Musings of a Hopeless Romantic

@jedichick04 / jedichick04.tumblr.com

Rachel. She/Her. Currently drowning in Obi-Wan Kenobi feels. I started Tumblr life in the Arrow/Olicity fandom, but I love Star Wars, Bridgerton, Jane Austen, and many other fandoms. Sometimes I write. My inbox is open to Anons!
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Found on twitter, going to adopt this now

Writer friends, tell me how many WIPs and how many UFOs you have. I have 2 WIPs and [redacted] UFOs (jk it’s around 16 across my three main fandoms)

going one step further... another yarn craft term that writers should put into use is frogging. If you don’t like the project, but the yarn is good, you can frog it (take it apart) and reuse it for another project.

I think a lot of writers don’t give themselves credit for how many of their ufos have actually been frogged, ie that particular project has been abandoned, but the concept, characters, or setting has been taken and reused on a new project.

Almost all of my abandoned fanfics have been frogged. You’ll find the pieces of them in my original work

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jadefyre

my favourite thing about frogging and why it’s called that is because you… rip it rip it (ribbit ribbit)

But! yes! I wholeheartedly concur. I keep “line graveyards” for works that I keep frogging and they wind up being so useful later.

as someone who’s in the writing community AND crocheting/knitting community, i approve of this message

the perfect thread is real

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jate-kara

So Bail, get this, Bail Organa sends some ships to an Imperial-controlled planet. And those ships get stolen by The Rebel Scum. Bail goes ‘how dare you let my ships get stolen I demand full compensation’ and the Imperial Senate goes ‘ohhhHH of course of COURSE we are SO SORRY here are your credits Mr. Senator Organa sir’ and Bail, get this, Bail uses those credits to buy MORE ships and send them on Relief Missions to planets Suffering From Rebel Presences and those ships get STOLEN right out from under the Imperials’ noses. How could this be??? The INCOMPETENCE. In THEIR GREAT EMPIRE.

And Palpatine, who knows Bail had tea on the weekends with Obi-Wan Kenobi, has seventeen different reports on his desk every week telling him that the Empire is compensating Alderaan for losses sustained on Imperial planets and he’s seething as he signs them because he just KNOWS it’s never an accident and he’s actually funding the Rebellion but he can’t do anything about it because Bail, when asked about it, just presses a dramatic hand to his own heart and says, ‘why, Emperor, I have NO IDEA how The Rebel Scum keeps acquiring my vessels. Maybe if YOUR security forces were more effective we wouldn’t be in such a TRAGIC situation so often. Sign here.’

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kyraneko

I guarantee you it’s some random Imperial admiral signing the checks thinking Bail’s just claiming fake losses and pocketing the money himself like any other self-respecting senator who has the good fortune to be married to a planetary head of state would do, so he doesn’t ask questions but Bail’s just SO goddamn popular with the Empire’s dedicated grifters. They’re in awe of him. He’s legendary. Mercy missions! Fleet after fleet getting “captured by Rebels.” The sheer NERVE of the guy to risk admitting to bad news like that, again and again! And he gets points for “honesty” every time, because who would willingly cop to losing ships to the Rebellion when there’s convenient pirates and criminal underworlds to be blamed? Bail Freakin’ Organa, that’s who!

Every grifter and self-enriching con artist in the Senate, the Navy, and anywhere else in the Imperial bureaucracy wants to be like him. He’s got the trust, the courage, the reputation of a saint, he even courts suspicion of Rebel sympathies—freakin’ TREASON—as his decoy vice, and he keeps disappearing entire fleets to line his pockets with the insurance money!

The efforts of Vader, the ISB, and even the Emperor himself to nail Senator Organa for treason just fizzles away to nothing, every time, because the Imperial machine they depend on to do the heavy lifting is like 85% grifters and embezzlers and thieves all the way down and none of them will entertain the notion for even a second that he’s ACTUALLY funneling all this wealth to the Rebellion.

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Ok we all talk about the Pevensies’ trauma at returning to Earth at the end of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and their trouble readjusting to life there again but think of all the funny/good parts too

  • They return from the country, and their mom is surprised when all her children hug her at the station. Even Peter, who thinks he’s all grown up. Even Edmund, who went away surly and withdrawn. She doesn’t know her children haven’t seen her in over a decade.
  • They miss their dear Cair Paravel, but they absolutely do not miss its chamber pots. Indoor plumbing is amazing.
  • It takes a while to remember how modern technology works, though. How many heart attacks did the siblings give their parents or the professor because they walked into a dark room only to turn on the light and find the children sitting there in the dark. (They were by the window! There was still plenty of light from the sunset! They would have gotten a candle in a minute!) The kids sheepishly remember oh yeah electricity is a thing.
  • (Edmund has a new electric torch in Prince Caspian. He was so excited to get that torch. Almost more excited than you’d think a kid his age would be, and his parents expect Peter at least to tease him, but the siblings all agree light in your hand at the touch of a switch is terrific.)
  • Suddenly getting really high grades in some subjects and terrible in others. Their grammar, reading comprehension, spelling, vocab, even penmanship? Amazing. History and geography? They don’t remember anything. One time in class Susan forgets Earth is round and wants to die.
  • Also they can never remember what the date is supposed to be because Narnia uses different months and years. They can estimate time really well by looking at the sun though, and Edmund at least can always tell which way is north etc without thinking about it (again, using the sun)
  • Okay but how many times did they go to pick something up or reach something and realize they are so much shorter and less muscled than they expect? It’s a common sight to see Peter climbing on counters to reach a top cabinet, grumbling about how he’s High King this is demeaning. (No he never takes the extra five seconds to grab a stool. He will climb that shelf.)
  • Peter and Susan being delighted because they are no longer almost thirty. (In a few years Edmund and Lucy will tease them about being old and their parents will not understand.)
  • Lucy doesn’t have to deal with periods anymore for a few years yet. Susan might not either. Heck yeah
  • Lucy loves to climb into her siblings’ laps and be cuddled. In Narnia she eventually she grew too big, but now she is small and snuggleable again. Peter is her favorite, and if she’s upset, he’ll tickle her and tell bad jokes until she’s smiling again, but really she loves cuddling with all her family. She grew up without her parents; how many times did she just want to crawl into her mom’s lap and her mom was a world away? Imagine the first time she realizes she can now. Or, imagine one day, a cold and grey sort of day, when the rain is pattering against the windows, and it sounds like the rain on the windows of the Professor’s house, that first day they went exploring. It sounds like the day they played hide and seek. It sounds so like the rain on the windows of Cair Paravel, that if Lucy closes her eyes she can imagine she’s back there, having tea and chatting with Mr. Tumnus before the fireplace of her room, and soon the rain will stop, and they will go out on the balcony and wave to the naiads and the dryads and the mermaids, who have come out to enjoy the rain and visit one other on the banks of the Great River winding past Cair Paravel down to the sea.
  • But if Lucy looks out the window, all she’ll see is the rain over London, so it’s not only a cold and grey sort of day, it’s a lonely sort of day too.
  • Susan and Edmund are playing chess in the living room (and they must have studied with Professor Kirke, thinks their mother, because they certainly weren’t that good when they left). Lucy goes over to Edmund, and oh dear, thinks their mother, now he’s going to call her a baby and be horrible to her, but instead he picks her up and puts her on his lap without even taking his eyes off the chessboard; it’s simply a matter of course.
  • “Doesn’t the rain sound familiar?” says Lucy in a solemn, wistful way.
  • Their mother doesn’t know what that means, but her siblings must, because Susan says, “Yes, Lu, it does,” and Edmund gives her a little hug with his free arm as she tucks herself under his chin to watch the chess match.
  • (Five minutes later there is a crash from the next room as Peter falls off a counter. Their mother does not understand the words he must have picked up from the Professor, but he’s grounded for them anyway. His siblings have no respect for their High King, because they refuse to stop laughing.)
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bastart13

What I’d give for one of the Cinderella remakes to go into how when you’re in an isolated and abusive situation, sometimes you need to be saved and you’re not weak if you can’t escape by yourself

I’ve never been a fan of bad faith reinterpretations of fairy tales, especially ones which flatten the originals into “princesses is saved by a prince and nothing else”, to then go #girlboss. The princess can save herself because she’s a strong female character! (Implying if you’re in a bad situation, it’s because you’re not strong enough to get out)

He’s been trained to read the room. To read the context clues. To read politics and scheming and planning and people. He’s a Prince, it’s either that or accidentally drink poison by age 15. And he reads her and …

She’s impossibly wealthy. The dress isn’t a fabric he can recognize, but it’s beaded with cut diamonds, faintly milky opals that shimmer with a rainbow, little pale aquamarines, and somewhere are little bells gently ringing with each step - he’s a Prince and he can’t afford to dress like that. The slippers ring too … there is nothing like that crafted by the hands of humans. That’s fairy stuff. She has an in with them that eclipses royal politics. She is powerful in the Old Ways.

All this wraps around the poorest woman he’s ever seen in his entire life, and he’s seen some very, very, poor people in his time.

Poor in money, but poor in “oh you poor thing!” as well. This is someone who has been robbed blind. This is someone who carried themselves waiting for the lash, for a browbeating, for harsh, cruel, abrupt, punishment.

He expects her to be haughty, or hard, or meek or… something else… but she’s just nice. She’s just … nice.

The rigid posture comes out of his back, his tongue unsticks. She’s like sitting by the embers of a low, calm, fire. He feels warmed and rested simply speaking to her. He wonders if it’s magic, and it might be, but if it is it is magic that is her own.

And that terrifies him, because he’s trained to see these things and he knows someone with a cruel hand is waiting to douse her, and snuff her, and beat the last glimmer out of her shining eyes - eyes that put that dress to shame and and and and… she’s gone.

Oh god, she’s gone. It will be all over her sweet, kind, warm face that she transgressed and … oh god they’ll kill her, whoever they are. This will embarrass them and if there’s anything he knows, it’s that you don’t humiliate someone who has power over you and walk away unscathed.

And all he has is a fairy slipper that will only ever fit her foot (it’s not merely shoe size, it’s a kind of spiritual fit as well), and the vain hope that he can keep such a bright light from burning out. It doesn’t even touch his heart that what he’s feeling is a kind of pure philia, not until it enraptures him soul to bones, all at once. Oh god, oh no, oh shit… he’s reached well above his station, but…he can try to be good and worthy.

The way he sees it, sometimes even the strongest people can be brought low and need just… a little help. She had enough in her to do whatever she had to do to free herself of those evil relations if she had to, but she shouldn’t have to. There’s no glory in blood. Sometimes it’s okay for the ending to be happily ever after.

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pipistrellus

my favorite part in attack of the clones is when obi-wan just fucks off to play space nancy drew on Clone Rain Planet with the alarming giraffe-necked aliens and swans in like “HELLO IT’S ME, the jedi who definitely… … was here before and probably, uh, spoke to you, and stuff” and theyre like “ah you are here for the order” and hes like “beg pardon” and theyre like “the order of millions of identical human men?” and hes like “RIGHT YES. ABSOLUTELY I AM HERE FOR THE ORDER OF MILLIONS OF IDENTICAL HUMAN MEN”

and then later when he SNEAKS INTO A CORNER TO FUCKING… facetime yoda… like “ok so we have these millions of identical human men who were apparently suspiciously ordered for us by someone???” and yodas fucking response is just “when countless sapient lemons life gives you…….. send those lemons into intergalactic battle you must”

 and obi-wan’s like “shit man you’re so right" 

There literally isn’t a frame of this scene where Obi-Wan doesn’t look confused as hell

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I think one of the big strengths of fanfiction as a medium is that it can, on average, assume the reader has a way higher degree of familiarity with canon than like…canon can. If you’re in the Star Wars AO3 tag you probably like Star Wars enough to remember more things about it than the average Star Wars-enjoying-ten-year-old. Which makes it way easier for fanwriter a to get to the juicy stuff and really engage with the worldbuilding or minor characters without having to spell out like. Who Wedge Antilles is for everyone who forgot or never noticed him in the first place. You could write a book about Wedge in the old EU because EU readers could also be assumed to be serious fans, but you can’t make a new canon Disney+ show about him. Those cost money to make and are intended for a broader audience.

And all this means that like. A good fic writer can and often will surpass canon when it comes to like. Thematic resonance and stuff, because they can really dig into something. Star Trek 2009 gave Kirk a new, more generic tragic backstory because it couldn’t expect the average moviegoer to be familiar with Kirk’s old, way more interesting tragic backstory. (Frankly, I’m not sure jj abrams knew about TOS Kirk’s backstory) whereas I have read a LOT of well-written, interesting, deeply resonant fanfic examinations of Tarsus IV, and what it means for Kirk’s character that he’s a genocide survivor. Star Trek 2009 answers the question “why did Kirk cheat on the kobayashi maru?” With “‘cause his dad crashed a spaceship when he was a baby.” A close examination of TOS canon implies the answer is “because he lived through a real-life Kobayashi that did have a win option, but which wasn’t taken.” BUT—and this is significant—even the TOS canon movies can’t really assume knowledge of the full TOS tv show, so that implication is never examined or made explicit. Instead it’s fanfic (and maybe spin off novels? Idk I’ve only read 2 trek books, if there’s one out there that covers this that would be really cool) where we get dives into that thread, where Kirk gets a commendation for original thinking because he can look a testing board in the eye and say “I’ve seen what happens when someone is entrenched in this kind of thinking, and I cannot let it happen to me. I understand the lesson, but it’s not hypothetical anymore and it never will be. I did what I had to do.” And that’s interesting! That’s meaningful! That can’t happen in a summer blockbuster. But it can happen in fic, easily, and that’s a strength of fic, I think.

I hope you don't mind me adding to this very good post, but in general i think the financial supremecy of movies and (more recently) tv has lead a lot of people to assume that the best stories can be interchanged between mediums. That every book can be adapted into a movie, every light novel into an anime, every movie into a video game etc etc

and that's the same attitude that underlies all the 'the goal of fanfic is to file of the serial numbers and publish it' or 'fanfic isn't real writing because real writing is novels and fanfic is usually structurally so different from a novel' type of takes come from.

this assumption that the medium is largely coincidental to the story being told

when that's just not true.

the very best adaptations always change things, because mediums are not interchangeable, and they fundamentally shape the stories told in them.

there are things you can do in fanfic that are simply not possible in a traditional novel, because you're starting from that possition of love and knowledge, and because you aren't bound by the need to be canon compliant, so you can ask questions like 'if these characters met in other lives, under different circumstances, what would they be like? how different would they be? how much of what makes them them is tied to the circumstances they found themselves in?' or 'what was it like to not be the heroes, to not be actively involved in the cool exciting bits? what was it like to be a minor character, left behind to deal with the consequences' because your audience is already invested, they'll show up for questions like that in a way a movie or novel or tv audience wouldn't.

there are things you can do in a podcast or radio play that are not possible in visual mediums like film or tv, because you're relying on the audiences imagination. there's a reason the best radio comedy tends to be surreal, and the best podcasts tend to be horror, those are both genres that thrive when the audience's imagination is allowed to fill in blanks.

there are things you can do on TV that are not possible in a novel or a movie. the way WandaVision completely changed its visual style with each episode is something that would not work in any other genre, but it's essential to the story. TV usually exists in very defined seasons, but cannot traditionally be consumed all in one go, which is not true of almost any other medium, and that dictates a specific type of pacing. combine that with the fact that it's a visual medium, and you get something like the overarching stories of the 9th Doctor's season of Doctor Who. No other medium could have delivered the resolution to that storyline as effectively.

Video games can force the audience to consider their own part in events. No movie could do what Spec Ops did, when it gives you a button prompt to commit a war crime, and then turns around and asks you why? why did you do that? was it too easy? do you think it felt like this when the US government committed the exact same war crime within living memory? Was it easy then too? A novel or a movie could show you walker doing this terrible thing, but it could never convey the point with the same effective simplicity, and it could never make you the audience feel culpable. only the author is responsible for the actions of the characters in a novel, but in a game, it's the audience who bears that responsibility, and that allows for moral questions other mediums struggle to effectively convey.

Comics can tell stories that take three decades and ten different writers to tell. Movies can use silence more effectively than any other medium because cinemas give you a captive audience and close-ups means you can reliably assume they can see everything that's happening (unlike theatre, which can use silence, but can't assume everyone has a good view). Theatre provides real time audience interactivity and a very special and unique kind of suspension of disbelief. Professional wrestling can tell ongoing stories in real time over years or decades, and walk the line between fiction and reality. Novels can immerse you more fully in one person's view of the world than any other medium (which also allows for information to be hidden from the reader without it feeling cheap the way it can when a movie does the same thing). Live oral storytelling allows the story to be adapted on the fly to fit audience reactions, allows for infinite variations of the same story, because no two tellings will ever be identical.

Fanfic isn't a genre, not really. Fanfic has genres, but it isn't a genre in and of itself. Fanfic is a medium, and like all mediums, it offers storytelling tools that are unique to it, that it does better than any other medium. and as OP pointed out, one of the big ones is that it can assume both familiarity and love from the audience to the characters depicted. We can stray far further afield from where we started in fanfic than the original creator ever could, because our anchors are not the narrative, but the characters.

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intermundia
"As written, the ray-shield scene was longer than what ended up in the movie, and I was sorry to learn that one bit of humor was cut. Originally, the trio discuss how they might escape, and Palpatine has a suggestion: surrender and work out a negotiation. He gives his whole pitch to the Jedi and, once he's finished his speech, Anakin and Obi-Wan turn and look at each other as if nothing had been said." (via john knoll, visual effects supervisor, creating star wars)

we were ROBBED i tell you. robbed. i want the significant eye contact and ignoring darth sidious to his face.

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friend-crow

I am slowly losing my mind over the shift towards video as the default media format.

I do not find this to be an efficient way to absorb information. I am bored and distracted by the time the largely unnecessary introduction is over. I can't use ctrl+f to find the specific information I'm looking for. If there are instructions to follow, I don't want to have to constantly pause and back up to the part I need.

At least give me a fucking transcript.

I can read faster than you can talk and these videos are wasting my time.

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