Forum:FC:Café Fanfic XXX

Café Fanfic is a discussion topic centered around fan-fiction. Authors are encouraged to contribute to the café's monthly discussion, which are designed to stimulate ideas and encourage engagement between members of the SWF fan-fiction writing community in a criticism-free zone.

Participants in Café Fanfic are also welcome to submit ideas for the next month's topic of discussion.

Previous topics can be found in the archive list at the bottom of the page.

There are three basic premises for Café Fanfic
 * 1) Please restrict this to stuff from your fan-fiction (written or possibly just conceptualized).
 * 2) You can suggest and make observations, but no condemning other people's work
 * 3) "I don't know" is a perfectly acceptable answer.


 * December's topic: The Showdown. Star Wars is pretty famed for its climactic showdowns ala Luke vs Vader in ESB. How do you use showdown scenes in your fanfic? Who's facing off? Is the situation resolved without combat? If so, how? If not, how did the showdown play out? Are there any interesting devices or tactics you used to make the showdown more interesting? Do the combatants know each other, and how? (You could also consider these as duels, except sometimes, there's no combat. "Battles" are generally implied to be larger scale).

Brandon
If you’ve seen the Red Letter Media reviews of the prequels then you’ve already heard this, but it bears repeating and it’s something important to my writing: the lightsaber duel has absolutely nothing to do with the physical sword fight itself. The lightsaber duels as established in the original trilogy are about the emotion and the story behind it. Less so in A New Hope, but in Empire and Jedi they were about the culmination of what the characters had gone through in those movies. I can’t stress this enough: the importance of the lightsaber duel is not the lightsaber duel. It’s about what the duel represents.

You can say the same thing for battles: Yavin was the rag-tag rebels overcoming literal armageddon; Hoth was the consequence of Yavin; Bespin and Tatooine were about trying to save Han Solo; Endor was the underdog triumphing over evil.

The duel in A New Hope is about Luke feeling completely alone after the death of his aunt and uncle, and now Ben Kenobi, only to later realize he has two good friends and the Force on his side - and the Force can do amazing things, like letting Ben talk to Luke even in death. Empire is about Luke finally confronting his father’s killer only to learn that the killer is really his father, and finding out how woefully inept he is compared to Vader. Jedi is about the son redeeming the father. Even at the end of that duel, when Luke flipped out, it still wasn’t about the lightsaber duel. It was about how Luke gave into his anger, even for a noble reason (his sister), only to realize that in doing so he was going to become his father. It was the moment he became a Jedi Knight.

Flash forward to the prequels and you really have none of that. There’s no emotional culmination in any of those duels. The Darth Maul duel was at the end of a movie with characters you don’t really care about, and a villain who has no emotional attachment to the heroes. The only reason people like the Episode I duel is because it's flashy and looks cool. Episode II was exactly the same on an emotional level, only it couldn’t trick you into thinking otherwise because it was visually lame. Episode III could have had more emotional duels, but again it was characters you really have no reason to care about. The Obi-Wan/Grievous duel was ridiculous and served only to get Obi-Wan away from Anakin (which was a problem in Episode II as well). The Yoda/Palpatine duel never should’ve happened with lightsabers (they are above that), if at all. The Obi-Wan/Anakin duel was overly long and had no emotional resonance. It’s the duel that should have worked the best, but really failed the most.

So for me, if there's no emotional reason to have a lightsaber duel, you should skip the lightsaber duel. There shouldn't be a sense that those duels are obligatory, and that they have to be there to end a Star Wars movie. They don't. Take the duel out of Episode II, for example, and absolutely nothing changes.

If you do include an action scene like a lightsaber duel, it has to build to a climax, both with the action and the emotion. Take this year's Star Trek Into Darkness (which I enjoyed) and compare it to The Wrath of Khan - they’re both Khan movies, so that’s an appropriate comparison. In Into Darkness, the action was totally in your face. It didn’t build to a crescendo, it was just a big ship pounding a smaller ship over and over until Spock deceived Khan and got the upper hand. That then led to a Transformers-style destruction porn scene.

That’s contrasted with Wrath of Khan, and the battle in the Mutara Nebula. It was slow, methodical, and tense. You could feel the intensity even as nothing was happening, and the characters just sat there waiting for the other to strike, because the emotions were heightened. Khan was obsessed and desperate to kill Kirk. Both ships were blind as a bat. Kirk defeating Khan was going to require his superior command ability mixed with a bit of dumb luck. It was anyone’s game until Kirk finally got the upper hand, when he and Spock realized that Khan was a mediocre starship commander. Then, finally, Enterprise fired on Khan’s ship and it was all over - but even then, that led to the escape from the nebula and the death of Spock. Most importantly, it led Kirk to learning a life lesson: they avoided a no-win scenario, but to do so sometimes requires a personal sacrifice.

We have a tendency these days to think that fast and flashy is better than slower and emotional, but that’s not true at all. What matters is the story and the emotion. I’ll take the duels of the original trilogy over the duels of the prequels any day. One has emotion, the other has flash.

So that really long diatribe is my philosophy on showdowns. Now I'll give you an example of one from my upcoming fic, The Jedi Guardian. Early on, as I mentioned in the November Cafe Fanfic, the resurgent Sith attack a small Jedi transport ship called Serendipity around 980 ABY. The emotional core there surrounds Jhon Cordatus, a Jedi Knight who basically thinks he’s invincible. He’s suddenly confronted by this battle-hardened Sith, his first real fight, and gets his ass handed to him. As a result, people die. Throughout the rest of the story, Jhon knows he needs to be better, until he’s finally confronted by that same Sith again at the end and has to put himself to the test again. The questions it asks are things like, what does it mean to be a Jedi in a time of peace? What does it mean to be a Jedi in a time of war? What does it say when the guardians of peace can’t effectively guard the peace anymore? Those questions, by the end of the story, don’t have good answers for the characters.

- Brandon Rhea (talk) 18:36, December 2, 2013 (UTC)
 * I'm all for hating on the prequels, but I don't think the Anakin versus Obi-Wan duel was the insult to art and storytelling you make it out to be. Likewise, TPM's showdown was well-constructed for what it needed to be&mdash;Maul was supposed to represent the shadowy, unknown menace of the Sith. Giving him an emotional or personal connection to the Jedi would have been counter to what Maul represented&mdash;a distant, cold, calculating enemy revealing itself for the first time in centuries. I agree with Lucas's decision to make him the strong, silent type in TPM. Obi-Wan handles the emotional aspect of that duel. Also, I've never liked how ANH's showdown was set up. If Vader was "waiting" for Obi-Wan, why not do something more proactive to draw him out&mdash;like capturing his friends? Vader's also able to sense Obi-Wan through the Death Star, but though he can sense Luke's Force-potential during the Battle of Yavin, he doesn't detect his own son running around at the time? I know there's a lot of "they let them go" hand-waving, but it's not until ESB when Vader realizes "Dang, I should capture this guy" when he had him not fifty meters away.
 * Darth Maul didn’t need to be explored more, I agree. What there needed to be, though, was some emotional connection in general, and that didn’t mean Maul couldn’t have been a distant, cold, and calculating enemy. The problem with that duel is that there were no stakes; it was entirely irrelevant to the outcome of the Naboo conflict. Anakin destroyed the droid control ship and saved the Gungans, and Padme and her team captured the Viceroy. The duel was just there; we’re never given any reason to believe that capturing or killing Darth Maul was important to the Jedi, so it’s just a flashy duel.


 * What could have made that duel and the movie better is if Obi-Wan was the main character of the movie, and if Qui-Gon had been killed on Tatooine. Qui-Gon wasn’t needed after that (or in general, really), and it would’ve given Obi-Wan a lot of direction, character exploration, and depth for the rest of the movie. Remember those 2 minutes at the end where Obi-Wan flips out on Maul? That could’ve been the entire second half of the movie, with a duel between a furious Obi-Wan and the killer Maul the culmination of that. Darth Maul wouldn’t have needed anymore screentime, exploration, or anything to make that work. It would’ve been Obi-Wan going after the silent assassin.


 * The duel still wouldn’t have been necessary to the outcome of the Naboo crisis, but you can make that part of the story. For example, Padme’s team could’ve used Obi-Wan, yet he would rush off to face Maul out of revenge rather than a tactical need to do so. That could leave Padme’s team in a very precarious position, until Anakin shuts down the droids – which amplifies Anakin’s heroics, given that he saved the day after Obi-Wan bailed on the mission for his own vendetta. That would give Obi-Wan something to learn from. It gives more strength to his warning to Luke about going after Vader in Empire. - Brandon Rhea (talk) 18:30, December 3, 2013 (UTC)

ANYWAY&hellip;

Jhon and his Sith. The Sith represents a nameless enemy to Jhon&mdash;a representation of a challenge to his beliefs and worldview, of course, but personally, there's no real enmity. How about the Sith? What's his take on not outright killing Jhon the first time? Does he view Jhon as a personal failure, or a victory? What's his stake in this? Or is he like Maul: a largely mindless tool solely bent on destruction? Atarumaster88 ( Talk page ) 16:27, December 3, 2013 (UTC)


 * The enmity for Jhon comes as a result of the duel. The Serendipity battle sets up the greater battle later on, where Jhon comes face to face with his failures in a big way. For Elim (the Sith), killing Jhon isn't necessary to his mission. He's not the cliche, "rawr rawr I kill you" type of dark sider where he’d kill Jhon just because he’s a Sith and Jhon’s a Jedi. Prior to the novel, Elim was a warrior who fought in great battles in the Unknown Regions, battles and conflicts that the Jedi have never even heard of. After those battles ended, he became a wanderer, with no real challenge for him to fight until the Sith offered him the chance - they wanted him since he was a great warrior, and they offered him the chance to fight. So when Jhon is beaten easily, Elim is disappointed. He was hoping Jhon would be more of a challenge. However, Elim still accomplished his objective, and knew that there’d be more chances for greater battles later. - Brandon Rhea (talk) 18:30, December 3, 2013 (UTC)

Sholus
Well said, Baccie-o.

Anyhoo, as I have said before, battles aren't really my thing, but showdowns? I can do showdowns. Showdowns are personal and are visual representations of emotional turmoil. I love turmoil! :D

So, let's see, which showdown should I pick? I haven't got any in the stuff I've released so far, so, again, I have to dig into Fate territory. Thus, I shall pick the first personal confrontation. There are action scenes before this confrontation, but this one is the first to carry real emotional weight - it closes out Part I, after all. I can't say too much, but it involves a Jedi and a law officer trying confronting a Jedi who has lost his/her way. This latter Jedi is scared and confused, but is also willing to lash out if threatened, and the others are trying to calm this person down and bring him/her home. It's supposed to be a tragic scene (which is why I need to work on its prose some more LOOOOL). Not to mention the character arcs between the Jedi and the law officer, that plays a part. Actually, pretty much everyone involved has their character arc moved forward by this fight. Oh, yay! I never thought of it in that light. :D

I hope that wasn't so vague as to be confusing! I do that sometimes. =^-^= - Solus          Talk to the Hand  06:06, December 3, 2013 (UTC)

MPK
Unless you're doing some kind of genre that's unusual for a fanfic, you pretty much gotta have a showdown in your story of consequence (it is Star Wars, after all). Still, the jist of what was said about how battles need to be about the characters is pretty much spot-on. I try to follow this rule as best as I can in my serious stories. So far it's always involved Jedi, most often duels - an emotional shootout would be interesting to try to write.

River (why did I pick such an absurd title?) is pretty much all about the buildup to a showdown. Everyone's dead except the Sith and the Jedi, and it's gotta come down to the two of them. The conflict is not quite about their emotions in particular as it is about every light-dark conflict in Star Wars history, ever. That's what I was going for, at least - the backstories of both combatants are minimal, and it's not just about them. It ends, like the best such conflicts do, with a kind of sacrifice.

The Beast of Rutan was heavily influenced by Paul Kemp's Jaden Korr novels (Crosscurrent and Riptide), particularly with regard to the endgame. Both of those stories climax with the hero physically and emotionally hanging by a thread, and it's more or less what I did with Morgent Kelbus here. His friend's dead, he's wounded, and he's been mind-fucked by his enemy. He's no longer the calm Jedi Knight; he's reduced to being just a wounded creature fighting for its life. Consequentially, he'll leave Jedi rationalization and philosophical ponderings for if/when he makes it home again. The battle ends like in Crosscurrent with the hero triumphant but helpless, his fate in the hands of others.

Through Glass (again, a meaningless title) did sort of have a showdown in the end, I guess. Revan fights a vision of the Exile and gets stabbed with a vision of a sword, but I don't really want to talk about it. I wrote that story a long time ago and while I'm still happy with most of it, my ideas about Revan as a character have changed and my earlier attempt at a sequel hook appears trite and clumsy to me now.

-MPK, Free Man  15:04, December 3, 2013 (UTC)
 * What do you mean by "story of consequence"? And what does it mean to "pretty much gotta have a showdown"? I can think of probably half-a-dozen FWs here that don't have a specific showdown (Rakata, Wounded, Iron Maiden, Death and Life, and Vanguard of the Republic, The Passing), along with multiple canonical works. Scoundrels has a bunch of face-offs, but there's no climactic showdown, arguably. Several of the X-wing books use space battles rather than personal confrontation. Thoughts? Atarumaster88  ( Talk page ) 16:36, December 3, 2013 (UTC)
 * Eh. It's the narrow range of what I write showing through. By "story of consequence", I suppose I mean a story where you've got a conflict with serious things at stake and bitches getting shot and stuff - unless a writer's trying to be subversive (which isn't a bad thing), then he's likely to have it come down to some sort of final fight, and if done properly, it can be a great way to move the characters' journeys to their finish. Granted with regards to Rakata, but I don't think it really fits the bill - it technically does have conflict between the protagonist and his overlords, but they're not fighting, they're just going about their lives. I can't speak about the other works you've mentioned. I'm not assuming that this is the only way to put the cap on a story's conflict. A bigass dramatic duel wouldn't really work if, say, the people fighting aren't very of the larger-than-life variety which lends itself well to such things.
 * The idea of a climactic duel's necessity stems in part from my Jedi-centricism. I mean, it's how all the films go, and if there's any kind of serious conflict going on with mortal enemies (i.e, Jedi/Sith), of course they're going to swing their sabers around.
 * As for space battles, I think they can work just as well as face-to-face confrontations. One needs look no further than certain parts of the Star Trek franchise (or the X-Wing/TIE Fighter series) to see that. However, I'm inclined to think that one needs there (in most cases) to be some kind of communication between the participants, rather than just them shooting at each other or whatever. -MPK, Free Man  20:14, December 3, 2013 (UTC)