Legends of a Fall: Introduction to the Museum Studies Edition. PG: Anakin, Obi-Wan, Padmé, others

[wyncatastrophe]

Disclaimer: George Lucas owns Star Wars.  This story is purely a work of fan fiction, and I am not making any profit from it.

Author's note: Written as a congratulatory gift!fic for attanagra, who totally deserved it!!!!! [/wild cheering] This particular (re)introduction won't appear in the "framing" effort; but since it is fairly common for chapters of

Comments

I love it! I love it! I love it!

[attanagra]

I love it. I've been fascinated for awhile by the way the Empire destroyed and transformed pre-Imperial history. And it's an interesting way in which we, the fans, were in the same boat as the characters for a long time. We didn't know any more about their past than they did. And then we got the prequels and now we know so much more, and are left amazed that they knew so little. It's as if we thought we knew what that loss of the past was like for the characters, because we had the same lack of knowledge, but we (maybe I should be saying "I") weren't really conscious of it as a loss, just as an absence. Only when we learned about the past did we become aware of what a gaping wound the Imperial era really was, that so much could have been lost or suppressed so completely.

And all of that is not a response to your fic in the strictest sense, but maybe it's complimentary in another way? :) Because I really do love all the little touches (Altisian heresy!!, trying to figure out military records! the implied debate over what constitutes the "Imperial Era"!) It's the perfect present for the situation. Thank you! :)

(Now I have all these questions. How did Anakin's braid survive? Is Anakin shirtless in all the holos Evinne donated? :p I instantly suspect the dressing gown is one that was worn on Naboo and left behind in the Naberries' home, rather than a "famous" one we would have seen in the movie, but maybe not. . . And I want to see Han Solo-Janren's family tree.)

And I meant to use THIS icon, dang it.

[attanagra]

Also, I was not language-triggered at all. This is so good on multiple levels. :)

Re: And I meant to use THIS icon, dang it.

[wyncatastrophe]

Yay! That is also very good news! *happy dance*

ZOMG YAY YOU LIKED IT

[wyncatastrophe]

I'm so excited that you liked it! I was kind of worried, writing it - I don't usually try that hard to write for an audience, but because this was a gift fic I was working really hard to keep your preferences in mind as I wrote it … which was really funny because in practice meant that I ended up doing the same thing as the anonymous academic writing this: keeping a lot of different readings in mind, trying to derive some sort of overarching theme from the available materials. That's how the Altisian stuff ended up there, too: you have "altisian jedi" listed on your profile under "interests." I had a great deal of fun wrangling with previous conversations and trying to develop a sense of what you as a reader might enjoy, plus working in the museum stuff that was just obvious - but I was never sure that I was really getting it, of course: the only test of that would be when you read it, and I've been biting my nails in case I had Done It All Wrong. But I'm so psyched that you did like it! Yay!

YES to everything you said about the OT/PT dissonance and sense of loss. So Much This.

I will answer your questions in fic …

*hugs*

Re: ZOMG YAY YOU LIKED IT

[attanagra]

I really, really liked it. :)

And the Altisian Jedi. . I was obsessed with the Altisian Jedi before we knew they were the Altisian Jedi. LOL. I was a big Callista fan when Children of the Jedi first came out, and from then on, really. And when we first got the prequels, Callista's version of the Jedi was one of those things that got shoved into canon limbo. Then "they" gradually started retconning things, and then we finally got Altis himself and his status as leader of "heretical" cult in No Prisoners and even Anakin interacting with Altis. . .and well it's just so awesome. I still want to do a sw_meta post on the Altisian heresy. And if I didn't have the Writer's Block from hell. . . I desperately want a ROTS AU where Anakin goes off to join Altis one way or another.

More fic! Yay!!! :)

Re: ZOMG YAY YOU LIKED IT

[wyncatastrophe]

Yay!!! :)

I didn't know anything about Altis or Callista until I read No Prisoners - I've still never read Children of the Jedi. Good?

The Anakin/Altis interactions were some of my favorite things. Not surprisingly, there is a Ryn storyline in FFV that relates; but by the time she gets hip to Altis, it's too late for that to really do anyone much good (more's the pity).

The ROTS AU does raise some interesting questions - why doesn't Anakin seek help from heretics before Sith? Is it the time constraint? Is it that he feels a fall is inevitable after he saves Palpatine at the expense of Windu? Did he just panic? Give in from sheer exhaustion? There is a lot that's left unanswered as we move through ROTS.

More fic! What am I getting myself into here? Hehe.

Re: ZOMG YAY YOU LIKED IT

[attanagra]

COTJ is in a different style than most Star Wars novels. Some people love it and some people hate it. And I think it was "fashionable" to hate COTJ because Callista was a love-interest for Luke and therefore the Mara fans hated her and COTJ and the Mara fans had a lot of influence in the fandom. You had to feel very strongly about it to be willing to put up with the crap you got from the majority if you confessed to being a Callista or COTJ fan. I'd say, yes, read COTJ, because Callista is such an awesome character in her own right, and there's a lot of good Luke stuff, but be aware that a lot of it will seem really odd now because of developments in the canon and the fandom since then. And the little we see of Geith in COTJ is very different from the Geith in No Prisoners, (he doesn't seem to necessarily be a Jedi in COTJ, for one thing, let alone senior to Callie), though I suppose some of it can be explained as the effects of the war and the purges.

I'd imagine Anakin's friendship with Ryn would affect his reactions to Altis quite a bit. In the book Altis seems to be his first real "heretic", where in the Rynverse of course that's not so.

I wonder what, if anything, Anakin told Padme about Altis after meeting him? I got the impression from the book (and this goes to the ROTS AU question too) that Anakin was so disturbed by his not-quite-realization that he might not do well with attachment even in Altis's group (poor boy, he doesn't realize that his emotional issues are not his fault, and maybe Altis could help with that too, and Altis didn't have time or opportunity to tell him any of that), that he buried that experience pretty deeply. In which case he probably wouldn't have brought it up in any depth with Padme. And the book makes mention of Anakin's loyalty and felt obligations to Obi-Wan as a reason he isn't more tempted by Altis too. We know Anakin is loyal to people. So Obi-Wan and Ahsoka would be a constraint. And once loyalty to them is no longer an issue, I suspect even Vaderkin knows that even Altis is not likely to welcome the leader of the Temple massacre, assuming he could think clearly enough to Mustafar to consider it.

When I've thought about a potential fic, it seemed to me that Obi-Wan (and Ahsoka for that matter) would probably have to have been killed before or early in ROTS for Anakin to act on the potential of the Altisian sect.

Re: ZOMG YAY YOU LIKED IT

[wyncatastrophe]

I'll have to check out COTJ.

Well, actually, not as much as you might think - because by the time he meets Altis, he doesn't really think of Ryn as a heretic, because he doesn't think of her as a Jedi at all. She's her own Lorethan thing, and in a lot of ways Anakin's perceptions of her fall victim to his conflicted problems of trying not to think too hard about anything, because if he does the pieces of his life start to come unwound. If he thinks about what the Jedi say, he can't agree with it, but that makes him disloyal to Obi-Wan, and undermines his whole life's work and renders Shmi's death meaningless; if he thinks too much about what Ryn offers, a different kind of life, then he has to deal with the fact that there's some appeal there, which means admitting Padmé isn't quite perfect, which he also can't handle. There's a lot of denial going on in his life, or that's the way I read it. But I ought to emphasize here that a lot of this is stuff that I'm still trying to work out in my own head for FFV - how much he pays attention to any particular item at a given point in the story, how much denial is credible, how he sustains his always-shaky sense of self in this inner dialectic (but not forever).

I guess I was thinking that if Anakin were going to turn to Altis, it would be after his meeting with Yoda ("what must I do?") not after the attack on the Temple. By that time I think Anakin sees himself as unredeemable: you can never go back, but there is always a way forward, as he says to Bant'ena Fhernan in the Gambit duology.

I have to think about this further, but in the meantime I have sisterly obligations …

Re: ZOMG YAY YOU LIKED IT

[attanagra]

I think all those books are available as ebooks now.

That all raises an interesting question. Did the Republic Jedi make a distinction between Jedi heretics and non-Jedi force users like the Fallanassi and so on? In No Prisoners one exchange makes it sound like the Temple Jedi might actually come after the Altisians (in what way? As if they were Sith? I don't know) except that they have "an arrangement"--which almost makes it sound like Altis has blackmail material on Yoda or something. LOL Which brings up something else, do the Altisians and Temple Jedi ever find themselves in competition over potential Jedi? Or do the Altisians only recruit their own kids and outside the Republic's active jurisdiction? For that matter, I wonder if Qui-Gon would have taken Anakin and gone off to join the Altisians if he hadn't died and the Council had still been pissy about training Anakin? Or want another AU I've thought about? What if ALTIS had found Anakin as a youngster instead of Qui-Gon? Anyway, back to my original speculation: Do the Temple Jedi only consider outsiders who claim to be Jedi "heretics" or is it anyone who uses the Force? I've seen the phrase "rogue Force-user" in fic, I know, but I can't remember if I've seen it in pro-material. And what makes a Force-user "rogue"? Just using the Force without Temple training? Or doing something unethical with it?

Yeah, the only reason I brought up Mustafar is that my line of thought was that Anakin wouldn't even consider Altis as long as he was loyal to Obi-wan and didn't want to leave him. And it's only after the initial confrontation on Mustafar that his loyalty to Obi-wan is shaken at all, so only then might he consider Altis, but by then he's too far gone.

I've really gone off wild myself. LOL Hope y'all are having fun.

Re: ZOMG YAY YOU LIKED IT

[wyncatastrophe]

You're saying fascinating things, and I want to respond to them - only it occurs to me that this conversation might be more productively take up over at sw_meta. Should we try and transpose it in some fashion? We could post a "redacted" version of the thread so far … ?

Re: ZOMG YAY YOU LIKED IT

[attanagra]

Oh, yeah, the thought had crossed my mind. I'm not sure of the best way to "move" it either, though. Or we could just go on with the conversation here, see what we come up with, and then turn that into a post over at the comm later. I've been meaning--once this grad school stuff is over until January--to gather all the info I can find on the Altisians for a post over there.

Re: ZOMG YAY YOU LIKED IT

[wyncatastrophe]

Well, that would be okay, too - I'm having some trouble with the formatting since I lost the "reply" functionality in gmail, but I'll struggle along with it, if you want.

I think the main thing I'm struggling with in your previous comment (raising several important questions) is I'm not sure if you are posing those questions to me, as an author of FFV, or to the canon texts, in hopes of pursuing the answers jointly. This makes a difference, obviously, in how I respond - canon or FFV, which is canon compliant but on which I can speak far more authoritatively than I might do with respect to canon proper?

Re: ZOMG YAY YOU LIKED IT

[attanagra]

Oh, no, if it's a pain then don't worry about it. (What's up with gmail? I guess I'm behind the times; I just reply here on LJ.)

I was kinda flailing I guess. Throwing out ideas. Just raising issues for discussion, as I'm not sure there are canon answers for most of them. Feel free to answer from whichever perspective you like, either would be interesting.

Re: ZOMG YAY YOU LIKED IT

[wyncatastrophe]

What I mean is that with the "old" style gmail, until this past week, you could reply to comments on LJ from within the gmail window. Under the "new" look, I usually have to open a new window and reply in LJ (sometimes it gives me the reply option still; not sure whether gmail has plans to make that a regular thing or not). So I can't actually see what I'm replying to while I'm typing my response; it's a constant scroll-up, scroll-down, which would be okay except that I always feel like I lose some coherency in my responses that way. If you want to try and do this and then synthesize it for sw_meta, I can work around it.

Don't flail! I'm going to print out the thread from gmail so I can see what's going on and then I'll say something awesomely intelligent (or, as the case may be, not).

Re: ZOMG YAY YOU LIKED IT

[attanagra]

Oh, I see. Sorry.

Re: ZOMG YAY YOU LIKED IT

[wyncatastrophe]

Don't be sorry! I think the formatting on my LJ is part of the problem; is it blocking off large swathes of text for you? I made a .pdf and now I'm analyzing. Just imagine me like Data, "accessing."