Jar Jar's Bizarre Adventure - Exodus - Chapter 1
#1 of Jar Jar's Bizarre Adventure
I got to thinking one day as I was hearing people still complain about the 1999 "Phantom Menace" Star Wars movie: What if instead of bitching about it, somebody tried to FIX it? Further to that question, I thought: What if George Lucas had done a SECOND draft?
Comic relief isn't what Phantom Menace needed. What it needed was a Han Solo-like counter balance to the Jedi. I didn't turn Jar Jar into Han Solo, but I did try to turn him into a dramatic foil rather than a "comic" foil.
Here's the introduction and the first chapter of my vision for a better Phantom Menace. Which do you prefer: This fan fiction I wrote, or the original film?
Everything you've been told was a lie. Well, damn near everything. For one thing, my people don't talk like Sy Snootles after an all-night spice jag. Here's the thing about totalitarian dictatorial empires: They_control the _information. It's a big step in suppressing opposition to one's power. Heck, I hail from under the sea in the outer rims, and even I know that much. Even still, I have taken an incredible risk to bring these truths to you, and I will not waste this opportunity with the same lies you've been led to believe about the Empire, the Rebellion, and the events that led up to this entire sordid cold war. What you have been told up until this tale has been propaganda.
My name is Jar Jar Binks, and this is my story.
Jar Jar's Bizarre Adventure
Written by Terry Echoes
You probably wonder why a Gungan wasn't living beneath the sea with his own kind, particularly after decades of conflict with the colonial humans. Our amphibious biology lends us to thrive whether on land or underwater, and the environments of Naboo have been and will ever remain pivotal to our species' deeply spiritual culture. However, war equals bloodshed, a reason why most are all too content to permit the Empire's transgressions against them. Sometimes getting results comes at a cost, and those costs may be too high, or far more than ever intended. I've never been able to narrow my banishment from Gungan civilization to just one reason, but I was living an incongruous existence both as an uncelebrated war hero and a danger to society.
EXODUS - Chapter 1
I spilled the whole basket of carrots when I saw what they had done. I watched as everything was taken away from me, everything I had scrounged and "borrowed" to build. In a flash, what little solace I had was dashed before my very eyes, crudely slugged into the mud like a smashed bottle, and even the cacophony of snickering blades and chunnering metal turned to white noise in the haze of my distraught mind. I could feel all the blood pounding at the front of my skull as I watched in helpless distress of what the Droid army was capable. An internal scream tore my brain in half in the same shape as my arboreal home had been smushed with callous disregard.
And it had been such a lovely morning.
I awoke, sitting up, ready to tackle the day. I stretched, leapt to my feet, and stepped out of my treehouse and into the pulley basket I had spent weeks constructing and months perfecting. I wheeled myself down the mighty skywood, the largest trees to grace the rainforests of Naboo. They smelled like fruit when they were sopping wet, and there had been a refreshing storm the night prior. I welcomed the cool mist that doused me as the trees exuded excess moisture from their mighty fronds as though wringing out a sponge. I always liked to start my day with a quick bath in a nearby pond which was the main reason I had situated my house here, and then it was time to gather some breakfast.
The snow carrots are always swollen after a day of sun and a night of rain. They're a widespread tuber of three orange "limbs" that grow best in the wild. You wait a bit for them to dry out just a little, then you can snap them in three and chow down just like that. Sure, you can cook 'em up any way you like, but just plain raw after rinsing them is great too. They taste just like ice cream, I thought, and with all the nutrients, my hungering stomach would soon be appeased.
As I had been digging them up and counting them into my handwoven basket, I heard the grackle of a crawcraw bird somewhere overhead, probably drilling into trees for her own food. Wildlife may not be much for conversation, but they make for an excellent song. I decided to entertain myself as I so often did by reciting what little I remembered from some performance I had seen as a child; some play about pirates and love and the long ago. I had been hamming up the voices when I finally noticed the ground shudder. I thought this was rather odd, the ground seizing as though reality had been ruptured, or as if a record geyser might issue forth at least as tall as the Great Tiboo on the southern continent. I quickened my pace and spurred myself further onward as a thought crossed my mind that the brontonyrax had migrated this way again. I rolled my eyestalks at the chore defending my house would be.
It wasn't what you'd call a big house. Bamboo studs, shearbark walls, ironfrond roof. Two windows, a door, and a mattress. Every day I could doodle on the walls, give myself a fridge or a TV, and by morning the dew would wipe it all down. Then I could have a jacuzzi and a stereo. Not that I needed such luxuries anymore. Not that they'd fit inside, what, a thirteen by eight foot shack? Living out here, doing rather than thinking, I lost all sense of scale, except when it came to the brontonyrax. I'd built my house plenty high up, but this bull had a longer neck than any of its reptilian brethren I had seen. I considered stopping by the shoreline to arm myself from any new flotstam or jetsam, but it was too far a hike and I really wanted to get home. I still had plenty of boomers lying about, little blue orbs that splatter and zap good whatever they hit. Brontonyraxes hate having things thrown or jabbed at them.
When I studied the mud along the route back home, I realized the colossal dinosaurs had left tracks tearing away in the opposite direction. I heard one last raspy grackle overhead and managed to glimpse a crawcraw--probably the same crawcraw--flapping for its life. Now my chest was tight. My haillu (Gungan ears, basically) itched with anticipation. Still clutching my basket for dear life, I broke into a run.
I was deafened by the sounds of timber being cut, and mighty trees crackling and falling with enough force to lift me off the ground. What in the hell was happening? In, gosh, ten years at least, I had never seen the droid army up close. Well, I still wasn't; it was only their machines, their skyscraper tanks rumbling stupidly forward and terrorizing the rainforest. Why the hell were they out here? I'd left my last home to get away from these mechanical monstrosities, and now they were here, in the middle of absolute nowhere, as if the galaxy was intent to spite me.
The Humans of Naboo lived far from any Gungan settlement. They were the ones who ventured out into the galaxy. They were the ones the Droids wanted. What did half a year's work ever do to them? That bamboo wasn't easy to source, mind you. I wanted to drop into a curled-up heap on the ground.
But then it all came back to me: The constant barrage of meaningless noise that deafened you, the threat of encroaching death, the big shadowy "Them" of the opposition. The bottle was cracked, and I had been let free of all the faithful inhibition my solace had afforded me. The voices in my head were no longer the voices of actors, but the shouts and screams of soldiers.
I left my basket behind and reached for my hip, only to find no blaster there. Nothing I could use. It was just me, six-foot-eight, and the big brown machine with the buzzsaws, a few hundred feet. May as well have been a few thousand. Trees that had spent centuries reaching for the sky were emasculated and falling around my errant, swaying form, and all I could do was look up, up, up into the steely jaws ready to tear me asunder.