Title: The First Casualty Fandom: Star Wars Characters: Rey, Kylo Ren, Luke Skywalker Rating: PG13 Summary: The first casualty in any war is truth, as Rey is about to painfully learn.
Luke Skywalker spoke to her like a father at first. He took the lightsaber from Rey’s outstretched hand and put it carefully away, he praised her for having come so far, he expressed sorrow for all that she had seen, and he sat her down in his hovel and brought her some tea. Then he started talking to her like a fellow adult.
I just showed my 11-year-old son how many coffee shop AUs there are on AO3.
Why?
He sat down the other day to write a Minecraft story about three kids who go through a portal in their back yard and end up in the world of Minecraft where they have to battle all the big bosses (I didn’t even realize there WERE big bosses in Minecraft but that’s beside the point). He wrote three chapters with a little input from me – his first beta – and y’all?
He was fucking excited. To be writing a story.
Today he came home from school and seemed a little down, so I asked him about it only to find out that some little asshole at his school told him, “There is already a Minecraft story.”
Me: Okay? So what?
Lucifer: If there’s already a story, no one will read mine.
Immediately, I dragged him in and pulled up my AO3 account. My boys know I write fanfiction, so I showed him my account and how many subscribers I have. Then I showed him how many Teen Wolf stories there are. And then, because it seemed like the perfect analogy, I said, “What if I wrote a story where two characters meet in a coffee shop and fall in love? No werewolves, nothing at all to do with the actual Teen Wolf universe. Just Stiles and Derek meet in a coffeeshop and fall in love.”
He laughed.
I showed him Mornings Aren’t For Everyone. Showed him how many hits it had, how many kudos, how many lovely comments.
Then I said, “So do you think, if anyone else wrote a story about those exact same characters meeting in a coffee shop and falling in love… would anyone read it?”
He laughed and said, “No because you already did.”
So I clicked on the Sterek tag and refined to coffee shop AU. His mind was blown to see that they ALL had thousands of hits and kudos and comments. Then I clicked on JUST the coffee shop AU tag and showed him all the fics across all the fandoms written by countless different people.
I’m going to tell you all now what I told him because it applies to everyone.
Write your story. It doesn’t matter that someone else has written a story about that subject. They didn’t write YOUR story. Only you can do that.
And I want to read your story.
This makes me so happy. Kudos to your son for writing about what gets him excited (omg, I’ve got one all immersed in Minecraft; it’s an 11-year-old THING, isn’t it?). And more kudos to you, for showing him what a big world it is out there, and how easily he can fit into it. That it’s INCLUSIVE, not competitive.
This is beautiful and important on so many levels. What a wonderful and thoughtful mother you are, and also what a message for fic writers, who often feel so competitive with one another. We all have something to say, we all have a story to tell, the worlds we create are not finite. Love this.
I’m reading Don Quixote for my world literature class and apparently when it was first published in 1605 it was world-changingly popular, one of the first “popular novels” as we know it today, and there were all sorts of people who were writing and publishing their own unofficial fan-sequels to Don Quixote which was basically the first fan-fiction, and then in 1615 the original author wrote an official sequel in which Don Quixote reads a piece of fanfic about him and sets out on a quest to beat up the author who mischaracterized him
This is all true. What happened more specifically is that one fan fiction got really really popular and since people weren’t all that familiar with how novels worked (because there weren’t really any other novels in Europe yet), a lot of people just took this as a valid sequel. Cervantes (the original author) had pretty much stopped working on any kind of sequel to the original at point, but he got really pissed that people were reading this fan fic and assuming it was as legit as his canon. So he got off his butt and wrote this sequel, which academics call big words like “meta-textual” when really it was Cervantes trying to make sure people understood his canon correctly and didn’t get carried away with their silly fan theories based on this one fic writer’s interpretation.
Now-a-days, the “true sequel” is normally just lumped in and stuck onto the end as a “part II,” in case you are wondering why you’ve never heard of a Don Quixote the Sequel. By all accounts, the fan fic was pretty bad, which makes it’s a perfect beginning to the grand tradition of fanfiction.
Calling this the first instance of fanfiction, though, comes from the fact that this was the first time, as far as we know, that the author of the original stepped in to officially denounce fan work as not canon. For most of history (at least western history) there wasn’t really an idea that stories had ownership. Most famous greek plays and poems are based on other works. Virgil’s Aeneid can easily be called Homer fan fiction (we have no real way of knowing how much of the story existed in folk tradition and how much he made up). Most of the versions of greek myths you know come from Ovid’s Metamorphosis, which is largely his short fics about other myths. Moving out of the classical world, bible fic constitutes a lot of what literature is for a while. Dante’s Inferno, specifically, (which is, lets be clear, a self insert fic where the author meets his fave author – so it’s also RPF – and they take a tour through a crossover fic between the Bible, historical fic, and greek myth) was so popular that it’s kind of crossed over into fanon (quick – biblically how many cicles does Hell have? Answer: none, they all come from Dante and in turn Virgil, and eventually Homer…) On the run up to Don Quixote, we have Shakespeare, who adapted most of his plays directly from other works by other people, from which he asked no permission (nor was he expected to.)
The real move that makes this false sequel the first official fan fiction is that the author of the canon material asserted his ownership of the intellectual property that was the characters and the story. Not in the legal sense – there was nothing illegal about this sequel – but in the sense that you could call this sequel “unauthorized.” It’s the beginning of thinking of characters and stories as belonging to a specific person, rather than simply being created by said person.
Hey, you know what I love? Fics where ladies who never had conversations in canon get to have conversations! Here is one of that genre.
Title: Pretty Dresses
Fandom: Star Wars
Characters: Padme Amidala, Beru Whitesun
Rating: PG13 (there’s nothing in here worse than in any Star Wars movie) Summary: Padmé has never really had a conversation with a woman who doesn’t change her clothes even once a day.
(or, some missing moments from Attack of the Clones.)
*
*
Padmé
had slept the night on the one spare bed at the Lars homestead, and
when she had woken up she discovered there was nowhere to wash. Because
there was, of course, no water.
She felt stupid for not having
realised that earlier. She had been to the planet before, after all, and
she should have remembered that it was the most unbelievably
uncomfortable place. If you didn’t need to wash, you weren’t going to get to.
So
she changed into her most Tatooine-appropriate dress, which also by a
stroke of luck was the very last clean one she had, and went to find her
hosts. She was worried about Anakin and didn’t much feel like being
sociable, but she figured she should at least show her face.
Beru
was in the kitchen cooking, and she was wearing the exact same clothes
she had worn yesterday. There was a jug of water on the side, and Padmé
badly wanted some to drink, but she thought she had better wait til it
was offered. Beru looked up at her, and then did a double take. Padmé
realised with some discomfort that this one dress of hers was probably
worth more than the Larses’ entire farm.
I’m so, so happy to have found this fic! Let me start off by saying that Beru and Padme are two of my all-time favorite characters in Star Wars (strange choices, I know) and you’re right, there absolutely isn’t enough fic about Beru (or Owen, for that matter) so I love it when people write about her. This was so beautiful and adorable; I loved the awkward interactions between Padme and Beru, how Padme felt uncomfortable because of her wealth and the opulent Naboo lifestyle in comparison to the Larses’ poverty and simple lifestyle, but how Beru wasn’t a bitter person and never once held it against Padme or treated her as strange. I love how Padme tried to help out on the farm and couldn’t do much, but eventually found a small but kind way to be helpful. I loved seeing your interpretations of Naboo culture and Tatooine culture; that was wonderful. I loved the little bits of Owen’s and Beru’s relationship, and especially how you said there wasn’t much touching between them because I actually headcanon that theirs wasn’t a very physical relationship (not that it wasn’t loving, mind you, just not very physical or sexual).
My favorite thing, of course, was Padme leaving behind the dresses for Beru. Just imagine her coming back into the house, worn-out and upset after the funeral, and seeing these beautiful things lying on her bed. I can imagine her at first being all “oh no” because she thinks Padme’s forgotten them, and then she realizes they’ve been left for her and feels both awkward but also grateful. It would be so nice for her to have something beautiful in such an ugly, harsh world as Tatooine.
And another thought popped into my head – what if she still has them when Luke’s around? Would she put two and two together that Padme was his mother? Would she tell him the dresses were hers? Would Luke feel the soft fabric and wonder what his beautiful, generous mother was like? These things give me such feels, dammit.
The one thing I was a bit surprised about was Owen’s and Beru’s nonchalant, even approving, reaction to the Tusken slaughter, because I actually have the opposite headcanon about how they perceived it, but you know, your way really does make sense. Why should they be expected to have pity for people who constantly slaughter their friends and neighbours for no reason whatsoever? Plus, yeah, they’re not bound by the Jedi Code, so there’s no reason why they’d feel any obligation to “love all creatures” or “fear the path to the dark side” or whatever.
OH, and the best thing about it all was the dark irony in the dresses representing a long life, because we know that, unfortunately, that’s not what Beru’s going to have. :C
Anyway, wonderful Fanfiction! I’m so happy I decided to go into the Beru Lars tag and happened to stumble across it!!! :D
OMG how did I not see this earlier!?!?!?! I’m so sorry I missed it until now, I LOVE it when people leave these things for me. <3
I’m glad you liked the Naboo culture bit, because I LOVED thinking all that up.
Oh no, Luke and the dresses. :(((( I also wonder if Beru still had them. Tatooine’s a highly dangerous place so there’s a chance they were stolen, I suppose. But I like to think she got to keep at least one. I’m not sure if she’d have shown it to Luke, though, she might have worried he’d start asking too many questions about his mother. Maybe she lied and said it was Shmi’s.
You know…I thought so long and hard about Beru and Owen’s response to the slaughter, and I thought as awful as it sounds they probably would be approving, for revenge’s sake if for nothing else. They probably never knew the exact details, I bet Anakin never told them, but…I always wondered the Larses filled Padme’s head with stories about the other atrocities Tuskens Raiders had committed whilst she stayed with them, and if that managed to scratch away even slightly at her sense of justice. I suspect it would have done, she’s only human after all….
It has also occurred to me that Beru did at least live longer than Padme herself did and now I’m sad.
Anyway, thanks again, so much, for this great response. :D
1. When he’s eight years old he decides that freedom means never having to say “Yes Master” or any variation thereof again.
2. Two days later, he starts counting. In one day, he says it 13
times. Kitster says he said it 16 times, and Anakin wonders if that’s
worse, or just more of the same.
3. When the Jedi comes, Anakin calls him “sir.” He hates that word,
too, but he’s learned the hard way that it’s safer. The Jedi doesn’t
correct him.
4. Even so, for a few days after leaving Tatooine he almost believes
he’s free. He’s off planet (and that’s where all the freed people go,
isn’t it?), and in a starship, and he’s going to be a Jedi. He’s heard a
lot of stories about the Jedi, but none of them say they’re slaves.
5. He was wrong, though. He has to call all the Jedi “Master,” and
there are rules to follow, and they cut his hair and dress him and tell
him where to go and how to behave and what to do. Master Obi-Wan tries
to explain the difference, but he can’t see it, so he doesn’t understand.
He chafes, but never too much. He’s always known just how far he can push, and no further.
6. By the time he’s nineteen years old, and in love, he’s said “Yes Master” 22,753 times.
7. Padmé is upset that they have to hide their wedding, that it has
to be private and unshareable. She pretends that it doesn’t bother her
so much, and in return he pretends that it does bother him, too.
It doesn’t, though. On Tatooine, all slave marriages are like this. He’s always known he would get married this way.
8. He’s going to be a father, and he’s joyful and giddy and terrified. (He’s now said “Yes Master” 35,802 times.)
There’s a corner of his mind that repeats the old Tatooine law like a
mantra. Children follow the mother. His child will be free.
9. There’s something to be said, he thinks, for choosing one’s own
master. Or at least having the illusion of choice. He’s now said “Yes
Master” 35,998 times, and as he kneels before Palpatine, he could almost
believe this is what he’s always wanted.
10. Luke is twenty-four years old, whole, and beautiful, and he’s
never said “Yes Master” in his life. Vader doesn’t know this
empirically, of course, but he knows it all the same. The slave can
always recognize the free man.
It’s not until Luke lifts away his mask and looks at him with desert
blue eyes that Anakin realizes he’s said “No” for the very first time.
Hey, you know what I love? Fics where ladies who never had conversations in canon get to have conversations! Here is one of that genre.
Title: Pretty Dresses Fandom: Star Wars Characters: Padme Amidala, Beru Whitesun Rating: PG13 (there’s nothing in here worse than in any Star Wars movie) Summary: Padmé has never really had a conversation with a woman who doesn’t change her clothes even once a day.
(or, some missing moments from Attack of the Clones.)
I was cruising through the net, following the cold trail of one of the periodic “Is or is not Fanfic the Ultimate Literary Evil?” arguments that crop up regularly, and I’m now bursting to make a point that I never see made by fic defenders.
We’re all familiar with the normal defenses of fic: it’s done out of love, it’s training, it’s for fun. Those are all good and valid defenses!
But they miss something. They damn with faint praise. Because the thing is, when you commit this particular Ultimate Literary Evil you’ve now told a story. And stories are powerful. The fact that it wasn’t in an original world or with original characters doesn’t necessarily make it less powerful to any given reader.
I would never have made this argument a few years ago. A few years ago I hadn’t received messages from people who were deeply touched by something I wrote in fanfic. So what if it’s only two or three or four people, and I used someone else’s world and characters? For those two or three or four people, I wrote something fucking important. You cannot tell me that isn’t a valid use of my time and expect me to feel chastened. I don’t buy it. I won’t feel ashamed. I will laugh when you call something that touches other people ‘literary masturbation.’ Apparently you’re not too up on your sex terminology.
Someone could argue that if I’d managed the same thing with original characters in an original world, it could’ve touched more people. They might be right! On the other hand, it might never have been accepted for publication, or found a market if self published, and more importantly I would never have written it because I didn’t realize I could write. The story wouldn’t have happened. Instead, thanks to fanfic being a thing, it did. And for two or three or four people it mattered. When we talk about defending fanfic, can we occasionally talk about that?
I once had an active serviceman who told me that my FF7 and FF8 fic helped get him through the war. That’ll humble you. People have told me my fanfic helped get them through long nights, through grief, through hard times. It was a solace to people who needed solace. And because it was fanfic, it was easier to reach the people who needed it. They knew those people already. That world was dear to them already. They were being comforted by friends, not strangers.
Stories are like swords. Even if you’ve borrowed the sword, even if you didn’t forge it yourself from ore and fire, it’s still your body and your skill that makes use of it. It can still draw blood, it can strike down things that attack you, it can still defend something you hold dear. Don’t get me wrong, a sword you’ve made yourself is powerful. You know it down to its very molecules, are intimate with its heft and its reach. It is part of your own arm. But that can make you hesitate to use it sometimes, if you’re afraid that swinging it too recklessly will notch the blade. Is it strong enough, you think. Will it stand this? I worked so hard to make it. A blade you snatched up because you needed a weapon in your hand is not prey to such fears. You will use it to beat against your foes until it either saves you or it shatters.
But whether you made that sword yourself or picked it up from someone who fell on the field, the fight you fight with it is always yours.
Literary critics who sneer at fanfic are so infuriatingly shortsighted, because they all totally ignore how their precious literature, as in individual stories that are created, disseminated, and protected as commercial products, are a totally modern industrial capitalist thing and honestly not how humans have ever done it before like a couple centuries ago. Plus like, who benefits most from literature? Same dudes who benefit most from capitalism: the people in power, the people with privilege. There’s a reason literary canon is composed of fucking white straight dudes who write about white straight dudes fucking.
Fanfiction is a modern expression of the oral tradition—for the rest of us, by the rest of us, about the rest of us—and I think that’s fucking wonderful and speaks to a need that absolutely isn’t being met by the publishing industry. The need to come together as a close community, I think, and take the characters of our mythology and tell them getting drunk and married and tricked and left behind and sent to war and comforted and found again and learning the lessons that every generation learns over and over. It’s wonderful. I love it. I’m always going to love it.
Stories are fractal by nature. Even when there’s just one version in print, you have it multiplied by every reader’s experience of it in light of who they are, what they like, what they want. And then many people will put themselves in the place of the protagonist, or another character, and spend a lot of time thinking about what they’d do in that character’s place. Or adjusting happenings so they like the results better.
That’s not fic yet, but it is a story.
But the best stories grow. This can happen in the language of capitalism—a remake of a classic movie, a series of books focusing on what happened afterwards or before—or it can happen in the language of humanity. Children playing with sticks as lightsabers, Jedi Princess Leia saving Alderaan by dueling Vader; a father reading his kids The Hobbit as a bedtime story as an interactive, “what would you like to happen next?” way so that the dwarves win the wargs over with doggie biscuits that they had in their pockets and ride to Erebor on giant wolves, people writing and sharing their ideas for deleted outtake scenes from Star Trek and slow-build fierce and tender romance with startling bursts of hot sex between Hawkeye and Agent Coulson.
A story at its most successful is a fully developed fractal, retold a million times and a million ways, with stories based on stories based on stories. Fanfic of fanfic of fanfic. Stories based on headcanons, stories based on prompts, stories that put the Guardians of the Galaxy in a coffee-shop AU and stories where the Transformers are planet-wandering nomads and stories where characters from one story are placed into a world from another. Stories that could be canon, stories that are the farthest thing from canon, stories that are plausible, stories that would never happen, stories that give depth to a character or explore the consequences of one different plot event or rewrite the whole thing from scratch.
@taiey tagged me in this not long ago, and I assumed it was a 6 things I made this year meme so I waited a week or so to do it, and then I realised it was actually just (’just’) a 6 things I made anytime that I’m most proud of meme. Oooh. Ooooooh….
(I’ll just stick to fanfiction/fandom stuff)
1. I’m still very fond of Things They Talked About In The Playground. (Was that really almost four years ago? Jesus.) I don’t know how it happened, but god it’s important to me. Still chills me, too.
2. I kinda like my article about female Star Wars fandom, the Prequels and what it’s like to Like Boy Stuff when you’re A Girl
3. The Doctor Who Bechdel Test blog and related infographics etc wasn’t remotely all me, but I think it kinda counts. Also I love making infographics now
4. Humanity In The Abstract is a deeply personal story about life, death, love and madness, as told with the assistance of an apocalypse, a blue guy, a demon child and an anthropomorphic personification of mortality who sometimes speaks in emoji. It’s sad, and weird, and flawed, but it gives me courage sometimes.
5. The Storyteller is a Spider-Man fanfic set in the universe presented by the Raimi movies, in which everything had…sort of more realism, I thought, than the average superhero movie. This is the tale of a good, decent woman who was just on the periphery of Peter Parker’s story but deserved her own.
6. A late entry! A week ago, inspired by The Force Awakens, I wrote A Snow Song. Which is Star Wars meets A Christmas Carol, because…well, those are two works of fiction so deeply embedded into the public consciousness that they ought to meet at some point? I like the whole thing, but mostly I like it for this one line I think: “Do you think there is anything so evil or so powerful in the galaxy, Luke, that could permanently part a parent from its child?“ I love that line. It sums up Star Wars for me.
However, Star Wars does not have a Christmas! Or any kind of holiday season, I gather. That did not stop me from writing this spoiler-laden, slightly Clone Wars-borrowing-from take on A Christmas Carol. Luke is about to be visited by three spirits! Ooh yes.
[I wasn’t kidding when I said ‘spoiler-laden’! This will ruin the movie for you if you haven’t seen it!]
