Revamped list of handmaiden characters cast and other notable Nabooians, part one: polgarawolf

polgarawolf

Revamped list of handmaiden characters cast and other notable Nabooians, part one

Aug 09, 2012 16:00

For upwards of a year now, I've taken suggestions from people, looked through fashion magazines (which I normally eschew like the plague) and browsed various onlines sites that have wallpapers of models, singers, and actresses, "borrowed" actresses/characters from other films/tv shows I know, searched through the Wiki looking at pictures of actresses and child actresses (looking for actual teenaged actresses to play Apailana's handmaidens and some of Padmé's earlier handmaidens), and in general wracked my poor wee brain trying to come up with real life people to use as the visual templates (read: models) for OFCs and EU handmaidens while the storylines for the canon handmaidens grew by leaps and bounds and gained new twists every single time I turned around. In this time, I've come to the following conclusions: no one may ever look exactly like someone else, but little tricks like cosmetics (including hair dye, contacts, and cosmetics), clothes, and attitude can go a long way towards making people who only look a little alike look pretty much the same in other people's eyes; there are a lot more fake blondes and redheads in Hollywood and etc. than I ever would've guessed, which makes it extremely hard to find people who actually are brunettes and not just hiding behind a dye job; after awhile, all people start to look alike to me; internet pictures frankly suck for trying to tell if people have dimples or not (especially chin dimples) while magazine pictures suck for trying to tell if people have cheek dimples since most models are not encouraged to smile/laugh in their pictures; and the GFFA apparently has cosmetic/plastic surgery as well as normal surgery, which means that all of the really inconvenient things like obviously different noses and ears and probably dimples too could actually be fairly easily "fixed," if the handmaidens thought it was necessary. So nyah!!! (In other words, I'm tired of doing this and some of the possible handmaiden models are growing stories of their own whether they look a lot like their sworn lady or not so it looks like I'm going to have to wing things just a tad no matter how long I scruntinize these blasted pictures.)

PS - Just so y'all know, I have no bloody idea who some of these people really are or what they actually do in real life, so if somebody happens to be something freaky in real life or to have bad connotations for you because of a role played or song sung or whatever, please keep in mind that these are just the visual (and sometimes vocal, if I know what they sound like) models for the handmaidens. Please don't be tempted to conflate the visual models with the actual characters! I might borrow a talent for acting/impersonating/etc. from some of these people, but the truth is that once I get my (figurative) hands on them, they are my characters from that point forward, alright? I reserve the right to do any/all of the following to my visual templates once I get ahold of them: change the age of a real life person to make her a better match for a handmaiden and/or bring someone back from the grave at a certain age to make her work as a visual model for a handmaiden; make cosmetic alterations (some permanent, others via various SWish cosmetics and dyes and such as a part of the storyline for that particular individual. And some made to the actual model before I even start writing about that handmaiden in order to make her look more like her sworn lady to begin with so that she won't have to, say, wear color contacts and dye her hair her entire life as a handmaiden), including changing such things as eye color, hair color, skin tone, dimples, height, etc.; and in general either disregard actual real life talents or even bestow particular talents whenever the muse might deem them necessary. In other words, while these characters may start out with some pictures and a general idea of what the life of a handmaiden for a Nabooian Queen or a Senator from Naboo is like, by the time the muse is done with them, odds are that if a person were to try to actually cast some kind of film based solely on what I'd written for these characters, then some of the actual real life people I'd started with to help create these characters would likely only be considered semi suitable at best for the roles they'd actually helped to inspire. I do tend to be more visually-oriented than I probably should with SW because I came to it first through the OT films, as a child, but once my muse gets ahold of somebody, that person is frankly never the same. And apparently I'm not the only writer who's like this, or why else would the heights of characters in the GFFA occasionally be listed officially as being different from the real heights of the actual actors/actresses who've played them in the films?

PPS - You might also want to keep in mind the ages of these characters when you're trying to picture them for yourself. Apailana was only twelve (though I've put her much closer to thirteen, to make it a little bit more plausible for her to not be the youngest elected monarch in Nabooian history) when elected Queen. Padmé had just turned fourteen when elected and had been in office for roughly half a year before the Trade Federation invaded Naboo. Since no age is given for her in canon or EU that I can find, I've decided that Jamillia was not quite sixteen when elected (which would put her at about eighteen, maybe eighteen and a half, in AotC, and almost twenty-two during RotS), because she looks/sounds older, to me, than Padmé and Apailana do when they are Queen. My point being that some of these characters are going to be barely teenaged girls, which means that they're still going to be growing into their bodies, including their facial features. A woman can and generally does change a whole heck of a lot between the pre-teen years and the twenties or thirties. I've tried to keep a basic rule of thumb for an acceptable age range for all handmaid(en)s (consisting of four years to either side of the sworn lady's actual age), so unless a greater age difference won't interfer with a handmaiden's decoy duties or there is an actual emergency that precludes abiding by the general rule of thumb for the range of age for a lady's sworn handmaidens, all handmaidens should be within four years of age (to either side of that) of their sworn lady. But some of these girls are literally going to be girls. So please don't cling too tightly to your current vision of certain of the visual models, who may actually be in their twenties, thirties, forties, or even older right of this very moment in time. Okay?

PPPS - My attachment to the handmaidens has been reinforced a great deal by a Christmas present from a wonderful online friend by the name of aruna7, a genius of a vidder who, along with so-out-of-ideas, is co-creator of the AU SW 'verse usually referred to as either One Path or The Kenobi Way. People, this AU saga is one of the best, most well thought out, most lovingly created and intricately detailed, most true to the spirit of SW and the heroic soul of GFFA and the message (of hope and good triumphing over evil in the end because of the hopes and dreams and perseverance and sacrifices of good people) that's carried by the film saga that I've ever come across in my life. These wonderful SW fans have single-handedly made me fall in love with the character who was, frankly, number two on my SW shite list, just below Sidious/Palpatine and just above Tarkin on my personal list of people the GFFA would be entirely better off without - the person who happens to be none other than Padmé Amidala Naberrie. They are Obidala shippers, and, when I am reading or watching their work, they can make me completely believe that those two are good together and wonderful for each other, despite the fact that I've been shipping Obi/Ani since I was like five years old. So trust me when I say that they're good at what they do. They would prefer not to have anything to do with certain slash couples in the SW 'verse, and their understanding/vision of the relationships among the characters in question is such that I completely understand why, but other than that, their grasp of the SW characters and the way that the GFFA is set up and works is sometimes eeriely close to what I think/believe, and, despite the fact that I am something of a canon-based slash writer/extrapolator as well as a what I consider to be a regular canon-based het writer/extrapolator, we get along and chatter about all kinds of things. aruna7 knows that I think the women in SW are underrated and underwritten and made me a beautiful fanvid for the women of the SW films for Christmas, and I will be the first to admit that, though a lot of my mental framework for Nabooian culture and the way that being a handmaiden works was already in place and a lot of my handmaiden choices were complete as of late last winter/early last spring, I've still been influenced (if in no other way than a reinforcement of my love for all the characters of handmaidens and all the strong women of SW) by receiving and watching (and adoring!) her vid. So again, if anyone ever wonders if I'm influenced by other SW fans (aside from my wonderful idea beta, fancyspinner, and also cariel, who's let me "borrow" and modify some of her ideas specifically for Dormé and Sabé - which I consider to be a part of fanon lore in that particular AU neck of the fandom woods and therefore extremely important to acknowledge in my AU neck of the fandom woods - including some that she developed with her occasional co-writer bloodraven77 - who, as I've been recently informed, is largely resposible for the initial creation of Sabé Nabish and is the voice of Anakin Skywalker in all of the Dormékin AUs that have been co-written by her and cariel), look no further than those two!

*Note: The name listed beneath each actress/model/singer/etc. is the tentative name of the actual character she will be acting as the visual (and sometimes aural) model for, though some of these names might change as the characters are being finalized.

*Please also note: Some handmaiden names are obviously a result of me screwing around with the name of the real life person who's acting as a model for that character. Some are a result of me taking an English word or name and francophying it or otherwise latinizing it (yes, I took French in high school and undergrad. No, I never was all that fluent. If it'll help, just consider the latinate/vaguely franchophilic names an odd result of traditional, non-Basic based Nabooian names having been translated from Basic - the language of SW - into English, okay?). Some were randomly pulled out of the air and may or may not be based on my knowledge of what specific words mean in other languages or on names taken from various different branches of mythology and/or folklore worldwide. And some I fear may also be influenced by having listened to a lot of Elvish during the process of making one of the earliest versions of this list (due to a LotR marathon with some good friends) and, thus, been prompted to remember much more of Tolkien's made-up languages than I ever though I would've been able to without referring to my copies of the books. If anyone catches anything too jarring or weird or non-SW-ish, please drop me a line explaining so and I'll do my best to fix it, okay?

Okay. And now, without further ado, I bring you *the handmaidens and handmaids!

*For more on the difference between handmaidens and handmaids, see my nattering on the subject in my post http://polgarawolf.livejournal.com/97633.html on the differences between Sabé Dahn and Dormé Tammesin and Dormé Jaffa and Sabé Nabish of cariel and cariel and bloodraven77's AUs and then please keep in mind that most people outside of the handmaid(en)s themselves are unaware of that difference and so tend to use the terms interchangeably!

OFC and EU handmaidens who have been cast (tentatively, at least) will be played by the following:

For *Padmé:
(Keeping in mind, at least generally speaking, that Padmé is portrayed in canon by Natalie Portman, born Natalie Hershlag on June 9, 1981, brown hair and eyes, 5' 3" [1.60 m])

another galaxy another time . . .