*De-lurks*

 

Glad to see you back to writing again!

Some Suave Dance

Chopper would pull a prank like that given the slightest inspiration. And of course, poor Ezra takes the fall. It's his lot in life, as Threepio would say.

A Stranger in Someone Else's Dream

The end to this one caught me totally off guard... It Was All a Dream.

On first reading, what struck me was how still Anjie's life is caught in this weird suspension between reality and the images that his various career-builders/spin doctors/marketers create to appeal to the public. Even the attempt at a new start becomes part of "the story" to be presented. Which then affects his actual state of mind, which then influences how he behaves and what gets captured by the holocams -- kind of a feedback loop of unreality, even as he's trying to establish some sort of solid ground.

Marea made for an interesting foil to all of that, as she seems like someone ferociously pragmatic and yet subject to her own self-delusions. Artificial but genuine, kind but standoffish, impulsive about sex but disdainful of emotional connections... she's full of contradictions. Then comes the reveal that she somehow made this connection to a memory that apparently she hadn't before, and it's over as far as she's concerned. So even as she seems like someone who tries to be entirely in the present, the past has more power than she maybe realized.

[hl=black]Knowing that this was from start to finish All a Dream cooked up by Doria's mind (or was it? ) adds a whole new angle. This is how she sees Anjie -- which is very interesting, as she apparently sees him more wholly and sympathetically than whatever bad date they had would hint. Because she doesn't seem to be that far off in her evaluation, noticing a lot of his quirks and the way he feels trapped by his history. And as for Marea, it now seems that she's somehow a composite of what Doria's own longing and wariness and a little bit of jealousy made up as a plausible rival for Anjie's affections. So there's a whole 'nother level of complexity added to an attraction that she's rather ambivalent about to begin with. Or maybe she's actually seeing something "real", either a vision of past/present/future reality or of possibility from the Force. [/hl=black]

Congratulations on further warping my brain; I think it's partially inside out now. Nothing is real and everything is real.

 

Definitely a very weird dream.

 

It’s always wonderful to see a new Anjie story, and you definitely took this sea shanty in a few different unexpected directions. Like a lot of sea shanties, it revolves around a one-night fling and some of its aftermath, but you get a lot of complexity out of this one-night “tractor beams and freighters”-type of fling, and we get a lot of insight into Anjie’s character from it. The sudden physical attraction between him and Marea is very compellingly described, as are their respective feelings about the night they spent with each other, with the cool parallelism between them—and I say all this as a person who is not normally very drawn to one-night-stand stories. They are both utterly sincere in their feelings about that shared moment, and when Anjie says he’s in love and starts talking about stars and suns (that’s how we know he’s for real!), I don’t doubt him at all (indeed, his absentmindedly huge tip the evening before already spoke volumes about those feelings, in its way). When Marea realizes who he is and turns him down (and in a way, I can’t blame her, given the earlier circumstances—he was harsh!), he is really and truly shattered, and I like to think he feels some remorse about the mean, callow young wailer he use to be. (Incidentally, this is an interesting reversal of the trope of the man abandoning the woman for no real reason after a one-night stand—both in the reversal of genders and in the fact that this time there actually is kind of a good reason stated for Marea’s rebuffal.)

Have to mention the opening photo session with that insufferable Charape felow, too, which was a great way to set the scene—emphasizing for us that this story is taking place in a sort of dreamworld already, between fame and “real life.” It brought me back to the crazy performance stunts Anjie was asked to perform early in his career in “Radiophonic Heart,” and it says volumes that even now, much later, he is still being forced into silly, artificial poses for the sake of publicity and projecting an image. But even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and when Charape describes Anjie as being like a Force-ghost… well, he’s actually more right than he knows. And when the whole session goes so much better than Charape expected, well, I have a feeling the sudden chemistry between Anjie and Marea may have played at least some role in that. It served some purpose!

And wow, what can I say about the [hl=black]final twist[/hl] that Kahara hasn’t already said so eloquently? See under the cut below…

Spoiler

In a way I’m relieved that things turned out the way they did, on Doria’s behalf, because *I* as a reader at least know now that she really DOESN’T have anything (much) to be jealous of. Even if she doesn’t know that yet herself—if that makes sense. And that’s understandable: I know from Doaba that this is one of many dreams she has been having about this mysterious personage, and still doesn’t yet know which of them do and which don’t reflect a present or future reality. Which would fit with what Kahara says about how Marea is a projection of Doria’s desires for love and fears about jealousy at once; perhaps Doria’s not yet at the stage where she can separate those strands. But being the optimist that I am, I feel like the desire for love is what’s ultimately at the heart of this, and I know that with time that’s what will win out. <3

And now I think my mind is all tied up in knots too, in the best possible way—great stuff here, and thanks for another fantastic addition to Anjie’s ongoing journey toward love and self-knowledge!

 

So, I know that I still owe six of you responses to the most recent story and one to Kahara on the crazy Chopper meets Michigan J. Frog thing, but I wanted to thank you...

...for two shorts from this thread have been nominated at the 2018 Awards!

Drops of Mustafar
- Best One-shot
- Best Drama
- Best Established Relationship (Anakin and Padmé)

Echo Bounces
- Best Interpretation of a EU Character (Mara Jade)

I'm immensely proud of both of these - I consider Drops the best thing I have written so far and Echo Bounces a brave experiment and a standing proof that I actually like Mara Jade, despite what some folks thought, so I'm grateful to whoever nominated them.

And I don't know why I'm not in the respond-to-comments mood this year, but I hope it changes soon. There are just so m...OH, SHINY!

 

Those are definitely some very well deserved nominations—big congratulations to you!

 

I read only Drops of Mustafar and yes, a planet would require much more time to cool down - I watch too many astronomy and astrophysics-related shows...but does it really matter here? Anakin and Padmé had tragic lives, he wronged her so much and this is both his eternal suffering and his eternal redemption. The pain was forever, but so was love.

Good luck at the awards. After what we suffered in 2017, to see you write again is a miracle.

And now less Star Wars, more work!

 

COMMENT IN WORKS, NEED TO REBOOT, LOCKED UNTIL I HAVE COMMENTED. <3

As you can guess by the new title (thank you, mods!), this thread is going into some sort of a retirement. It got too long - there are 21 stories in it - and after dabbling in the index for this year's awards and realising how annoying such threads were, I realised that separate threads were a better solution. When the board upgrade introduced tags, I was 100% sure about this decison. So, yeah, thanks for having stood by this thread for two years...even back when there were 3-4 stories and they all were a bit "out there".

But yeah, if anybody is still up for reading anything, go ahead. It's not like I'm going to lock it.

Re: Drops of Mustafar

Oh, yeah? Most likely going to reply to this in person. Getting concrit from the person who brought you to the world is kind of priceless.


Re: Some Suave Dance Chop(per)s

Re: A Stranger in Somebody Else's Dream

Before I have responded to specific comments - yes, as most of you have guessed, this NEVER HAPPENED, Marea doesn't exist, neither does her boss, Charape. By the way, čarape means "socks" in my native language, not sure how low I have sunk in terms of naming my characters.

As said in the other thread, you're NOT GETTING AWAY WITH THIS.

Yup. Thanks for dropping by.