the wombatcave

Riffed elsewhere, based on an initial line by vian_l: "Your tragic [SW fan] also gets wistful and occasionally choked up at the mention of double-sunsets, thinks elaborate hairstyles are the perfect fashion accessory, if one has time and hair enough, and who will keep up an interest in what George Lucas is doing, even if he seems intent on pulling all the life out of the movies and replacing it with noisy pixels."

Had we but hair enough and time,
Those cinnamon buns would be fine:
We would sit down with hairpins, comb,
And styling products (mousse and foam).
The setting suns would cast their hue
Of auburn warmth across this 'do,
And we would dress in sumptuous frocks
That would do justice to these locks.

But sad to say, we're left with just
Jar-Jar and poop jokes, and we must
Cling to old hopes, though long forlorn.
Please pass the bucket of popcorn.

Anakin still bugs the hell out of me in the prequel films. No matter how I try to contort my certain point of view, I can't get his character development or even basic setup to make sense.

First of all, let's start with the slave-boy thing, because we have to. From a plot-external perspective, this mostly seems to be dictated by the virgin-birth thing-- his mother has to be in a situation where his conception can't be explained, but also where she can't just pick up and go with him. So she can't be a single mother on her own, unless she gets trapdoored just in time for the Jedi to whisk Anakin away by himself, or unless she just doesn't care about the kid. If she'd already been married to Clieg Lars and dandling another baby, that would've explained her lack of mobility and also set up some later dimensions to Vader ordering the old homestead to be torched around his (step-)brother's body, but it also would've required some extra explanation along the lines of "Anakin was conceived before I married Clieg-- no, we weren't fooling around beforehand; some guy with wings played the sax at me while I was getting dive-bombed by a dove, and-- no, I wasn't just being a ho-bag with an earlier boyfriend-- no, honest; stop smirking!"

Hence Shmi's slavery, and hence also why none of her known owners are particularly humanoid (afaik-- I'm just going by what I remember of the movies themselves, regardless of whatever supplemental materials might've been published). But it's still a clumsy device for framing Anakin as the result of a virgin birth; it doesn't exclude possible interactions by Shmi with past human masters, co-slaves, or whoever. There's also no explanation of how she became a slave, or, since Anakin seems to have inherited his mother's status, why she hasn't been put to work breeding litters of separately sellable/workable siblings. The conditions of their slavery don't even seem particularly onerous, compared to the theoretical scenario of already having Clieg as a stepfather.

The previous paragraph was shifting toward plot-internal factors, of which the biggest hurdle for me is this: if you're a Dark Lord of the Sith (and who isn't?), and you want to create a Child Of Prophecy (TM) to plant within the Jedi Order to destroy it from within-- and heck, did Sidious even really *need* Vader to help with that, on top of all the clonetroopers?-- wouldn't you want to keep track of him, instead of letting him and his mother drift off to nowhere in the hands of random masters who might've airlocked the kid in a fit of pique? I doubt that Sithly powers from afar could've saved Ani-chan from being buried in a sandstorm or crushed by falling scrap.

Next, the bad-seed thing. Unless you simply postulate that he was conceived as Pure Evil (TM) from the start and nothing could've saved him-- which rather negates the supposed irony of "Oh, what a cute innocent sweetie he was to start with!"-- or that Sidious gradually used the Dark Side to make him Stupid, what step of his upbringing is supposed to've gone wrong? He loved his mother and she loved him (and yet their story is rather grim); how much should that really have screwed up the usual Jedi apprenticeship? (It makes his obsessive imprinting on Padme even creepier, when you think about her maternal gesture of giving him a blankie to curl up in.)

Yes, there were some initial rivalry issues with Kenobi, at least from Kenobi's point of view; I'm not sure that Anakin even noticed them at the time, and Kenobi seemed to quash them down pretty well after he was promoted and had to take charge of Anakin himself. Anakin lost his initial Jedi mentor, yes, but how traumatic should that have been when the kid had only known Qui-Gon for what, a few days? weeks? surely not longer than that. Definitely not longer than Anakin had known Shmi.

...I think there's also a proto-thought gelling toward the back of my brain cell about Padme, slavery, and different planetary prejudices toward aliens/droids, but that'll have to wait for a bit until I can find some Kool-Whip to garnish it with.

I'm vaguely thinking about poking at "Arcadia" again. (For those of you unfamiliar with it, it's a bit of SW prequel fanfic I started a long, long time ago....) Every so often I feel guilty about blithely skipping away from her, but then I consider that I felt almost equally guilty about gearing up to start chapter 9 (esp. since the assorted draft bits were making it increasingly clear that it was not going to be the last chapter after all), and that I regarded it as some sort of Sign when fanfix.com (and my ficwriting laptop, for that matter) died shortly after I uploaded chapter 8.

In a way, I suppose I do share Jasper Fforde's view of fictional characters, wherein they possess an odd sort of immortality/limbo within the bounds of their narrative frame. If I turn my mind's eye in a certain direction, I can "see" her waiting for the fate to which she's resigned herself, not yet knowing about the headlong rush of Other Characters toward her or about the final duel which I wrote first, and is now older than some of the people I've been interacting with online.

Hell, I have Usenet posts older than some of the people I've been interacting with online. Maybe this is a Sign that I need to find a different set of interactions.

Does anyone have fic-archive suggestions of where to put "Arcadia"? I'm no longer in contact with most of the people who have her on their sites (assuming that they ever contacted me in the first place), my old homepage belongs to an ISP whose account we dropped about five years ago, and ff.n continues to suggest the alternate punctuation ff'n, and frankly I'm tempted to park her here within some LJ cuts if I can figure out how to keep her in chronological order. And pry her out of the Word files I managed to salvage, since I still haven't picked up a copy of Word for the replacement laptop.