thinky thoughts on SW and Queen's Gambit + a snippet

[bedlamsbard]

I just spent like an hour trying to logic out the layout of Theed, the capital city of Naboo, which is impossible because LucasFilm didn't even try for continuity between TPM and AotC (on anything, mind; start me on how they changed the entire aesthetic of Naboo fashion in order to make a single character sexier sometime). Let alone logic, but I was barely hoping for logic because, you know, Star Wars.

*beats head into desk* There's even a map! It's just that the map doesn't make any sense when you try to compare it to what actually happens in TPM. Or when you think about it for two seconds and wonder why they (a) put the spaceport right next to the center of government or (b) they put a massive refinery complex right next to the center of government. Or where exactly the Palace Courtyard is supposed to be. (For about five seconds I entertained the happy notion that Padme and Anakin don't actually go to Theed in AotC and went to a different city instead, since it's entirely possible that the Monarch has multiple palaces, but the throne room is exactly the same as the one in TPM. Except that the throne cushions are a different color -- red-orange for Amidala and blue-green for Jamillia.) That's not even getting into RotS. Or RotJ, because Lucas just flipped the footage from TPM for RotJ, which makes it make even less sense.

*breathes into paper bag* Okay. I'm going to pull worldbuilding from TPM alone and completely ignore what we see from AotC and RotS unless it doesn't actually contradict anything from TPM, since Queen's Gambit goes AU from canon during TPM and that was what I was planning to do for the costume/aesthetic changes anyway. We don't actually see that much of the city in TPM anyway, and what we do see is all in the immediate area of the palace. If I completely ignore what the EU says and go totally on what we see in the movie alone, which is my preference, I think I can bang it into something resembling logic. I mean, Gambit's an AU anyway; I just have to make sure it's an AU where the underlying worldbuilding makes sense. (Unlike canon. I'm just going to pretend "almost everyone is in [prisoner-of-war] camps" means "everyone of authority" instead of the entire planetary population because it (a) makes more sense and (b) makes a more interesting backstory for Gambit.) Any really shocking differences can be blamed on the fact that in Gambit, Naboo was occupied by the Trade Federation for a year and sustained a lot more damage in the fighting than it did in canon, then went in a completely different direction in the twelve years between the end of the occupation and the beginning of Gambit than in canon. (Naboo is way, way more militarized in Gambit than it is in canon, for obvious reasons and also because I want to write a battle scene.)

Oh, yeah, the current chapter-in-progress (5, unnamed) and the next one (6, also unnamed but featuring a SPACE BATTLE AWW YEAH uh, I mean) are both set on Naboo. I am super-excited about this, because it means I finally get to write a couple of scenes I've been looking forward to for a while now. Also we finally get to meet Queen Amidala in the flesh, rather than just in holovids or offscreen in a flashback (4, upcoming, also not named yet).

I don't know why I'm bitching about continuity when I literally just pulled a battleship out of a completely different universe to give to the Naboo Fleet instead of using one of the many, many spaceships in the Star Wars universe. Just wanted something different, I guess. (Yes. I gave the Naboo the BSG battlestars and named the one we see in Gambit 4 Constellation, which is the only name from the six original US Navy frigates that I could easily transfer to the SW 'verse. Yes, I'm a nerd; the secession speech in Gambit 2 quotes from both TPM (Amidala to Palpatine just before she leaves Coruscant) and the (U.S.) Declaration of Independence, and Bail's order is One Seven Seven Six, the year the Declaration was written.)

As per usual, it's weird being two chapters ahead of what's being posted, since previous to Wake I posted chapters as I finished them. On the one hand, it's convenient, because if I want to change something in the chapter previous I can (Bail Organa's scenes in Gambit 2 were originally in 3 and moved back to allow for a timing issue in upcoming chapters), but I'm not so far in advance that I can't still react if a reader brings a question up about something in a recently posted chapter (I kept getting questions in Wake about the time travel vs. alternate universe issue, which meant that I hadn't covered it adequately when it was first introduced). It's strange as a writer because readers are reacting to things that have in some cases already been explained -- the cliffhangers in Gambit 3 and Wake 9 are probably the most grievous examples, since Gambit 4 and Wake 10 were already written when those two were posted.

I like serial fiction, I like writing serial fiction; I pay a lot of attention to how individual issues of comic books and television eps are constructed to in order to figure out how to construct a chapter and where to put an ending. This doesn't always work out -- the beginning scene of Gambit 3 was originally the ending scene of Gambit 2 before I decided that the secession speech had a bigger punch than "It was Anakin Skywalker", but if I was putting it in a comic book or a TV ep, I probably would have switched the two because the visual impact of seeing another Anakin is greater. But prose isn't a visual medium.

Likewise, the prologue would have been much stronger in a visual medium; the one I was thinking of is the opening scene of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic #6 (the scene in question on the Dark Horse website, sadly, you can't see the two page spread on pages 2 and 3 since it only displays one page at a time). In an ideal world, that scene would be in a visual medium that starts with the hologram itself, then the audio goes over scenes of the viewers (Dooku, the Jedi Council, the Quartet, Ani Skywalker, and a mysterious hooded figure), and ends with the execution. But there's no way to do that in prose, so we get what we get.

I'm still not sure that was the best way to do that scene, but I didn't want to do it in regular prose for reasons that will become clear, and one of the major...themes? I'm not sure it actually counts as a theme -- in Gambit is the dissemination of information by the government or the lack thereof, how biased it can be, and how the availability of information impacts how individuals react to events and other individuals. The news broadcast transcripts are as close to absolutely neutral as I can get; everything else is filtered through the viewing characters' reactions. That's part of the same reason that while we've had a couple of different POVs in the Republic (Dooku, Mace Windu, Yoda, and Bail Organa aside from Padme), we haven't had any POvs in the Confederacy yet. Padme and the others only have information that's being disseminated by the Republic government right now; everything they know about the Confederacy is being filtered through the HoloNews broadcasts they've seen, just like the Republic officials themselves (who do have more information, but it's still biased information). Despite the fact that I laid out the backstory for the Gambit universe earlier on DW, I'm not going to do so in the fic itself until the characters are there. Sure, the audience knows some things that Padme and Dooku don't, because there are a couple of places where you can extrapolate from canon on things that the characters themselves don't know yet (who is this mysterious hooded woman making promises and stabbing people?), but the big things haven't been laid out yet. I set up the Gambit 'verse to look a hell of a lot like a straightforward mirrorverse.

It's not.

(Take this with a grain of salt: I'm probably not actually as clever as I think I am.)

But, as the writer, even though I've laid something out to look a certain way, it's weirdly jarring to see the readers (apparently) taking it like that. Even though the story is supposed to look like that, and if the reader was taking it differently, it would mean that I hadn't laid the trap properly. Writing WIPs/serials is a strange, strange experience.

*

Also, if you made it through all that, you probably deserve a snippet. (Plus, you know that I love to share whatever I'm working on at the moment.)

When she stepped back out in the corridor, meaning to go back to the cabin and finish going through her saved HoloNews reports, she saw that one of the other cabin doors was open, spilling light into the corridor. Padmé hesitated, then heard a familiar mechanized voice and couldn’t resist going to investigate.

“Threepio?”

The protocol droid – plated silver rather than gold, but still immediately recognizable – swung around to look at her. So did Ani Skywalker, who was sitting at a work table and fooling around with a partially disassembled probe droid.

“I beg your pardon, I don’t believe we’ve been introduced,” C-3PO said. “I am C-3PO, human-cyborg relations.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Padmé said, surprised at how evenly the words came out. “I’m Padmé.”

“Threepio’s a protocol droid,” Ani said, resting the probe droid in his lap. “I built him when he was a kid to help my mom at work. After Mom died I brought him back with me. He comes in pretty handy sometimes.”

“I am fluent in over six million forms of communication,” Threepio informed Padmé. “As Master Ani’s vocabulary sometimes seems to be made up largely of profanity, I have found that my presence is often conducive to a more –”

“Threepio, that’s really not necessary,” Ani said hastily. He grinned at Padmé. “Sorry, he’s a little overenthusiastic sometimes.”

“I know,” Padmé said, smiling back. “Back in my – my timeline, he belongs to me.”

Comments

[sporky_rat]

(Take this with a grain of salt: I'm probably not actually as clever as I think I am.)

You are totally as clever as you think you are.

And I can't wait for further information - because the name of the tattooed individual is tickling my brain, but it's so tired and full of goo that I can't pull it out.

I started TCW last night. We watched three episodes between me doing homework. Ugh, homework. Why does it exist when there's STAR WARS to consume?

[bedlamsbard]

Aww, that's nice of you to say. We'll see if what I'm trying to pull off actually works!

That scene's actually set up so that the assassin could be one of two characters (both from the EU, though one appears briefly in AotC, but they're really built up in TCW). I scrubbed all the identifying details except the tattoos in successive rewrites so that the reader can't tell whether it's supposed to be Character X or Character Y. (Mostly because I haven't decided yet, to be fair.)

Having watched four seasons of TCW during my senior year of college (including during finals, whoops), I find that TCW is a really good chaser for homework, because each episode is so short but usually packs a lot in.

[lady_songsmith]

*stares at the map for a bit*

Ok, actually, the thing that is driving me nuts about that map is that the river(s) break all rules of geological fluid dynamics? Unless Theed is REALLY TINY and that's supposed to be a delta of some sort. But then the legend labels the falls by the hangar as a 'tributary' of the river in the upper portion, and, uhm, are those falls going uphill or something then?

See, you're not the only neurotic one around here.

The musings on the difference between visual and prose mediums is really interesting, because I was having slightly similar issues the last time I was actively working on one of my WIPs -- things I wanted to accomplish that would have been so easy in a visual medium are the next thing to impossible to pull off gracefully in prose. For instance, I've got a bit upcoming where in visuals I'd do a focus-change from a shot of one of my main/POV chars to the background, thus letting the audience see a major clue about the bad guys. But in prose, especially in a limited 3rd, dropping that clue to the audience but not the character is HARD. I kick things, it's therapeutic.

[bedlamsbard]

If I actually tried to apply SCIENCE to Naboo I'm pretty sure my head would actually explode. THE PLANET CORE. MADE OF WATER. WHAT EVEN. I'm trying not to think about how stupid it is to build a palace (or a city) literally right on the edge of a cliff that has to be constantly eaten away by water. (And the actual scientific word for that is escaping me right now. Whoops.) Like, I know they were going for a Venice-like look here, but that does not mean ignoring all the laws of physics.

*nod nod* I think about this a lot, mostly because episodic comics structure is actually a pretty good way to plot and construct a story. Comics (and TV, but in a slightly different way) can pack a lot of story into just a couple of issues! (Wake was originally plotted out to be six chapters like a six-issue comics arc, to the extent that I actually have notes somewhere with what I would have used for cover art for each chapter to keep me on focus. That is also the reason that Wake is the first story I've ever written that has chapter titles.) And using a visual-structure base rather than a prose-structure base (like Dust, which is constructed like the ASOIAF novels) is why I started writing multiple POVs and quick scene changes in the same chapter, rather than one POV over a single long scene per chapter. There's no way I could have pulled off something like the last scene of Wake 9 in Dust, for example.

Actually, it's interesting thinking about the differences between an audio/visual medium like film, a prose/visual medium like comics, and a pure prose medium like novels. And how much of the structure from one can actually transfer over the others, and what aspects can't. (Hard to put a montage in anything but film, for example. And the benefit of prose is that you can actually see what's going on inside a character's head, which you can do in comics, but which usually (though not always!) weakens the narrative for me. And you can do some amazing things with panels and timing in comics that you just can't pull off in other media.)

[lady_songsmith]

I don't read a lot of comics, mostly because I have a deep resentment about spending that much money on something I'll be finished reading in about 5 minutes flat, so I can't talk intelligently about narrative structure in them. But it's interesting that you associate the multi-POV scene-changing chapters with a visual medium, because I think I encountered it in prose a lot more often than the ASOIAF type.

I outlined my epic WIP like a TV show, mid-season cliffhangers and all, when I was massively stuck and beating the structure with sticks to make things fall out and line up. It worked... but now I have a visual outline for a prose structure and occasionally I hit these 'shit how do I' moments. A montage would be really helpful, actually... or a nice long shot panning along as one tiny set of skirmishers goes right through a great big army (by accident! really!) with, er, predictable results.

[bedlamsbard]

Bah, my horrendously terrible internet connection ate my response.

One reason I've started looking at comics rather than TV for structure purposes is because comics splits into much smaller pieces in order to tell a complete story, and it's easier to plot in five or six parts than it is for twelve to twenty-four, like TV usually goes. Plus, comics do something really interesting in that it's a serial, which is initially released as a serial, but ends up being collected as a whole without the break points included in the trades. So even though I own the trade paperbacks (and the omnibuses, in a couple of cases), I went back and ahem-ahem'd the individual issues just so I could see how they had originally been split up. John Jackson Miller, who wrote my favorite Star Wars title, does trivia and author's notes for every issue, and he said something that I think of a lot as someone who writes and posts WIPs:

I think many comics creators find that third issues of six present some unique storytelling challenges. They are often spent in transit, getting all the pieces in place for the revelations to come in the second half -- and given their position in the events of the story, they aren't as amenable to true cliffhangers. (Having seen a lot of "false cliffhangers" in third issues, I try to either end on something real or on a joke -- here, we did both.)

In collected format, the role of third chapters changes completely, fitting in much more organically. That poses, in fact, a temptation comics creators actively have to resist -- it'd be easy to tell a 132-page story and just chop it up into comics-sized chunks without mind to where things are breaking in the serial. As a comics guy, I do work to make the story play "both ways" -- Episode V was a completed thought despite leaving almost every big issue "To Be Continued" -- but it's not always desireable to give every chapter exactly equal amounts of action, revelations, etc.

So that's something I think about a lot while structuring and writing, because I know there are a lot of people in fandom who don't read WIPs but since I'm writing it as a WIP/serial...

[whatistigerbalm]

Wait wait where's this fic? I want to read it.

[bedlamsbard]

It's over here on the AO3! The one I'm talking about here is Queen's Gambit, which is a WIP, but the first story in the series, Wake the Storm, is complete.

[whatistigerbalm]

Aw yay thanks! To my tablet with it!

[lady_songsmith]

Heya! Pursuant to the twitter conversation we were having the other day, I was on TVTropes today (don't ask, just send rescue parties) and came across this entry (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/XanatosSpeedChess) with some Word of God background on his original scheme:

Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars ... so much that people now assume every single aspect of the series is his doing, and all went as planned (except dying). They forget that most of The Phantom Menace has him quickly changing his game plan, either because he overestimated the heroes or because X-factors kept popping up. He ends up getting what he wanted, but Word of God says there were enough setbacks that he had to wait a decade to get the ball rolling on the next big step in his plan, including the loss of an apprentice. That he was able to take one of those X-factors and befriend him early so he could turn him into a replacement apprentice is testament to his speed-chess abilities.

It's eventually revealed that he did anticipate and plan for Maul's death (he's a Sith Lord, duh). However, the Jedi being sent to deal with the Trade Federation, as well as Amidala's arrival on Naboo, were not part of his plans according to supplementary materials (Valorum consulted the Jedi without informing the Senate first, and he did expect Maul to succeed in retrieving Amidala). In fact, his original plan was that he and his agents would create turmoil, draw the occupation out for months or even years, and cause enough pressure to cow the Senate into electing him. Almost everything after Amidala turned up on Coruscant was improvisation and moving up the timetable considerably.
Plus, he and Banking Clan big shot Hego Damask (alias Darth Plagueis) meant for Amidala to be a martyr. And there was a nine-year-old hydrospanner in the works as a side effect of Plagueis' experiments.

[bedlamsbard]

Oh cool. (One of these days I need to get round to reading Darth Plagueis, because there's apparently some Naboo stuff in it that I should know before I completely ignore it.)

I don't know whether to be disturbed or impressed that that's pretty close to what happened in the AU's backstory.