Work Text:
fic!: re-framing, re-visioning, and re-defining the Life in Freefall Saga: a scholar's perspective
Disclaimer: George Lucas owns Star Wars. This story is purely a work of pseudo-academic fan fiction, and I am not making any profit from it.
Author's notes: Some members of my f-list will be already aware that constructing a pseudoscholarly framework for the FFV is a project I have had in mind for a long time. In the back of the FFV as it is told and appears on LJ, there is the idea of a further layer of storytelling that would constitute the narrative of a researcher, long after the events of the story had taken place, trying to piece together the fragments of legend in order to create a unified whole. This would be partly the grounds for his doctoral work (or the GFFA equivalent) and also in part a tribute to his grandmother, who told the most fabulous stories …
This piece is a small gesture toward that larger project. It is incomplete, and very much in need of editing, revision, refinement. Even the title given below is tentative. In short: it needs work. But I hope that it may be enjoyable and/or provocative for some readers, even in these very early stages –– and also I hope by sharing it to obtain some indications of how the story may be received, and how it might be enlarged or clarified or improved. Feedback, whether it consists of emoticons or extended commentary, will be most welcome –– indeed greatly appreciated!
Legends of a Fall
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Introduction: An Apologetics of Narrativity
Undertaking the reconstruction of a single coherent narrative from the tangle of evocative fragments, many contradictory and all compelling, that survived the end of the Empire and the widespread destruction of the Yuuzhan Vong War is a daunting task for any researcher. I have done my best to follow the line of the most credible documents, where that could be determined with reasonable clarity; but there are substantial gaps in the written materials, for which I have relied on the versions of the legend I have been able to collect and on my own good (or bad) sense. In some places, where there was no clear guide, I confess that I have simply followed my own instincts and preferences: my feeling for what rendered the story not only coherent and intelligible, but moving. If in this endeavor I have sometimes erred on the side of preserving the Orun character’s reputation and integrity despite her very real marginality to the course of galactic history, I may perhaps be forgiven: family history (well-documented on my home planet of Loreth) has it that Ryn Orun (also, confusingly, sometimes called Llewellyn) was a lateral ancestor on my mother’s side, and much of my childhood was spent listening to her story, in one form or another.
But Llewellyn’s story is inevitably also the story of Anakin Skywalker. Neither of them was prone to speaking publicly about their feelings, so documentation of a historically verifiable nature is scarce; but when the story is told on Loreth, Orun’s unrequited love for Skywalker is always at the very heart of the tale. (Significantly, when told within the borders of what used to be the Republic the legend shows a good deal more variation, so that the emotional core may rest in the forbidden love of Anakin Skywalker and Padmé Amidala, in the relationship between Anakin and his master, or in the adventures and fates of Anakin’s children, according to the taste of the storyteller.) In any case it is clear that the friendships between the major players on what I am calling the “Republic” side (even though Orun was an ex-patriate from a heretic colony, Skywalker eventually became the most feared enforcer of the Empire, and for much of the period in question Palpatine was duplicitously acting as the Republic’s head of state) were both genuine and deeply felt.
In the end, they changed the galaxy.