Notes: Imperial Justice, Pt. 2
On being cruel to fictional characters
WARNING: These notes will completely spoil Servants of the Empire: Imperial Justice. Haven’t read it? Stop and go here.
(Part 1 of Imperial Justice notes are here. Go here for notes for Edge of the Galaxy and here for Rebel in the Ranks.)
Part 2: Justice
In the second part of Imperial Justice, Zare discovers the consequences of continuing his quest to find Dhara, pushing him to a fateful decision. He’s made enemies of both Roddance and Oleg, and the net seems to be closing on him. It’s definitely closing on Merei – and worst of all, our protagonists no longer have each other, as their relationship goes from strained to finished.
Maybe this is a good place to stop and talk about being cruel to fictional characters.
UH-OH, Y’ALL, HE’S DRAGGING OUT THE SOAPBOX.
About a million years ago, a small but vocal segment of Star Wars fandom lost its collective mind about (wait for it) Kevin J. Anderson’s decision to kill off General Madine in Darksaber. I read the back-and-forth in disbelief. General Madine? Really? The guy who was inserted into Return of the Jedi as insurance in case the Mon Calamari masks weren’t expressive enough? Beyond that, I couldn’t figure out what those angry fans wanted. A novel in which Madine accompanied Luke & Co. on picnics, everyone was nice to each other and nothing bad ever happened?
Unfortunately, that pretty much was what this segment of the fanbase wanted, for every character you’d expect them to care about and a bunch of others besides. (Once again: Madine? Really?) I’ve learned that every fandom has this faction, and every writer has to politely but pointedly ignore its members, because there’s no storytelling that way – no conflict, no suspense, no growth and ultimately no measurable audience.
As fans, few of us take things that far. (Thank goodness!) But even a moderate-sized draught of Protect My Favorites is bad for storytelling. A book will fail if readers don’t care enough about the characters. But a book will also fail if the author cares too much about the characters. That’s not your job. Your job is to manipulate them as required for the story – to which the storyteller must be “eternally and unswervingly loyal,” in the words of the great Isak Dinesen.
And sometimes that means your job is to be one cold-blooded motherfucker. Isak Dinesen probably wouldn’t have put it that way, but I bet she would have nodded.
I THINK HE’S CLIMBING OFF THAT THING. IT’S OK TO COME BACK.
Imperial Justice is indeed cruel to Zare and Merei, pushing them to breaking points beyond which they’re no longer the same people. But that cruelty is in service of the story and their breakup is an unhappy but logical outcome of their situation. They’re extremely capable, but they’ve navigated wrenchingly difficult times in part by being able to rely on each other for comfort and counsel. Once that’s taken from them, they struggle to adjust. Rather than helping each other through tough patches by talking, their inability to talk makes those tough patches worse. And once they can talk again, during Zare’s winter break, they discover it’s too late.
Zare returns to the Academy and is assigned, along with other cadets, to supporting Kallus’s crackdown on dissent – an exercise that Roddance hopes will force him into a mistake and his dismissal from Imperial service.
He’s paired with Oleg, his nemesis, and goes door to door asking Lothal citizens about their neighbors’ loyalties. The techniques are straight out of the fascist playbook, from breaking down social bonds by recruiting informants to using the letter of the law as a weapon. Same goes for the rhetoric that accompanies those techniques. It’s hard to disagree that evading even a minor law is wrong. It’s tough to argue that treason doesn’t, in fact, begin with disloyal thoughts. And it’s difficult to raise practical objections to rigorous law enforcement when you know you’ll be accused of being soft on crime.
Whether you’re in a galaxy far far away or a divided county close to home, opposing such rhetoric demands you say “yes but” to seemingly straightforward propositions, something depressingly few people have the strength and/or intellectual honesty to do. It’s tempting to drop the “but” and not think about the bigger picture, with its gray areas and complications and imperfect answers. (Of course, as a member of the military, Zare has far less leeway than that.)
There is some pushback to Kallus’s orders and discussion of those gray areas, which I used to explore the key characters’ different points of view. As true believers, Oleg and Roddance don’t care about those gray areas. Chiron is painfully aware of them but trusts that someone with more authority will do the right thing. It’s Zare who sees what Chiron can’t – that the Empire’s abuses aren’t a bug but a feature.
Things get worse from there, with Zare and the other cadets ordered to take the children of fugitives into “protective custody.” That forces Zare to confront the question that breaks him: What isn’t he willing to do in order to find his sister? Is Dhara’s life worth bringing pain and misery to many other families? Zare eventually finds his limits and vows that he won’t obey an order he knows is wrong, even though he knows such an order is inevitable. This is the trap Roddance has set for him, and Zare escapes it only because Oleg stumbles into his own trap first.
Merei, meanwhile, grows increasingly desperate to escape her mother’s investigation and Laxo’s organization. She and Jix cook up a plan to use a pulse-mag to erase her records at Bakiska’s – an attempt that relies more on bluster than planning, and predictably fails. But Merei then improvises, faking her own kidnapping and engineering an Imperial raid she convinces herself will send Laxo to prison. Instead, it results in the crime boss’s death, leaving Merei to live with the consequences.
I’d sketched out a chillier endgame, in which Laxo’s death was what Merei intended. My editor Jen Heddle objected to that, and she was right. The sticking point wasn’t the audience but the character – that was too ruthless for Merei at that point in the story. Having Laxo’s death be accidental, even if Merei should have realized the danger, was a better way of showing she was in deeper than even she realized, and raised the interesting question of how she’d react to a miscalculation that got people killed.
The lesson, as always: storytelling is a collaborative process, and editors are there to help you. Listen to them!
Notes on this section:
I enjoyed writing the scene of Merei, Rosey and Laxo’s thugs in the back of the speeder van. Girl’s got sand, as they put it in True Grit. Though I do feel kind of bad that I stuck Wookieepedia with a character whose name might be Gort and might be Vort and might be neither.
Laxo calling Merei “clever girl” is, of course, a nod to Jurassic Park – and one that foreshadows Laxo’s fate.
I liked the scene of Merei telling Zare how she waved to him when she passed the Academy, and being upset when she figures out he wasn’t there. If we think back to breakups, often we’ll remember a little thing that somehow became a big thing – and our queasy realization that the reaction was the tipoff that something was really wrong.
Holshef steps into Beck’s role as the conscience of Lothal, something that’s important in The Secret Academy. But note Holshef isn’t actually present in Imperial Justice beyond this brief flashback. I tried to thread a needle there: I needed to establish Holshef so he didn’t come out of nowhere in the next book, but I didn’t want to lose the focus on Merei. (I also didn’t have the word count to stretch out the way I’d need to.) So I wrote a brief scene to plant the seed and moved on.
Jix was an interesting character to play with. I saw his interest in Merei and her reaction to it as a way to ratchet up the emotional pressure on her. I also liked portraying a character who’s admirable but a little shy of “hero” status. Jix really is brave and wants to help Merei, but he’s just not cut out for this – as will become painfully clear in the next book. Merei, on the other hand, is figuring out that she’s capable of far more than she might have guessed.
I often say that writing for kids isn’t different than writing for adults, beyond the protagonists and manuscripts being shorter. It’s a good line, but only mostly true. One difference is what you show and what you don’t: we mulled showing Zare and Oleg rounding up children, but a) I didn’t have the word count and b) I thought that scene was too upsetting for a kids’ book.
Still, I’m not sure I would have included that scene in a work of adult fiction, either. Zare’s reaction is the most important takeaway from it, along with learning that he tried to minimize the kids’ trauma. I was able to establish both those things with a bit of dialogue and a quick flashback. I find that’s often a useful way to approach a scene, particularly when you’re pressed for space: figure out the scene’s primary function in the story, look for a secondary function, and think about how to check those things off as quickly and efficiently as possible.
The customs raid is where everything comes crashing down for Oleg – and we get the payoff from that seemingly stray detail about his uncles from Rebel in the Ranks. Oleg is done in by blind adherence to the letter of the law and guilt by association – an ironic comeuppance given his budding career as an eager young fascist. But we also see Zare smoothly take over the investigation when Oleg falters, and immediately capitalize on his rival’s stumble. Zare wouldn’t have raided the warehouse in the first place, and his decency compels him to speak up for Oleg – but that doesn’t stop him from eliminating an enemy. I don’t love recalling Imperial Justice, but I am proud of that scene: it advances the plot, characters and theme, and accomplishes all that in less than four pages.
I needed readers to react to Laxo’s demise by thinking that on some level he had it coming. That’s why we see him callously betray Pinson, and order Merei to watch as Holshef is turned over to a bounty hunter, which will lead to the gentle poet’s detention and death. Laxo’s charming, but has neither honor nor morals – Merei knows that sooner or later, he’ll sell her out too. Still, I wanted things to be a little more nuanced than that. So we also see that Laxo genuinely likes Merei and is more exasperated and disappointed than angry about the debacle with the pulse-mag.
Does the Inquisitor believe Zare has Force powers like his sister’s? Or is he merely using Zare to get to Ezra, Kanan and the other rebels? It’s not entirely clear in Servants of the Empire, and I liked the ambiguity. That said, I think the Inquisitor’s last line to Zare reveals a lot.
I had to do a few things in a hurry to get Zare “in place” for his cameo with Ezra from “Vision of Hope,” so we see him get his promotion and his new code clearance. The toughest part was arranging their meeting, since much of the book had shown Zare unable to speak freely with Merei. The obvious answer was to send a (very freshly repainted) Chopper. But how would Zare and the droid communicate? I fussed over various answers before going low-tech: a hidden note, complete with pen. Sometimes a plot solution is worse than the problem, so you just move on as quickly as you can.
Zare’s meeting with Ezra is followed by a brief scene in which Zare manhandles Oleg and essentially boots him out of the story. I liked that scene because it showed us a righteous and ruthless Zare. He’s changed since the beginning of Imperial Justice, but is that a good thing? Zare isn’t sure, and neither are we. (That last line sucks, though – it’s simultaneously purple and empty.) As for Oleg, I don’t know what became of him and ultimately it isn’t important. Oleg has no character arc – he’s a little jerk when he arrives and a little jerk when he departs. I can picture him as a brutal Capital City cop embittered by the theft of his chance at Imperial glory, or living out some similarly small and mean existence.
Epilogue
The epilogue is essentially a preview of The Secret Academy, setting up a few things that are important to that book. We find out that Zare hasn’t escaped but been maneuvered into greater danger by his enemies. Zare and Merei are moving on completely different tracks that may or may not converge. And Merei can’t resist more electronic snooping, suggesting that her getaway may not be so clean.
All of those elements would come into play in the series finale – but that’s another set of notes. See you soon!