Tell us the meta about your writing that you really want to ramble to people about (symbolism you’ve included, character or relationship development that you love, hidden references, callbacks or clues for future scenes?)
Thanks for the ask (and for your patience!). I’ve been stewing over this one. It’s a little wide-ranging,but it does come down to one major meta I’m working on.
In terms of callbacks and clues, I often write multiple pieces at the same time. As a result, I weave in certain threads that seem to recur sporadically through the storylines... but they’ve been added at the same time. So it’s not like I’m keeping a running tab on “hmm, need to put this in the fic.”
One of the things I really like to do is establish enduring quirks that absolutely don’t matter in canon. For example, I’ve invented the Saturday morning adventure characters of Shiv Starrunner for Guss Tuno (who appears all the way back in Love in the Time of Technoplague) and Princess Power-Tart for Risha (first appears as bandages in The Grand Reveal, simply as an alternative to Shiv Starrunner bandages, but now I have entire premise for her). Do these fictional fictional characters have absolutely any bearing in canon? Nope. Totally irrelevant... but we all know people who still love their childhood fandoms -- they can sing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song on demand. It helps give depth to characters that are all too readily rendered as flat for ease of plot (which is why I get hung up on my smuggler crew; they each have a thing).
I have a similar headcanon with Jace, Satele, and Theron all (secretly) liking the same high fantasy holonovel series; Jace watches the holofilms since historical nonfiction is more his jam, but Satele and Theron read the books. They’re all completely unaware they like the same thing, and it gives the reader something more about well-established characters in canon without interfering with any major plotpoints. Same goes with the headcanon/fanon that Jace was a swooper like Theron (I’m not the only one to think of this).
I’ve spoken before about my enjoyment of trope inversion and undermining anticipated stereotypes. Obviously, my smuggler is one of those efforts: completely uneducated by any galactic standard, yet intelligent. In it for the credits, but she has a conscience. Absolutely chaotic, but though there be madness, there be method in it (and it drives Risha right up the wall -- it’s the most fucked up logic that SOMEHOW works out every time). Gronn the Bounty Hunter is, in theory, in it for the money, but he’s absolutely terrible at actually collecting. The three Jedi I’ve introduced in the Yavin fic were originally one, massively screwed up Jedi -- they each fulfill a certain stereotype. Fria, the innocent and the unworldly; Romjomos the zealot due to lived experience as a slave; and Norwan... without spoiling, I’ll just say he does not want to give anything more to the Order than he already has.
The same goes for NPCs -- I like reworking characters so that they remain canon compliant and yet there’s a little more to them. This goes for the obvious, prominent characters like Theron and Lana, but I also enjoy the background characters. I love letting Trant make trouble, and he’s going to get lots of opportunity prior to Theron’s departure from the Republic. T3, Rogun, and Alilia are also characters that receive development....
But everything here goes to building the tragedy of lost potential. The doors not opened, the choices not taken, the weekends not had, the parties not attended-- that’s one of the metas I will push as Yavin turns to Ziost and the Eternal Empire. All the future things people hoped to do after Yavin -- the trajectories their lives would take -- are altered by Ziost and Eternal Fleet. There is no way back. In some other universe, they did something different and their life is completely unrecognizable. But that’s not here and now. That universe is dead. Some of the characters I’ve made will fall, as will some of the characters I’ve built up. They’re OCs or we never see them again after Vanilla, so who cares what happens to them?
If I’ve done my writing well enough, the reader does.
