Analysis (of sorts): Legends of a Fall (etc) by wyncatastrophe (1/3)
I've mostly lurked here, but I recently did an audio commentary on wyncatastrophe's Legends of a Fall, Introduction to the Museum Studies Edition - not planned, just whatever entered my head as I read it (so, lots about my personal tastes, not a lot of rigorous analysis) - and she thought it would be appropriate to the community here. So here's the first part, with a transcript for those who prefer written material (and because the sound is spotty at times).
(The picture is a sketch of Alexa Wilding, by John Waterhouse. An unfinished sketch, passed down through the generations, seemed suitable for Ryn and for the first part.)
Legends of a Fall, Introduction to the Museum Studies Edition, by wyncatastrophe
Legends of a Fall: Introduction to the Lives on Hand: A Museum Studies Anthology Edition, with special thanks to New Freedom University
Textual evidence of Orun’s life is scanty, and the conspicuous absences tell their own tale. This should not be surprising, as her most famous years were spent under the authority of the Jedi, before the Purges; she served as an officer in the Grand Army of the Republic during the Clone Wars. The Empire was surprisingly effective, within a relatively short period of time - hardly more than twenty standard years of Galactic dominion - in silencing, if not actually erasing, popular memories of the Clone Wars heroes.
I think that's interesting as a sort of - maybe it's just me, but as a commentary on canon, where one of the things that people discuss is how absolute the Empire's grip seems after a relatively short period of time, and that people talk of the stuff that was happening circa the prequel trilogy as if it were decades, if not a century, ago. So this seems, to me, at least, a bit of a commentary on how quickly the Empire manages to suppress everything.
Further complicating the problem, Orun herself seems to have been, if not actually illiterate, at least wary of writing - betraying a typically Lorethan feeling that any story worth telling demands to be told in person, between participants who share a particular convergence in space/time and therefore mutually experience the act of storytelling as a shared event.
The ... ah, anonymous scholar seems to be fairly familiar with Lorethan custom, I suppose. It interests me, in these pseudo-academic pieces, to try and get at the voice of the scholar, and this one has a particularly detached tone, clearly trying for objectivity, but I definitely get the impression that, like I said, they're very familiar with Lorethan mores. And the way that this person talks about storytelling seems to have a sort of flash of genuine feeling that overrides the attempts at objectivity.
Recording such narratives obviously misses the point; it is not to be done.
Apart from her military record, whose unexplained gaps suggest either considerable censorship or a very spotty career at odds with her reputation, there is little to show that she ever existed. This, again, may be owing to the Imperial attempts at re-writing history that very nearly succeeded in erasing it, as before the rise of the New Republic the same can be said of Anakin Skywalker (and indeed of anyone closely associated with the Old Jedi Order); almost all the documents relating to his life are narratives reconstructed ex post facto.
What I definitely do think is interesting is just the idea of what might have survived the Empire. Certainly I would think that there are people who survived into the New Republic who not only remember the Empire, but remember the Old Republic, since it was only a twenty-year period. And so I'm not sure - on the one hand, I do think, as I said, that it's very interesting to look at it in the way that history is often reconstructed in the real world, and I really love the idea of applying that to Star Wars. But when I look at it myself, and when I'm reading this, I kind of wonder how that could actually happen, in that it seems like it would be difficult for records that are not printed to be completely done away with, and moreover, that because this was such a short regime, that a lot of these things would have happened during people's lifetimes.
You'd think that they would have left memoirs, during the time of the New Republic. So I find it a little bit odd that there would be nobody with memories of Anakin before his fall. You know, memoirs that evne mentioned since he was such a significant figure. Even Ryn, who was not quite so central, but was certainly affiliated with him and with Obi-Wan, so I'm not sure I guess that I quite follow that nobody ever wrote a memoir except the people in later generations.
The earliest and most reliable of these seem to have been compiled by his son, Luke,
LUKE! [squee]
with the assistance of Orun herself, and it is these accounts that bear the strongest (implicit) testimony to Orun’s personal importance - not to the galaxy at large, but to the Skywalker family, as a family.
Yeah, so Luke really having written the earliest surviving one does seem a little weird to me. The Jedi were very nearly all wiped out, of course, but there are just so many people in the Old Republic. I can't think that all of these people were successfully killed and that the survivors would not have found occasion to record their memories for posterity. Luke and Leia really have to be the youngest of that period; they were born right at the tail end of it. Literally at the tail end of it.
However, I do really like that it's Luke who compiles it, in that ... In other stories, I'm pretty sure that there is some kind of relationship bteween Ryn and Leia, and that - just my impression was that they were somewhat better acquainted than she was with Luke. Now, maybe it's that we don't see much of what happens later, because that's Original Trilogy era, but that what - I like that it's Luke, even though Ryn seems to be closer to Leia, in the other stories, because first of all, I think it's just more probable that Luke would be a scholar, just in terms of his interests, and also that because Ryn's association with the Skywalkers would clearly be tied up with Anakin, and I think we can all imagine why this is something that Luke would be a lot more comfortable with than Leia would.
Of Orun’s own writing, we have very little; for a woman who, by all other accounts, led an active life, she seems to have had very little to say for herself. Leia Organa quotes her as saying (apparently in explanation), “I never became comfortable in the language of my captors.”
That's interesting, especially - I can't help wondering because I haven't read all the Freefall stories, if that's any point of connection between her and Anakin, who is not literally a captive in the way she is - I mean, of the Jedi - but who spoke Huttish and, you know, Shmi is clearly not a native Basic speaker, I think. He, too, is speaking a language that, at least, is not of his people. And obviously neither is Ryn. And so yeah, I'm sort of curious if, not so much in relation to this particular story, but in the verse overall, if that's one of the, sort of, points of affinity.
But since Orun certainly conducted most of her life in Basic - she left Loreth at twelve and never returned for more than three months at a stretch until at least the period of the Yuuzhan Vong invasions -
Oh man, Yuuzhan Vong is canon?
this utterance makes little sense unless it is taken to mean specifically written language, the language of the Republic, the Empire, and quite literally of her enslavement.
I'm not clear about the distinction between spoken and written Basic here. It may be my comparative unfamiliarity with the EU, but Basic is the spoken language of the Republic and the Empire, as well as the written language, so I'm not sure what the qualitative difference is here.
Of the painfully few documents that have endured to give us Orun “in her own words,” none is in her native Lorethan, and over ninety percent are military reports, written for the use of other beings.
I do like this being what survives. It sort of reflects what we see with history and archaeology in the real world, where a lot of times it is things that are military, things that are - you get things that are really quite ... trivial. Not worthy of being destroyed. And I think that, accepting that the Empire did manage to destroy all these records and apparently the people who could correct the Imperial propaganda, even after the Empire was gone - accepting that, I do think that is what would survive.
Many of them are directed to (eventually) Grand Admiral Thrawn,
Okay, that's very EU-ish.
with a few intended for Lord Vader. A fragmentary history of Orun’s life, in her own words, may be constructed from the reports she posted over the years to various beings. But these are unsatisfactory in that they are hardly ever personal; Orun says almost nothing about herself, or on her own account - though one does get a fair sense of her priorities.
And it doesn't really detail that. That was one where I got the sense of being spoken to as someone who's read the stories - at least a good portion of them. We, of course, know what her priorities were and what would filter even through her military reports, but just reading this by itself, I'm like, what sense do we get? If I were reading an academic paper, I would be like, "what?"
By contrast to Orun’s speaking silences, Obi-Wan Kenobi has left a capacious body of words -
I love this. He totally would!
and yet, if we lacked Luke Skywalker’s testimony to the integrity of his collection, it would hardly be possible to recognize his musings on philosophy and his forays into narrative as having the same author. The former are dry, pedantic, occasionally relieved by flashes of gentle humor; the latter are intense, lyrical, almost like poetry in their concentration of meaning.
I like this sort of representation of the divided part of Obi-Wan's identity, especially because we have the very literal division of young Obi-Wan and old Obi-Wan. I don't think it maps perfectly onto that, but there very definitely is this sense of him being ... eternally divided, which completely fits.
Click to view(The picture is a sketch of Alexa Wilding, by John Waterhouse. An unfinished sketch, passed down through the generations, seemed suitable for Ryn and for the first part.)
Legends of a Fall, Introduction to the Museum Studies Edition, by wyncatastrophe
Legends of a Fall: Introduction to the Lives on Hand: A Museum Studies Anthology Edition, with special thanks to New Freedom University
Textual evidence of Orun’s life is scanty, and the conspicuous absences tell their own tale. This should not be surprising, as her most famous years were spent under the authority of the Jedi, before the Purges; she served as an officer in the Grand Army of the Republic during the Clone Wars. The Empire was surprisingly effective, within a relatively short period of time - hardly more than twenty standard years of Galactic dominion - in silencing, if not actually erasing, popular memories of the Clone Wars heroes.
I think that's interesting as a sort of - maybe it's just me, but as a commentary on canon, where one of the things that people discuss is how absolute the Empire's grip seems after a relatively short period of time, and that people talk of the stuff that was happening circa the prequel trilogy as if it were decades, if not a century, ago. So this seems, to me, at least, a bit of a commentary on how quickly the Empire manages to suppress everything.
Further complicating the problem, Orun herself seems to have been, if not actually illiterate, at least wary of writing - betraying a typically Lorethan feeling that any story worth telling demands to be told in person, between participants who share a particular convergence in space/time and therefore mutually experience the act of storytelling as a shared event.
The ... ah, anonymous scholar seems to be fairly familiar with Lorethan custom, I suppose. It interests me, in these pseudo-academic pieces, to try and get at the voice of the scholar, and this one has a particularly detached tone, clearly trying for objectivity, but I definitely get the impression that, like I said, they're very familiar with Lorethan mores. And the way that this person talks about storytelling seems to have a sort of flash of genuine feeling that overrides the attempts at objectivity.
Recording such narratives obviously misses the point; it is not to be done.
Apart from her military record, whose unexplained gaps suggest either considerable censorship or a very spotty career at odds with her reputation, there is little to show that she ever existed. This, again, may be owing to the Imperial attempts at re-writing history that very nearly succeeded in erasing it, as before the rise of the New Republic the same can be said of Anakin Skywalker (and indeed of anyone closely associated with the Old Jedi Order); almost all the documents relating to his life are narratives reconstructed ex post facto.
What I definitely do think is interesting is just the idea of what might have survived the Empire. Certainly I would think that there are people who survived into the New Republic who not only remember the Empire, but remember the Old Republic, since it was only a twenty-year period. And so I'm not sure - on the one hand, I do think, as I said, that it's very interesting to look at it in the way that history is often reconstructed in the real world, and I really love the idea of applying that to Star Wars. But when I look at it myself, and when I'm reading this, I kind of wonder how that could actually happen, in that it seems like it would be difficult for records that are not printed to be completely done away with, and moreover, that because this was such a short regime, that a lot of these things would have happened during people's lifetimes.
You'd think that they would have left memoirs, during the time of the New Republic. So I find it a little bit odd that there would be nobody with memories of Anakin before his fall. You know, memoirs that evne mentioned since he was such a significant figure. Even Ryn, who was not quite so central, but was certainly affiliated with him and with Obi-Wan, so I'm not sure I guess that I quite follow that nobody ever wrote a memoir except the people in later generations.
The earliest and most reliable of these seem to have been compiled by his son, Luke,
LUKE! [squee]
with the assistance of Orun herself, and it is these accounts that bear the strongest (implicit) testimony to Orun’s personal importance - not to the galaxy at large, but to the Skywalker family, as a family.
Yeah, so Luke really having written the earliest surviving one does seem a little weird to me. The Jedi were very nearly all wiped out, of course, but there are just so many people in the Old Republic. I can't think that all of these people were successfully killed and that the survivors would not have found occasion to record their memories for posterity. Luke and Leia really have to be the youngest of that period; they were born right at the tail end of it. Literally at the tail end of it.
However, I do really like that it's Luke who compiles it, in that ... In other stories, I'm pretty sure that there is some kind of relationship bteween Ryn and Leia, and that - just my impression was that they were somewhat better acquainted than she was with Luke. Now, maybe it's that we don't see much of what happens later, because that's Original Trilogy era, but that what - I like that it's Luke, even though Ryn seems to be closer to Leia, in the other stories, because first of all, I think it's just more probable that Luke would be a scholar, just in terms of his interests, and also that because Ryn's association with the Skywalkers would clearly be tied up with Anakin, and I think we can all imagine why this is something that Luke would be a lot more comfortable with than Leia would.
Of Orun’s own writing, we have very little; for a woman who, by all other accounts, led an active life, she seems to have had very little to say for herself. Leia Organa quotes her as saying (apparently in explanation), “I never became comfortable in the language of my captors.”
That's interesting, especially - I can't help wondering because I haven't read all the Freefall stories, if that's any point of connection between her and Anakin, who is not literally a captive in the way she is - I mean, of the Jedi - but who spoke Huttish and, you know, Shmi is clearly not a native Basic speaker, I think. He, too, is speaking a language that, at least, is not of his people. And obviously neither is Ryn. And so yeah, I'm sort of curious if, not so much in relation to this particular story, but in the verse overall, if that's one of the, sort of, points of affinity.
But since Orun certainly conducted most of her life in Basic - she left Loreth at twelve and never returned for more than three months at a stretch until at least the period of the Yuuzhan Vong invasions -
Oh man, Yuuzhan Vong is canon?
this utterance makes little sense unless it is taken to mean specifically written language, the language of the Republic, the Empire, and quite literally of her enslavement.
I'm not clear about the distinction between spoken and written Basic here. It may be my comparative unfamiliarity with the EU, but Basic is the spoken language of the Republic and the Empire, as well as the written language, so I'm not sure what the qualitative difference is here.
Of the painfully few documents that have endured to give us Orun “in her own words,” none is in her native Lorethan, and over ninety percent are military reports, written for the use of other beings.
I do like this being what survives. It sort of reflects what we see with history and archaeology in the real world, where a lot of times it is things that are military, things that are - you get things that are really quite ... trivial. Not worthy of being destroyed. And I think that, accepting that the Empire did manage to destroy all these records and apparently the people who could correct the Imperial propaganda, even after the Empire was gone - accepting that, I do think that is what would survive.
Many of them are directed to (eventually) Grand Admiral Thrawn,
Okay, that's very EU-ish.
with a few intended for Lord Vader. A fragmentary history of Orun’s life, in her own words, may be constructed from the reports she posted over the years to various beings. But these are unsatisfactory in that they are hardly ever personal; Orun says almost nothing about herself, or on her own account - though one does get a fair sense of her priorities.
And it doesn't really detail that. That was one where I got the sense of being spoken to as someone who's read the stories - at least a good portion of them. We, of course, know what her priorities were and what would filter even through her military reports, but just reading this by itself, I'm like, what sense do we get? If I were reading an academic paper, I would be like, "what?"
By contrast to Orun’s speaking silences, Obi-Wan Kenobi has left a capacious body of words -
I love this. He totally would!
and yet, if we lacked Luke Skywalker’s testimony to the integrity of his collection, it would hardly be possible to recognize his musings on philosophy and his forays into narrative as having the same author. The former are dry, pedantic, occasionally relieved by flashes of gentle humor; the latter are intense, lyrical, almost like poetry in their concentration of meaning.
I like this sort of representation of the divided part of Obi-Wan's identity, especially because we have the very literal division of young Obi-Wan and old Obi-Wan. I don't think it maps perfectly onto that, but there very definitely is this sense of him being ... eternally divided, which completely fits.