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On Anakin Skywalker, ten years post-RotS
Dec. 31st, 2006 12:43 amOh my God, you have no idea how hard it can be to write Anakin Skywalker ten years after RotS, especially an Anakin that's been on his own for ten years and is even more hardcore than Han Solo ever was.
No. Seriously. Hardcore. This kid has grown up. I quote from the story that still has no title:
(Anakin is setting up a deal to act as gunrunner for a guy he doesn't know is an Imperial officer)
“Thirty thousand credits. Fifteen when you pick up the package, fifteen when you deliver it to Haa.”
“No deal,” Anakin said, still narrow-eyed. “All of it when I pick up the weaponry or the deal’s off. And an extra ten grand for aggravation purposes if I run into trouble on the way there.”
Traynt shook his head. “How do I know you’ll deliver the goods?”
Anakin jerked the knife out of the table and tossed it up into the air, catching it by the blade. “My reputation. I’m just that good. You’re lucky I’m not adding on another ten grand for having to go Mid Rim Empire territory.” He licked his lips, slow and deliberate and well aware of the effect it was having on the other days. Some days, who needed the Force? “I don’t like the Empire,” he said, and smiled, showing all of his brilliantly white teeth. One part of his body that didn’t have durasteel in it, at least; sometimes he felt like half his bones had been replaced with artificial replacements, although it was really more like his right arm and three bones in his left foot.
Traynt quailed in the face of ex-Jedi threat. “My ship’s docked at number 42,” he said, rising as quickly as humanly possible. “Come by around ten standard tomorrow.”
Anakin sheathed his knife. “You didn’t try your drink,” he called after him.
There are some other very kick-ass Anakin scenes that have already been written as well, but this is the kid that thirteen years earlier was a kid, who a decade earlier was still a kid. This is an Anakin Skywalker that looked evil in the eye and said, "Oh, fuck no," at the age of twenty-two and helped four Jedi masters hold off ten thousand clone troops long enough for the Jedi Temple to be mostly evacuated all the while knowing that one of his closest friends had betrayed everything he stood for, that Jedi were dying all over the galaxy, and that his best friend had died as a direct result of all that. This is an Anakin Skywalker that never went after Mace Windu to confront Palpatine and thus never turned, an Anakin Skywalker who had to grow up far too quickly in a real world, not the relatively sheltered one of the Jedi (and I'm counting battlefields as relatively sheltered here, because we have no real evidence how much he was exposed to actual people and guessing from his characterization in the movies? It ain't much). An Anakin Skywalker who mindtricked (for the first time, ever) his wife into resigning her senatorial position and leaving Coruscant, with the immediate assumption that Anakin had rejected her. An Anakin Skywalker who went off to sulk on the Outer Rim, and found a hell of a lot of trouble. He's not the Anakin Skywalker of the prequel trilogy, and he's not Vader, either. Which makes him, occasionally, damn hard to write, but very, very snarky.
In other words, summing up the story in a single sentence:
"The irony of the situation was that Anakin had never understood what being a Jedi was about until the Jedi Order had been destroyed."
ETA: It also makes writing sex scenes damn hard, but I sucked at that anyway. Lots of dialogue, though: "Don't worry, [Obi-Wan]...it doesn't affect your girlish figure at all."
No. Seriously. Hardcore. This kid has grown up. I quote from the story that still has no title:
(Anakin is setting up a deal to act as gunrunner for a guy he doesn't know is an Imperial officer)
“Thirty thousand credits. Fifteen when you pick up the package, fifteen when you deliver it to Haa.”
“No deal,” Anakin said, still narrow-eyed. “All of it when I pick up the weaponry or the deal’s off. And an extra ten grand for aggravation purposes if I run into trouble on the way there.”
Traynt shook his head. “How do I know you’ll deliver the goods?”
Anakin jerked the knife out of the table and tossed it up into the air, catching it by the blade. “My reputation. I’m just that good. You’re lucky I’m not adding on another ten grand for having to go Mid Rim Empire territory.” He licked his lips, slow and deliberate and well aware of the effect it was having on the other days. Some days, who needed the Force? “I don’t like the Empire,” he said, and smiled, showing all of his brilliantly white teeth. One part of his body that didn’t have durasteel in it, at least; sometimes he felt like half his bones had been replaced with artificial replacements, although it was really more like his right arm and three bones in his left foot.
Traynt quailed in the face of ex-Jedi threat. “My ship’s docked at number 42,” he said, rising as quickly as humanly possible. “Come by around ten standard tomorrow.”
Anakin sheathed his knife. “You didn’t try your drink,” he called after him.
There are some other very kick-ass Anakin scenes that have already been written as well, but this is the kid that thirteen years earlier was a kid, who a decade earlier was still a kid. This is an Anakin Skywalker that looked evil in the eye and said, "Oh, fuck no," at the age of twenty-two and helped four Jedi masters hold off ten thousand clone troops long enough for the Jedi Temple to be mostly evacuated all the while knowing that one of his closest friends had betrayed everything he stood for, that Jedi were dying all over the galaxy, and that his best friend had died as a direct result of all that. This is an Anakin Skywalker that never went after Mace Windu to confront Palpatine and thus never turned, an Anakin Skywalker who had to grow up far too quickly in a real world, not the relatively sheltered one of the Jedi (and I'm counting battlefields as relatively sheltered here, because we have no real evidence how much he was exposed to actual people and guessing from his characterization in the movies? It ain't much). An Anakin Skywalker who mindtricked (for the first time, ever) his wife into resigning her senatorial position and leaving Coruscant, with the immediate assumption that Anakin had rejected her. An Anakin Skywalker who went off to sulk on the Outer Rim, and found a hell of a lot of trouble. He's not the Anakin Skywalker of the prequel trilogy, and he's not Vader, either. Which makes him, occasionally, damn hard to write, but very, very snarky.
In other words, summing up the story in a single sentence:
"The irony of the situation was that Anakin had never understood what being a Jedi was about until the Jedi Order had been destroyed."
ETA: It also makes writing sex scenes damn hard, but I sucked at that anyway. Lots of dialogue, though: "Don't worry, [Obi-Wan]...it doesn't affect your girlish figure at all."