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
- Please restrict this to stuff from your fan-fiction (written or possibly just conceptualized).
- You can suggest and make observations, but no condemning other people's work
- "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).
Entries
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)
Sholus
<golf clap> 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)
Discussion
Archives
| Enumeration | Topic | Month |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ten protagonist questions | April 2011 |
| 2 | Remembering the deceased | May 2011 |
| 3 | Species likes/dislikes | June 2011 |
| 4 | Synopsize an action scene | July 2011 |
| 5 | Downtime activities | August 2011 |
| 6 | What scares your characters? | October 2011 |
| 7 | Locales | November 2011 |
| 8 | Holidays | December 2011 |
| 9 | Mementos | January 2012 |
| 10 | First kiss | February 2012 |
| 11 | Parents | March 2012 |
| 12 | Home sweet home | May 2012 |
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| 14 | Music and writing | July 2012 |
| 15 | Politics and writing | August 2012 |
| 16 | Minor characters | September 2012 |
| 17 | Horror and fan-fiction | October 2012 |
| 18 | What are characters thankful for? | November 2012 |
| 19 | Coldest your character has ever been? | January 2013 |
| 20 | Romance at three stages of life | February 2013 |
| 21 | Betrayal | March 2013 |
| 22 | Preferred character archetypes | April 2013 |
| 23 | Writing process | May 2013 |
| 24 | Writing influences | June 2013 |
| 25 | Gender roles | July 2013 |
| 26 | Potential retcons | August 2013 |
| 27 | Reaction to tragedy | September 2013 |
| 28 | Prominent Ships | October 2013 |
| 29 | Prominent Battles | November 2013 |