"Two fighters against a Star Destroyer!?"

Another Tuesday, another highlighted trope. Every week we venture into the black hole that is TV Tropes and investigate a theme or device that makes the entertainment we love work. Up on the docket is a favorite of mine: Deadpan Snarker.

A character given to gnomic, sarcastic, sometimes bitter, occasionally whimsical asides.

The Deadpan Snarker exists to deflate pomposity, point out the unlikelihood ofcertainplans, and deliver funny lines. Typically a Deadpan Snarker isthe most cynical supporting character. In most cases, it is implied that the snarker would make a good leader, strategist, or consultant given their ability to instantly see the flaws in a constructed plan. More often than not, their innate snarkiness is the only thing preventing the other characters from comprehending this for themselves. In other cases, the Deadpan Snarker resorts to sarcasm because they’re the Only Sane Man.

The Star Wars Expanded Universe has a number of these characters. Most notable is Mara Jade, the snarky foil that Luke Skywalker so desperately needed in his life. Of course, their son Ben takes after mom. One of my favorite lines from him in Fate of the Jedi occured after Luke had relayed some stories of personal failure.

Ben: You know, it gives me hope that you screwed up so badly and so consistently as a kid, Dad.

From the X-Wing novels, you’ve also got Ton Phanan and Hobbie Klivian. The latter of which played the role of Deadpan Snarker perfectly in Starfighters of Adumar. A non-Star Wars example I’ve enjoyed lately was the character Fran Kranz played in Cabin in the Woods. That’s a case of mixing genre savvy with deadpan snarker.

Case study in this trope.

Welcome back to another edition of Trope Tuesday, our weekly sojourn into the abyss that is TV Tropes. Each week we aim to look into a literary theme, device, or quirk that gives some color to our favorite entertainment. On the docket this time around: Depending on the Writer.

In some stories, a character is very different every time they appear — so different that it’s almost a different character with the same name. This is particularly common with Long Runners and comic books, due to the large number of writers on staff. But there are some characters where even the same writer makes them different every time.

This is not Character Development — nothing happens in the story to justify the personality change. Writer on Board or Creator Breakdown might, though.

Don’t get this confused with characters with some actual depth. Just because you can’t predict a character’s moves 100% of the time doesn’t mean they’re inconsistent. Now, if you can predict a character’s moves 100% of the time only when you know who’s writing, then they’re definitely inconsistent.

Different writers with different ideas and understandings of the work are also the usual culprit of Continuity Drift.

Talk about a trope that is tailor-made for the Star Wars Expanded Universe. Let’s just take a look at the last major series that wrapped up, Fate of the Jedi. In my review of the series as a whole, I hit on something that really hurt it in my mind: the stark differences in how Luke Skywalker was written. On the one hand, you had Aaron Allston who erred towards the Luke you saw in the films. Somewhat optimistic, someone who hadn’t strayed too far from his Tatooine farmboy roots. On the other hand, you had Troy Denning’s Luke Skywalker, who regularly says that family members and sixteen-year-old girls are beyond redemption. Yeah.

Two ends of the personality spectrum for one character. These are the kinds of things that happen when you have so many different authors working with pre-established characters. You might get a Allston-style Luke, who feels very grounded into the source material. You might also get a Luke that veers perhaps too much into Darker and Edgier territory. When it gets really strange is when you get these different Lukes in back-to-back books. Going from Vortex to Conviction was a relief in one sense because the latter felt significantly more like Star Wars than the former, but there’s no denying the jarring shift in tone and themes when jumping between authors in a series like Fate of the Jedi.

Welcome to another edition of Trope Tuesday, where we hit up the black hole of productivity and investigate a literary theme or device that helps our favorite entertainment chug along. This week, we’re hitting on one that many Expanded Universe fans are intimately familiar with: Retroactive Continuities, or Retcons.

Reframing past events to serve a current plot need. When the inserted events work with what was previously stated, it’s a Revision; when they outright replace it, it’s a Rewrite. The ideal retcon clarifies a question alluded to without adding excessive new questions. In its most basic form, this is any plot point that was not intended from the beginning. The most preferred use is where it contradicts nothing, even though it was changed later on.

While the term comes from comic books, dating to All-Star Squadron #18 in 1983 and shortened to “retcon” by the end of the decade, the technique is much older. Often, it’s used to serve a new plot by changing its context; however, it’s also done when the creators are caught writing a story that violates continuity and isn’t very plausible.

In Marvel Comics, the person who pointed out the problem and at the same time provided a plausible explanation was awarded a Genuine Marvel Comics No-Prize by editor Stan Lee, a tradition that was kept alive by other editors after he became publisher.

See also Ass Pull, which is something that was not properly set up before it is sprung on the audience. It is related to Deus ex Machina. Some but not all retcons are Ass Pulls, and a good retcon can actually improve the current narrative. A good way to get away with a retcon is to reveal new implications or motivations for events that have already been established.

Where do you even start in Star Wars? This is a franchise that ties itself into knots trying to explain away any minor-to-major inconsistency that crops up whenever a new book accidentally invalidates something an older book said. Or when The Clone Wars television series simply steamrolls swaths of the Expanded Universe. The latter (among other things) got author Karen Traviss to ragequit right before she was scheduled to start writing the Fate of the Jedi series.

You know retcons are important to a franchise when they hire a guy to keep tabs on all of them. Hello, Leland Chee, the Keeper of the Holocron.

Granted, all sorts of series in all sorts of mediums have needed to resort to retcons to keep things straight. The Other Star Franchise, anyone? No one, however, seems to be in the same league as Star Wars when it comes to making sure anything and everything fits into a lone canon.

It’s Tuesday, which means I’m about to bludgeon you over the head with another entry from that great timesink in the cloud, TV Tropes. This week, we’re examining one we like to call Darker and Edgier.

A Tone Shift that seeks to make a work of fiction “more adult”. Usually, this is practically interpreted as “add more sex, profanity, heavy violence, and controversial content”.

This trope usually means that a show will attempt to shift towards seriousness, cynicism and grit. In theory, archetypes which we are usually accustomed to acting in a more noble setting will have to act in one where they must think and act grimly in order to make progress, thus forcing re-examination of the tropes involved and making a different sort of character. In practice, though, writers often are too lazy to make use of what most of those words mean, and ending up randomly “spicing up” a work with gratuitous gore, cursing, and sex. See Not A Deconstruction

When a show uses this trope as a tagline, expect anything that can go wrong will go wrong, the setting to be a World Half Empty, everyone to be bastards, lots of unpleasant things happen to the characters or backstories giving the characters a particular issue they can spend time angsting about.

As we can expect, this is fairly easy to screw up and poor use of these tropes can just result in Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy and Narm instead.

Thankfully, the Expanded Universe hasn’t fallen victim to this trope. I mean, it’s not like fans are keeping a running tally of how many major characters get killed, abandoned the tone and philosophy of the source material, or shifted the villains from tactical geniuses to more trite Eldritch Abominations or any…

Erm…

It’s Tuesday! Which means it’s time to dive back into that wonderful time sink full of literary themes and devices, TV Tropes. On the docket this week: Fate Worse than Death

Think death is the cruelest fate? Think again. There are several things much worse: torture, taxes, and tofu, to name but a few. And more often than not, some unlucky soul will experience it. Originally, this phrase meant rape; that’s still one possible meaning. And now there’seven worse than that.

This phrase is usually used in a Just Between You and Me moment by the Evil Overlord as he boasts about the agony-inducing Death Trap that awaits the hero for delaying his plans. It’s also fairly commonly used as a warning to the hero against seeking forbidden power or knowledge, and consequently to foreshadow the particular Karmic Death the villain will suffer because of meddling with the universe’s Cosmic Keystone.

The Galaxy Far, Far Away is practically filled with fates infinitely worse than death. I mean, there’s being digested over the course of a thousand years by a Sarlacc. Forcing to merge and become one with some sort of Eldritch Abomination. Getting frozen alive. Carnal relations with giant bugs. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather take a blaster bolt between the eyes than face down the other horrors the Galaxy seems to have in store for people.