Lit It's not a toilet, it's a 'fresher: Star Wars and immersion.

Some of these slightly annoy me, but I just can't stand "jizz music". That needs to stop now.

 

Ah, so you are a Gliz mando

 

It's a fine line to walk. The key seems to be me to use words that don't seem blatantly "constructed" to the audience. If they can detect your dark authorly hand laboriously at work trying to be clever or insert your favorite beverage, it's usually not a good thing. It should feel like it comes out of the setting to some degree, not just a copy-paste from our world. Of course, sometimes constructed jokes can be pretty fun, but that depends on the tone you're going for in the your particular EU work.

Michael Flynn is a sci-fi author that does this pretty well, but he's helped a lot by the fact that, since his Spiral Arm trilogy is set in the future, he can take a lot of obscure things from present and past Earth societies and combine them or extrapolate from them pretty freely; because of this, it can be very hard to tell where an element is something he's made up, something he's extrapolated from a real society, or something from a real society that's survived into the future. Even if you do know, it's not jarring, because he's thought through in depth which elements have survived and how they would change and be combined with elements from other cultures. But he's a hard sci-fi guy, so obviously you can't do exactly the same thing with Star Wars.

Actually, this relates to one of my EU pet peeves, which is Star Wars authors assuming that the Star Wars Galaxy is exactly like modern American society. It's clearly not. Star Wars is not even really based on the modern world; it's based on a lot of different past societies, which is where it gets most of its elements. If you want to add color, I say borrow elements from Medieval Europe or Japan or the Roman Empire. Instead of having people drinking "coffeine," just have them putting garum (fish guts sauce) on their food like good Romans. I guarantee not many people would notice the reference, and I'm sure it would sound better than Ketch's Yup Sauce or whatever.

 

Halagad_Ventor had a nice blog entry about curses in the GFFA, back when TOS hosted blogs. I wonder if it's still around in some shape.

 

Also in TPM, after Sebulba crashed his podracer, he said "Poodoo" which is a curse word in Huttese.

 

That it is. The problem is that it's also in the running for the dumbest-sounding Star Wars expletive, which is an impressive achievement, to say the least.

 

What about Han solo's sky house?



"Luxurious, the home was equipped with many modern conveniences, such as two of the ultra-high-density household communication screens, floating beds, a nanowave stove, a trash compactor and recycler, a
cooling chamber for food, an answering machine for messages, the most comfortable chair ever designed, and a remote-control opener for the door to the cloud car garage."

 

Wait a second. Is Lwhekk not the aforementioned dinosaur planet?

 

Maybe he was just talking about old people. There's gotta be some sort of retirement colony planet out there.

 

Great topic! It's even more interesting for me because I mostly read Star Wars novels in my native language so we got here even greater problem. Not all made-up words can be translated well and not everything that sounds good in English can work in Polish. It was really bad in the old days (for example we had robots, not droids) but now is better, since books are selling very well they put efford to make the translation perfect.

For example in "Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter" appeared "power-wrench" which translator converted into monkey wrench, so in Polish we got "klucz francuski" which is the same thing but it means "french key" in direct translation. We don't have France in Star Wars, so it sound really stupid.

There are even funny examples of a use of Polish language to name some things in Star Wars universe, e.g. http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Wilk_(wolf) - Wilk means "wolf" in Polish But best one is even in the movies - in Return of the Jedi we can hear some Huttese and I'm sure some words are based on Polish language (they even mean the same). Some made-up words can even just by accident have another meaning in other languages, e.g. Huj mat - huj is a vulgar way to call "penis".

Same problem for all translations is the metric system - some of those measurment units have their names based on famous scientists (like Celsius) and I'm sure they appeared in Star Wars novels.

 

I meant four-letter words that can't be in a PG movie.

 

Nah, I don't thinks so... I'll have to look it up again. It was mentioned in the opening of the Lando Adventure series if I remember.

 

Trammiss III. That's the dinosaur planet... It's mentioned when Lando is playing sabacc with Arun Feb in the opening of The Mindharp of Sharu.

 

It's horrible for me when it's done like the worst of badfic authors, or Karen Miller, who throw in one random "Kriffing Stang!" in the story, especially by a character that would never display emotion in an immature manner- i.e. Bail Organa or Obi-wan. The author so desperately want to convince readers it's a star wars story, they toss in one vaguely star-wars esque jargon chosen and placed completely at random. It makes their story impossible to take seriously.

My favorite thing is when authors evenly mix the mundane with the strange and sci-fi. This is why hot chocolate works for me, I assume they also have water and milk (as opposed to blue milk).

 

I so want story that introduce Luke to white milk, to see his reaction

"What is the white liquid?"
"Milk."
"But it's white!"

 

I never liked refresher. I think lavatory is a different enough word that that should be the word used for bathrooms.

 

Which one's are those? All I can think of is the f-word and c-word.

The Goonies
Sloth: [Sloth rips off his shirt revealing a T-Shirt with the Superman 'S' on the front] Sloth!
Jake Fratelli: We're in deep **** now, Francis.
Francis Fratelli: Oh, ****!

Mouth: Chunk, I'm pretty much ODing on all your bull**** stories!

Back to the Future
Dr. Emmett Brown: If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits 88 miles per hour... you're gonna see some serious ****.

Dr. Emmett Brown: Oh, my God. They found me. I don't know how, but they found me. Run for it, Marty!
Marty McFly: Who? Who?
Dr. Emmett Brown: Who do you think? The Libyans!
Marty McFly: Holy ****!

Hell, there was an f-bomb in Super 8. Swearing isn't exactly alien to even kid's movies, only the ones that are totally lame go out of their way to avoid it.

I actually wouldn't have a problem with it if they started using the s-word in Star Wars, not even a blink. It barely registers as a hard swear to me. The only word's I'd object to are the one's commonly used as slurs.

 

That's my personal problem. S- and F- aren't even considered inappropriate for kids' movies anymore. Words that once would've not been spoken in good company are now shouted out by kids now, trying to sound like adults, and it just makes them sound even more childish. It's my personal preference that none of those words be in a Star Wars movie. If you don't have a problem with it, that's great. But it's the way I was raised; I don't believe language that'll chip the paint off walls should be in a movie that is in a saga that has largely been child-appropriate.

 

Why refer to blue milk as "blue" milk at all. If milk is blue in the Star Wars universe, just call it milk!!!

I don't make a point of pouring white milk on my cheerios, its just milk.

 

Yes. Which gets its name from the country.

 

I think it's a very delicate balance. It's all about not standing out in either direction. There are some things that just pull you out of the immersion and remind you that you're experiencing a fictional construct. That happens in both directions. There are some things that are just too Earthy -- generally things that are too aggressively modern or too particularized. Things that scream "of the moment" take you out of the feel of a timeless fictional universe -- texting, iPod equivalents, contemporary political references, what have you. If you're turning this strange fantasy universe into a direct analogue or copy of the modern day, you're destroying its space fantasy nature. There's also turning it into a direct copy of Earth too generally. You don't want things that feel mundane. It's why certain names -- ones that aren't super-common (Gavin), are foreign to the majority of the audience (Janek), or that are simple and sound like natural and universal names (Luke) -- work, but naming people George or John or Lawrence doesn't. It's hard to define that line, but it's there. You can have Earth terminology like the exotic type of sword katana, but not cappucino -- it's too day-to-day. Kangaroos, likewise, would pull you out, because they're decidedly and particularly Earth animals, and the world should be one of strange wildlife we don't know, but the snakes and small lizards seen on Dagobah don't because they're so simple and nonparticularized as wildlife. If something can make you think, "That belongs here, not there," it shouldn't be there. It should be omitted or disguised or adapted somehow.

That's where something like television, to use one of your examples, would bug me. It's a particular Earth technology, exclusive to the modern age, that we use routinely and mundanely now. The concept of moving pictures doesn't need to be confined to that one particular name, and we're better off using a different one to create that feel of remove from the particulars of our world and immersion in a space fantasy world. The word used instead should feel natural, but something like vidscreen takes me out a lot less than television would. It's a screen that shows video, it's two syllables, it feels like a term that would grow up naturally -- approved. Similarly, refresher -- English alone is packed with words for the bathroom. So having another doesn't feel unnatural, and it avoids picking a particular culture-specific one (loo or water closet vs. restroom, etc), and it creates that sense that life here is just slightly off -- that it developed on its own, and isn't a slavish recreation of modern American society. The signs in this galaxy full of aliens don't look exactly like the ones at our local mall. Slight tweaks in terminology that make elements recognizable but just different enough to feel exotic, are exactly what the GFFA needs to feel fresh and timeless and foreign.

You don't want to go too far in disguising real-world elements, though. The rampant reworking of innocuous idioms and phrases to make them spacey for no particular reason (prolific in the Reaves/Perryverse) is something particularly glaring and distracting. That goes in the other direction of pulling you out, by direction attention to how artificial what you're experiencing is. I don't want to hear about anybody's space pants, because tacking "SPACE!" gobbledygook onto a basic word that has no reason to be distracting is what's actually distracting. The balance often tips too far in that regard. You also don't want to make life in the GFFA too divorced from our reality so that it becomes unrelatable or unrealistic. This is something I think the GFFA has tended to go a little too far on -- our protagonists seem to exist without any kind of pop culture or entertainment. Han gets ragged on for using an old blaster and ship -- but never for having out-of-date taste in music. We never hear about Luke and Mara going on something as simple as a date night out to dinner and a movie. There's no weaving of the fabric of a real life in, and as a result we get characters who are missing facets. You don't want to get too particularized in that, again, but you do want some sense of realism -- that Luke has a favorite drink, that Ben has a favorite kind of music, that Han follows sports, that Leia has a life outside of presidenting and Jediing and Millennium Falconing.

I think a really good example of how to hit that balance actually came from Karen Traviss. In one of the RC books, she has one of the commandos listening to music via his helmet before beginning a mission, in order to psych himself up. It's a nice detail, taken from the behavior of soldiers in the real world, but universal in nature -- we all understand listening to music for pleasure. Rather than turning it into a direct Earth analogue by giving him a Space iPod, it integrates the concept of listening to music, even digitally stored music, into the futuristic setting by allowing him to play it via his computerized space armor. It also avoids over-Earthizing it by assigning an Earth genre term that would take us out of it. The particularized labels of modern musical genres are too time-specific, too direct a reference to the last fifty years of Western Earth-culture. Traviss simply assigns a made-up term to the music -- glimmik -- and gives us seamless context cues (it's being listened to very loud, to psych up a soldier for action, and prompting some light head-banging) that let us know it's clearly some kind of heavy rock or possibly rap, and that's all we really need to know. We get in detail that is recognizable and relatable, but with a sufficient twist that it's not overly mundane and familiar.

It's a real middle road that has to be followed, and that's why I've got to disagree that we should just have coffee and jazz and bathrooms and cigarettes (I'm pretty sure Zahn intended "cigarra" to be a term for a space cigarette, not a cigar -- and that's a good example of putting a slight "this is a different universe with its own history" twist on it by choosing a different diminutive form of "cigar"). You do want your galaxy far far away a long time ago to feel distinctly different from Earth.

I disagree about the X-wing books. I think Stackpole has been the absolute best at hitting that balance of making the world real and three-dimensional and full of day-to-day detail that doesn't get overly modernized or distract from the fact that it's still a space-fantasy adventure. I think there has been a tendency to overdo it with caf as a result of the particularly modern obsession with coffee as a cultural fixture, but Stackpole's use of hardworking military personnel drinking coffee while working long hours is something that goes back beyond being a particularly "modern" craze and recalls the long use of coffee reflected in society from well before "our time" as an audience. If it was a whole thing about cappuccino and Luke having to go through the drive-through for a latte on his way to the Jedi Temple every day, that's modern. But working stiffs brewing up a pot of black coffee for late-night work goes back before the seventies, to eras Lucas was drawing on as sufficiently historical and entertainment-exploited to have entered the popular culture as timelessly historical -- World War II, the gangster era, the fifties (Luke's adolescent pastime of souping up speeders and racing with his friends is so incredibly fifties it hurts).

It's close to too much in X-wing, but it doesn't get there, and Stackpole does so much else right in making these characters feel like real people living real lives, while maintaining that exotic distance of a fantastic civilization that I can't complain. I would point the finger at Traviss, actually (despite my highlighting of one particular scene she did) as the worst offender in that regard. Her GFFA was very much the modern UK, period. Lots of offices, stacks of datapads replacing stacks of paper without regard to whether that image made sense within a GFFA context rather than a "modern Western society transposed into space" context, Mandalorians who had flavor text thrown on top in terms of the adoption stuff but when it came down to it behaved in every particular exactly like blue-collar British laddies who love to watch the footie and play the footie and use particularly British slang and drink pints in pubs, characters who ordered take-out and ate it in the bath -- it was modern Earth, in your face, with a smattering of space adventure dropped on top. Intense mundanity without any real exoticism, and that tripped things up. Stackpole, on the other hand, had characters who drank coffee and redecorated their apartments and experienced the fact that fashions moved in and out and spent time with their families and ate comfort food, but it was done in as nonspecific and universal a fashion as possible, the daily life wasn't focused on intensely, and it was peppered equally with exoticisms like interspecies relationships and the details of spaceflight and battles against sinister warlords. Details were pulled from mundane life to flavor and make realistic a universe that remained fantastic -- mundane life wasn't simply plunked into a no-longer-fantastic universe wholesale.

I like the cursing when it's not overdone. Too much of it calls attention to the fakeness of the curses, but nobody cursing at all, or using only minor-league hells and damns feels fake. Indiscriminate swearing is also a problem; soldiers and fringers swearing, fine. Luke and Ben swearing, or Jaina swearing in casual conversation with Luke? Rings false -- consider character voice.

Using fake curses shouldn't be an issue -- it's the best way to thread the needle of family-friendliness and realism in language. The problem is bad fake curses. "Kriff" doesn't sound that strong, and the decision to basically standardize it as a substitute for the F-word is bad usage, because it highlights that authors are just doing a one-for-one substitution, and it comes across as lame bowdlerization rather than universe-building detail.

Real swear words tend to be short, unless they're a phrase, and they tend to sound sweary -- harsh and hurtful rather than silly. They hit. That's why "son of a murglak" doesn't work -- "murglak" is too silly-sounding to sound like real profanity. "Stang" works because it sounds just like "dang" -- it sounds like a minor curse, which it is. The explosiveness of "spast!" makes it hit hard as an exclamation -- it sounds real. "Kark" is a much better "strong swear word" than "kriff" because it sounds so much harder and more aggressive. It replicates the sound of real swear words by ending on that hard K rather than the soft, fizzling-out F. Using non-silly made-up profanity that mimics the sound of real profanity, and using it with variation rather than just sticking the F-word everywhere and then copy-pasting it with one word, gets you pretty far without any real immersiveness problem.

 

I absolutely loved the bit in Starfighters of Adumar where Darpin is explaining how the facilities are a bit primitive, and the pilots may need shown how they work when Janson breaks in with "You mean a refresher course?" And Hobbie grumbles that Wes beat him to it.

 

Just wanted to say, first post I've ever "liked" on this forum. Because it's saying what I haven't got the words to say myself. Well done, sir.

I've written a fair amount of fan fiction in my time; I've used cigarra in the context of assuming that it's supposed to be the equivalent of a cigarette, not an actual cigar, and I've tried to stay away from using the more campy curses like "son of a bantha" or "Emperor's black bones" simply because those don't feel right for the characters I write for (generally Imperials and fringers) or in the context where the cursing would take place. A one-to-one substitution from word to word is lazy writing, nothing more.

 

I suspect you will be doing that a lot when it comes to what Havac has to say.