Author: Rocky Blonshine

I Am Altering the Deal: On TF.N’s Fanfic Rules

Posted on June 3, 2015by

Screen Shot 2015-06-03 at 7.24.07 AMA momentous decision has been made. At long last, the Jedi Council Forums allow same-sex pairings in fanfiction. Yes, you may say, that was mostly allowed for a while. It just had to be original characters only, and the most permitted was vague references. And now, we’re allowed to write same-sex pairings, and canon characters are included. Basically, the most controversial rule of the JC Forums has been repealed, and let’s just say Twitter went wild with the news. The responses have been overwhelmingly positive, and I for one am quite excited.

One of the most prominent places on the internet for Star Wars fandom was honestly not very friendly to LGBT fans. A rule that explicitly says that “the relationships you want to have are not ‘family-friendly’ enough for our site” is inherently discriminatory. However, it was the rule. We were told “it was handed down from the powers that be on this site.” There really was no way to get around it or discuss it. The old fanfic guidelines had examples of the maximum amount of sex and violence allowable, and honestly? If you’re going to allow that level of violence, two same-sex people holding hands is definitely nowhere near as scandalous. But apparently it was. It felt hypocritical and exclusionary. Read More

No Sleep Till Bespin – On Hyperspace Travel Times

Posted on May 22, 2015by , , , , and Not A Committee

Hyperspace_falcon

One of the best selling points of the canon reboot has been the opportunity to revisit troublesome details in the worldbuilding of the Galaxy Far Far Away that were either ill-conceived to begin with, or became overcomplicated as the years went on and new stories piled up. One detail that was confusing from the get-go is exactly how fast hyperspace is. For one thing, the film characters call it “light speed”, when it’s clearly got to be way, way faster than that—in fact, the films also tend to suggest each transit takes no more than a few hours; no one brings a change of clothes before departing Tatooine for Alderaan, and Luke doesn’t seem very stiff or grubby when he exits his X-wing on Dagobah.

So maybe you can’t blame the Expanded Universe for never really ironing out these inconsistencies; they didn’t have much to go on. When I raised this topic to the others, David Schwarz pointed out that West End Games’ original table for the transit times depicted in the original trilogy (below) actually contained a typo that suggested all these trips took a matter of days, not hours—which might have been more sensible, but certainly doesn’t seem to be the films’ intent, and isn’t that more important?

Meanwhile, one of my own favorite examples dates all the way back to Heir to the Empire—the Star Destroyer Chimaera, with a hyperdrive faster than even the Falcon‘s, takes five days to travel from Myrkr to Wayland. Look for those two planets on the Essential Atlas‘ galactic map and you’ll find them practically right on top of each other at the coordinates N-7. So if it takes five days to go that tiny distance (and it’s not a freak detail; multi-day hyperspace journeys factor into the Thrawn trilogy alone on multiple occasions), how the hell did Luke survive a trip from Hoth (K-18) to Dagobah (M-19) without his body eating straight through that flight suit? Read More

Pick and Choose: Not Always Liking Canon

Posted on May 20, 2015by The Holocron

DEOssusLibraryWhat do we accept as canon, how do we perceive canon, why does it matter? It matters because there are things we aren’t willing to give up. Those don’t have to be large elements; it may be something small, concepts, ideas, whatever it is that really makes Star Wars what it is. Our relationship as fans with the Star Wars canon has varied over the years, and now that we definitely know what is and isn’t canon, that doesn’t necessarily make it easier for us to feel at peace with it. It feels like we’re living in a blended universe nowadays, where there is a possibility of many things becoming canon even if little is set in stone.

One of the best terms I’ve heard lately is “shadow canon.” There are plenty of ideas in Star Wars that haven’t been formally canonized, plenty of events not mentioned, but the references to them are plain. Clearly, there are some things that may have survived the great Legends announcement mostly intact, but may never be mentioned as such. Simply put, there are enough good ideas from Legends that it’s worth it to allow some things to make their way into canon, even if a bit indirectly. It brings a sense of unity and allows for the selection of the best elements of older canon. You can’t do a complete reboot without maintaining some of the original features of the story, and the small things being brought into new canon help Star Wars feel less empty.

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Paging the Next Generation

Posted on April 29, 2015by The Holocron

JediAcademyOne of the great problems of the old Expanded Universe is just how much it fails the next generation. For a galaxy-spanning tale of war and intrigue that ropes in thousands of years of characters, there can often be a striking lack of young characters, those ready to take the reigns as their elders die or retire. During a time of transition, of changing the guard so to speak, we must establish who is taking over. The prequels and many of the Old Republic-era novels are good at setting up new characters and allowing for the young to continue their forefathers’ legacy, but by the time of the Yuuzhan Vong invasion, much of this has broken down. The next generation has been lost and forgotten. Why? What really is its purpose, other than for plot? It’s time to accept that we need new main characters, something The Force Awakens appears ready to do.

Right now I’m in the middle of a Legacy of the Force re-read, and it strikes me as odd just how many we lose. Between the New Jedi Order and Legacy of the Force, so many of the next generation of Jedi (and their friends) die. Many of them are the ones we expect to take on their parents’ jobs in the future, and when we lose them and the old guard maintain their positions, suddenly it seems like the universe isn’t moving on as fast. We’re at the end of Fate of the Jedi, and only just now are the younger ones starting to inherit the galaxy from their parents. Note that these younger ones are well into their thirties by now, and many of the main characters are in their seventies. There’s a visible amount of characters we have lost, due to war and plot devices. Somewhere, the future of the story has to be established.

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Yankee Canon Swap: Reboot, Year One

Posted on April 24, 2015by , , , and Not A Committee

sw2chaykinWe knew early on that a group piece would be in the cards to celebrate this, the one-year anniversary of the Legends announcement. But without really planning it, it just sort of worked out that several of us had their own larger commentaries to offer on the reboot, modern fandom, and the current state of continuity—such that by the time we got around to today’s piece, I thought something more distinct was warranted.

With that, allow me to present Yankee Canon Swap! Which is an odd title that basically means I told the gang to pick a canon story to replace with a Legends one they preferred. But! That would be too easy, and really, borderline whiny. The thing is, there are very few canon stories to choose from at this point, and (though opinions vary) there isn’t really one universally agreed-upon stinker in the bunch that would make for an easy answer—so what I wanted was to get us thinking about Bigger Things than just which stories we liked and which we didn’t; I wanted to talk about priorities, by potentially forcing ourselves to reject a good canon story because what it represented wasn’t important enough to us as what some other story represented. Read More