hatred empowers us
...to quote Darth Vaarsuvius.
This isn't fic -- I'm going to try and post Lucy in a few chunks, starting tomorrow, and then move on to First Impressions. No, this is just me complaining about a trope I hate, with respect to one of the Star Wars expanded universe's novels and Pride and Prejudice. (Doesn't everyone think of these things together?)
Awhile back, I read Tatooine Ghost, which I’d heard was one of the less annoying products of the post-ROTJ EU. Shockingly, I didn’t like it.
I really, really didn’t like it. I definitely didn’t buy it (so all of this is going off memory, but I think it was pretty straightforward).
It wasn’t the writing, though that wasn’t anything exceptional. It wasn’t the “meh” plot. It wasn’t the phenomenally bland Kitster Banai (where’s fialleril when you need her?) and less-than-thrilling Han Solo. It wasn’t the idea of Han and Leia as the Solos (though it grates). It was Leia.
In many ways, Tatooine Ghost is about Leia’s troubled relationship with her natural father. The storyline smacked of ‘excuse plot’ to get her to Tatooine and force her to deal with Anakin-as-Anakin and not Anakin-as-Vader. That is not my issue -- I think random something-or-other bringing Leia to Tatooine and forcing her to confront her legacy is an awesome idea.
My problem is with the way that Tatooine Ghost handled it. Basically, TG fell back on this incredibly annoying trope (which, alas, I have not yet found at TV Tropes -- I’m sure it’s only a matter of time) that I see ALL THE TIME.
It goes something like this.
Person A does something unpleasant to Person B. The level of unpleasantness varies, but it’s sufficient that normally you’d sympathize with Person B and dismiss Person A as a total asshole. Since the whole point is to get Person A and Person B on reasonably good terms, Person A has to gain our sympathies somehow.
This is done by making Person B completely overreact to whatever happened, blaming Person A for things they didn’t do, going on and on about comparatively minor slights, often falling into gross hypocrisy, and generally making every complaint except the one they have a right to make. If they do make it, it’s lost in the mass of irrational vitriol, allowing the author and readers to dismiss B’s antipathy to A as unreasonable, self-sabotaging, and just … well, wrong.
Quite often, there are a number of other characters around to go “lolwut” at B, attempt to explain (or mansplain!) things to them, and so on. But silly B, they just don’t listen, and keep being silly and unreasonable until confronted with irrefutable proof of their wrongness. Then they’re sorry!
(Undoubtedly by pure coincidence, A is often male and B is often female. There’s enough variation that I went for gender-neutrality in the summary, though. Oh, and the extras vary quite a bit.)
I can think of exactly one example of something that does this well: Pride and Prejudice. And a more quintessential, over- (and poorly-)imitated example would be hard to find.
Darcy insults Elizabeth at a party, within her hearing. She is, understandably, insulted. Less understandably, she remains convinced that his character was frozen in time at that moment and refuses to see anything beyond it, in the face of steadily mounting evidence. She reads his awkward attempts at flirtation as really involved insults. She reads confessions as boasts. She prides herself on her perfectly perfect judgment of everything, and turns around and accuses him of vanity.
So when the inevitable showdown comes, she rips him up one side and down the other about (1) things he did and is totally at fault for, (2) things he did, but for different (and more defensible) reasons than she thinks, and (3) things he never did at all. And while she seems to be celebrated at the moment, the scene becomes agonizingly cringeworthy in retrospect. When the truth comes out, Elizabeth is devastated, feels like a horrible person, turns her criticism on herself for once (and is much the better for it).
Oh yeah, and her sister served as the Lolwut Squad all through the first half of the book. P&P is this plot. There’s just one thing.
Elizabeth was right. Oh, not about everything she said. Not about most of what she said. But Elizabeth continues to believe that Darcy is a jerk even afterwards, and it turns out that after Darcy got over being royally pissed off, he believed it too. So he tried to be more considerate, or at least act in more considerate ways. And Elizabeth finds that, while he was certainly a jerk when they met and when they proposed, he’s (1) not like that all (or most) of the time, and (2) now trying really hard to not be like that ever (with only partial success, because Austen).
Which is to say, Pride and Prejudice is a nuanced version of this where Person A is successfully rehabilitated on many different levels, where Person B does overreact, but where that overreaction does not erase Person A’s offense, and where Person B’s single valid objection is not dismissed with the mass of unreasonable vitriol, but carefully differentiated.
Okay, back to SW and Tatooine Ghost. In this novel (and in a lot of Skywalker-centric fic in general), Leia’s antipathy towards Anakin is presented as irrational and unreasonable. Yeah.
Off the top of my head, here are some of the reasons Leia Skywalker Organa has to hate her father.
(1) He turned to the Dark Side, sacrificing his judgment and basic integrity of personality for something that didn’t work anyway, and leading to nasty consequences for pretty much every life touched by his, including hers.
(2) He choked her pregnant mother into unconsciousness, at the very least contributing to her death.
(3) He helped lead an oppressive fascist regime that she has dedicated her life to fighting.
(4) He murdered a lot of people, including children.
(5) He hunted her down and captured her.
(6) He tortured her for information.
(7) He cooperated with the man who blew up her entire planet.
(8) He captured her again, tortured both of her companions, and intended to take her away to some undisclosed location for some undisclosed purpose. It wouldn’t have been nice.
(9) He sliced off her twin brother’s hand.
(10) When he discovered her existence, his immediate reaction was to use her as leverage against her brother by threatening to turn her to evil, too.
But in Tatooine Ghost, we don’t (as far as I recall) hear Leia say, “he tortured me and he tortured you and that is not something I should just get over, okay?” We hear some vague idea that his blood is tainted or something and, somehow, his voluntary turn to evil could be transmitted in his -- and therefore her -- DNA, so she shouldn’t have kids.
She seems offended that his old friends retain their affection and admiration for him, even though he never did any harm to them or Tatooine -- rather the reverse if he did free the slaves (and in any case, as a slave who got away and proceeded to become the second most powerful person in the galaxy, it’s hardly a stretch to see why he’d be a local hero regardless).
She also seems to be under the impression that he emerged from the womb in full armour and struggles to even consider that he wasn’t a child of the Corn. She even admits that she would likely have done exactly what he did to the Sand People in his position, while still regarding it as proof as his innate evil or something.
It’s Han who has to be the voice of reason. He’s the one who points out that people aren’t generally born evil, that the people of Tatooine have valid reasons to admire Anakin Skywalker, that he or Leia would likely have done the same thing if somebody they loved had been tortured to death, that evil is not a hereditary disease.
(His “it’s your choice, but” guilt-trips on her in regard to having children are pretty squicky, by the way, as is the narrative’s implicit endorsement. See, when Leia is all confused and irrational and conflicted, she doesn’t want children. Then she comes to terms with her family and grows as a person and is at peace with herself, so she’s okay with having children. Offspring are emblems of maturity and moral growth, y’all.)
And in accordance with tradition, Leia pays no attention to any of this and only comes around when confronted with irrefutable evidence that Anakin was not born evil: his mother conveniently left a journal full of daily accounts of their lives, which unsurprisingly include Anakin being a child and not a tiny Darth Vader. So Leia realizes that hey, she’s not a carrier for evil, Anakin made these things called choices that generally happen in sequences over extended periods of time.
I think a holojournal from Padmé would have been cooler, and more likely to provide a compelling look at her father as a good person-gone-horribly-wrong than the fact that he was a nice child. Padmé’s voice would also likely be more powerful and immediate for Leia in particular, since she actually remembers her.
End result: Leia is somewhat reconciled to her heritage, at least to the point that she gets over her silly childfree ways and presumably goes on to conceive offspring (...a future Sith Lord, lol, a on-again-off-again cool daughter, and another brother she actually names after her father idek).
Yeah, no. Cool subject, painful execution.
This isn't fic -- I'm going to try and post Lucy in a few chunks, starting tomorrow, and then move on to First Impressions. No, this is just me complaining about a trope I hate, with respect to one of the Star Wars expanded universe's novels and Pride and Prejudice. (Doesn't everyone think of these things together?)
Awhile back, I read Tatooine Ghost, which I’d heard was one of the less annoying products of the post-ROTJ EU. Shockingly, I didn’t like it.
I really, really didn’t like it. I definitely didn’t buy it (so all of this is going off memory, but I think it was pretty straightforward).
It wasn’t the writing, though that wasn’t anything exceptional. It wasn’t the “meh” plot. It wasn’t the phenomenally bland Kitster Banai (where’s fialleril when you need her?) and less-than-thrilling Han Solo. It wasn’t the idea of Han and Leia as the Solos (though it grates). It was Leia.
In many ways, Tatooine Ghost is about Leia’s troubled relationship with her natural father. The storyline smacked of ‘excuse plot’ to get her to Tatooine and force her to deal with Anakin-as-Anakin and not Anakin-as-Vader. That is not my issue -- I think random something-or-other bringing Leia to Tatooine and forcing her to confront her legacy is an awesome idea.
My problem is with the way that Tatooine Ghost handled it. Basically, TG fell back on this incredibly annoying trope (which, alas, I have not yet found at TV Tropes -- I’m sure it’s only a matter of time) that I see ALL THE TIME.
It goes something like this.
Person A does something unpleasant to Person B. The level of unpleasantness varies, but it’s sufficient that normally you’d sympathize with Person B and dismiss Person A as a total asshole. Since the whole point is to get Person A and Person B on reasonably good terms, Person A has to gain our sympathies somehow.
This is done by making Person B completely overreact to whatever happened, blaming Person A for things they didn’t do, going on and on about comparatively minor slights, often falling into gross hypocrisy, and generally making every complaint except the one they have a right to make. If they do make it, it’s lost in the mass of irrational vitriol, allowing the author and readers to dismiss B’s antipathy to A as unreasonable, self-sabotaging, and just … well, wrong.
Quite often, there are a number of other characters around to go “lolwut” at B, attempt to explain (or mansplain!) things to them, and so on. But silly B, they just don’t listen, and keep being silly and unreasonable until confronted with irrefutable proof of their wrongness. Then they’re sorry!
(Undoubtedly by pure coincidence, A is often male and B is often female. There’s enough variation that I went for gender-neutrality in the summary, though. Oh, and the extras vary quite a bit.)
I can think of exactly one example of something that does this well: Pride and Prejudice. And a more quintessential, over- (and poorly-)imitated example would be hard to find.
Darcy insults Elizabeth at a party, within her hearing. She is, understandably, insulted. Less understandably, she remains convinced that his character was frozen in time at that moment and refuses to see anything beyond it, in the face of steadily mounting evidence. She reads his awkward attempts at flirtation as really involved insults. She reads confessions as boasts. She prides herself on her perfectly perfect judgment of everything, and turns around and accuses him of vanity.
So when the inevitable showdown comes, she rips him up one side and down the other about (1) things he did and is totally at fault for, (2) things he did, but for different (and more defensible) reasons than she thinks, and (3) things he never did at all. And while she seems to be celebrated at the moment, the scene becomes agonizingly cringeworthy in retrospect. When the truth comes out, Elizabeth is devastated, feels like a horrible person, turns her criticism on herself for once (and is much the better for it).
Oh yeah, and her sister served as the Lolwut Squad all through the first half of the book. P&P is this plot. There’s just one thing.
Elizabeth was right. Oh, not about everything she said. Not about most of what she said. But Elizabeth continues to believe that Darcy is a jerk even afterwards, and it turns out that after Darcy got over being royally pissed off, he believed it too. So he tried to be more considerate, or at least act in more considerate ways. And Elizabeth finds that, while he was certainly a jerk when they met and when they proposed, he’s (1) not like that all (or most) of the time, and (2) now trying really hard to not be like that ever (with only partial success, because Austen).
Which is to say, Pride and Prejudice is a nuanced version of this where Person A is successfully rehabilitated on many different levels, where Person B does overreact, but where that overreaction does not erase Person A’s offense, and where Person B’s single valid objection is not dismissed with the mass of unreasonable vitriol, but carefully differentiated.
Okay, back to SW and Tatooine Ghost. In this novel (and in a lot of Skywalker-centric fic in general), Leia’s antipathy towards Anakin is presented as irrational and unreasonable. Yeah.
Off the top of my head, here are some of the reasons Leia Skywalker Organa has to hate her father.
(1) He turned to the Dark Side, sacrificing his judgment and basic integrity of personality for something that didn’t work anyway, and leading to nasty consequences for pretty much every life touched by his, including hers.
(2) He choked her pregnant mother into unconsciousness, at the very least contributing to her death.
(3) He helped lead an oppressive fascist regime that she has dedicated her life to fighting.
(4) He murdered a lot of people, including children.
(5) He hunted her down and captured her.
(6) He tortured her for information.
(7) He cooperated with the man who blew up her entire planet.
(8) He captured her again, tortured both of her companions, and intended to take her away to some undisclosed location for some undisclosed purpose. It wouldn’t have been nice.
(9) He sliced off her twin brother’s hand.
(10) When he discovered her existence, his immediate reaction was to use her as leverage against her brother by threatening to turn her to evil, too.
But in Tatooine Ghost, we don’t (as far as I recall) hear Leia say, “he tortured me and he tortured you and that is not something I should just get over, okay?” We hear some vague idea that his blood is tainted or something and, somehow, his voluntary turn to evil could be transmitted in his -- and therefore her -- DNA, so she shouldn’t have kids.
She seems offended that his old friends retain their affection and admiration for him, even though he never did any harm to them or Tatooine -- rather the reverse if he did free the slaves (and in any case, as a slave who got away and proceeded to become the second most powerful person in the galaxy, it’s hardly a stretch to see why he’d be a local hero regardless).
She also seems to be under the impression that he emerged from the womb in full armour and struggles to even consider that he wasn’t a child of the Corn. She even admits that she would likely have done exactly what he did to the Sand People in his position, while still regarding it as proof as his innate evil or something.
It’s Han who has to be the voice of reason. He’s the one who points out that people aren’t generally born evil, that the people of Tatooine have valid reasons to admire Anakin Skywalker, that he or Leia would likely have done the same thing if somebody they loved had been tortured to death, that evil is not a hereditary disease.
(His “it’s your choice, but” guilt-trips on her in regard to having children are pretty squicky, by the way, as is the narrative’s implicit endorsement. See, when Leia is all confused and irrational and conflicted, she doesn’t want children. Then she comes to terms with her family and grows as a person and is at peace with herself, so she’s okay with having children. Offspring are emblems of maturity and moral growth, y’all.)
And in accordance with tradition, Leia pays no attention to any of this and only comes around when confronted with irrefutable evidence that Anakin was not born evil: his mother conveniently left a journal full of daily accounts of their lives, which unsurprisingly include Anakin being a child and not a tiny Darth Vader. So Leia realizes that hey, she’s not a carrier for evil, Anakin made these things called choices that generally happen in sequences over extended periods of time.
I think a holojournal from Padmé would have been cooler, and more likely to provide a compelling look at her father as a good person-gone-horribly-wrong than the fact that he was a nice child. Padmé’s voice would also likely be more powerful and immediate for Leia in particular, since she actually remembers her.
End result: Leia is somewhat reconciled to her heritage, at least to the point that she gets over her silly childfree ways and presumably goes on to conceive offspring (...a future Sith Lord, lol, a on-again-off-again cool daughter, and another brother she actually names after her father idek).
Yeah, no. Cool subject, painful execution.