Sunday, November 1, 2015

Behind the Scenes of "Star Wars: Force of Nature" - Part 7

Zillo-Beast Rejects: These guys were born from an idea I have concerning Kaiju movies in general. You know how people say the human stories are boring half the time because they’re doing nothing? They come around and all they do is talk at length and are ultimately ineffectual. At it’s worst, all we want at some point is to just get to the monster battle. In a lot of ways I sympathize with that, but at the same time one has to acknowledge that you can’t just have the big monster fight. It would be one big spectacle low on story or effects. We need the humans to add more story, to discuss exposition, set up plot points, everything that makes the movie have an actual narrative. Unless you want to have Godzilla talk, you don’t have a choice. The humans are needed in that way.

However, they should be more involved in the plot itself. They should have things they need to do beyond being ineffectual and maybe looking on like slack eyed gawkers. To keep them from being boring, maybe we should give them more agency. One where to do that would be with something I’ve developed over the years, Monster Mini-Minions. It’s similar to something they did in a tabletop game feauring kaiju, Coverfield, the Gamera vs Legion movie and, in some respects, the 98 Godzilla film.

What if the monster of the movie wasn’t alone? What if he or she had smaller versions allied with itself that did some extra dirty work. Like it’s the pack leader and all these other creatures follow it. In Monsterpocalypse, the Tabletop RPG I mentioned, they did this by having, not only big giant kaiju pieces to play as, but by making smaller pieces that represented a larger monster army aligned with the big Kaiju. It was really clever as an idea, as it gave battles greater dimension beyond just one big brawl taking up everything. If the monster had an army, the humans could be engaged in their own battles for survival. It’s similar to what the aliens in the later Godzilla films were like, an enemy for the humans to fight themselves, but allows the human characters to be more directly involved in the actual battle.

They did this in Cloverfield with those undersea skin lice creatures the monster brought with it. In the Legion movie the monster could disassemble itself and fought soldiers. Kinda like Destroyah did before he merged into one big devil monster. The 98 movie did this too, but ended up looking more like a Jurassic Park rip-off than anything else. I’m not saying it’s a perfect idea, but would give the humans more to do than just fart around which is a consistent complaint about Kaiju films.

The rejects were my idea of doing that, creating a mini-versions of the actual enemy monster and having them attack the Rebels. I knew that it would add some much needed switch up to the on going ground fight and make sure it didn’t devolve into something to similar to your standard Star Wars laser fight. I think it came out alright. Although just to clarify, not all the Rejects decided to go after Godzilla, there’s still a few that remained. It’s why I showed Vader killing some. Not just to showcase how cool he is, but to give myself a justification to use them in the finale if I want.

One thing that was good about the Rejects was how crazy I could go with them. Theyre mutated clones, so their anatomy can be a bit more crazy. Allowing me to do different kinds of things with them. Well, I should crazier, because they’re based off a three armed giant semi-reptilian monster. Still, really enjoyed writing them.

Ahsoka and Ezra: I see a lot of similarities between the both of them and I wanted a chance to explore that a bit. I figure the series proper might do this at some point, but I kinda wanted to suggest how it might play out in the show. Ahsoka can be seen as a different viewpoint on the Jedi, given her history. She could act like a second teacher to Ezra, like Obi-Wan was to her. In the process, maybe she could better learn how to reconcile her past with her present, because of who Ezra is. She was once a young aspiring Padawan like Ezra, but it didn’t turn out the way she wanted. In the meantime, he’s a lot more hopeful and idealistic about what being a Jedi means and hasn’t had the bad experience she has. So maybe, both of them can learn from each other.

Here I showed Ahsoka learning that idealism and optimism aren’t weaknesses and that maybe there’s still little bit of the Jedi in her that she didn’t leave behind at the end of Clone Wars. In respect to that, I’m really hoping they explore this and other angles in the show, in regards to both Ezra and Kanan. These three characters share a lot of similar experiences and themes and they each have their own idea on what a Jedi should be. So seeing how they interact is incredibly interesting to me and I really hope they take the opportunity that’s presented itself. They have more episodes this season, no sense in not using them.

Overall, I really enjoyed having the characters interact and allowing Ahsoka to share her history with Ezra a bit more and vice versa. It was a nice character study for both of them.

Devo Dies: Well, finally happened. Although he went out more heroically than originally planned. I wonder if anyone cares as much about his death because he wasn’t a major focus. Compared to Arch and Kamo, he was a bit of a third wheel. I do like how I did eventually end him though, giving him a chance to save Arch and go out in a blazr of glory. Better than being eaten I guess.

Again, I do wonder if anyone feels as saddened by his death as Arch does. I always worry about overplaying a death for more than it’s actually worth. Probably another reason I don’t do that many deaths when I feel they’re avoidable. You kill off people like flies, eventually no one cares, there’s no investment. I don’t like to treat characters like fodder, I like to hope everyone, background characters or otherwise, die for a reason and not in some incredibly stupid way to create drama. Devo died because he saved Arch first and didn’t think of himself. He wasn’t selfish enough. If he had just rocketed away he probably would’ve lived. Many Stormtroopers probably would’ve done that, but he’s not like that. I like to think that at least shows that his inability to follow Imperial doctrine made him a better person even at the cost of his life. I don’t know, just my thoughts on the matter.

Rebel Spy Revealed: Was this too obvious? Maybe it was. I’m not sure if anyone bought that Nulon was the traitor among the senior staff. I mean, come on, he’s too much of a coward. Part of me wonders if Boll was too obvious a choice, but in my mind it made the most sense given her own character arc in the original Zillo-Beast arc. At the start she was indifferent, but by the end she was remorseful and regretted her role in the creature’s death. Part of me feels she went through a long period of self-loathing and depression as she continued working on the project. She kept trying to justify it, over and over again. Until one day she couldn’t reconcile it anymore and decided to do something about it.

One nice thing was just the absolute heartbreak I knew it would cause Klusto. Here’s a guy who’s lost all his friends and had his image of the Empire completely turned upside down. Then, he goes to save the only woman he loves and trusts, and it turns out she didn’t need it. Worse yet, she was working against him all along, meaning she knew this attack was coming and did nothing to help stop it. In other words, she partially responsible for Sakal’s death. I think I like turning the average love story on its head like this, if only because I enjoy subverting romantic tropes. Oh I love the traditional love story, but I have a strange thing about romances that don’t work out how you’d expect. Maybe it’s because I’ve come to realize, love isn’t nearly as simple as a lot of stories claim. I’d go into this further, but it probably would be a bit depressing.

I had one concern, stemming from the fact that Boll’s motives also revolved around saving the Zillo-Beast series. You know how everyone complained that Bryce Dallas Howard’s character carried the theme of “She just needs to make babies” and before that a few people got pissying over “Black Widow is was forcibly sterilized”, yeah, I was concerned I fell into that trap. There seems to be this idea that too many stories with woman fall back into the “They have to be moms” trope. That if they just had kids their lives would be complete. And while I see that as a problem, not everyone needs children, I did not feel either of those characters, and by extension Boll here, were playing into that.

Claire in Jurassic World doesn’t "NEED Children”, that’s not her arc, it’s just something that her sister suggests and she quickly laughs off. Claire’s arc is about realizing that nature isn’t something you can commercialize and that she’s sacrificed a lot of her life in order to be a successful business woman. She had therefore lost a connection with those around her and has become introverted to an excessive degree. Causing her to place her job over her family and the creatures she is in charge of. Through the course of the movie, she has to realize that life isn’t a series of numbers on a chart and her “assests” are living breathing thinking beings that aren’t just products to peddle. It’s not about her just needing kids and to suggest that’s all her arc is about is ludicrous. As for Black Widow, it wasn’t that “being sterile makes her a monster” it’s that she doesn’t even have the choice because it was taken away from her. Because being preggers would just be inconvient to her handlers in Russia, because it’s easier to have an assassin who can’t claim maternity leave. Rather than allow her the choice, they took it away and in doing so it made her just an expendable object they could sick on their enemies because she had nothing to lose. It wasn’t about “I can’t be a mom, I’m horrible and inhuman”, it was about “I can’t even have the choice, it was taken from me in the hopes it would make me a better killer and in some ways I think it did.”

I was really concerned that Boll making baby Zillo-Beasts in eggs would make it look like “She just wanted kids”, but that’s not what it’s about. I wanted to be sure it read as “Boll feels guilty over her entire career being used to make weapons and she wants to actually create something.” Because science isn’t about making bigger bombs, it’s about making new discoveries. She found one in the Zillo-Beast and she was forced to kill it to save her career. She didn’t care enough at the time and she hated herself for it. So she saw this as a chance to save an entire species. If anyone suggests that’s not noble than I guess the folks who considered bringing mammoths back to life “just wanted kids of their own to fill a void” or some crap.

I guess I can’t avoid people deciding that’s what I did, but at the very least I hoped I presented enough within the story for things to be understood. That my intentions are clearly shown. That Boll isn’t doing this to have kids, she’s doing it to right a wrong she played a part in committing. I guess if anything else, I don’t want my work to be misinterpreted as pushing a tired old trope that I don’t agree with myself. It would be like having an anti-racism message and the book coming across as racist. It would be really disappointing to me because I’d had failed in my intent. That’s something every writer worth his or her salt should fear I feel.

Return to the Mindscape: So I was a bit worried when I was writing this, but I think it came out great. I had already stated that Godzilla actions stemmed from his anger over what humans did to him and that a lot of what he did was out of a desire for revenge. I made it pretty clear his reasons for doing what he did was because he felt himself justified, that man’s faults made co-existence impossible. That one of them had to go and he wasn’t going. So he attacked them en masse, becoming a God of Destruction. But my plan always involved Godzilla realizing that he was using his rage too much and that it was becoming a weakness. And that he would discover this with the help of the Jedi, Ezra in particular because of his own feelings of rage and anger that once overtook him.

I was concerned this would feel repetitious given what Godzilla’s scenes and self-reflection have suggested. He has a low opinion of humans and wants them to suffer as he has, but I hoped that in this scene, in actually examining the why of his anger, that it would show a change in his thought process. That while humans have faults, he’s angry more at an action and not the humans himself. That his concern with self-preservation was overriding his true purpose as a force of balance. It was my explanation for why Godzilla stops being a bad guy and starts being a hero, that he discovered a better way. That way being he controlled his rage instead of letting it control him.

I decided to do that through going back to the mindscape and showing it this time from Godzilla’s perspective. He heres the voices of the Jedi and they hear his internal thoughts, mainly because he doesn’t talk. From his perspective he’s just thinking towards their words, soaking them in. But for Ezra and Ahsoka, they’re expericing those waves of thought again. Weaker than before, but still there. I’m not sure how well that got across or if got confusing. If you pay attention you can tell who is talking in the conversation, but at the start Godzilla doesn’t make differentions between the two Jedi. He just knows they’re different people but doesn’t care at first which one is speaking. As things get a bit more personal and Ezra starts breaking through to him, Godzilla actually personalizes him and his mind focuses on him in terms of age and gender.

It’s a bit of a weird concept and it may read strange for some, but I think it came out fairly well. I was worried about some of Godzilla’s dialogue sounding pretentious at points, but given he’s a Japanese Monster who is a bit like a Ronin Samurai in many respects, that kind fits for him. Being melodramatic and prose-like in his thought. Either way, it’s significant turn in Godzilla’s motives. Instead of wanting revenge and a kingdom all his own, now he recognizes that there are those who share his opinions on nature. There are those who are hurt just as much by this Empire as he is. It’s a small bit of empathy on his part. Recognizing that his goals have evolved, this is no longer just about getting what he wants, it’s about making a statement and showing the Empire it will not go unpunished for its crimes.

In this way, Godzilla truly joins the Rebellion, understanding their own motives are much like his own. That sometimes you need to destroy something to bring about a better world. That’s what a lot of Kaiju films are like if you think about. These creatures represent disasters and science gone wrong, their actions force the world to confront its sins and come together. Mothra did that in 1961 with her debut and before that Godzilla forced the world to confront the reality they had created through the atomic bomb.

I’ll accept criticism about Godzilla’s slight change in character, but in my opinion, if Godzilla is in your story as a character... he deserves an arc of some sort. All the stupid squishy humans get one, the king deserves a narrative all his own. He’s the title character after all!

New Rebels Episodes: I really thought I'd have finished this before that episode aired, but again this hasn't been the best year for me. I'm happy to see a few of the things I did lined up with my ideas, both those I've presented and those I will, but it has made me rethink a few things for how I will present those ideas. Actually, in some ways, the episodes helped to justify some of my decisions. Apparently the AT-ATs that appear in one of the episodes are an older and in fact bigger model than the ones in Empire Strikes Back. Which is fine by me, cause that means the AT-ATs in this story are in fact those same extra bigger AT-ATs which makes the fights with Godzilla a bit more scaled proportionately.

I don't try to get too beat up about the official canon tripping over my work. I know some fanfic writers do that, but really I find that petty. Your story wasn't canon from the start. You don't work on the show. It would be really cool if I wrote something and it actually turned out to be true because it means my fanfic now has legitimacy or something, but really, it doesn't matter. All I care about is making a good story that feels worthy of the original source. I don't really give too much of a crap if it doesn't match up perfectly. Seeing a few folks get pissy on their fanfics being ruined feels immature to me. Come on guys, there's being critical of the original source and then there's just getting pissed off cause your ego got bruised. Relax, it ain't the end of the world.

Subsequently, I may change a few things in response to what's going on this new season, but ultimately all I care about is telling a good story. That's my first priority, not having my ego stroked cause I totally got an upcoming episode or chapter or plot point nailed six months in advance. That's just cool to have happen to you, but it's not the end of the world if it doesn't.

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