Since We Have Now Passed The "Star Wars" Event Horizon…

 
And as it happens, we rewatched all three of the prequel movies this week. And every time, I have the same damn reactions:
Why did the Jedi fight so boring?
In Star Wars, we got empathy and mind control. In Empire Strikes Back, we got clumsy telekinesis. In Return of the Jedi, we got Force Lightning.
And in all three prequels, we see the Jedi at the height of their powers, and we see… the exact listing of powers.
I’ve literally seen more variance in the Star Wars videogames.
Come on, man. These are the Jedi Knights, and every swordfight is a cut-and-copy of the Holy Trilogy. I was hoping for new and exciting uses of Jedi powers that we see in fan films, the tie-in novels, even the Clone Wars cartoons, and it’s like the inspiration just ran out.
Why did Yoda have to fight? 
Oh, God, having the great Jedi master be a badass at combat was such a mistake. Here’s what he should have done, and why.
Why did we have to see Anakin as a young boy? 
Seriously, it added nothing. You could skip the Phantom Menace in its entirety and the story could start there, with a minor backfill to explain Ani’s mother in slavery. It’s two hours of wasted time.
Why was Qui-Gon Jinn so goddamned concerned with Anakin? 
We know that Qui-Gon Jinn wanted to “bring balance to the Force,” but that’s not a motivation: that’s a reason.  And as a writer, motivations trump reasons.
Take another example: why does Darth Vader try to recruit Luke in the Empire Strikes back? The reason is that he needs an ally to fight the Emperor.  Okay, fine, but emotionally that doesn’t tell us what itch that’s scratching in Vader’s burned little head.
The motivation is that he wants to join up with his long-lost son and create a new family.
Reasons give us logical rationales. Motivations tell us what emotional urge this satisfies.
We have reasons for Qui-Gon Jinn going “WE HAVE TO MAKE THIS BOY A JEDI.”  But at no point do we know why he’s so hell-bound on this. Is Qui-Gon Jinn dissatisfied with the Jedi Council’s lying and secrecy and secretly wants to undermine it?  Was he himself an orphan at some point and cannot bear to leave a boy behind? Is Qui-Gon Jinn just secretly sick of whiny Obi-Wan and is desperate to find himself a new partner?
Done properly, when the trilogy finished, we’d have an idea of whether Qui-Gon ultimately got what he wanted, or whether things went horribly ironically wrong for him. As it is, Qui-Gon Jinn is an enigma: his every action tells us what he wants, but we never find out why.
Why did Lucas get so wrapped up in terrible CGI?  
Watching Revenge of the Sith, there’s a great moment where Anakin and Obi-Wan climb out on a gantry, fighting, and it’s clear it’s a real gantry.   The actors have to adjust their weight, look worried they might fall off, are tentative.
Then, two minutes later, Anakin is standing on a tiny robot zooming forward at thirty miles an hour over a river of lava, and he looks exactly like he’s standing on a greenscreen floor. Because he is.
Cracked has a good article on why modern CGI looks surprisingly crappy, but it’s particularly telling in Lucas films, where the actors don’t seem to have been told where they are. There’s one scene in the latest Raiders where the actors are standing feet away from boulders rocketing past their face, and they don’t react like humans by cringing or expressing some hesitation or nervousness, because they’re not rooted in the moment.
I wish Lucas had recognized that practical effects make the actors sell it more.
Was Anakin justified or not? 
The biggest problem with the sequels is it wants to have it both ways: Anakin Skywalker’s fate is a tragedy, but he’s not really a villain. And so it dilutes its punch by going, “Well, Anakin’s bad, but he’s got some good sides!”
You gotta commit, George. If the Jedi Council was bad, then show how worm-infested they are. And if Anakin was bad, then he’s gotta do more than kill some offscreen “younglings.”  But as it is, Revenge of the Sith’s strongest scene is where the Emperor is talking to Anakin about how the Jedi council is spying, and stealing, and they obscure knowledge, and yet oh wait they’re the good guys and who’s right again?
There’s ambiguity, and there’s feeling like the movie can’t make it its damn mind. The prequels flop back and forth between whether the Jedi Council was efficient and undermined by a creatively evil mastermind, or weak and shoddy and deserving of fresh ground.  Alas.
If Padme really didn’t want to have anything to do with Anakin, how come an experienced politician like her invited him alone to her romantic bungalow and wore skimpy outfits straight out of the Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogue?
Did someone tell the costume designer what this scene was supposed to be?
Where did Padme’s motivation disappear to? 
She died of a broken heart? Just gave up? Oh, well, that’s good.
 

I Was Never Kinky.

“I was always kinky/sexual,” she says. “Even though I didn’t lose my virginity until I was 17, pretty much right after I started experimenting with kink, threesomes, lesbian sex, and orgies.”
And I feel a little sad, because I was always just slutty.
Slutty’s different. You don’t need to know anything to be slutty.
Which is to say that I didn’t so much as kiss a girl until the month before my seventeenth birthday, but from then on it was lighting a firework. I dated wildly, widely, catastrophically, racking up about forty new women in the next four years…
But weirdly, I was also strangely vanilla.
I knew about kink, of course. I’d read all up on PENTHOUSE LETTERS, and Playboy advice columns, back in the days long before the Internet. But that was the moral equivalent of porn. I knew threesomes existed, I knew that people tied each other up, I knew that bisexuality was A Thing, but…
Culturally, I knew nothing, Jon Snow.
These were days long before the Internet, a good decade before THE ETHICAL SLUT was penned, and so while I’d heard of wife-swapping I’d never heard of polyamory. I knew about whipping people, but never understood what purpose it fulfilled in people’s lives.
Basically, there were normal people, and then there was Kink. And Kink was a big red door you passed through and never returned from, an all-consuming passion that devoured all your other hobbies, and when you became A Swinger you never woodworked or had children or played tennis, you just fucked and fucked and fucked because nothing else satisfied.
And to be fair, the handful of Swingers I bumped into were like that, omnivorous, not interested in mere friendship, every relationship they had angling towards getting you in bed. If you didn’t fuck them within a few months, the fuse was burning down, and once they realized you weren’t walking willingly towards their bedchamber, the friendship terminated.
None of this was shameful, mind you. If they wanted to surf on a tide of Crisco, good for them! I had no problems with gay men spending their days in bathhouses losing their minds in anonymous sex.
Yet I had other hobbies, so I wasn’t kinky. The PENTHOUSE LETTERS erotica was mostly the same: Innocent, Roped Into Crazy Once-In-A-Lifetime Adventure. You couldn’t just start kink, you had to have someone basically abduct you into it.
I was a lesbian sheep, waiting patiently for someone to arrive, not quite sure how to start this process. I would have welcomed a threesome, or some crazy orgy, but those didn’t just happen – they were planned, by Orgy People, with Orgy Invites. The Orgy People owned Orgy Apartments.
So I ran rampant with vanilla sex, and some of it was in weird places – in the backs of hearses, on the floors of bookstores, certainly in theater bathrooms – but though I wanted threesomes, I didn’t know anyone who was a Threesome Girl. Because if you were a Threesome Girl, then you’d be nothing but a Threesome Girl, and all I knew were women who went to concerts and watched The Simpsons and had, you know, normal things.
Which was stupid, obviously. So fucking stupid. While I was doing all of this vanilla fucking, I was emceeing the goddamned Rocky Horror, surrounded by phone-sex girls and strippers and bisexual women who dressed up like men and fellated dildos for fun.
Yet I knew them in other aspects. And again, kink was the eclipse of all other hobbies, the black hole into which you fell and never emerged, and these people weren’t those people.
Furthermore, I wasn’t those people. It never even occurred to me to experiment. My girlfriend hog-tied me once and I fucking loved the experiment, but that wasn’t kinky. She just tied me up one day, bored, while we were watching television. If it was kinky, she would have worn An Outfit, and put on mood lighting, and started talking dirty – oh, God, I have such problems talking dirty – and I would have known that Kink Was About To Happen because man, Kink was a performance like Rocky Horror where Frank strode down that fucking floor and you knew.
She just tied me up. You couldn’t have kink in a living room with television reruns, man. Or have part-kink.
What I’d enjoyed wasn’t kinky, it was just… a thing. Which I didn’t know how to ask for. Because how do you ask someone to tie you up without it sounding kinky, and that’s awkward because you’re not kinky, you just want a girl to tie you up and sit on you?
Christ, I was so fucking stupid.
But that’s why I think the people who grew up with the Internet are at a real advantage. They’ve seen the same porn that I have, sure, but they’ve also seen FetLife and CollarMe and tons of other discussions of polyamory and kink and QUILTBAG issues where they can go, hey, alternative sexuality is an addition to a personality, not a subsumation of it. They watch accounts like KittyKuriosity’s Twitter feed, where yes, Kitty is a sexy owned painslut camgirl, but she also has pets and wants to be a vet some day and is getting into Final Fantasy cosplay.
And had I seen that melding back in the day, I think I would have been a lot kinkier. Because I could look at myself as I do today and go, “All right, I need to finish up my chapter of this book, and find some plans for the bookcase I want to start this weekend, and get some more alcohol for my fire wands, and get some ice cream.” That kink was a thing I did, not a destination.
I would have realized that some of those girls were Threesome Girls, I was just too stupid to see the signals, and I would have asked my girlfriend to tie me up, and I would have said “Hey, let’s try poly instead of me cheating all the damn time,” and I would have explored more.
Instead, I was convinced all that Kink stood far away from me, clearly for Other People, and I was a straight boy from Connecticut. It didn’t even occur to me that I could explore there.
But I’m here now. A little late. A little slow to understand that hey, maybe I could do that, too – even after all these years.
It’s a nice revelation to have.

AUTHOR ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: Kick-Ass Fan Art!

As I’ve been progressing down the path of Debut Novelist, I’ve been playing a secret game myself: when something happens to me that only happens to professional authors, I mutter, “AUTHOR ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED.”
Got my first blurb for Flex? AUTHOR ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED.
Book went into a second printing? AUTHOR ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED.
First appearance on a bestseller list? AUTHOR ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED.
First complaint that the ebook is too expensive, even though I have no control over pricing once the publisher buys it? First time I find my book pirated? Sure, I’m a little sad at people’s dickery, but AUTHOR ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED!
But today, my friends, is one of the happiest days in my Author Achievements, as it was one I was never certain would arrive:
Kick-ass fan art? AUTHOR ACHIEVEMENT FUCKING ROCKED!

This lovely image of Valentine DiGriz is brought to me by the most excellent Tormented Artist, who I’ve pondered doing webcomics with from time to time, but man, prose writing is just enough these days.  But Bill is extremely fond of the fuller female form, and as such Valentine was every bit as sexy to him as I’d hoped to convey.  And here she is, with all of her mental backup. I love her stance, and her shoes.
He assures me this will only get better as he fills in the inks and applies color.  Oh, I believe it.  His other art is also awesome, so check it out.

Say Yes To The Stress

In relationships, you can have identical actions that generate vastly different consequences. Kind of like watching “Say Yes To The Dress.”
Which is to say that my wife adores watching fluffy wedding shows where the bride tries on a zillion froofy outfits, parading this latest dress in front of her family, before finally settling tearfully on the perfect dress.
The bride flutters her hands in front of her face. Tears mean that this is the perfect dress. Gini tears up, too.
And sometimes, when Gini is having a bad day, she needs to curl up and watch a “Say Yes To The Dress” marathon.
We have one big television, so if she watches it, then I can’t spend my Saturday ferociously trying to beat the new Dragon Age game on the Xbox. And me, I need my videogames to blow off steam. Not destroying the Darkspawn will leave me stressed and unhappy.
Yet I recognize watching silly wedding shows makes Gini happy, and as such it’s a worthy thing to do. And so I’ll find something else to do on my laptop while Gini watches her dress shows.
Yet if I gritted my teeth the whole time, going, “I fucking hate this show, one day she’ll stop needing these stupid gown-parades, and until then she fucking owes me for putting me through this,” well, we’d have the exact same situation – me, watching “Say Yes To The Dress” with her – but the consequences and fallout would be profoundly different.
Which is to say that I occasionally get emails like, “Hey, I’m polyamorous, but I want my monogamous partner to be happy. Will this work?”
And the answer is that yes, they can – as long as they approach your polyamory as though it’s a choice they actively make in order to make you happy, and not some grudging sacrifice they make where there are secretly bills piling up, underlaid with the unstated assumption that this is a phase you’ll grow out of.
The two situations can look very similar – the monogamous partner staying at home, nervously passing time while you go out on a date – but one situation is going to implode eventually, whereas the other won’t.
And it’s okay that sometimes, you’re going to be uncomfortable in this relationship. Because the truth is, almost every partnership involves you stretching in some uncomfortable ways to accommodate your other partner’s needs. When our goddaughter Rebecca died, Gini dealt with her grief by withdrawing and silence, I dealt with it by needing hugs and attention. We both sacrificed our needs temporarily, switching off between me leaving Gini alone when my body screamed for hugs, and Gini cuddling me when her body screamed for isolation.
But we never resented. Because during those moments, we actively said, “Yes, this is outside our comfort zone, yet I love them enough to stretch beyond what I’m comfortable with.”
It’s possible that I could have left Gini alone for a day, yet silently seethed with frustration that she was being so unreasonable, wondering why the hell she couldn’t just get over this. The result would have looked the same, but eventually the resentments would have exploded into arguments.
But I chose willingly. Not because it would enable us to stay together, but because it would make her happy.
The root motivation makes all the difference.
So if you’re trying to decide how to make something work out, whether it’s a new partner or a switch to poly or a downshift from heavy BDSM adventures to more “vanilla” sex or any of the thousands of differences that can divide two people, a common mistake is to just get them to do the actions. Too many negotiations hinge upon Doing The Thing – but it’s not enough for them to just sit there passively, resenting the compromise, quietly blaming you for this fault.
They need to say yes to the dress.

Why Attack of the Clones Sucked

On Monday night, we celebrated by playing Star Wars trivia at our local nerd bar.  So on Tuesday, I posted this to Twitter:

Got so excited over Star Wars trivia last night that what the hell, we’re watching the prequels today. I’M SURE THEY’RE NOT THAT BAD

— Ferrett Steinmetz (@ferretthimself) May 5, 2015

The response was as though millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.
Yet the weird thing is that The Phantom Menace is bad, but it’s weirdly bad, uniquely bad, the Rebecca Black’s “Friday” of bad, where yes it’s a terrible movie and yet there’s just enough good remaining in it to stick with you.  The visuals are often amazing: Princess Amidala’s outfits are beautifully improbable, the Gungan City is still a breathtakingly interesting, and the final lightsaber battle is still a physical feat of amazing stuntwork.
Attack of the Clones, however?  I’d forgotten whole swathes of it.  TPM sticks because it’s got so many unique elements, but Attack of the Clones slides out of you like yesterday’s bad burrito.
The weird thing about Attack is how Lucas forgot the number-one lesson about being a writer: a story is about growth.  Emotionally speaking we have to go from A to Z in our stories, and the ending of the prequels is known, Khaleesi.  We know Anakin will become Vader.  We know Obi-Wan eventually has to cap his ass.
So it is completely inexplicable that Attack of the Clones starts with Obi-Wan and Anakin sniping at each other.
They’re not friends, to start – they’re snappish, clearly separated already, and though Anakin recites some dialogue about “Obi-Wan is like a father to me,” there’s none of the camaraderie that we had between, say, Han and Luke.  They scowl at each other, Obi-Wan berating Anakin to oh, don’t go there, Anakin reminding Obi-Wan peevishly that he’s really good at the force, and…
Where’s the evolution?
We start off by seeing two people who don’t get along.  And then the plot makes it so that Anakin and Obi-Wan are instantly separated, and spend the next two hours on separate plot arcs, not even thinking about each other.
So there will be no surprise in the Star Wars series.  They started off fighting, and they end up fighting, and how do you get any emotional revelation from that?  If we’d seen them as really good buddies, the best of friends, two experienced men who trusted each other implicitly despite their differences, then this could have been heartbreaking. But no.  Lucas bobbles that.
He bobbles the relationship, too, where Anakin is instantly stalkerish to Amidala, and jealous, and angry, and again, we have no where to go except to wonder why the hell Amidala is attracted to this creep.  People blame Hayden Christianson’s performance, which Lord knows doesn’t help, but the dialogue is repeatedly I AM GOING TO CHOP OFF YOUR LIMBS HAH HAH ONLY KIDDING, and that’s the opposite of romance.
Like, we knew he was going to be Darth Vader. Why did Lucas forget to put in the reasons that we should be rooting for Anakin?  Was he afraid we would feel betrayed when he turned evil?  Yet what we get is clearly a nascent bad guy, and it’s hard to feel bad for him when he’s being a jerk all the time.
And Lucas forgets that we need to see people together. The scene with him and his Mom is sad, yes, but abstractly so, because Mom’s only gotten five minutes of screen time total.  The scenes with him and Obi-Wan are, as noted, almost absent after the first and last action sequence.  If you want us to understand two characters’ relationships, we need to see them working together, and it’s like Lucas went so heavy on the archetypes that he just assumed we’d be sad because Mothers Love Sons and Sons Losing Mothers is sad.
Even more bizarre: The special effects are worse, in Attack of the Clones. Watching Phantom Menace, Jar-Jar still holds up, and had TPM been a better movie I think we’d celebrate the visuals more. Attack of the Clones has Anakin riding very fake monsters, action sequences that are clearly CGI, and if you’d asked me from an SFX perspective, I would have told you that TPM was made after Attack.  It looks cheesier.
And again, Attack is weirdly bland.  I remember several scenes from TPM vividly, but Attack seems to be pasted together from other movies.  The chase scene through Coruscant is very well done, but visually it’s a sped-up Blade Runner.  The space scenes are, well, space scenes, and the white light of the clone factory looks like an Apple store, and the glorious fields of Amidala’s home retreat are generic romance covers with a bit of sci-fi mixed in.  Attack of the Clones is both stunning and redundant, and I kept looking up and going, “Oh, yeah, that’s there, too.  How did I forget?”
But it’s easy to forget.  The movie is cloned, its sources too clear, and it’s bad in the worst kind of way: the kind where you have to be prodded into remembering it exists at all.  Such a waste, when you had such a juicy storyline about friendship and betrayal and love curdled sour.
So much lost potential.