rthstewart | Meme see, Meme do

Really bad week. I've been dealing with babysitting and cooking for many, many children not my own through 4 days of snow-related school cancellations and power outages and I'm very much understanding that the Donner Party probably turned cannibal and ate their young first. We've lost power, again, and have been camping out either in cold dark houses or in light, overly warm houses filled with children I am babysitting while the parents are all at work. Oh, and the $20 ice cream cake for the kid's birthday tomorrow melted. So, I've been alternating on the Blackberry between increasing frantic work emails coupled with a growing panic that maybe things are repeating and I did something wrong in the latest chapter of AW. Again. So, I'm trying not to cry or angst, because really, I'm just being stupidly insecure.

Also we had 30 enormous donuts that were supposed to go for the class party (canceled due to snow) and I never want to see another glazed donut again, ever. Or Mac and Cheese and hot dogs. On the plus side, as workers crawled home in the a nightmare of ice, snow, and gridlock this week, I was at home babysitting 6 children ages 12 and under and did not have to 1) sit in my car for 8 hours trying to go 10 miles; 2) get stuck and run out of gas in a snowstorm; 3) park the car and walk home as many did, then have to find the car the next day after it was towed; or 4) give up and sleep in a gas station or check into a motel where you pay by the hour.

I'm still not King but I do have Power as of this morning. So, I'm now in my own house, with own firewall, with light and heat and I spent 4 hours actually doing writing work that pays and cursing junior staff who don't understand how to redline documents.

And now I have fallen to the meme-side and I lovingly blame the f-list, including

snacky

metonomia

lady_songsmith

anastigmatfic and

animus_wyrmis who have been circulating these memes. And then Ana went and posted a fabulous one involving Glendon, Edmund, and a tree, and now I just HAVE to play along because I have a BAD RL WEEK and FIC ANGST.

So, these are the memes:

Ask me a fandom-related question in the comments. This can be fandom specific, general, or about fandom/lj stuff/fic writing/etc. in general. Questions can be as wacky as you want. Ask me about tv shows, characters, fanfic in general, fandom issues/meta, anything about any of my stories specifically.

Give me the title of a story I've never written, and feedback telling me what you liked best about it, and I will tell you any of: the first sentence, the last sentence, the thing that made me want to write it, the biggest problem I had while writing it, why it almost never got posted, the scene that hit the cutting room floor but that I wish I'd been able to salvage, a short excerpt, or something else that I want readers to know.

Name a character and I will tell you:

a) a fact about them from my personal canon
b) a reason he/she sucks
c) a reason he/she is amazing
d) a thing that I'd like to see happen to them
e) someone that I can't ship that character with

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

So I'll snag #3, and please, do tell me about Mara.

Oh MARA JADE! Tim Zahn created this amazing, complex woman, Force sensitive, taken from her family, raised by the Emperor as his top secret assassin. She's smart and sarcastic and she's been a dancer and a cocktail waitress, and a mechanic and all this other awesome stuff. And, if Jabba had let her go on the sail barge, she would have killed Luke and everyone else. She ends up working for a smuggler ring and she hates Luke Skywalker for taking away everything she's ever had but she survives and thrives and I so admire that about her character. What sucks? The fandom and pro fic treatment of her and that in the pro treatment she actually married Luke. (Spores are attacking my womb -- don't even get me started on that one). Done right, she's a an awesome character and with Luke done right, they are an awesome pair. But they were never done right.

My head canon for this pair is extensive. She and Luke go tearing around the galaxy running circles around everyone and everyone is always trying to kill them and they exchange lots of great sarcastic remarks and there's tons of UST. I took it after a couple of hundred pages to RST in a trash dumpster after a dinner date gone horribly wrong. They are absolute headcases, with really severe issues and that's why they should never get married but they eventually should have had two children, both of whom are terrific disappointments to their parents. And every time they have sex on Yavin IV at the Jedi Temple it causes the grazing animals to stampede.

I can ship Mara with all sorts of people except not her mentors -- people like the Emperor or her smuggler boss, Talon Karrde. And not Darth Vader either. Yuck.

I LOVE MARA JADE. And I've never forgiven - well, anyone - for the way she got treated. Especially in the NJO, which is what made me eventually quit reading this stuff altogether and go back to re-reading my X-Wing novels for the hundredth time, and did I really just admit this in public?

Mara and Luke - stampeding animals - disappointing children - making everyone else in the galaxy look like idiots - so, so much better than what was done. Especially Luke falling in love right and left when HELLO MARA JADE, how are you the most powerful Jedi and such a blithering idiot not to notice she's PERFECT for you?!

I really want to see her and Leia have some awesome adventures while Han and Luke have to stay home with the children, because - HA! - I am a stay-at-home mom and I think mothers should totally get to go have fun saving the galaxy once in a while and let the fathers handle the REAL crises at home. And because Han and Luke would be so hilariously incompetent with the children, and Leia and Mara would use finesse and style to handle situations that they would blunder through horribly. And because Leia must get SO sick of being a diplomat all the time.

Ahem. Sorry for hijacking this thread. Just had to get all that off my chest.

I HAD NO IDEA you were an SW fan and had actually READ the EU?!! My monikers and real name are splattered all over the Bantam Spectra line -- weirdest one, my dog's name showed up in the Stackpole/Zahn collaboration, the Union comic. Also there is a HUGE orange bow shown -- a result of our Las Vegas wedding where we married cardboard stand ups of Luke and Mara with Elvis presiding and I wore a purple hoop skirted dress with a giant taffeta orange butt bow. And then Scully and Mulder crashed the party. And the Men in Black.

Ahem, I digress. I wrote my big Luke/Mara story in 1995 to 1996, then took it down for some really complicated reasons and put it back up a few years later. I discovered that it still gets recs -- it's a very flawed work, and yet, I loved it and loved the people I met through it. So, I started posting it over on ff.net under one of my old monikers.

OMG, you are SO RIGHT about Luke falling in loved all over the place -- we called it the Skywalker curse -- kiss him and you die and I have a button that says: "Join the Jedi Academy! Get Chicks! See them buy the moisture farm!" I ended up parodying that in the fic I did by creating the "Tales of the Jedi" holovid with "Duke and Tara."

I'm trying to remember.... I think I did write a Mara & Leia adventure... errr... or maybe I beta'd it. They make a great team. I adore the two of them together.

X Wing books... sigh.... I was very firmly aligned with the Stackpole/Allston/Zahn axis, as opposed to the Anderson/Crispin/Hambly/Kube-Mac. I stopped reading them after... Vector Prime I think? I have friends who are still deeply into it. I understand that Callista has made a re-appearance in the novels as some sort of femme fatale alien vampiric succubus.

I was SO PISSED when I got to the end of Last Command and all he did was give her the darn lightsaber and touch her hand twice. WHAT? WHAT??? And then the fic. Oh gawd, the fic was so awful, with red silk boxers and embarrassing typos and euphemisms and Mara torn between Lando and Luke and UGH. And that was when I thought, "well, I CAN do better than that." The ultimate hubris.

I was ... thirteen? Twelve? Something like that when my cousin and I discovered and fell deeply in love with All Things Star Wars. We used to call each other on the phone and talk for HOURS about the EU.

One of my favorite EU novels was Jedi Academy because of how plainly it picked apart all the holes in the whole Jedi Academy world. JUST BLOW THE DEAD DUDE'S TEMPLE UP YOU MORON. And then Zahn's Thrawn duology, where Mara ruthlessly goes after Luke's incredible stupidity in never moving the Academy away from a clearly dangerous-to-Force-users planet ... and don't even get me started on the fact that Kyp NEVER had to face justice ... yeah. I'm a Stackpole/Allston/Zahn girl myself. Plus the fact that their females are awesome. Mirax! Iella! Shalla! Tyria! Winter! Mirax is second only to Mara when it comes to people I want to be when I grow up. (Actually, considering the whole Emperor thing, I think I might go with Mirax first.)

And, of course, Wes Janson.

As for Callista ... I have no words. At least, none that can be spelled without asterisks.

(I got into fanfic the same way you did - reading bad fic and thinking "I may not be great, but I know I can do better than this." Yeah.)

Er ... I, Jedi would be that favorite, not Jedi Academy. The dangers of writing comments while watching the US Figure Skating Nationals.

Oh dear. Yes, I know I, Jedi and the Hand of Thrawn duology very, very well. And it's time to take this discussion private.

Don't mind me randomly joining this conversation.... I just finished reading Wraith Squadron (last weekend?), and so far, not liking Tyria so much. I think I would have liked her more if she hadn't ended up as last woman standing, and there's nothing really wrong with her, but so far I don't see her as being a terribly strong female character (in how she was written, at least).

But despite having been a long time Star Wars fan (my mother tells tales of seeing the films in the theater when they were first released, so it's definitely genetic, and I don't remember a time when I hadn't seen Star Wars), I never really got in the EU....

Meme see, Meme do

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