Forum:FC:Café Fanfic XXVII

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 archival 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.


 * October's topic: What, if any, large-scale tragic events have you used in your writing? (For example, the destruction of Alderaan). How have your characters reacted?

Brandon
I like this topic, because I am a sadist when it comes to my characters. The character I’ll use for this is Jhon Cordatus, who is in Star Wars Legacies. When he was a relatively new Jedi Knight, he went on a joint Alliance/Imperial operation. This was around 980 ABY, when the Galactic Alliance and the Galactic Empire have been at peace for hundreds of years and they’re allies. To make a long story short, the Princess of Oro Prime had been kidnapped by the military of the planet Ardos, which had been in a dispute with Oro Prime for a number of years. The Empire requested Jedi and Alliance assistance for this operation, and Jhon, an experienced Jedi Guardian, was assigned to the rescue team.

Let’s look at who Jhon was at the time. In the simplest terms, he was a dick. He was pretty arrogant and full of himself and his own abilities. A good, well-known, and recent cinematic reference would be Thor before he was banished from Asgard. He was cocky, arrogant, and thought he had all the answers. That was Jhon.

So, he’s on this joint mission to Ardos, where they will rescue the princess from an Ardosian military facility. It’s a pretty standard action-adventure serial type of story. At some point during the operation, something goes wrong. I’ve never specified it exactly, at least I don’t think I have, but I’ve seen it as Jhon throwing his lightsaber at Ardosian troops and accidentally hitting a reactor core or something. Whatever it was, Jhon’s action leads to the facility exploding, which also takes out part of a nearby town. Thousands of Ardosians die. Because of the successful operation to rescue the princess, Ardos blames Oro Prime and brings their military to Oro Prime and starts to bombard it and attack it in any way they can. The princess, and keep in mind that this happened to save her, has her throat slit by an Ardosian soldier. So thousands of Ardosians are dead, a war that kills thousands if not more is waged until the Empire steps in and ends it, and it’s all because Jhon caused that facility to explode.

As you might expect, Jhon fell into a deep depression. He was exiled from the New Jedi Order for one year, and spent that year wallowing in his self-pity in a very depressed state. I’ve never specified the details of how he turned it around, but Jhon learned that dwelling on the past, even if you’ve done something really terrible, isn’t a good idea. Here is an excerpt from his character profile, written in first person:


 * My failure on Ardos brought into perspective my true failure: my inability to grasp what my master had told me during my training. I had to learn, in the most painful and destructive way possible, that the strength of a Jedi came not from combat but from the strength of character and conviction.


 * All that went through my mind during my exile was self-doubt and self-pity. I considered leaving the Order completely, resigning myself from the life of a Jedi and hiding from the rest of the galaxy where I could never hurt anyone again. I became fearful of my future, angry at my past, and I grew to hate what I was becoming. All I did was suffer through my own self-punishment.


 * When my exile ended, I finally forced myself out of the self-punishing daze I had been in for far too long. I knew, deep down the whole time, that such thoughts would only bring me closer to the darkness that brought me there to begin with, so I had to turn away.


 * I came to accept the fact that a Jedi’s life is one continuous mistake. This is not to cast mistakes in a negative light, however, nor to forsake responsibility for my actions. We cannot learn to improve ourselves without recognizing our own faults and failures. I would have much preferred to recognize my own without them leading to the deaths of countless innocents, but that was not what the Force had in mind for me. The lifelong cycle of mistakes is a lifelong process of learning, and when I was able to accept that I was able to put myself onto my true path in life, the one I should have taken from the beginning rather than forsaking it to become a warrior.

Once he came back and accepted all of this, he left the path of a Jedi Guardian and chose to become a Sage; from an early age he always showed more aptitude for the role of a Sage than a Guardian, but he wanted to be a great warrior and decided to forsake his true path for one of vanity. As he grew as a person and dealt with his guilt about Ardos and Oro Prime, he grew as a Jedi. He became a Jedi Master, was given a seat on the Jedi Council as the Sage Master, and then became the Grand Master. Currently in the RP, he is filling a role similar to that of Obi-Wan Kenobi; he is caring for Lana, the daughter of the Sith Empress. Both Andraste (the Empress) and Lana are the only living descendants of Luke Skywalker. There's destiny involved and I won't get into that, but it goes to show you that Jhon has come a long way since starting a war.

Interesting sidenote: a fellow SWRP admin and I are working on developing a story for a fan fic version of the Ardos/Oro Prime events, which we hope to write as a novel. One thing we found is that the events as described here work well enough as the backstory in a RP profile, but trying to construct a story around them requires us to change a lot of it. So, the definitive story of Jhon's early life and how he dealt with all of this will be different if we ever write the novel. Just goes to show you what I've said before, that RP storytelling and novel writing are very different. - Brandon Rhea (talk) 00:42, September 12, 2013 (UTC)
 * Why did the New Jedi Order exile him? What directions would you want to take his turn-around? Atarumaster88  Jedi_Order.svg ( Talk page ) 17:28, September 21, 2013 (UTC)
 * They exiled him as punishment for his screw up. In the fan fic version, however, it will be for more political reasons, where they use Jhon as a scapegoat for their own institutitional failure. As for your latter question, can you clarify? I'm not sure what you mean. - Brandon Rhea (talk) 17:36, September 21, 2013 (UTC)
 * You said he'd recover, but weren't sure how that happened. What impetus caused him to recover from his self-pity? Atarumaster88  Jedi_Order.svg ( Talk page ) 17:47, September 21, 2013 (UTC)
 * I went over that a bit in the italicized section. It was the realization that life is full of mistakes, and you can either hold yourself back and wither away or you can learn from those mistakes and move forward. The question he had to answer was what kind of life he wanted to live, and he chose the one where he learned and grew. - Brandon Rhea (talk)  22:29, September 24, 2013 (UTC)

Atarumaster88
One event that was particularly central to the Force Exile Series was the fall of the Jedi Order in 19 BBY. The protagonist of the series, a pretty ordinary Jedi Knight named Selu Kraen, suddenly had his entire life stripped away. He had already lost friends over the last three years of war, but to lose his closest friends, his former Master, his home&mdash;basically, everything but the clothes on his back and the lightsaber in his hand, was quite different. When you watch Episode III, the focus of the story is on Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Yoda during the Operation Knightfall scenes, with some Padme thrown in. You see some of Yoda's pain on Kashyyyk and later Obi-Wan's as well when he and Yoda re-unite and head to Coruscant, but they're still very much in "taking care of business" mode. I wanted to show a more personal take on that, so Selu's emotive experience is very raw and traumatic&mdash;maybe he doesn't have the mental fortitude that Obi-Wan and Yoda have, or maybe he developed his attachments too closely. We definitely saw Obi-Wan's true anguish show on Mustafar, so for him, that was where the loss truly hit home. For Selu, it was on Coruscant. I wanted to portray the sack of the Jedi Temple from the standpoint of one of its inhabitants who was facing sudden and catastrophic betrayal and destruction&mdash;and hopefully I succeeded. Atarumaster88  ( Talk page ) 15:42, September 24, 2013 (UTC)

MPK
The only example I can figure from something I've actually finished is shown in my novella Through Glass, in which post-KotOR Revan experiences a vision of the prelude to an event of the Mandalorian Wars. This particular battle happened late in the war and wasn't much of a battle at all; at this time Revan was in the full sway of the dark side and was using the war to selectively purge her military forces of leaders and units who weren't loyal to her. As such, she was sending this particular unit of soldiers into the meatgrinder of a Mandalorian outpost's defenses, and the vision picks up just as Revan and Voren (an apprentice of hers) are about to leave and order the attack to begin.

It's been ages since I read this thing, so forgive me if my self-analysis is spotty.

The focus of the scene is essentially how Revan reacts to being brought face-to-face with one of the numerous atrocities she engineered during the war, and it's conveyed partly via her arguing with the illusory Voren. When she says that she intends to actually lead the attack herself this time around, Voren acts as the voice of her past. He points out that not only does this go against the secret plan, but it's also foolhardy, as the outpost is apparently too well-defended to take, even with Jedi help. Eventually, he breaks character and tries to argue that even if Revan has ostensibly changed since the war, then she should still do in this vision what she did originally, that "These men are dead, and their blood helped to refine you and find yourself. Remorse will only drag you down into the darkness with them."

Revan's attitude is decidedly based on revulsion at what she once did and a desire to atone - she knows that this vision can't turn back time and erase her crimes from history, but to her, that isn't the point. She's not at peace with the fact that this crime is part of what made her who she is, and her decision in the present is entirely a matter of principle: "'This isn't about the battle [...] Or even about surviving. It's about making amends. Or trying to, at least.' [...] if she couldn't do the right thing when it was a vision, how could she trust herself to in the real world?"

Voren himself sort of encapsulates Revan's reaction to her old self, as well. Not only is she forced to remember the people she had killed on that day, but as they debate, she's reminded of what she did to the Jedi who followed her as well. For instance, when Revan tells Voren that they're going into battle with the soldiers, he first reacts with confusion or worry, like "a man who was being given orders that violated his conscience" - he completely believed in the legitimacy of sending the unit to die, he was entirely willing to become a Sith Lord, and Revan has to live with the fact that she's the one who made him that way. -MPK, Free Man  22:25, September 24, 2013 (UTC)
 * In your vision of Revan, does she ever find resolution over her past actions, or does she stay conflicted? Atarumaster88  ( Talk page ) 01:03, September 27, 2013 (UTC)
 * That question is difficult to answer because I stopped developing my idea of where her story would go a while ago - roughly around the time TOR started making itself visible. But if I recall correctly, my basic idea was that the conflict, the need to atone, would be what drives Revan to keep going after the Star Forge, to keep digging into her past self's activities and putting end to anything that remained - which, of course, would end up leading her back to the Sith in the Unknown Regions. The much later canon novel Revan differs from this in some respect, portraying his motivations as having less to do with atonement and more to do with keeping his family safe.
 * Ultimately, Revan would be driven by the need for atonement for the rest of her life. I originally envisioned this as a sort of deconstruction of the typical fanfic writer's stock "KotOR 3 Fic Idea". Revan disappears into the Unknown Regions, does some damage to the Sith Empire (I figured she'd do this by somehow convincing surrounding surrounding factions like the Chiss to go to war), and is eventually followed by the Exile and all their old companions - followed by much progress at the cost of them getting killed off one by one. I suppose that, through all this, Revan's main character dynamic would have been the toll that her life's actions have put on her. Pretty much since her young adulthood she's had the whole galaxy weighing on her soul and countless people's fates depending on her actions - and now that she's doing this whole bigass war thing again, she's started to get frayed around the edges.
 * At the time that I came up with an ending for all this, I thought it innovative, but now I consider it merely above average. Basically, it comes down to the classic scenario of "Every Good Guy Left Storms The Castle" with the "Every Good Guy Left" being just Revan, the Exile (we'll call him Jorus), and Bastila. They'd get in, fight the Sith Emperor (Vitiate's a better name than anything I came up with), he kills Bastila who is Revan's BFF but they're totally not lesbians, Revan kills the Emperor, and she snaps. All her friends are dead except Jorus but I guess he's not that great of a friend anyway, so Revan just can't take it - she's basically all like, "I did all this for all these people and not only do I get nothing in return, but I lose everyone also." She essentially reverts back to herself as she was when she was a Sith and shows many signs of craziness, such as talking to herself, talking to people who are dead, calling Jorus "Malak", and other odds and ends. She beats Jorus into submission and traps him, over time turning him to the dark side also by somehow forcing him to feed on various Sith using his Force Drainage powers or something, turning him halfway like Darth Nihilus, and he ends up as her apprentice (not unlike Luke in Dark Empire, come to think of it). In the end of the end, he'd finally come to his senses, turn on Revan and kill her, and then get killed by a horde of Sith guards. The Empire would then self-destruct since they've got no Emperor, and any of the higher-up Sith Lords who could've taken the position are already dead by this point.
 * Like I said, at the time I thought this was as innovative as the bee's knees. More recently, though, the concept of exploring the ending of Revan's story post-KotOR became less and less interesting to me. Like, it's been done so many times, there's so many things that by their nature they all seemingly need to have in common, and there just didn't seem to be enough unique to my version to make it worth writing - all this tiring shit about "Oh no the gang's getting picked off one by one I wonder who will go last even though it's flamingly obvious", "oh my, Revan's being tempted by the dark side," blah blah blah. If I ever do write a big story (or any story, really) about Revan, it'll be about her journey to evil from before the Mandalorian Wars to when she finds the first of the Star Maps - an ambiguous period that would allow for much more creativity and many fewer hackneyed, obligatory plot points. -MPK, Free Man  15:41, September 27, 2013 (UTC)
 * At the time that I came up with an ending for all this, I thought it innovative, but now I consider it merely above average. Basically, it comes down to the classic scenario of "Every Good Guy Left Storms The Castle" with the "Every Good Guy Left" being just Revan, the Exile (we'll call him Jorus), and Bastila. They'd get in, fight the Sith Emperor (Vitiate's a better name than anything I came up with), he kills Bastila who is Revan's BFF but they're totally not lesbians, Revan kills the Emperor, and she snaps. All her friends are dead except Jorus but I guess he's not that great of a friend anyway, so Revan just can't take it - she's basically all like, "I did all this for all these people and not only do I get nothing in return, but I lose everyone also." She essentially reverts back to herself as she was when she was a Sith and shows many signs of craziness, such as talking to herself, talking to people who are dead, calling Jorus "Malak", and other odds and ends. She beats Jorus into submission and traps him, over time turning him to the dark side also by somehow forcing him to feed on various Sith using his Force Drainage powers or something, turning him halfway like Darth Nihilus, and he ends up as her apprentice (not unlike Luke in Dark Empire, come to think of it). In the end of the end, he'd finally come to his senses, turn on Revan and kill her, and then get killed by a horde of Sith guards. The Empire would then self-destruct since they've got no Emperor, and any of the higher-up Sith Lords who could've taken the position are already dead by this point.
 * Like I said, at the time I thought this was as innovative as the bee's knees. More recently, though, the concept of exploring the ending of Revan's story post-KotOR became less and less interesting to me. Like, it's been done so many times, there's so many things that by their nature they all seemingly need to have in common, and there just didn't seem to be enough unique to my version to make it worth writing - all this tiring shit about "Oh no the gang's getting picked off one by one I wonder who will go last even though it's flamingly obvious", "oh my, Revan's being tempted by the dark side," blah blah blah. If I ever do write a big story (or any story, really) about Revan, it'll be about her journey to evil from before the Mandalorian Wars to when she finds the first of the Star Maps - an ambiguous period that would allow for much more creativity and many fewer hackneyed, obligatory plot points. -MPK, Free Man  15:41, September 27, 2013 (UTC)
 * Like I said, at the time I thought this was as innovative as the bee's knees. More recently, though, the concept of exploring the ending of Revan's story post-KotOR became less and less interesting to me. Like, it's been done so many times, there's so many things that by their nature they all seemingly need to have in common, and there just didn't seem to be enough unique to my version to make it worth writing - all this tiring shit about "Oh no the gang's getting picked off one by one I wonder who will go last even though it's flamingly obvious", "oh my, Revan's being tempted by the dark side," blah blah blah. If I ever do write a big story (or any story, really) about Revan, it'll be about her journey to evil from before the Mandalorian Wars to when she finds the first of the Star Maps - an ambiguous period that would allow for much more creativity and many fewer hackneyed, obligatory plot points. -MPK, Free Man  15:41, September 27, 2013 (UTC)

Solus
Hmmmmmmm. To be completely honest, I haven't really written anything with a big tragic thing in it. The first thing I wrote (The Story That Shall Not Be Named ) didn't have any large-scale...well, anything. The second fanfic-ish thing (Not Proud of That One Either) I wrote dealt with the aftermath of the Jedi Purge, but wasn't exactly about the reaction to it, just how people lived in that tumultuous time. "Rakata" happens...well, after a kind of tragic thing and before another tragic thing as it occurs when the Rakata are at their peak, but again, not dealing with the great tragedies themselves. The Thing I am Writing Right Now doesn't really have a great tragedy, either. There's more death in this than in other things I've written, I guess.

Hm. Why would I not write about big tragedies? I guess the only thing I can think of is that I write in a more low fantasy style or with a low fantasy preference, for some reason. The stuff I write about deals with very few people and their reactions to things. As what I write is more personal, big tragedies wouldn't be my thing. Big anything isn't really my thing - frak, the biggest battle scene I've written involves only four people!

I'm happy with this, though. It's what I'm comfortable with and it's what I like, so there. ^-^ - Solus  Talk to the Hand 21:01, September 27, 2013 (UTC)
 * That's ironic, given your title as the Angel of Death in IRC :P Do you think that your decision to write more personal, smaller-perspective stories was intentional, or just something that happened? Atarumaster88  ( Talk page ) 03:26, September 29, 2013 (UTC)
 * lol. :D I think it sorta just happened. I don't think I set out saying "NO EPICS FOR ME," especially since there are many epic stories that I love. I suppose it must be more natural for me, though I imagine if I put my mind to it I might be able to crank out a high fantasy of some kind. :p - Solus  Talk to the Hand 21:36, September 29, 2013 (UTC)
 * I think it's probably more natural in general. Smaller stories are easier to write because they're easier to relate to. Big fantasy concepts involving destiny and epic conflicts aren't something that people actually encounter in their lives, so it's harder to wrap your head around them; they're great to read, to sink your teeth into another world, but someone actually has to think that world up from beyond their normal experiences. Even still, though, the best big fantasy stories always have something that makes them relatable. Luke Skywalker, for example, just wanted to escape his lot in life and see the world beyond his small little corner of it. Everyone can relate to that. So in a way, by writing smaller stories, you've already had experience writing the most important part of a bigger fantasy story. I bet you could write one. - <font color="#1A2BBB">Brandon Rhea <font color="#1A2BBB">(talk)  21:44, September 29, 2013 (UTC)
 * Hm, you make a good point about that. And d'awwwwwwwww <3 i kill you last. :3 - Solus <sup style="color: blue;">         Talk to the Hand  02:59, September 30, 2013 (UTC)