Thank you so much for the long and thoughtful comment!! :D
Reprise is definitely a favorite of mine, and has been for years, although I just detest the JA books' terrible worldbuilding. Unfortunately, I don't think I know a single long, well-written time-travel fic that doesn't include them. The There (and back again?) by beamirang is just absolutely *magical,* if you're interested. Ib'tuur Jatne Tuur Ash'ad Kyr'amur by ziggyzigzagged also started out pretty well, but it's getting into levels of Mando-worship I'm uncomfortable with.
I have heard tons of good stuff about the Desert Storm, but one note from the author about how "people who think having sex with someone changes your relationship with them need to grow up" and I was really turned off x)
Tbh I don't always agree with the changes in Reprise either, but it's more because they're based on Legends stuff than Lucas' canon - so it's really personal preference.
I mean, Anakin's background as a slave cannot be dismissed, but I feel like the fandom has blown up how traumatized he really was when he came to the Jedi. In TPM, he's not afraid to stand up to Watto, he all but jokes about the slave-chips, he's eager, curious, pursues his own hobbies and had time to build a robot *and* a pod by age 9, *doesn't want things to change* (as per his own words), never once called Watto "Master" and didn't kill him, hurt him or in any way make it look like he hated him when he came back in AotC. Obviously growing up deprived of your freedom does terrible things to a child's development, but the fandom often makes it look like Anakin was just an absolutely feral child on the verge of being non-functioning, crippled by anxieties, and terrified at the thought of calling more people "Master," when that's really not how he was characterized in TPM *at all.*
Although past AotC, YES, drag this idiot's ass to a shrink! The problem is, we do see people attempting to reach out to Anakin fairly often (Obi-Wan trying to get him to open up about Padmé in TCW s6 *and* s7 comes to mind) - but Anakin is completely uncooperative, and you can't just 'fix' someone's state of mind if they won't commit to it. And seriously? All the other Jedi were FINE!
Yes, absolutely, 99% of anything bad ever is Palps' fault. He's the best villain, he's great, I love hating his stupid face, and I soooooo want him to choke painfully on a cracker and slowly die of asphyxiation at any point before Order 66. Or better yet, have the Zillo beast eat him.
Thank you in return for the long and thoughtful answer! :)
I must confess, it's been a while since I read most of the earlier works of the Desert Storm so I can't exactly place the line you quoted. I imagine it's from somewhere near the stuff about Ben/Jango having sex. Honestly, sometimes you read so much fanfic and it gets a little difficult to keep straight what happens in which! I mean, as an ace woman, sex really isn't my area. But I imagine having sex with someone would change your relationship them almost all of the time.
I never actually read any of the books or comics so I'm not entirely familiar with legends canon. I've only ever picked up stuff from reading fics that include some of it. While I do enjoy some of the stuff (the addition of the some of the characters is quite nice), but yeah ... some of it is also not so good.
'Ib'tuur Jatne Tuur Ash'ad Kyr'amur' by ziggyzigzagged isn't something I've read for a little while either. Haven't quite got round to having a few rereads of stuff this year. I can see there is perhaps a little much Mando-worship or whatever. I do love Mando culture, but the Jedi also have a really intricate and complicated culture. Both deserve recognition and respect, but I guess a fic that's about Jedi should focus on Jedi culture. I will have to have a look at 'There (and back again?)' by beamirang - always love getting new recommendations!
And yeah, I have to say after thinking it over, I do agree with points about Anakin in TPM. While slavery is obviously a terrible thing, Anakin doesn't appear as too badly affected. Perhaps because he's never known anything else and Watto, while it's bad that he owns people, doesn't come off as objectively being completely awful otherwise. Anakin is still allowed to have his own hobbies, as you say, and does have the time and ability to build a whole droid. It's been a little while since I watched the films so I'm not completely certain about this, but Anakin clearly gets the parts for his pod and for C-3PO from somewhere. Perhaps taking parts Watto won't miss, or perhaps even given them. Feral desert child Anakin isn't always an accurate depiction, but I guess we don't get what to see what Anakin would've been like once all the excitement of being freed and the Naboo Invasion had died away and he'd been able to process everything. But neither can we deny that Obi-Wan was clearly making attempts to reach out to Anakin like in TCW. So yeah, a substantial part of Anakin's problems was his inability to really adapt to his new environment and his lack of ability to actually trust and reach out to the people who cared about him.
Palpatine is definitely a great villain. I guess some of the best parts are that you never really know how much control he actually has. He's clearly very clever, very manipulative, and very convincing. It's not hard to think that he's got back-up plans for back-up plans for back-up plans. Or perhaps that he's just very good and spinning a situation to his advantage. Either way, he makes an excellent villain but I still always hope that the Zillo beast will eat him!
Almost at the end of this second long rant, I promise! :D I forgot to add Soft Wars and Rex Adopts A Jedi to my list of good fix-its. They're sorta interlinked series, and the fix-it progression is definitely a slow one. The focus is more on character development, and for people like Anakin to actually learn and grow as a person instead of just changing the rules to suit them. And there's lots of snazzy clone stuff as well which is always lovely. I'm actually having a reread of those series starting today which is why they've only just sprung to mind.
I guess we just have to take fanfic with a pinch of salt. We like what we like, and that's okay.
Yup, it was about them. And as a Christian who considers sex to be sacred - and even though I understand that the vast majority of western society does not hold the same view - it was kinda hard to swallow.
Yeah... Legends really is... a mixed bag, to put it nicely. Yeah my issue with many time travel stories is that they all make Anakin, Obi-Wan or even more Jedi or Shmi Mando??? Like, even Tano and Kenobi is kinda starting to do that :/ I mean, not that Mandalorian culture is wrong but why has everything got to be about them? It's not like they're even that big of a deal in the movies. (As in: they're never even named in the movies, nor do they appear in them because Jango and Boba weren't even really Mandalorians according to Pablo Hidalgo and TCW)
"So yeah, a substantial part of Anakin's problems was his inability to really adapt to his new environment and his lack of ability to actually trust and reach out to the people who cared about him." - Yup. And of course those issues probably stem from slavery, but it's not things that weren't immediately noticeable and that the Jedi somehow failed to address. They're subtle, insidious character flaws that you can't just fix with more love, more cuddles and more leniency, as it's often proposed.
#Let the Zillo Beast eat Palpatine 2k20
Hehhhh, I'm not super Soft Wars. I'm not into Codywan, for one thing. If you want to see Anakin grow tho, definitely check out Ibelin's "Life and What Comes After" verse. There's even a bit about the Tuskens.
May I recommend "Of Queens, Knights, and Pawns" by chancecraz, or if you want something prequel era, "Shifting Sands" by chancecraz and "Like Fire In Our Bones" by acuteneurosis. Leia is quite possibly the best time-traveling fixer ever, because:
1. She doesn't know or care about the restrictions of the Jedi Order, and has no interest in being a Jedi. But even less interest in being a Sith. 2. She is Not Impressed with Anakin Skywalker, but 100% invested in Making Him Fix His Own Shit. Similarly, she's squicked by Anakin's inept flirting with Padmé, but accepts it as a fact of life. 3. She is good at many things, among them pissing people off. Even people on her side. But she's so freaking competent and inspiring! 4. The Snark Side is strong with her. And she gets to disdainfully ask Dooku, "Aren't you a little short for a Sith Lord?"
Have either you or Look For Miracles read the fic below it’s pretty funny...
Chancellor Zilobist BoliTheSenate
Summary: Commander Fox of the Coruscant Guard hates his job, or rather; he hates what Chancellor Palpatine turned his job into. He hates the unreasonable demands, the tons of paperwork and he hates having to forge Palpatines signature on a daily basis. So, when he sees an oportunity to appoint a new Chancellor, he takes it.
And in Fox' opinion things have only improved so far, no matter what the other Commanders say.
I do think that you (and the Jedi) downplay the emotional effects of growing up enslaved in a society based on chattel slavery. While Watto may not have been physically abusive (other than demanding that Anakin risk his life podracing, overriding his mother's wishes) and may have been a "decent" slave owner, that doesn't mean you should trust a 9-year-old's self-report to outsiders he's trying to impress, some of whom didn't even previously know that slavery existed, and none of whom seem able and willing to DO anything about it.
You're right, obviously. My point was more about the movie's narrative than the actual consequences of slavery on a young mind though. While I do think TPM probably underplayed the emotional damage of slavery, I stand by my assessment that the film itself isn't presenting Anakin as that almost non-functioning and timid, but rather as brash and confidant (and yes, those traits are defense mechanisms as well)
Obviously growing up deprived of your freedom does terrible things to a child's development, but the fandom often makes it look like Anakin was just an absolutely feral child on the verge of being non-functioning, crippled by anxieties, and terrified at the thought of calling more people "Master," when that's really not how he was characterized in TPM *at all.*
What I meant by all of that wasn't that Anakin wasn't affected by slavery, but that he was affected in subtle ways that did not manifest as full-blown trauma as early as nine. Rather the effects were like cracks in a house's foundation, small enough to be unnoticed and that grow and grow until the house collapses. Again, not disputing the consequences of slavery, just that - for example - the movie never implied that Anakin had a problem with calling people "Master" (when he never called Watto that) and thus that the Jedi expecting him to use that word wasn't emotional abuse as I've seen claimed.
True, he is outwardly functional. At first. From what is seen in TPM (heavily fueled by adrenaline). I do think there is leeway in interpretation of what happens after the celebration after the battle of Naboo, because here is a child from a society built on slavery, now trying to navigate a completely new culture, with none of his support system from his old life.
Did the Jedi get him appropriate therapy? Who knows? They may have tried, but their in-house therapists most likely have little to no experience with children who have been enslaved in any significant way (other younglings may have been trafficked, like Ahsoka, but a five-year-old and a nine-year-old are going to be very different in terms of how much they process of their situation) and outside therapists wouldn't have experience with Jedi. (This is one of my favorite parts of Hindsight Is Not Perfect: they have a Jedi therapist and an outside therapist working together on Anakin. And then Anakin tells them "so I'm actually a time-traveling ex-Sith...") So, maybe calling people "Master" was a problem for Anakin, maybe it wasn't; it WAS the responsibility of the Jedi to find out whether or not it was, and it doesn't seem like they tried too hard to do that. And maybe Qui-Gon didn't make it sufficiently clear to the Jedi before he died, what exactly Anakin's situation had been before. I don't think the Jedi purposefully emotionally abused him, definitely, but I think there was a bunch of misunderstanding on all sides, because hey, take one lonely traumatized-to-whatever-extent nine-year-old, one grieving barely-adult-within-his-society guardian, throw in some culture shock, and add a creepy meddling Sith preying on the kid, it's a recipe for disaster.
And maybe Anakin *couldn't* read Basic when he got to the Temple, I find that perfectly plausible. I find it entirely believable that his initiate and padawan peers would shun or pick on him, because have you seen what children are like to anyone who's different?? I could see him having a breakdown after weeks or months of Jedi life because that's a thing that happens when people are dumped into a new culture. And maybe fanfic authors are writing their own childhood traumas into their fanfic; that's a thing people do. But I don't think any of this is necessarily contradicted by the source material.
I think that we fanfic writers, as (mostly) reasonably affluent westerners, may be prone to swinging wildly from underplaying the effects of slavery on a character to clumsily overplaying them. And that's actually okay. Because we as a society (particularly in the US) are coming from a culture of "slavery wasn't THAT bad" and, tbh, while baby-wokes may be annoying, I am 100% in favor of baby-wokes working stuff out in their brains through fanfic. It seems less appropriative and exploitative than some avenues they (we) could choose, and maybe if people can learn some empathy for real people from writing or reading about Darth Vader's Generational Slavery Trauma, the world can get just that little bit better.
Disclaimer: I am not a professional scholar of any kind of minority studies or history. My scholarly background is in sociolinguistics and historical linguistics, which is adjacent to these issues but not focused on them.
That fic was awesome I loved it so much I think it’s one of my favorite prequel fic right up there with Supreme Chancellor Obi-Wan Kenobi by Stonefreeak on tumblr (which has the most chapters) and Ao3. Awesome fic I can’t recommend either of them enough. I think I love Supreme Chancellor a little because right from the start it hooks you from the start when a random an OC character finally has enough and rather epically calls out the Chancellor and the Senate as whole for the nightmare that Clone Wars is making the galaxy become. Here’s some of the highlights of that speech.... ———- ————- ——— “My fellow Senators!” Senator Mandai straightens, her long scaled body glittering in the light, the feathers on her jaw and crown swaying as she turns around to address them all. “The war has been going far longer than any of us could have imagined. It has dragged on, caused more damage and cost more lives than any of us could have ever dreamed.”
“The Republic is funding an army of clones. Sentient beings created and raised simply for the sake of dying in our war. I ask you, is this Just?!”
“In the midst of it all are the Jedi. Acting as Generals and Commanders of the Republic Army. An army made up of clones who are little more than slaves!”
“The peacekeepers of our Galaxy have been turned into army leaders. Forced to go against the very core of their own teachings, for the sake of this Republic. My fellow Senators, this cannot continue! Supreme Chancellor Palpatine has been incompetent since he was voted into office after the Vote of No-Confidence against former Chancellor Valorum! He’s been inefficient, slow to act, and allowed his own term to be dragged out without a new vote for far longer than any competent politician should have allowed! The war has dragged on because our Chancellor has done nothing to stop the powers that drive it, and it is the Jedi and the Clones that shoulder the weight of his incompetence!”
“By Republic law B-45-SK-9, the Jedi Masters of the High Council are our fellow Senators. The Master of the Order, Master Mace Windu and his fellow councillor Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi—High General of the Republic Army and renowned as The Negotiator—are both in session today. With the direct backing of 134 other Senators, I call for a Vote of No-Confidence against Chancellor Palpatine.”
Ah ah, thanks for the rec – but I kinda know that speech by heart already, oops xD I've been following Chancellor Kenobi on tumblr for like three years at least.
It *is* an amazing, and the politics of it are way too clever for me to ever write.
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