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Sue-age
Okay, the back journal entries from September through December 1991 are up. I'll get to the spring ones tomorrow, hopefully. I'm sure you're all riveted by this. q:
So. Sues. Everybody's sues seem to be Star Wars. So is mine. This is the last OFC I wrote before I got too jaded to do a self-insert without arch meta commentary included. Oddly, despite fulfilling every basic criterion, poor Valay Eilellan just barely makes the cut on the SW mary-sue test. It's because she fell in love with Admiral Devlia (from the X-Wing novels, in case you *somehow* didn't recognize the name right away) instead of Han. Isn't it.
So here's a short bit of my generation-spanning saga, which, for once fortunately, was never finished:
Imperial Shuttle Toronto Gosh swept into the sky over Etchipoi like a graceful long-winged bird. Middle-aged General Devlia and his very young, very beautiful, very pregnant wife Valay stood arm-in-arm in the cockpit, watching over the pilots as they moved into a holding pattern for landing.
"It's beautiful," Valay said breathlessly.
Devlia raised his eyebrows. "I've rarely heard an Imperial administration center described as beautiful, I have to admit."
"Someone once told me that anything is beautiful if you look at it from far enough away. And it is, isn't it? Look at the pearly orange color in the clouds, and the way the Interceptors and their shadows dance in perfect harmony over it."
"I suppose, from a certain point of view, it is rather pretty."
The girl wrinkled her nose at him. "You can't hide it from me. You're glad to see the planet too."
"Admin centers aren't exactly exciting. But yes, I am. More for what it represents than the place itself. Freedom."
"Peace," she said, looking up at him with a sparkle in her eyes.
"Peace," and he bent over to kiss her.
The pilot cleared his throat. "Excuse me sir, if you're not too busy right now, we're about to begin landing procedures. You need to be getting ready."
Devlia shook himself. "Yes, thank you. Come, Valay, we don't want to be distracting the pilot."
When they were gone the copilot rolled his eyes. "Must be nice to be a general and have your own Hutt-trained dancing girl."
His comrade nodded. "I didn't think they let you make it through the Academy with that much sappiness left in you. I bet he decides pretty quick he got more than he bargained for."
The copilot gave a snort of laughter. "And considering Hutt bargains, that doesn't happen very often."
For a few minutes they concentrated on slipping into the traffic pattern, then the pilot looked up. "Speaking of Hutts, d'you hear what happened on Tatooine?"
"Something actually happened on Tattoine? That's the most shocking news since Yavin!"
The pilot threatened to hit him. "Hey! I was born there, ya know! Anyhow, yep. Somebody finally managed to take out ol' Jabba. Supposedly they snuck into his palace with a thermal detonator, and blew it-- and themselves-- all the way to Onderon."
"Sweet. Does this mean we can quit chasing glit smugglers and get back to killing Rebs?"
"More than you know. It was the Rebels took out Jabba."
"Suure. Where'd you hear this, Imperial News Services?"
"How gullible do you think I am? Nah, there were a couple of impstars in orbit. One of the maintenance techs on the _Desertstorm_ is a friend of mine, he told me the whole bit."
"I see." the copilot was still skeptical. "And why exactly have the Rebels decided to start doing our job for us?"
"Man, you really are out of touch, aren't you?"
He shrugged. "I've been spending a lot of time in the simulators lately. You know, become a TIE pilot,--"
"Save the galaxy! Right. I though you were supposed to be the smart one. Anyway, the story is that the reason we haven't seen much Rebel activity lately is that about a year ago, we managed to capture the scum Princess's little toyboy, then the Emperor's pet Dark Lord got distracted by something shiny and accidentally sold him to Jabba. So she's diverted, like, almost all the rebel strength to getting him back."
"What, all three Y-wings?" the copilot grinned.
"And one of the tramp freighters. So you know it's serious. Can't have her bored nights, after all."
"Why does that not surprise me at all?"
***
Slightly later in the story our poor force-sensitive heroine dies tragically in childbed, from shock and premature labor induced by a disturbance in the Force, as of millions of voices crying out in terror and being suddenly silenced. (What she was sensing, of course, was Emperor's selfless sacrifice to destroy the Death Star the Rebel terrorists had built over Endor.) And then Devlia, who was about to be retired, gets put back on active duty and has to defend the innocent citizens of the Imperium against the evildoers, and most of his friends were killed at Endor, in valiant defense of their nation and ideals, and all is ANGST. And PAIN. That's right, I was writing Imperial-propaganda style Mary Sue fic. Yay! (This was the summer of '01, so I can't even blame it on RL events.) Valay's grandmother Halla was a dark Jedi and her father was a clone trooper and her daughter Mela was orphaned in a cruel Rebel attack on civilians and raised on a Victory-class Star Destroyer to believe that all Force-users were inherently evil, and went on to become the galaxy's first mistress of a troupe of performing ysalamiri.
Here's another bit, set right after the non-EU novel "Splinter of the Mind's Eye." Yep, Vader's quite righteously pissed, although I can't quite remember why, unless it was because his son and daughter were getting into the heavy flirting again q: And the lightsaber is also a force-shield!
Valay Eilellan gave up on sleep for the night after she woke the fourth time from a disconnected nightmare vision. She set out on a quest for the kitchen, in hopes of some cold bruallki to soothe her restless mind, but stopped in the hallway when she saw the kitchen light on.
One of the water-damaged floor plates creaked under her foot, and heard her mother's voice call from the kitchen, "Vale? Is that you?"
Relieved, she trudged in to the kitchen, pushing her fringe of dark hair out of her eyes. "Yeah. Couldn't sleep."
Valay's mother Allya was sitting at the table with an empty plate in front of her, polishing something small and metal. She looked up and grinned rogueishly. "Nightmares?"
"Jedi don't *have* nightmares," Valay said authoritatively.
"Right. Me too." her mother replied. "You're far too late, I already finished off the bruallki. There might be some menkooroo left, though, if you look in the cooler." She turned back to her rubbing, lost in thought, then suddenly continued. "Jedi may not have nightmares, but I hope it is just nightmares. Because if it isn't nightmares, it's visions from the Force. And I really, really don't want what I've been dreaming to be a true glimpse of the future." With a decided click, she dropped the object she'd been polishing onto the counter.
Valay almost dropped the tub of menkooroo. "Is that what I think it is?" It was a cylinder of silvery metal, about twenty-five centimeters long, unmarked except for three black rings inset in its length, and on one end, two nested parabolic dishes, the larger almost ten centimeters diameter.
"Probably." Allya stared at it for a second, then fluidly swept it up and into a dancer's stance, thumbing one of the black rings as she moved. A meter-long shaft of actinic yellow light sprouted from the smaller bowl, hissing and spitting. "It was your grandmother's lightsaber. A weapon of elegance of a very different time and place, made by a woman who prefered a good ray shield and a thermal detonator." She thumbed it off and tossed it to her daughter, who caught it by sheer reflex. "I never felt comfortable carrying it; Mother didn't give me nearly enough training, and around the time she was killed the galaxy became a very dangerous place for wanna-be Jedi. You keep it now."
Valay started to protest but her mother shushed her. "You're seventeen. As old as I was when I got charge of the thing, and better trained and disciplined. More of a Jedi than I ever was. If the visions are real and we're heading into a time of danger, it's safer with you."
The younger woman stared at the weapon in her hand, wordless for the moment. When she lifted her gaze she saw that her mother had drifted back into her reverie, looking inward and muttering to herself. "I feel something . . . a presence I haven't felt since . . ." She jerked herself. "Skywalker! Sithspawn!"
Valay slid slowly into the seat opposite her mother's. "Mother, what was that?"
Allya remembered her daughter was there. "Oh, sorry. Excuse my language."
"Mom, I'm not an infant. I can handle your language." She managed a grin. "Though your command of profanity is still impressive. Even I have never heard anyone use "skywalker" before."
"That's the legacy of spending twenty years hiding out on the fringe. Remember Kethrithan? He once scared away a Calamari patrol ship just by cursing in Shyriiwook--"
"Mother. You felt something. What was it?"
Allya found herself involuntarily looking her far more solid daughter in the eyes. She sighed. "Darth Vader. He's nearby. Probably in system."
Valay froze. "Do you think he knows about you?"
"If he didn't before, he does now: there's no way on Kessel he hasn't sensed our presence. Sith! I knew we should have left as soon as the Rebels set up shop in this sector, but . . . it was so nice to pretend, for a few years, to be safe."
"So, what are we going to do?"
"Do?" Allya laughed, softly. "We're going to die. There's no way he's forgotten the way my mother humiliated him, and there's no way he won't kill us for it if he can. And this is the man who hunted down the Jedi. He killed my mother. He took out /Yoda/, by the force. If he comes for us, there's no way two half-trained children will be able to stop him."
****
Guess what happens next? Allya gets killed by Vader! Hey, they were Jedi during the Imperium; getting killed by Vader is what they *did*. And then Valay gets sold to a Hutt with a fondness for force-users. It doesn't come out in the segment I have handy but at this point Allya and Valay are living on the dole in a parked and rusted-out spaceship in a swamp with fifteencats smeerps puffskeins-- yeah, *these* stories are never getting finished, I've forgotten all my EU knowledge. Good thing the Stargate crossover has decided it's only using original-trilogy canon. :D What are those kitten-things? All I can remember is that Leia had a pink one named AT-AT when she was little.
And then-- since my dear readers clearly aren't bored yet, here's an original fantasy Mary Sue dating back to when I first ran into the concept of Sue-age. Although it wasn't called that, it was in a very annoying how-to-write book in Mrs. Meade's classroom and it said something along the lines of "all writers go through a narcissistic phase in their youth. Fortunately, most of them grow out of it." Then I got really offended and sat down in high dudgeon and wrote this:
It was a sun-kissed warm day near the end of winter, and Cashy was helping her father break ground on a new vegetable plot, when she felt the pull-- a pull she'd only felt once before . . .[skipping long-winded exposition so we can get to the stilted dialogue] . . . This new pull gave a clear feeling of danger. Cashy went over to her father and asked if she could leave.
"Well, I guess so. You've certainly been working hard enough."
"Oh thank you!" Cashy was extremely relieved. Her father hadn't realized she meant forever.
But why was she so relieved? she thought, jogging back to the hut. Why did she want so strongly to leave? It's not like she was badly treated or anything. It must have been that pull again, she thought, coming up on the hut.
Cashy went quickly to her corner of the one room and gathered up a few vital things: a warm cloak, her other dress and apron, her knife, and her tinderbox. Gathering it her cloak to go to the pantry, she suddenly heard a very loud SQUEAK. She turned around, startled, even though she knew it was only a mouse.
Sure enough, there was one standing on her sheets.
"You weren't thinking of leaving this, here, were you?" it said.
"You can talk?" she gasped.
"Oh- well, yes, you see, I'm not really a mouse. I'm enchanted. I was your mother's viseir, you see. She enchanted me to keep me out of the dark sorcerer Drenmoor's hands," the mouse said matter-of-factly.
"Oh," Cashy replied.
"So, you weren't thinking of leaving this, right?" it repeated.
For the first time Cashy looked at what the mouse was standing on. "My mother's locket! Why would I want that? Id' probably lose it, wherever I'm going."
"My tail, you don't know much. It's magic! Why were you packing if you didn't feel the pull?" said the mouse.
"I felt the pull! I just didn't know what it was!"
"Well, now you know. You should also bring your spellbook. It'll come in handy in Faerie."
That was written ten years ago, when I was eleven. It's the oldest thing still in one of my active story folders; the paper it's written on is yellow. It's also, sadly, ten times better than my NaNo novel currently is. The plot went something like this: When Cashy was just born, there was this Dark Lord making war on all the magical people. But Cashy's mom sacrificed herself, and the sorcerer was killed-- but not completely! The wise people at the School for Wizards had Cashy raised in secret by her relatives, until she turned eleven and was old enough to go off to the hidden school for wizards and learn how to defeat him for good, as had been prophesied. And then she went to school and made some friends, even though she didn't quite fit in, and ended up finding her way into the secret room just in time to prevent him from getting his hands on the magic stone.
Oddly, she also only barely achieves Mary-Sue status on the quiz, probably due to my utter hatred of describing my characters physically . . .
So. Sues. Everybody's sues seem to be Star Wars. So is mine. This is the last OFC I wrote before I got too jaded to do a self-insert without arch meta commentary included. Oddly, despite fulfilling every basic criterion, poor Valay Eilellan just barely makes the cut on the SW mary-sue test. It's because she fell in love with Admiral Devlia (from the X-Wing novels, in case you *somehow* didn't recognize the name right away) instead of Han. Isn't it.
So here's a short bit of my generation-spanning saga, which, for once fortunately, was never finished:
Imperial Shuttle Toronto Gosh swept into the sky over Etchipoi like a graceful long-winged bird. Middle-aged General Devlia and his very young, very beautiful, very pregnant wife Valay stood arm-in-arm in the cockpit, watching over the pilots as they moved into a holding pattern for landing.
"It's beautiful," Valay said breathlessly.
Devlia raised his eyebrows. "I've rarely heard an Imperial administration center described as beautiful, I have to admit."
"Someone once told me that anything is beautiful if you look at it from far enough away. And it is, isn't it? Look at the pearly orange color in the clouds, and the way the Interceptors and their shadows dance in perfect harmony over it."
"I suppose, from a certain point of view, it is rather pretty."
The girl wrinkled her nose at him. "You can't hide it from me. You're glad to see the planet too."
"Admin centers aren't exactly exciting. But yes, I am. More for what it represents than the place itself. Freedom."
"Peace," she said, looking up at him with a sparkle in her eyes.
"Peace," and he bent over to kiss her.
The pilot cleared his throat. "Excuse me sir, if you're not too busy right now, we're about to begin landing procedures. You need to be getting ready."
Devlia shook himself. "Yes, thank you. Come, Valay, we don't want to be distracting the pilot."
When they were gone the copilot rolled his eyes. "Must be nice to be a general and have your own Hutt-trained dancing girl."
His comrade nodded. "I didn't think they let you make it through the Academy with that much sappiness left in you. I bet he decides pretty quick he got more than he bargained for."
The copilot gave a snort of laughter. "And considering Hutt bargains, that doesn't happen very often."
For a few minutes they concentrated on slipping into the traffic pattern, then the pilot looked up. "Speaking of Hutts, d'you hear what happened on Tatooine?"
"Something actually happened on Tattoine? That's the most shocking news since Yavin!"
The pilot threatened to hit him. "Hey! I was born there, ya know! Anyhow, yep. Somebody finally managed to take out ol' Jabba. Supposedly they snuck into his palace with a thermal detonator, and blew it-- and themselves-- all the way to Onderon."
"Sweet. Does this mean we can quit chasing glit smugglers and get back to killing Rebs?"
"More than you know. It was the Rebels took out Jabba."
"Suure. Where'd you hear this, Imperial News Services?"
"How gullible do you think I am? Nah, there were a couple of impstars in orbit. One of the maintenance techs on the _Desertstorm_ is a friend of mine, he told me the whole bit."
"I see." the copilot was still skeptical. "And why exactly have the Rebels decided to start doing our job for us?"
"Man, you really are out of touch, aren't you?"
He shrugged. "I've been spending a lot of time in the simulators lately. You know, become a TIE pilot,--"
"Save the galaxy! Right. I though you were supposed to be the smart one. Anyway, the story is that the reason we haven't seen much Rebel activity lately is that about a year ago, we managed to capture the scum Princess's little toyboy, then the Emperor's pet Dark Lord got distracted by something shiny and accidentally sold him to Jabba. So she's diverted, like, almost all the rebel strength to getting him back."
"What, all three Y-wings?" the copilot grinned.
"And one of the tramp freighters. So you know it's serious. Can't have her bored nights, after all."
"Why does that not surprise me at all?"
***
Slightly later in the story our poor force-sensitive heroine dies tragically in childbed, from shock and premature labor induced by a disturbance in the Force, as of millions of voices crying out in terror and being suddenly silenced. (What she was sensing, of course, was Emperor's selfless sacrifice to destroy the Death Star the Rebel terrorists had built over Endor.) And then Devlia, who was about to be retired, gets put back on active duty and has to defend the innocent citizens of the Imperium against the evildoers, and most of his friends were killed at Endor, in valiant defense of their nation and ideals, and all is ANGST. And PAIN. That's right, I was writing Imperial-propaganda style Mary Sue fic. Yay! (This was the summer of '01, so I can't even blame it on RL events.) Valay's grandmother Halla was a dark Jedi and her father was a clone trooper and her daughter Mela was orphaned in a cruel Rebel attack on civilians and raised on a Victory-class Star Destroyer to believe that all Force-users were inherently evil, and went on to become the galaxy's first mistress of a troupe of performing ysalamiri.
Here's another bit, set right after the non-EU novel "Splinter of the Mind's Eye." Yep, Vader's quite righteously pissed, although I can't quite remember why, unless it was because his son and daughter were getting into the heavy flirting again q: And the lightsaber is also a force-shield!
Valay Eilellan gave up on sleep for the night after she woke the fourth time from a disconnected nightmare vision. She set out on a quest for the kitchen, in hopes of some cold bruallki to soothe her restless mind, but stopped in the hallway when she saw the kitchen light on.
One of the water-damaged floor plates creaked under her foot, and heard her mother's voice call from the kitchen, "Vale? Is that you?"
Relieved, she trudged in to the kitchen, pushing her fringe of dark hair out of her eyes. "Yeah. Couldn't sleep."
Valay's mother Allya was sitting at the table with an empty plate in front of her, polishing something small and metal. She looked up and grinned rogueishly. "Nightmares?"
"Jedi don't *have* nightmares," Valay said authoritatively.
"Right. Me too." her mother replied. "You're far too late, I already finished off the bruallki. There might be some menkooroo left, though, if you look in the cooler." She turned back to her rubbing, lost in thought, then suddenly continued. "Jedi may not have nightmares, but I hope it is just nightmares. Because if it isn't nightmares, it's visions from the Force. And I really, really don't want what I've been dreaming to be a true glimpse of the future." With a decided click, she dropped the object she'd been polishing onto the counter.
Valay almost dropped the tub of menkooroo. "Is that what I think it is?" It was a cylinder of silvery metal, about twenty-five centimeters long, unmarked except for three black rings inset in its length, and on one end, two nested parabolic dishes, the larger almost ten centimeters diameter.
"Probably." Allya stared at it for a second, then fluidly swept it up and into a dancer's stance, thumbing one of the black rings as she moved. A meter-long shaft of actinic yellow light sprouted from the smaller bowl, hissing and spitting. "It was your grandmother's lightsaber. A weapon of elegance of a very different time and place, made by a woman who prefered a good ray shield and a thermal detonator." She thumbed it off and tossed it to her daughter, who caught it by sheer reflex. "I never felt comfortable carrying it; Mother didn't give me nearly enough training, and around the time she was killed the galaxy became a very dangerous place for wanna-be Jedi. You keep it now."
Valay started to protest but her mother shushed her. "You're seventeen. As old as I was when I got charge of the thing, and better trained and disciplined. More of a Jedi than I ever was. If the visions are real and we're heading into a time of danger, it's safer with you."
The younger woman stared at the weapon in her hand, wordless for the moment. When she lifted her gaze she saw that her mother had drifted back into her reverie, looking inward and muttering to herself. "I feel something . . . a presence I haven't felt since . . ." She jerked herself. "Skywalker! Sithspawn!"
Valay slid slowly into the seat opposite her mother's. "Mother, what was that?"
Allya remembered her daughter was there. "Oh, sorry. Excuse my language."
"Mom, I'm not an infant. I can handle your language." She managed a grin. "Though your command of profanity is still impressive. Even I have never heard anyone use "skywalker" before."
"That's the legacy of spending twenty years hiding out on the fringe. Remember Kethrithan? He once scared away a Calamari patrol ship just by cursing in Shyriiwook--"
"Mother. You felt something. What was it?"
Allya found herself involuntarily looking her far more solid daughter in the eyes. She sighed. "Darth Vader. He's nearby. Probably in system."
Valay froze. "Do you think he knows about you?"
"If he didn't before, he does now: there's no way on Kessel he hasn't sensed our presence. Sith! I knew we should have left as soon as the Rebels set up shop in this sector, but . . . it was so nice to pretend, for a few years, to be safe."
"So, what are we going to do?"
"Do?" Allya laughed, softly. "We're going to die. There's no way he's forgotten the way my mother humiliated him, and there's no way he won't kill us for it if he can. And this is the man who hunted down the Jedi. He killed my mother. He took out /Yoda/, by the force. If he comes for us, there's no way two half-trained children will be able to stop him."
****
Guess what happens next? Allya gets killed by Vader! Hey, they were Jedi during the Imperium; getting killed by Vader is what they *did*. And then Valay gets sold to a Hutt with a fondness for force-users. It doesn't come out in the segment I have handy but at this point Allya and Valay are living on the dole in a parked and rusted-out spaceship in a swamp with fifteen
And then-- since my dear readers clearly aren't bored yet, here's an original fantasy Mary Sue dating back to when I first ran into the concept of Sue-age. Although it wasn't called that, it was in a very annoying how-to-write book in Mrs. Meade's classroom and it said something along the lines of "all writers go through a narcissistic phase in their youth. Fortunately, most of them grow out of it." Then I got really offended and sat down in high dudgeon and wrote this:
It was a sun-kissed warm day near the end of winter, and Cashy was helping her father break ground on a new vegetable plot, when she felt the pull-- a pull she'd only felt once before . . .[skipping long-winded exposition so we can get to the stilted dialogue] . . . This new pull gave a clear feeling of danger. Cashy went over to her father and asked if she could leave.
"Well, I guess so. You've certainly been working hard enough."
"Oh thank you!" Cashy was extremely relieved. Her father hadn't realized she meant forever.
But why was she so relieved? she thought, jogging back to the hut. Why did she want so strongly to leave? It's not like she was badly treated or anything. It must have been that pull again, she thought, coming up on the hut.
Cashy went quickly to her corner of the one room and gathered up a few vital things: a warm cloak, her other dress and apron, her knife, and her tinderbox. Gathering it her cloak to go to the pantry, she suddenly heard a very loud SQUEAK. She turned around, startled, even though she knew it was only a mouse.
Sure enough, there was one standing on her sheets.
"You weren't thinking of leaving this, here, were you?" it said.
"You can talk?" she gasped.
"Oh- well, yes, you see, I'm not really a mouse. I'm enchanted. I was your mother's viseir, you see. She enchanted me to keep me out of the dark sorcerer Drenmoor's hands," the mouse said matter-of-factly.
"Oh," Cashy replied.
"So, you weren't thinking of leaving this, right?" it repeated.
For the first time Cashy looked at what the mouse was standing on. "My mother's locket! Why would I want that? Id' probably lose it, wherever I'm going."
"My tail, you don't know much. It's magic! Why were you packing if you didn't feel the pull?" said the mouse.
"I felt the pull! I just didn't know what it was!"
"Well, now you know. You should also bring your spellbook. It'll come in handy in Faerie."
That was written ten years ago, when I was eleven. It's the oldest thing still in one of my active story folders; the paper it's written on is yellow. It's also, sadly, ten times better than my NaNo novel currently is. The plot went something like this: When Cashy was just born, there was this Dark Lord making war on all the magical people. But Cashy's mom sacrificed herself, and the sorcerer was killed-- but not completely! The wise people at the School for Wizards had Cashy raised in secret by her relatives, until she turned eleven and was old enough to go off to the hidden school for wizards and learn how to defeat him for good, as had been prophesied. And then she went to school and made some friends, even though she didn't quite fit in, and ended up finding her way into the secret room just in time to prevent him from getting his hands on the magic stone.
Oddly, she also only barely achieves Mary-Sue status on the quiz, probably due to my utter hatred of describing my characters physically . . .
no subject
Ee! A lot of the entries are endlessly amusing! (Well, the one's that didn't come up "database temporarily unavailable", that is) (:
Favorite quote (by no small margin): "My favorite part of Thanksgiving is eating."
Allow me to restae my previous "Ee!".
That is all.