Armored in Fire, Armed with Memory for @ annathecrow.ao3
Star Wars Legends: Republic (Comics)
Zule Xiss
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annathecrow asked for a story about Zule Xiss, a minor but memorable character from the old Dark Horse Star Wars comics.
I was torn between writing fixit and a character study; I ended up doing both, although the fixit aspect is limited—Zule gets out after all, but she’s the only one. (Maybe someday I’ll write a fixit that saves the rest of the Pack too…)
Once I figured out that the “full” fixit was out of my reach this time around, I decided to put in the two sequences of Zule thinking of each of the Pack in turn—first the “this is for X” sequence, when she’s fresh off of Order 66, and then the more measured memories later on, when she’s recovering a bit more and giving herself reasons to live, not just reasons to keep fighting.
(I’m pretty proud of “May the Force be with them. May they be the Force. May they be with her.”)
The passage about Zule’s masters was originally a false start at a separate fic, but ended up being pulled into the rest—I thought it functioned well as a part 1 to the Padawan Pack sequences, and an illustration for the Jedi Order falling apart as the war went on + Zule gradually falling through the cracks.
The Broken Shell, the Breaking Clouds for![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
Kartaylir
天使のたまご | Tenshi no Tamago | Angel's Egg (Anime)
Boy
This request was the last remaining pinch hit, and by Sunday I decided that I might as well try. Surely even I could concentrate on an audiovisual canon if it’s only 90 minutes long?
So I watched the movie on Youtube (which took me longer than 90 minutes because I very quickly decided I wanted to icon it and that meant going back periodically for screenshots I’d failed to time correctly).
It’s a beautiful, disquieting movie, dreamlike in a sense that borders on but does not quite tip into nightmare. The dialogue is minimal, the two characters nameless. It raises many questions and answers (almost) none of them. A girl treasures and hopes to hatch an egg that she probably did not lay, although I had that impression at first; I originally assumed she was a young woman, but when she encounters another person she’s roughly half his size, which suggests that she’s actually a young child. Both of them have forgotten much of their pasts; they repeatedly ask each other’s names, and neither ever receives an answer. There is no explanation of where the girl got the egg, or where the boy (that’s his listed “name”, although he’s either an adult or in his late teens, physically) got the strange weapon he caries.
What had seemed to be statues of soldiers or fishermen come to life and hunt the shadows of giant fish. A character quotes a slightly modified Biblical passage, which is immediately juxtaposed with what appears to be a fossilized angel. The characters are deeply suspicious of each other, but are drawn together by curiosity, concern, and the fact that they have no one else: aside from each other, their world is inhabited only by ghosts and bones.
When I reached the (surreal, possibly tragic) ending, I stared at it for a bit—how do I write fic for this?—and then started jotting down images as they came to mind.
If I remember correctly, these were the first two bits I wrote:
There were a fairly large number of short snippets like that—images and questions.
Then I rearranged and recombined until a narrative (or at least a throughline) emerged.
(I could never have written this fic without Scrivener or a similar program.)
Second pass revealed that I’d misinterpreted something, and I had to end on a different question, since the one I’d intended to close with turned out to be one of the very few the movie answers. Probably. I think. As usual, I’m a bit confused!
In the end I did not get the pinch hit (someone else grabbed it while I was writing—I didn’t want to claim until I had a story, because I didn’t know if I could pull it off until I had it more or less done). But I did have the story, so it went up as a treat. I’m glad I wrote it.
Star Wars Legends: Republic (Comics)
Zule Xiss
annathecrow asked for a story about Zule Xiss, a minor but memorable character from the old Dark Horse Star Wars comics. I was torn between writing fixit and a character study; I ended up doing both, although the fixit aspect is limited—Zule gets out after all, but she’s the only one. (Maybe someday I’ll write a fixit that saves the rest of the Pack too…)
Once I figured out that the “full” fixit was out of my reach this time around, I decided to put in the two sequences of Zule thinking of each of the Pack in turn—first the “this is for X” sequence, when she’s fresh off of Order 66, and then the more measured memories later on, when she’s recovering a bit more and giving herself reasons to live, not just reasons to keep fighting.
(I’m pretty proud of “May the Force be with them. May they be the Force. May they be with her.”)
The passage about Zule’s masters was originally a false start at a separate fic, but ended up being pulled into the rest—I thought it functioned well as a part 1 to the Padawan Pack sequences, and an illustration for the Jedi Order falling apart as the war went on + Zule gradually falling through the cracks.
The Broken Shell, the Breaking Clouds for
天使のたまご | Tenshi no Tamago | Angel's Egg (Anime)
Boy
This request was the last remaining pinch hit, and by Sunday I decided that I might as well try. Surely even I could concentrate on an audiovisual canon if it’s only 90 minutes long?
So I watched the movie on Youtube (which took me longer than 90 minutes because I very quickly decided I wanted to icon it and that meant going back periodically for screenshots I’d failed to time correctly).
It’s a beautiful, disquieting movie, dreamlike in a sense that borders on but does not quite tip into nightmare. The dialogue is minimal, the two characters nameless. It raises many questions and answers (almost) none of them. A girl treasures and hopes to hatch an egg that she probably did not lay, although I had that impression at first; I originally assumed she was a young woman, but when she encounters another person she’s roughly half his size, which suggests that she’s actually a young child. Both of them have forgotten much of their pasts; they repeatedly ask each other’s names, and neither ever receives an answer. There is no explanation of where the girl got the egg, or where the boy (that’s his listed “name”, although he’s either an adult or in his late teens, physically) got the strange weapon he caries.
What had seemed to be statues of soldiers or fishermen come to life and hunt the shadows of giant fish. A character quotes a slightly modified Biblical passage, which is immediately juxtaposed with what appears to be a fossilized angel. The characters are deeply suspicious of each other, but are drawn together by curiosity, concern, and the fact that they have no one else: aside from each other, their world is inhabited only by ghosts and bones.
When I reached the (surreal, possibly tragic) ending, I stared at it for a bit—how do I write fic for this?—and then started jotting down images as they came to mind.
If I remember correctly, these were the first two bits I wrote:
Did you die or did you hatch?
If she is dead he killed her.Perhaps the bird, like the people, forgot its purpose, its past.
Perhaps it even forgot it was a bird.
There were a fairly large number of short snippets like that—images and questions.
Then I rearranged and recombined until a narrative (or at least a throughline) emerged.
(I could never have written this fic without Scrivener or a similar program.)
Second pass revealed that I’d misinterpreted something, and I had to end on a different question, since the one I’d intended to close with turned out to be one of the very few the movie answers. Probably. I think. As usual, I’m a bit confused!
In the end I did not get the pinch hit (someone else grabbed it while I was writing—I didn’t want to claim until I had a story, because I didn’t know if I could pull it off until I had it more or less done). But I did have the story, so it went up as a treat. I’m glad I wrote it.