Those pesky fanfic acronyms, abbreviations, and random odd terms

[polgarawolf]

Hi, all! The owner/moderator of this lovely community asked me to post about some of the more often used fanfic acronyms/abbreviations. Of course, after I agreed, I discovered that the best fandom glossary I know of no longer seems to function (though it might come back online later, in which case I suggest that those who're interested check back

Comments

[polgarawolf]

*Lol!* Actually, it's rather prosaic. Dear ol' Georgie is rather fond of wearing plaid and/or flannel shirts. Or at least he used to be, when he was making the OT. The nicknames started basically as descriptive little nomikers and they've stuck for quite some time. Even my mom refers to Mr. Lucas as the Flanneled One sometimes.

Many fans blame Vergere's appearance in the NJO series and her "contamination" of the New Jedi Order as a whole and of Jacen in particular for the downward spiral the EU has headed, lately. Jacen, the poor boy, has become a bit of a sociopath of late. The Darth Moron, as some of us call him (and other variants along those lines), is far worse a hypocrite and far more destructive to those he supposedly cares for than Anakin Skywalker ever could have been, nowadays. It is a - sore point, for many fans. Since Vergere is a Fosh and therefore rather avian in appearance and since she is supposed to have fled to the Far Outsiders in order to escape from a botched attempt to usurp Sidious' place as the head Sith before he could murder her in retaliation and she twisted both Jacen and Luke and the Order through her "everything I tell you is a lie" manipulations, Darth Chicken has become a way to insult her three times with one blow.

*Lol!* I've left stuff out. I know I have. I'm not at all an expert. And I mostly know what I do because I've pestered people for this kind of info, to try to cover up my ignorance.

[polgarawolf]

*Lol!* S'okay, I know what you mean! (And my spelling doesn't always have a good end-of-the-week-and-out-of-brain-cells excuse.)

No problem! There's lots and lots and lots of SW books. Probably about 100 novels alone, plus maybe, oh, 50ish or more young adult books, plus the kids books, plus all of the graphic novels and comics (of which there are probably close to a thousand individual comics). And then there's the games with their storylines, too. Trust me when I tell you that few fans keep up with it all. Most of us either stick mainly with certain characters we like or either pick books over comics or comics over games or some combo of all of those to follow and either ignore the rest or else cheat and read up on them on the SW Wiki instead.

[polgarawolf]

*Lol!* Yes, Obi-Wan's in quite a few of the prequel-era books (and I'll be quite happy if he ends up being in more!) and a lot of the prequel-era comics, too (though of course, if you're like me, you read those and fill in the actors mentally). There's no such thing as too much Obi-Wan. No such thing at all, ever!

That's my favorite SW place. I think I spend more or at least as much time just poking around on the Wookiepedia, reading and looking at the media files, than I do visiting any other site, even if you combined all the different lj communities.

[polgarawolf]

I probably spend as much time on the Wookiepedia as I do because I like to research and read about things I'm not familiar with in the EU (like the characters from the games and how their bios connect them to each other). I lose track of the time a lot because I follow links to articles with more links and then to more articles with more links and . . . well, you get the idea.

I tend to like the prequel-era books a lot more than I do the other stuff that's being written at the other end of the EU (post-NJO series stuff), so I spend a lot of time rereading those. It's kind of odd because even though I tend to like almost all of the prequel-era books, I'm constantly disappointed because Obi-Wan isn't actually in all of the novels. So I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to imagine what the other prequel novels would read like if Obi-Wan had been in them. I'm probably far too entertained by those kinds of what-ifs.

first half reply (because I went over the lj's word/character limit)

[polgarawolf]

I've been a fan of the SW saga since I was a little girl & first saw the movie that was still called Star Wars and hadn't been renamed A New Hope yet. So I grew up reading a lot of the old SW Bantam books - A C Crispin's Han books, Barbara Hambley's books with Callista, the Thrawn books by Timothy Zahn, etc. - & spent a lot of time scribbling really embarrassing speculative stories about the people I really wanted to see some books about, namely Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker. I was completely fascinated with the idea of those two & their friendship & the reason why Obi-Wan would blame himself so completely for Anakin's (well, death, at first, but then it turned out it was a figurative death since the Vader personality murdered Anakin in his rise to power as a Sith Lord) fall from the very beginning. I have to admit all the time when people ask about whether or not I read/tolerate slash that I was slashing people even before I was ever old enough to've known the term or what it meant). Reading about the other people from the films was okay, but it was frustrating because I wanted to know about Obi-Wan & Anakin (especially Obi-Wan, because he just always struck me as very sad, which made me want to know what had hurt him so badly) & I wanted to know how the Old Republic fell & the Empire arose where the Republic had been. I wasn't half as interested in following the Big Three and their cohorts after the Battle of Endor as I was in finding out about everybody's backstories. I was ecstatic when I found out Lucas was really going to do a set of prequel films, because I finally thought we were going to be told Obi-Wan's and Anakin's full stories and the fall of the Old Republic and the old Jedi Order and the rise of Palpatine's Empire. Needless to say, though I wouldn't give up the prequel films or prequel-era books for the world, I wasn't really entirely impressed with them all, either. My disappointment in Lucas' storytelling abilities and my frustration with the EU writers is what makes me a fanfic writer, when it comes to SW. If I didn't love Obi-Wan so much, I'd probably be rewriting the whole darn EU shebang from the NJO series onwards, just because I think the EU plunges downhill at a very fast clip starting with the NJO series and it offends me that these so-called professional writers can't bloody well do any better than that crap when it comes to stories for the GFFA.

*lol!* Don't worry. I think Qui-Gon is a bloody hypocrite and a pompous arse. I mostly tolerate him only because Obi-Wan loves the lunk like his father. Well, that and I think I'd get burned at the stake if I didn't at least try to tolerate him and at least give him a chance to try to redeem himself. *Makes wholly innocent face over the fact that said redemption is going to drag him through several wringers and nearly get him "killed," which is going to be a fairly serious thing considering he's already dead and a Force spirit*

Padme's ludicrous inconsistencies as a character in both canon and EU are a serious problem to me, but the truth of the matter is that she's probably so darn inconsistent because she's frankly not as important as a character to Lucas and so doesn't get as much attention paid to her, with the result that she essentially comes across as an entirely different (and progressively morally weaker and more selfish) person in every single one of the prequel films and that her relationship with Anakin isn't really portrayed in the same way in any of the EU sources, none of which match up to what we're given/shown in the films and the novelizations of the films (which carry more weight, to me, than the EU, because they're G-canon and not C-canon). I really think she was in love with the idea of Anakin, the idea that she could have someone like Anakin (and so know love and have a little family of her own) without having to give up the career and the life she'd built for herself, more than she cared for Anakin himself, as a person. She cared about him and she certainly seems to have become infatuated with him, but she wasn't in love with him and she didn't (by my definition of the emotion) truly love Anakin. And Anakin, as we all know, was obsessed with the idea he had of Padme as his own personal angel.

Re: first reply to your first half of reply

[polgarawolf]

I swear I bet the Flanneled One is somewhere laughing up his sleeve at all the people who see Anakin and Padme and think "O, true love!" and get swoony. For pity's sake, the whole darn prequel saga is pretty much about how nothing is what is seems, on the surface. You'd think more people would've caught on to that, not to mention Anakin's neediness and ego/insecurity issues (given, duh, he spent most of ten years as a SLAVE) plus the severely unhealthy (one might even say fucked up) power dynamic in that particular relationship, and twig to the fact that what Anakin and Padme share is not real love. It kills me that people don't get that, that they can actually watch the movies and get anything like a healthy relationship or a romantic love out of what Padme and Anakin have. It's like calling a drug addiction romantic, for pity's sake!

God, I can't stand the saintly notion people have of Qui-Gon. The guy was a hypocrite (one instant Obi-Wan's ready for his trials, the next he's Qui-Gon's very young apprentice who still has much to learn?! Oh, yeah, right, and like the man isn't just talking out of both sides of his mouth in order to pursue something he wants as a prop to his own vainglory, just then!!!) who always thought he knew best (better even than 800-plus-year-old Grand Master Yoda, for pity's sake!) and who pretty much ruined everything and everyone he touched. His first Padawan? Qui-Gon killed the boy's father in front of his eyes and then abandoned him to his fate and the Dark Side because the boy was not too pleased with dear ol' Master afterwards. He kept refusing to take Obi-Wan as an apprentice, despite what the Force willed, out of sheer stubborness. He abandoned Obi-Wan in the middle of one of their fist missions, on a world in the midst of a generations-long civil war, in order to rush his own childhood crush and secret love back to the Temple for healing, because Obi-Wan didn't want to abandon the mission and Qui-Gon couldn't be bothered to deal with him when Tahl had a boo-boo that needed bacta. I could go on like this for paragraphs more! The list of that man's crimes in the EU alone (without even touching on his sickeningly skewed, for expediency's sake only sense of ethics, in the actual films) is longer than I am tall! I can't stand him. I tolerate him for two reasons alone: 1) Obi-Wan loves the s.o.b. like a father and 2) I'd prefer not to be sacrificed by being burned at the stake by the Qui-Gon-ites.

Re: first reply to your first half of reply

[polgarawolf]

*Sighs* Yes, my sympathy for Liam Neeson keeps undermining my disgust with Qui-Gon. And every time I come up with something to inflict on Qui-Gon that's that what he deserves, I get this mental flash of Obi-Wan giving me this heart-broken expression, and I end up going easy on the schmuck so Obi won't look like somebody just killed his kitten.

Well, aside from the fact that I'm pretty sure he wouldn't've fallen without Sidious there to push him, I put the blame for Anakin's fall as follows: 50% on the hypocrisy and fear of the High Council and Qui-Gon's manipulativeness, 40% on Padme's selfishness and the fact that her very presence in his life taught him how to keep secrets he shouldn't have from Obi-Wan and to break rules he shouldn't've been so willing to break if he was that set on being a Jedi, and 10% on Anakin's own stupidity and pride. Anakin is one of the few characters in SW I can feel almost wholly sorry for and still want to smack, because honestly, when it all comes down to it, there's no excuse for what he does. He knows better. He has someone he could've gone to for help when he started to realize he was in over his head and he refused to do it because he was too afraid to risk having to explain what he'd been up to with Padme. After everything, Obi-Wan STILL didn't want to have to hurt him, and he could have turned back, but it was easier to explode at Padme for bringing Obi-Wan there where he didn't want him and to lash out about how unfair everyone was being and etc. *Sighs in exasperation*

second half reply (because I went over the lj's word/character limit)

[polgarawolf]

Anakin never knew her well enough as a person to really know or love her. Neither one of them really spend enough time with the other to ever get past the stage of infatuation with the concept they have of each other. They have limerence, really, not love. I don't really know if Padme ever actually allows herself to be close enough to anyone (either in canon or EU) to've ever been what I would call truly in love. And the only person Anakin ever knew enough to truly love was Obi-Wan, IMHO. Those two are my SW OTP because, after all, we all know that Anakin loved Obi-Wan and that Obi-Wan loved Anakin. Obi-Wan tells Anakin so on Mustafar, there near the end, and Anakin tells Obi-Wan he loves him in AotC, when they're in pursuit of that shape-changing bounty hunter/assassin and Obi-Wan repeats that quip about having the feeling Anakin will be the death of him someday. Somebody made the decision to have Anakin articulate his love in familial terms rather than romantic terms, but we all know Lucas likes to pull in as big a demographic as possible and the odds are very high that this clarification was put in to make the remark more acceptable for parents whose small children are obsessed with or wanted to go see the SW prequel films. As for Obi-Wan using a past tense, well, he feels he's failed Anakin and that Anakin has been destroyed by the Dark Side. He's had his whole world destroyed, and when Anakin would not see reason, to him it signified that what had made Anakin his Anakin no longer existed in the person claiming the title of Darth Vader. So to him it makes sense to use the past tense, even though he quite obviously never gets over Anakin or the loss of him.

IMHO, RotS makes it pretty clear that the relationship Obi-Wan and Anakin share is a very complex thing and that it is neither quite just friendship or just a familial type of love, and there's not very many other kinds of love left once you strike out love that is familial and love that involves friendship, especially when Jedi are supposed to have infinite compassion for all beings and we know that what Obi-Wan and Anakin share isn't just a part of their duty as Jedi (in fact, as we know, their partnership puts strain on both men's ability to do their duty as Jedi, because they care more for each other and will strive to protect each other first and foremost, before they will worry about completing their missions and therefore doing their duty as Jedi). All you've basically got left, then, is the kind of passionate love that involves desire and the kind of love you get when you've got two people who complete each other on a fundamental level (as in, two people made for each other, soul-mates). Now personally, I find it extremely telling that Obi-Wan and Anakin are labelled even in Lucas' canon (the RotS film and novelization) as being "The Team," capital letters deliberate, one breath (as if for the name of one being) Kenobi & Skywalker or one breath (ditto) Anakin & Obi-Wan. That sounds like people who complete each other, to me. I don't care if you call it yuanfen or ai or agape or sayang - the love those two have is essentially selfless and giving and unconditional and yields a unity, a completion or wholeness. And I think it's why things always bloody well go wrong when those two split up, because them being apart from one another disrupts that unity. Padme (in a way similar to the way the EU depicts Siri Tachi, for Obi-Wan) is just a crush, a childhood fascination, who becomes an adolescent attachment and a personal ego-prop more out of Anakin's need to feel loved and to see himself as a worthy person, as a real individual (not as a slave, not as someone who doesn't really matter, not as someone to be tolerated out of duty or a promise made to another person), and his fear of being alone and just simply being not good enough (in Obi-Wan's or the Order's eyes). Anakin's downfall is fear - he clings too hard to others because he's terrified of being left alone with his own unworthy (or so he fears) self. He loses his sense of perspective when Obi-Wan isn't there to center and ground him.