Project Revision: Free Fall. Draft of Part X. Obi-Wan and Yoda talk - a lot.

[wyncatastrophe]

Author's note: Yay! I finally typed this monster up.  Transferring things from pencil gets kinda cumbersome sometimes.  Anyway, this follows from the previous chapter draft (on which 

Comments

[wyncatastrophe]

Thanks for commenting! I keep on saying this, but let me reiterate it once more: there is no need for a scientific, supernatural, or otherwise fantastic explanation for Ryn's sexual development and desires at this stage in her life. Perfectly normal human girls experience the same thing at the same age all the time. I've seen it happen plenty of times myself. It is in no way unusual for a girl of twelve or thirteen to have a period and experience sexual attraction and/or arousal. Really. I promise, I swear, this is well within the range of normal human development. What she does have is a psychic attraction to him, which most human beings doing experience at all for the same reasons that they don't go to Dagobah and move rocks with their minds - and that's the part I am most interested in exploring, re: Ryn's responses to Anakin and her own emotional development.

In that sense, then, no -- I won't be carrying the development of Master Eramon's experiments in that direction, because I don't think there is any need for it within the story, and I would rather use his presence here for other things, plotwise. However, you are definitely on the mark when you point out that Master Eramon and his experiments open up a space for doing interesting things that I wouldn't otherwise have the opportunity to do. The earlier version did not refer to Eramon by name, and contained only a vague mention, later in the series, of Ryn experiencing some torturous experiments in the Jedi Temple before she met Anakin and Obi-Wan. During revision, I decided to expand that and put the explanations earlier in the story, so that readers had more a sense of what Ryn was doing here than just hanging around moping about Anakin (which, to be fair, she still does quite a bit). It also gave me some story conflict to work with early on, which I think the original version was really lacking; for almost the entire arc of Freefall, in the original, it was just "Ryn likes Anakin and is keeping secrets and Anakin likes Ryn but not that way and Obi-Wan would like everyone to behave, please." Which is kind of how things often work in real life, and yet is pretty underwhelming as far as a plot goes.

With Nu Tai Eramon - and I'd be interested to see what you make of this - I am really interested in exploring the tensions between the Jedi and Loreth, which are of course embodied in Ryn, in the sense that she becomes, by the nature of her assignment in the Temple, the point at which these conflicting interests converge - and yet none of it has to do with her personally. She becomes the site of the conflict, rather than an agent in it. And my plan with Nu Tai Eramon is to have him become a sort of shadowing presence in the story, as they try to figure out What Is Up with his weird experiments - and yes, many of them will explain further what is going on with the Lorethans, including speaking to the sticky question of whether they are actually human or not …

Thanks so much for commenting, great to hear that the Eramon storyline sparked some interest for you. I hope the next chapters please you - so far the plan is to try something radically different, and open the next bit with Padmé!