Discussion The Scribble Pad (Fanfic Writing Discussions)

Have to ask, have you done any "10 AU fic-meme" with Ezra?

 

I’m not familiar with that. What is it?

 

I have also really enjoyed writing AUs over the years. I have done it primarily in my drabble threads, where the fics are only 100 words long. I agree with the idea of jumping right in. If you're doing something short then you set your scene and get to the meat of the idea. It could be a twist ending, a character change, even a genre change. I wish you success.

 

It was something that went on at least Livejournal back when, the idea is that you have ten different genres* and write a short using the original fandom's characters and possibly references (which was Avatar the Last Airbender in the part of Livejournal I lurked in). I never got if there was an original post that you had to follow or if you practise just wrote ten AUs in different genres. You can see my attempt at it if you follow the 'Gamiel's drabbels' link in my signature.
* f.ex. Wild West, fairy tale, pirates, ...in SPACE!!, schoolfic, etcetera

Some of the authors made follow up post on stuff they had created with the 10 AU fic-meme or did the meme again, either with new genres or using the same, in the later case they sometime made follow ups on the first post while other time they created new Au within that genre

 

@Gamiel that's an interesting concept. My Ezra AUs aren't so much Ezra in different genres as they are tweaking something about the character or the canon storyline--e.g. his parents weren't arrested, he takes Hondo's offer to become a pirate, he's apprehended for pickpocketing as a child and grows up in the Wilhuff Tarkin Home for Boys, he is raised by Loth-wolves. The closest I've come to doing a different genre was "A Diamond in the Rough", my OTP challenge based on Aladdin, though even that one made the story fit into the GFFA's conventions rather than being a true fairy tale.

I'll have to keep it mind for the future, though, it could be a fun exercise, especially in drabble form like yours.

 

Techically do you not need to do a full AU, many of the 10 AU memes I saw had some of the ficks taking place in the fandoms original background universe just with another focus or having the characters taking another path/similar (like my own fics for the "Pirates", "Gender Bender" and "an other culture" prompt)

 

One thing that has always worked for me is accentuating the traits of certain characters. Luke's farmboy naivete, Han's stoicism, Leia's temperament.

Also, having fun with everyday occurrences works as well. I wrote a fic many moons ago about Han and Leia sharing a bathroom. It was called 'I need space' or something like that. What he wanted was a bit of room on the counter, but the hilarity ensued when Leia decided he wanted 'space' in the relationship.

Puns and playing with words is a good way to write humorously as well.

 

What an excellent exercise --- it would seem the first tip is to collect admired humor authors (Richard Armour, Dave Barry and surpassing Richard and Dave in characterization, worldbuilding, and plots, Patrick F. McManus --- and glean little things from favorite stories. Like, look for the surreal things or experiences in your life and build on them.

 

Those guys are great storytellers for sure. Humor has so many subgenres, from subtle to slapstcik to satire to telling a story with a humorous punchline (joke).

Setting can also work with humor. Taking the characters out of there canonical setting and putting them into another time or place can make for some good laughs.

 

In addition to the above, crack!fic is also on the extreme humor spectrum which is easy to write but difficult to write well. It's really easy to make characters OOC (which I'm not a fan of) so there needs to be a balance between making it funny and being somewhat coherent, unless it's meant to be ridiculous which I guess could be funny as well depending what the intent is.

 

Just wondering, how do people do if you want a sentient species to not just be humans that look different when it comes to their behaviour/psychology?

 

That is a tough one. To this day I have never read 'Stranger in a Strange Land' by Robert heinlen but I know that it explores those themes.

Off the top of my head the best way I could think to do it is to turn traits we take for granted on their heads for at the very least modify them to make them seem alien. That seems simplistic. Just my 2 cents.

 

I would probably go about studying what living things (animal, plant, etc) we have here and see how different their behavior/psychology is and try to imagine them in human environments or situations and use that as inspiration for a new sentient species.

 

Some possible ways:
- they don't understand gender and use only one type of third-person singular (he/she/it/[other]) when speaking basic to somebody, no matter the subjects gender.
- have hard telling individuals of from other species apart, and even different species that have similar enough looks
- lack a what we see as a standard sense - like the sense of smell, meaning that they don't realise that something might be uncomfortable for other species because it smells bad or that species with strong sense of smell can notice them even when they are hidden.
- Have problems distinguishing different species that have similar body shape, like f.ex. many of them cant tell that a human, a ho'din, a givin, and a devaronian are not the same species; and when they do try to see the differences they have been known to focus on the wrong thing, like believing that a group of women from different species belong to the same since they all have breasts.
- Have much easier for group work and understanding what other's want them to do than humans (this can sometime seems like a hive mind to outsiders but it's not)

 

@Gamiel always asks these questions but then always seems to have possible and complicated answers to his own questions...is he testing us....?....... Gathering our responses to report to some other species/secret alien agency? It's a conspiracy, I'm telling you!

In all seriousness, I like those answers. I've been experimenting a bit with species who don't understand gender (ie, perhaps hermaphroditic species). And you can have the "males" of a species give birth or carry young which will make silly humans so confused.

 

Note that a species is likely to only 'fail to understand gender' in a first contact scenario and in the peculiar case where they originate in a biosphere where nothing whatsoever has gender. Earth, for example, has any number of mono-gendered female-only species (reproduction exclusively by parthenogenesis, which is common in whiptail lizards) and plenty of nominally gender-less organisms like jellyfish, but any sapient being actually living on Earth would recognize gender pretty quick from the behavior of animal life (plants and fungi have gender, or at least genetic sexual differentiation, but it's less obvious). So 'doesn't recognize gender' would probably be limited to species outside of the typical Earth-like carbon-based life system that represents 99.9% of all GFFA life. A mineralogical being like a Tsil, for example.

In general, culture modifies and expounds upon existing biology, so a single major physiological or psychological quirk is likely to induce massive cultural changes that would be almost instantly recognizable. A species that lays eggs in large clutches, for example, so that every members has 10-25 siblings of exactly the same age, is going to be vastly different from any extant human culture.

It's also important to keep in mind that, in Star Wars, species with a significant degree of mental deviation from the human standard are, for better or worse, largely excluded from galactic affairs. If you aren't capable of thinking in sufficiently human terms to navigate a human built environment, interact with human social customs, or deal with human politics, expect to be either largely confined to your homeworld or outright exterminated (in Legends the Republic went on a thousand year crusade to exterminate barely alien species, never mind the truly weird ones). A species can still be significant while stuck on their homeworld - the Colicoids are a good example - but weird species get sent home. Consider that, when it comes to non-humanoid species with any sort of significant role in GFFA affairs there's Hutts and well...that's pretty much it.

 

I agree that, unless a species comes strictly from a planet where everything is a hermaphrodite or is genderless, there would be some basic concept of gender--even something like, "this member lays eggs/bears the offspring and the other member does not" or perhaps like in clownfish, "this member who did not lay eggs/bear young before now does." Hierarchy can be built upon reproductive function in a culture, for example.

But the human concept of what "female/male" means would be completely different for a species and I think honestly this is something SW should explore more instead of falling on default.

 

Certainly there ought to be species that find the idea of gender roles, as a cultural element, to be incomprehensible. This would be quite likely in species with minimal sexual dimorphism and perhaps those with external fertilization (this is common in arthropods, where the female places the egg on the ground or a stalk and then the male comes by and fertilizes it) and therefore a vary different conception of 'sex.'

That being said, in the Star Wars galaxy the overall human-centric spacer culture apparently exerts immense pressure on other species to the point that hermaphroditic species like Hutts usually adopt male/female gender identities and some measure of human-based gender roles (there's also a weird tendency in Star Wars art to draw nominally non-mammalian sentient species with mammalian secondary sexual characteristics, ex. Mon Calamari). So perhaps these sorts of species would be best utilized in stories set in the Unknown Regions or otherwise isolated worlds.

In Legends the Pius Dea Era explains a lot of the otherwise unbelievably high cultural unity found among the Republic's major species components and that era would be an ideal stage for exploration of viewpoints with a high level of deviation from the standard that was forcibly imposed upon everyone with extreme prejudice. Pity it was devised so late in the Legends run and is very poorly detailed.

 

Interesting that the gender thing was what people focused on.

If people are interested in different Earth-animal gender/mating behaviour so do the creator Humon show details of that, in the form of human looking characters here: http://humoncomics.com/archive/animal-lives Can be of some real inspiration for alien species biology/behaviour.

oh would you not want to know...

Its actually more of a thing that when I ask a question I have a tendency to think about the question myself and come up with some ideas, and hopefully my comments give other people some ideas that I have not thought of.

or plant-based, or fungous-based, or coming from an animal-stock that's notably different fro Earth's, or energy-based, or whatever-technobabble-term-you-could-have-sentient-life-based-on.

But intellectually understanding gender is something else than actually practically understanding it. So f.ex. yes they know gender exist and understand it on a biological/theoretical level but that don't mean they really can wrap their head around it when interacting with other species.

It's actually one of the easier way of showing how alien a species way of thinking is: to have them unable to really grasp a concept we take for granted.

Or we just not see them. SW stories are usually adventures or action stories, sometime mysteries, and stories about diplomatic discussions, misunderstanding because of different ways of thinking, xeno-cultural studies, or etcetera, are just rare. But just because we don't see them don't mean they don't exists, just as Jedi go on boring diplomatic missions where all the tensions are about the stuffs written down or not written down and are solved by long discussions, we just only see the action packed ones or the ones with a murder - b.t.w. something I would like to see is something like the West Wing but taking place in the corridors of the Republic senate.

What are you talking about here? Also what species?

Or Mon Calamari are mammalian fish-people?

I really don't like Pius Dea Era, it feels like it's the authors trying to be "grim-n-realistic", have a "oh the Republic was not always nice" thing, and explaining stuff that don't need explanation since it's space opera.

I also dislike it because that kind of religious fever needed just don't feel possible in that kind of multicultural society that the Republic is presented as.

 

To continue with this:
- lacking the sense of sight would mean that they are probably relaying on other senses (higher smell, touch, and hearing; and maybe somekind of sixth sense*) or maybe just one super sense (all their senses are similar to a blind humans except one which is really superior). But that would mean that they would not have any concept of reading something without having to touch it or being able to identify somebody when you can't smell/hear/other them, maybe they find video surveillance something very strange, colours would also be something completely alien.
* like some kind of feelers that constantly senses how the air/water shifts around them; electroreception; a tremorsense; the Miraluka's Force sight; heat sense;

Another way is to have them find something we instinctively find taboo as something normal - like seeing no problem with eating their own young when the times are harsh.

 

Except, there are sources that state the Republic was actively, brutally exclusive to species that didn't fit the human-standard mold, and even when the Republic wasn't prejudicial itself, it allowed others to enact their various purges mostly unmolested. The Essential Atlas does so, as does the Saga supplement The Unknown Regions. The latter makes the explicit point that species with a broadly militant xenophobic viewpoint like the Vagaari were largely exterminated and/or forced back to their homeworlds thousands of years earlier. Heck, there's even a pre-Republic trend in this regard. SWTOR introduces the Esh-Kha as a species to rival the Rakatan Infinite Empire (the Esh-Kha as an aside, are super weird in an intriguing way, as they seem to lack traditional individuality), and the Rakata essentially exterminated them. Its Star Wars, and violence is the principle solution to social conflict, especially interspecies conflict.

See, I think the key is that I do not consider the Republic to be a multi-cultural society. It's a multi-species society, yes, but it is in fact quite monocultural, at least among the people who are actively engaged with interstellar activity. If you wander around the Star Wars galaxy in almost any source, video games are the most obvious, but the books go this route at times too, and the movies display this too, you mostly encounter people who behave in the same way and have extremely similar cultural mores regardless of species. There's one overarching culture, with various subcultures, and the species who maneuver through the galaxy have to conform to that culture or face at least some ostracization. This applies even to humans. Mandalorians, notably, have a distinct culture that violates several Republic-based cultural norms and they get into no end of trouble because of it.

This extraordinary cultural unity is strong enough that even when the Sith periodically conquer huge swathes of the galaxy the cultural practices of the people living under Sith dominion don't actually change all that much (mostly slavery becomes legal again and the corruption moves out of the shadows and into the open). This is arguably part of the essential framework established in ANH. It's a Rebellion against an Empire, two divisions within a single culture fighting for dominance, rather than two different cultures fighting each other for control.

When we do see alternative cultures in Star Wars, whether they're human, alien, or even droid settlements, they are almost always disconnected from interstellar commerce and media in very substantial ways. The Sand People, for example.

 

Just so we are on the same page here: what do you mean with "alternative cultures"?

Just wondering, what species and where was is stated?

I don't think the Rakatan is a good example to give if we just are talking the Republic since they are presented as evil and with alien ways of thinking to most species. That they exterminate a species seems to be something they do just because they find it fun or feel lightly insulted by the others existence.

And what culture is that? I'm actually wondering.

You make it sounds that the Republic have problem with their culture and not their warmongering ways and tendency to attack others for fun and profit.

They had no reported problems with warrior cultures like the Coynites.

 

There's no name because it's a generic and assumed culture, but there is clearly a single, central, shared culture shared between multiple species, planetary populations, and the general interstellar community that encompasses the bulk of the characters who appear in all Star Wars media. It might be called 'spacer culture' or 'republican culture' or just 'star wars culture' but it clearly exists. For example, Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, and Princess Leia are all part of it, despite all being from different planets and vastly different social classes. It's a culture with strong commonalities to the greater British Imperial culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (probably not by design, most likely a sort of osmosis due to so many of the OT actors being Brits) with its strong social classes, dominance by an aristocracy, and strong pioneer sensibility.

A huge portion of alien species in Star Wars have been assimilated into this culture. For example, the various companion characters in SWTOR include any number of aliens such as Aric Jorgan, Kaliyo Djannis, and Vette, who are all not human but clear map to the extant culture (particularly notable in Kaliyo's case since she's an anarchist trying to bring down the culture of the Empire, not a distinctive Rattataki culture). Likewise whole worlds with multi-species populations fit easily into the extant pan-galactic culture easily, like Balmorra or Taris.

An alternative culture is any culture that is not dominated by this overarching Republic-influenced pan-galactic culture, usually one confined to a single planet. A good example is Voss, a world with a very distinctive culture, vastly different social structures, and a completely different relationship to the Force.

The warmongering ways of the Mandalorians are a key feature of their culture. Yes the Republic had problems with that, obviously, and in the same way they had a lot of problems with any other cultural features that broke existing taboos. The people of Alderaan, an absolute pillar of the Republic, waged war for millennia upon the Killiks and even had a special Order of Extermination created specifically to deal with them. Another good example would be the Zygerrians. Their culture is based around slavery, and the Jedi Order - agents of the Repbulic - crushed their empire.

And sure, we would generally define most of the cultures the Republic oppressed as 'evil' in some way, because the Republic viewpoint broadly maps to the cultural mores of most of the Star Wars audience (though interestingly it has been rather slow to update to changes in said mores, which highlights its somewhat archaic nature), but that doesn't change the fact that cultures which violate those cultural mores in significant ways (and aren't clever like the Hutts in terms of playing cultural kabuki) tend to get pushed out of the broader galactic community. The ultimate example may be the NJO, which concludes by exiling the Yuuzhan Vong to a single isolated planet rather than making any attempt to integrate them into the galaxy.