Chat corner 15: Rebels

[annathecrow]

Welcome to this week’s chat corner! How is your life going?

 

Optional chat prompt

The optional theme for this week is the show “Star Wars Rebels”. (Curiously, there is no colon in the title, unlike… everything else SW, probably.) Trivia time: It ran between 2014 and 2018, got nominated for a handful of Emmy’s , and it’s the first major project produced after Lucas Arts was acquired by Disney (or so Wookieepedia says).

 

Comments

[annathecrow]

The Dark Side post is here, in case you need to vent about something SW- or SW-fandom-related.

[extrapenguin]

I am writing a lot for exchanges, some of which is Star Wars (and will be linked here when it reveals, in the post after the 14th). I have also signed up for fffx, a 10k/10-panel comic minimum exchange, and that has a bunch of Star Wars stuff nominated as well!

In non-exchange news, I have come up with an idea for my next no-deadline longfic! It will involve dimension travel into a canon divergence AU.

Other fanworks: I can't recall if I told you about this before, but I'm also doing the descent-into-vidding vexercises summer edition, and the first one was a vidding haiku! I vidded Star Wars: the Old Republic. (No-One Can Escape) Destiny.

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Rebels was one of the first Star Wars things I watched! (I came in a really unusual way, KOTOR -> Rebels -> TCW -> Prequels -> SWTOR.) I ended up much preferring TCW due to the greater number of Jedi plus spunky female sidekick >>> spunky male sidekick just by principle. Ahsoka is great!

[annathecrow]

It's cool to see comics specifically mentioned in exchanges.

Good luck with the longfic. Honestly, one of my favorite things on SW fandom is how much reality-altering people are okay with. Time-travel? Dimension travel? Things happened differently and nobody cares? Everything goes!

I've never heard of vexercises, thanks for mentioning that! *extremely intrigued*

[extrapenguin]

Yeah, it's great! I see a lot of time travel fixits, and I think pretty much everything I'd like to say has probably been said better by someone else already, but dimension travel into an AU is less densely populated and I don't think anyone's hit upon the idea I had? So, yes, exciting!

A lot of exchanges nowadays allow art and fic both – and for the longfic (10k+) exchanges, the art equivalent happens to be comics.

[yourlibrarian]

A vidding haiku, how intriguing! And longform fanart=comics makes perfect sense. Even coming recently to SW fanworks I agree about the time travel. There have been a few good variations but on the whole I've already tired of it. I guess it makes sense though when you have a major "going wrong" sort of storyline and a generational story.

[extrapenguin]

I'm actually a bit baffled about how so much of the fixit fic is time travel instead of a good old-fashioned canon divergence! Surely it can't be that difficult to have the Palpatine discovery happen in a different fashion, with Anakin less sleep deprived or off planet? I have liked the fics where Leia time travels back, but most of the time it's just Obi-Wan trying to fix the galaxy. Though on the non-time travel note (or, well, not that sort of time travel at least? the Force does weird things to the fabric of reality), I really liked dehautdesert's In Fire as an excellent Anakin fixit. Nothing I write will ever come close to that, but, well, does it have to?

[yourlibrarian]

It's a good point. I haven't been reading SW fic that long but I agree that I've seen none of it primarily from Anakin's POV, where he, essentially, keeps himself off the dark path as opposed to being "fixed" by others. In some cases, such as Anakin/Obi-Wan I assume it's because it helps divert them into a romantic relationship. In some other stories there are other characters who are "saved" by the changes, such as Dooku or Ventress and their changes affect the outcome.

But I assume the time travel comes in because, the logic goes, if it was a fear for Padme that got him off track then a love for his kids would keep him from falling. And given that he retreats from the dark side for Luke, it makes sense. But what's most surprising is that I have yet to see a fic where Padme herself keeps Anakin on track. This ends up duplicating the lack of agency she has in Ep 3. Even though many stories keep her alive, leading the Rebellion, etc., they don't change this particular feature.

[extrapenguin]

I've seen none of it primarily from Anakin's POV, where he, essentially, keeps himself off the dark path as opposed to being "fixed" by others.
...you know, I think you just hit the nail on the head on why all my fixit ideas are Anakin POV? Since having him be fixed by external forces takes away from his agency and is also contrary to Jedi ideals.

With the caveat that I filter out het and thus have little idea what the Anidala fandom is doing, I think the relative lack of Padmé time travel is because Anakin isn't actually the cause of the Republic falling, it's Palpatine. And the "obvious" place for Padmé to time travel to is TPM, where she doesn't call for a vote of no confidence as a queen and Palpatine's chancellery plans are delayed. Meanwhile, Anakin is 9, which is not exactly prime romance territory, and Palpatine's threat is in general mostly/wholly political, so it's both Padmé's fight with very little reason to involve the Jedi (yet), and also involves so much politics, which most fic authors aren't keen on writing.

Episode 3 Padmé was surprisingly OOC. My friend and I have increasingly cracky theories on why (Real Padmé went on a year-long resort vacation and left Rabé to get impregnated by a Jedi!), but really, the movie would've been much improved by Padmé snapping a few times and surviving childbirth only to die trying to rescue Anakin from Palpatine's clutches. Let her actually do something other than deliver one killer line and go all "Anakin would never kill younglings! Unless they're sand people."

[yourlibrarian]

Completely agree that Ep 3 Padme seems like a different person from Ep 1 and 2, where she has agency and is an important part of developments. This seems done primarily to turn her into a prop for Anakin's fall and gestator of the future Jedi twins than because it has anything to do with her personality beforehand. Because if she behaved as you suggest (totally in character) then it would have been harder to buy both Anakin's fall and his eventual redemption.

But yes, I see no reason for Padme herself to travel back in time although perhaps something rather interesting could have been told had she been aware of Palpatine's true nature earlier.

[yourlibrarian]

This was my introduction to the non-Skywalker film verse and is why I got invested in the fandom. I thought the first few episodes were ok but as the season went on I became interested in the characters and what the stories told me about the missing years in between trilogies. So I became introduced to various characters backwards, as those appearing in the Clone Wars showed up.

I was glad for the back story episodes on Zeb but otherwise he was my least favorite characters. I enjoyed all the others but Chopper might have been my favorite, even though he could be pretty awful! But he so often served as the cavalry for the team.

I also always wished we could have gotten more on Hera and Caleb, not because I needed a ship but because the show started out treating them like an established couple but it seemed to back away from that, with this kind of closer yet always undefined treatment. But since Hera held everyone together I felt we often saw more of her when she and Caleb were together.

(Wish I could find some icons for the show too)

[extrapenguin]

*waves* I was introduced to Rex and Ahsoka etc backwards, too! I think it made me like early seasons TCW Ahsoka more, since I already knew her as a responsible adult and knew she'd grow out of the kid sidekick phase at some point?

[yourlibrarian]

Yes, I think you're right about that for me too. Ahsoka was rather too chirpy and accomplished for the pre-teen she appeared to be, especially in her introduction. Plus the mystery of Rex and the clones and what happened was more interesting to me because he survived. So they became less "side characters" because I didn't know how he'd ended up with the two brothers he had.

[extrapenguin]

I think she's meant to be 14 when she gets given to Anakin, but yeah, she's ... very chirpy. I am pretty sure I've never been that chirpy, lol. And yeah, knowing she and Rex survived definitely made them less side character-y, even from the start.

[fleurviolette]

Rebels was alright, kinda cheesy at times.

I thought the World between Worlds was neat!