Author: Rocky Blonshine

Collaborative Continuity: The Fan’s Place

Posted on April 10, 2015by

gffawide

Star Wars is a vast universe. Look at the galactic map– all that area labeled as Wild Space and the Unknown Regions, all of the new planets… But I digress. The most significant part of that vast universe is just how many people it takes to bring it to life and keep it going. Over the years, Star Wars has steadily absorbed more people. Many thought they might leave after one major event a year ago, many more have been drawn in, and the process of creation has not slowed. It’s not just about authors and artists- all of us as fans have a role in the Star Wars universe, and we can’t just dismiss ourselves as strictly the consumers. Even if I’ll never grow up to be a Jedi, I still feel like I’m a part of Star Wars fandom in a way that’s more than just being a consumer.

One year ago, something happened that shook the foundations of Star Wars. I’m still not always sure how I feel about it, and there are plenty of fans who are having a hard time dealing with it. Suddenly there’s something of a vacuum in the GFFA, and filling it is going to take a good long while. And yet it seems to have been for the better to reshape the Expanded Universe into Legends. The funny thing is, even with the ground-shaking that was the Legends decanonization announcement, it was not without precedent. There are other things within the GFFA that are not canon, even if they are still compelling stories. Entire universes being rebooted is far from unknown, especially in the comics world, and it’s possible to have several versions of the same story. Instead of debating old and new and whether something should be canon, what if we were to embrace the multiverse concept? Or what if canon doesn’t have to matter because fandom exists?

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Who Should Own Star Wars?

Posted on March 18, 2015by , , and

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The best part about choosing topics for Not A Committee, Eleven-ThirtyEight’s group format, is that sometimes I’m not sure how I feel about an issue myself. When I read this article on Vox a few weeks back, highlighting what’s known as the “Despecialized Edition” of A New Ho—ah, I’m sorry, Star Wars—and lamenting the fact that such exhaustive fan work can only be distributed in defiance of the law, I could see both sides of the issue. Not that I was clamoring for Star Wars to become public domain necessarily, but us dedicated fans are so used to talking about the franchise as modern mythology, the contemporary equivalent of Beowulf or The Odyssey, that we can kind of take for granted the fact that nobody owns Grendel and Odysseus, while Luke Skywalker is someone’s property—for a long time one specific person’s property, and now the property of one monstrously huge and mercilessly ligitious corporation.

So as I am empowered to do in these situations, I farmed it out. I put the question to the staff, in these exact words: “is there an argument to be made for ANH (at least) to be in the public domain, either by now or at some definite point in the future? Should Lucasfilm be able to own it for eternity, or does its cultural importance mean it should belong to everybody?”

While the complexity of this issue was one easy consensus to reach, the breadth, and content, of their answers were certainly an education. Read More

Legends: The Past Has Much to Teach

Posted on March 4, 2015by

We left the Legends universe in a rather unique spot. Much of the timeline of the GFFA had been filled in, and though there were still spaces to tell new stories, more of the universe was defined than many of us had perhaps hoped. Now that we are seeing new Star Wars publishing, in an era that had largely been untouched by the previous Expanded Universe, we can’t forget about the existence of Legends or its relevance. It might not be the current canon of Star Wars, but it’s still a part of ValleyOfTheDarkLords-EGTFthe framework of the universe. Much like ancient ruins (abandoned Sith tombs, anyone?), Legends has a great many of the answers and ideas we need for the next generation of Star Wars literature. Maybe even a Force-ghost or two.

In short, where did we leave Legends? As one reasonably complete story, to be honest. There are many time gaps still that could easily be filled in by other stories. Some of the earliest works do not make sense in the larger timeline simply because we didn’t have important pieces of the story. Nonetheless, there is a story that flows well together and allows for many new stories to be formed. We have all of the information right in front of us, and we can trace the development of Legends from its earliest days right up to July of 2013. We can even see where Legends might have gone if it hadn’t been decanonized.

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Everything Disney Needs to Know, It Can Learn from Young Jedi Knights

Posted on February 11, 2015by The Holocron

HeirsoftheForceDisney has a new generation in its hands. The youngest generation of Star Wars fans, brought in by The Clone Wars and Rebels and now the sequels, will be growing up with new heroes. There are definitely some Star Wars fans now who were introduced to the GFFA with Clone Wars, identified a lot with Ahsoka and her age. The equivalent, for many of us who were big EU fans as children, ran into a group of younger characters varied enough that all of us could identify with at least one of them. They were closely connected to the familiar characters of Star Wars, and made their own stories within the GFFA. As a series and for what it did for the SW universe, it would be worth it for Disney to learn from the Young Jedi Knights series.

Young Jedi Knights was a young-reader series devoted to the adventures of Jacen, Jaina, and their friends in the Jedi Academy on Yavin IV. It brought in the cast who later would become the Jedi of the New Jedi Order, gave the next generation of Solos a lot of life, and continued Star wars adventures for a younger crowd. Even though YJK was written for a teen audience, it still handled similar plot material to the rest of Star Wars, and retained the feeling of the universe, set up new characters, and gave a good jumping-off point for further adventures without feeling too much like a kids’ book.

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When Gone Am I – Kanan and Ezra in the OT

Posted on January 30, 2015by , , , , and Not A Committee

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“When gone am I, the last of the Jedi will you be” – Yoda, 4 ABY

For all the deftness with which Star Wars Rebels has told its story thus far, one criticism that it can’t quite escape is something that many would say plagued the Expanded Universe more and more as it went on: it’s allowing Jedi to survive in the Dark Times. Pretty much by definition, every single Force-user roaming the galaxy doing good deeds in this time period makes Luke and his training in the original trilogy less unique. To some, it goes even further, stunting Luke’s actual importance at best and making Yoda and Obi-Wan look bad at worst.

But Rebels is still four-plus years out from the OT, and over eight years from the quote at the start of this piece. There’s lots of time left for any number of fates to befall Kanan and Ezra—and Ahsoka’s fate at the conclusion of The Clone Wars demonstrates the folly of assuming we know where any young Jedi’s story is going. That said, Yoda’s declaration, and his and Obi-Wan’s clear hopes for Luke as their one real chance of defeating the Emperor, offer almost as wide a range of interpretations as there are real possibilities. Some fans aren’t even that keen on them being alive in the period we’ve already seen them. Some don’t mind them being around as long as they don’t actually join the Rebellion—Luke should be the only Jedi with that distinction, they’ll say. And some are concerned only with Yoda speaking the truth in the most literal sense possible; Kanan and Ezra can be and do whatever they want as long as they’re dead by the time Luke shows up on Dagobah. Read More