it'd be awful and warped by his being a tyrannical Dark Side-using mostly-villain.
And you can interpret earlier behaviour in light of what we discover later -- like, his complaining about the Death Star (... because it's not as cool as the Force?). His fascist joking (...) looks different knowing that he becomes a member of a tyrannical dictatorship. But at the same time, it can be difficult to balance the different pieces of characterization.
You can't ignore that Anakin becomes Darth Vader -- there's no way I can see that as irrelevant to his characterization at, pretty much, any point; something about Anakin makes it possible for him to become Darth Vader later, and something about Darth Vader makes it possible for him to die heroically. But it's ... you know, I hate The Phantom Menace as much as any PT-bashing OT fangirl, but people talking about baby!Anakin being a little psychopath make me go "whaaaaaat?" The fact that he becomes Darth Vader does not make him secretly evil as a child, or anything other than a restless, good-natured little boy. It's relevant, but I'm not quite sure in what way.
In AUs, of course, you get an extra layer of confusion, because the later characterization that retroactively alters the initial characterization is different -- but at the same time, what did happen in the canonical future is still part and parcel of the AU characterization. Like, if I (or someone else *whistles*) write a fic where Luke runs off to the Academy, is promptly discovered by Vader and goes to the Dark Side without really knowing any better and they overthrow the Emperor together, I've still got to consider what we know about them from ROTJ, even though they're not the same people and they're not really going to end up there.
But then, the fic that I'm actually writing is an alternate canon AU; it's not a for-what-of-a-nail type thing, it's a reimagining of ROTJ based on ideas that weren't used. So I feel free to actually dismiss ROTJ (or PT) characterizations as actually irrelevant -- but only somewhat.
So ... I don't know. Future characterization does modify present characterization, I think. Somewhat. Depending on the case. And especially when the case is something completely game changing like Vader's redemption or (on a muuuuch smaller scale) Darcy's affection for the Gardiners. Unless it's an alternate canon, then everything's out the window (kind of). I am clearly an exemplar of clarity and neat conclusions.
Asexuality meme
Day 17: What's your favourite asexual movie?
SW is only borderline, so. Um. Murder on the Orient Express?
Fanfic meme
Day 18: Titles -- are they the bane of your existence, or the easiest part of the fic? Also, if you do chaptered fic, do you give each chapter a title, or not?
Baaaaaaane. The only titles I've come up with easily are the ones that I wrote the fic around in the first place. Otherwise I hunt around for relevant pithy quotes, or something to parallel the original (as I'm doing for both au_bigbang stories this year -- but last year, I didn't title First Impressions until the day I posted it, and hele and I laughed about how weird it was to refer to it as FI instead of 'the genderswap'). I do not title chapters -- it's hard enough to think of a title for the whole story!