Star Wars Fic and Meta - From All The Spaces Between Times - Chapter 51

[elrhiarhodan]

Title: From All The Spaces Between Times
Chapter: Chapter 51 - Hanging Inside Dreams and Blood
Author: elrhiarhodan / elrhiarhodan / elrhiarhodan
Fandom: Star Wars, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars — Obi Wan Kenobi (TV), Star Wars — Jedi Apprentice Books
Characters Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon Jinn, Shmi Skywalker, Anakin Skywalker, Watto, Quinlan Vos, Padmé Amidala, Sabé, Darth Maul, Yoda, Mace Windu, Adi Gallia, Quinlan Vos, Professor Huyang, The Force, Plo Koon, Vokara Che, Siri Tachi, Aayla Secura, Bant Eerin, Bruck Chun, Xanatos du Crion, Sheev Palpatine | Darth Sidious, Hego Damask II | Darth Plagueis, Komari Vosa, Bail Prestor Organa, Bail Antilles Prestor, Rael Averross, Nim Piana, Original Characters, Other Characters To Be Added
Pairings: Obi-Wan Kenobi & Shmi Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Qui-Gon Jinn, Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker, eventual Obi-Wan/Qui-Gon Jinn (we’re arrived)
Word Count: ~ 5300 this chapter
Spoilers: None
Warnings/Enticements/Triggers: Graphic depictions of medical torture. Sith lightning.

Summary: Obi-Wan Kenobi has never known it, but he has always been the Force’s Champion, destined to suffer infinite sadness in defense of the Light. On his last turn on the wheel, responsibility for The Chosen One, the false child of prophecy, had been thrust upon him with no warning, and Darkness held the upper hand.

But this time, the Force has marshaled its power and will protect its Champion until the time is right, no matter how long Obi-Wan has to wait and how much he has to suffer.

Or,

Obi-Wan is reborn as a twelve-year old.

He wakes up on a slavers’ ship, with all of his prior life’s memories intact, and he’s bound for Tatooine with a Force-inhibitor collar around his neck, a bomb implanted in his spine, and no way of knowing what state of the Galaxy is in.

Just another day in the life of the Force’s Champion.

Chapter Summary: Darth Plagueis needs to decide what to do with his apprentice, Darth Sidious. The man is, by all accounts, a failure.

Sidious, though, isn’t going to go down so easily. His body may be wounded, his powers diminished, but his mind is still sharp and he has put plans in motion that will bring his master down.

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From All The Spaces Between Times —Chapter 51 - Hanging Inside Dreams and Blood (On AO3)

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Meta — Chapter 51 - Hanging Inside Dreams and Blood

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382,452 words, 68-ish chapters

Decent progress this week, almost 7k. But a lot of words scattered over different bits and pieces of various chapters. I have developed a nasty habit of writing out of order on these four chapters - 64 through 68, working on key scenes, dropping in fragments here and there to fill in moments as they strike me. I don’t like writing like this. It doesn’t feel productive but it obviously is.

Had another troll this week. A real little girl who started reading from the beginning, then complained about the pacing, bitched with nasty comments on three early chapters, telling me that everything was moving too slowly for her tastes. Then wrote in a comment that they didn’t read my author’s note in the beginning, that they never read author’s notes because if there’s important stuff in author’s notes, it would be in the story. She had the gall to confess that she didn’t realize this was a serialized story published once a week, blah blah blah, and how dare I stick to a disciplined publishing schedule like that?

How in the hell do you miss that this is a story a quarter-million words long, with fifty published chapters? And then feel the need to shit all over it. Also, apparently it has a low kudos to hit count ratio? And it seems I need to use fewer words and tighten up my plotting because I have just one good idea and don’t know how to get there.

(BTW, I took a peek at her account — she’s never written anything, but her bookmarks favor anti-Jedi stories and anti-Qui-Gon stories, so the hate doesn’t surprise me one bit. And so I banned the bitch.)

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Now let’s get to the good stuff.

Well, this is a chapter I’ve been longing to publish for months. I hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s chapter. I had a lot of fun writing it.

I have no love at all for the Sith. I hates them, my Precious. Particularly Sidious. He is the all-time Mary Sue of villains, all power, no weakness, which makes him boring and one-dimensional.

When I started writing this story, I really wanted to try to make it something different. There are a lot of truly amazing time-travel fix-it stories out there, and my favorites got a shout-out in the very first meta I posted (I rec them all with equal fervor), but me being me, I wanted to trod new ground, forge a new path. Having Obi-Wan defeat Sidious seemed, well, a bit banal. So many authors have done that, and probably done it better than I could ever do.

So what should I do that would be different and interesting?

How about fridgingkilling off Palps and making his master the real villain of the story? Canon doesn’t give us a lot about Darth Plagueis, other than a bit of fabrication that Sidious throws at Anakin at the end of Revenge of the Sith, the "Legend of Darth Plagueis the Wise. George Lucas has admitted that the whole thing was a lie that Sidious invented to get Anakin to turn. Whether or not there actually was a Darth Plagueis is up for debate, but there’s enough in the canon entry on Wookieepedia that confirms he’s supposedly Sidious’ Sith Master, and I decided he’d be a much better villain for this story than Skeevy Sheev.

This is where I really begin to hate what Disney has done with the Canon/Legends split. They have killed off everything that is actually interesting (looking at Galidraan, Dooku’s motivations, and Jango Fett’s backstory). James Luceno’s novel, Darth Plagueis gives us a really interesting backstory for Sheev Palpatine. He was a creep. In last week’s meta, I called him a "fuckboy", and that’s exactly what he was. He got expelled from numerous private schools for behavior that would have sent him to prison if his father hadn’t paid off people.

Throughout his education, Palpatine attended some of the most prestigious and exclusive academies in the galaxy, but never remained for long, soon expelled for some petty misdemeanor. Palpatine's list of offenses, while usually minor, was extensive enough that—were he anyone other than a nobleman's heir—he would have been imprisoned in a correctional facility. Sure enough, whatever his son's crime, Cosinga [Palpatine] was there, ready and willing to use his influence and credits to make it "disappear." Having been raised to believe that money could solve anything, Palpatine quickly dispensed with traditional notions of morality, instead forging a unique code of ethics for himself; a pedestal on which he placed himself, to be raised above all others.

Sound familiar?

He really was a fuckboy — Skeevy Sheev liked fast cars, hated his father, because his father wanted to keep Naboo as an isolationist planet, and wasn’t interested in political power. Sheev wanted power for power’s sake and killed his whole family, mother, father, and siblings when he couldn’t get what he wanted. (This would make a great Law & Order: Star Wars episode, yanno?)

And so I made this story’s Sheev an elderly fuckboy, leering at Queen Amidala, fantasizing about her, diddling Komari Vosa, whining about money (spending what he had and begging his wealthy, tightfisted master for more). But I was not going to diminish his all of his powers, because that wouldn’t be fair. He might not be all powerful as he is in movie canon, but he is still powerful enough. One of the most intriguing things about Sidious was what the Darth Sidious canon entry in Wookieepedia called his greatest power — foresight. "Among Darth Sidious' most powerful abilities was being able foresee the future, an ability which allowed him to plan for nearly any contingency."

And this is a canon, as opposed to a Legends ability, and one I’ve had fun playing with in this chapter.

So we see him lying in his sickbed, a stoma port sucking the shit out of him, suffering from terminal kidney failure, but enjoying a true Vision of how the Jedi Order is going to destroy his master. How the Jedi will rise up in glory and finish off the last living Sith.

A few final notes:

1. Just to be clear, Obi-Wan is not Oban reborn. The timeline doesn’t work, I did that deliberately. Palpatine is just plain wrong.

2. Palpatine calls Plagueis "a master Shah-tezh player, anticipating strategy a ten, fifteen moves in advance."

"Shah-tezh" is the Star Wars equivalent of chess. Dejarik, or holochess, the game shown in A New Hope with the holo-emitted alien pieces on the circular board on the Millennium Falcon is not as cerebral or strategic as Shah-tezh, from which that game had originated.


3. The idea of sealing Palpatine up in carbonite but leaving him fulling conscious is borrowed from The Old Guard, where Andy’s girlfriend, Quynh, is locked in an iron cask and dropped into the ocean, to suffer endlessly for hundreds of years.


4. There are few Easter Eggs scattered about this chapter, has anyone found them?

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As I said in my end note, I’m taking a few weeks hiatus, until the middle of August. The last few chapters I’ve been working on are a mess — I’ve been writing out of order and I need to get them organized. Also, I signed up for Smutwars and I need to work on that story (Tentacles anyone?) So a few weeks of summertime fun. I know I’d promised no more breaks, but this is just a month or so.