vestigal SW fangirlness
Nov. 14th, 2005 11:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wombat1138(Because let's face it, otherwise I wouldn't even be thinking about this sort of thing, right?)
Encouraged by a great deal of commentary that the ROTS novelization was (even?) better than the movie, sometime last week I pinned down a Barnes'n'Noble comfy chair and an hour or three to read the whole book. My reaction to the first few chapters was "Hot DAMN, this IS good" before gradually irking at authorial tics and underlying structural problems, but hey.
This is what it's like to be a particularly annoying authorial tic, right now: you open the starboard porthole of your Bilbringi lightflyer or raise the hatch of your latest-model Incom coupe, and as suddenly as pulling the emergency ejection lever, you toss out the basic narrative of the ongoing story and let it tumble away for a while before it regains its balance and catches up to you, fuming. While it shakes its most impolite pseudopod at your rear viewscreen's camera, spitting contrails out of its face and swearing to give up its two-tabacc-pouches-a-day habit, you indulge in a brief, delirious fugue of elaborate metaphors. Or you invoke isolated scenelets of distant locations which are never clearly identified, or at best are multiple-choice fly's-eye kaleidoscopes of desert sand-drifts, translucent Mon Calamari gallstones, and/or the delicate silken cocoons of Twi'lek lekku mites. Either way, you make the reader wonder why the heck you keep doing this, and whether perhaps there should've been some way to convey the same information by invisibly folding it into the narrative, like frothy meringue into a Hutt's favorite mousse, instead of producing large, obvious splats like bouts of figurative bukkake.
This is what it's like to be the plot of ROTS: you're composed of several large, showy setpieces, thinly bridged together with fragile threads of spackle. You are hugely dependent on Anakin Skywalker being as dumb as rocks, even the fabled brain-barfing antimatter neuralitonium boulders of Kayjayay.
But actually, neither of those things is my main point, The novelization cemented for me the lurking thought I've had wrt the prequel movies, that imho Kenobi is a far more sympathetic and tragic character than Anakin. I can't think of a single genuinely selfless action Anakin takes after offering Qui-Gon and Padme shelter from the sandstorm, and even that may've been influenced by him spotting Qui-Gon's lightsaber first. The kid already wanted to return to the Boonta Eve racetrack, and spotted a good excuse to do so. When Qui-Gon wants to haul him off to be trained as a Jedi, Anakin doesn't insist on having his mother come with them, or at least having her freed from slavery. My brain cell has self-protectively forgotten most of AOTC, but in ROTS, Anakin's acquiescence to Sithly training seems equally (or even more) driven by petulance at the Jedi Council's refusal to grant him what he sees as his own due, compared to genuine concern for Padme's well-being. Yes, he lost his mother, but he willingly walked away from her. He lost his wife, but he choked her hard enough to believe afterward that he'd killed her. He lost his daughter in never having known her, but in the meantime he tortured her without awareness of her identity.
Kenobi has his flaws, sure, but his actions generally seem to be motivated by what he thinks is right rather than his own self-interest. Having already been separated from his birth kin, he went on to lose all three generations of his surrogate family within the Jedi, suspecting or being suspected of personal betrayal in each case: Qui-Gon, his father-figure, whom he thought abandoned him in favor of Anakin; Anakin, his erstwhile apprentice whom he loved like a brother, flailing out at him with hatred and lightsabers; Luke, whose first training he provided all too briefly, along with a skein of protective half-truths which would be bitterly dismissed as lies once discovered.
Oh well. Don't mind me, I'll just be off in the corner reading Fruits Basket.
Encouraged by a great deal of commentary that the ROTS novelization was (even?) better than the movie, sometime last week I pinned down a Barnes'n'Noble comfy chair and an hour or three to read the whole book. My reaction to the first few chapters was "Hot DAMN, this IS good" before gradually irking at authorial tics and underlying structural problems, but hey.
This is what it's like to be a particularly annoying authorial tic, right now: you open the starboard porthole of your Bilbringi lightflyer or raise the hatch of your latest-model Incom coupe, and as suddenly as pulling the emergency ejection lever, you toss out the basic narrative of the ongoing story and let it tumble away for a while before it regains its balance and catches up to you, fuming. While it shakes its most impolite pseudopod at your rear viewscreen's camera, spitting contrails out of its face and swearing to give up its two-tabacc-pouches-a-day habit, you indulge in a brief, delirious fugue of elaborate metaphors. Or you invoke isolated scenelets of distant locations which are never clearly identified, or at best are multiple-choice fly's-eye kaleidoscopes of desert sand-drifts, translucent Mon Calamari gallstones, and/or the delicate silken cocoons of Twi'lek lekku mites. Either way, you make the reader wonder why the heck you keep doing this, and whether perhaps there should've been some way to convey the same information by invisibly folding it into the narrative, like frothy meringue into a Hutt's favorite mousse, instead of producing large, obvious splats like bouts of figurative bukkake.
This is what it's like to be the plot of ROTS: you're composed of several large, showy setpieces, thinly bridged together with fragile threads of spackle. You are hugely dependent on Anakin Skywalker being as dumb as rocks, even the fabled brain-barfing antimatter neuralitonium boulders of Kayjayay.
But actually, neither of those things is my main point, The novelization cemented for me the lurking thought I've had wrt the prequel movies, that imho Kenobi is a far more sympathetic and tragic character than Anakin. I can't think of a single genuinely selfless action Anakin takes after offering Qui-Gon and Padme shelter from the sandstorm, and even that may've been influenced by him spotting Qui-Gon's lightsaber first. The kid already wanted to return to the Boonta Eve racetrack, and spotted a good excuse to do so. When Qui-Gon wants to haul him off to be trained as a Jedi, Anakin doesn't insist on having his mother come with them, or at least having her freed from slavery. My brain cell has self-protectively forgotten most of AOTC, but in ROTS, Anakin's acquiescence to Sithly training seems equally (or even more) driven by petulance at the Jedi Council's refusal to grant him what he sees as his own due, compared to genuine concern for Padme's well-being. Yes, he lost his mother, but he willingly walked away from her. He lost his wife, but he choked her hard enough to believe afterward that he'd killed her. He lost his daughter in never having known her, but in the meantime he tortured her without awareness of her identity.
Kenobi has his flaws, sure, but his actions generally seem to be motivated by what he thinks is right rather than his own self-interest. Having already been separated from his birth kin, he went on to lose all three generations of his surrogate family within the Jedi, suspecting or being suspected of personal betrayal in each case: Qui-Gon, his father-figure, whom he thought abandoned him in favor of Anakin; Anakin, his erstwhile apprentice whom he loved like a brother, flailing out at him with hatred and lightsabers; Luke, whose first training he provided all too briefly, along with a skein of protective half-truths which would be bitterly dismissed as lies once discovered.
Oh well. Don't mind me, I'll just be off in the corner reading Fruits Basket.
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no subject
on 2005-11-14 08:28 pm (UTC)However:
You are hugely dependent on Anakin Skywalker being as dumb as rocks
So, so true. And the pro-Anakin folks put a lot of gruff on poor Obi-Wan for the "I loved you" as the Vadersickle goes up in flames, but... really... I just wanted to give Obi-Wan a hug.
no subject
on 2005-11-14 09:44 pm (UTC)I've been looking for the first volume of Fruits Basket, but noplace around here seems to have it. Two through Ten, usually, but not one. *sigh*
no subject
on 2005-11-14 10:50 pm (UTC)This is what it's like to be a particularly annoying authorial tic, right now: [....]
I have to say, I'll take this over the usual knuckle-dragging movie-to-novel conversion ("Anakin screamed in pain as he was burned by the lava. Obi-Wan looked sad, then walked away. Sadly.") any day.
Re the plot (of the film): Sure, it's still a connected series of setpieces. But for once, those setpieces are of plot, rather than mere wowza scenes dependent on eye candy. IMHO, of course.
It's true that Obi-Wan is far more selfless than Anakin--but in some ways, that may be the problem. Aside from setting up his inevitable failure with Anakin, there's no Obi-Wan plot per se--and that's precisely because he doesn't have any particular desires of his own, other than carrying on Qui-Gon's wishes (post-TPM). What makes both Anakin and Luke succeed in changing things (badly or well) is that, yeah, at some level they're both selfish. Anakin doesn't know how to subsume that, and the result is societal collapse. Luke also acts in the end out of selfish desires, though--to save his father--and this time it works. (Or, depending on your take on things, it leads again to societal collapse.) For better or for worse, selfishness seems to be how you get things done in the GFFA. (Heck, if Han hadn't left Yavin early in ANH, he might not have survived to be there to rescue Luke at the end.)
Luke doesn't seem very bitter towards Ben in ROTJ, at least for more than a line or two. In fact, I suppose that could be the basic difference between him and his father right there: When Anakin feels betrayed, people die, while Luke's at least able to see enough of other people's sides that he can connect (or connect back) to them.