Category: Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

So Let’s Talk About Zare Leonis Being Black

Posted on November 19, 2014by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

While I read Servants of the Empire: Edge of the Galaxy in preparation for my latest interview with author Jason Fry (not that I wouldn’t have read it anyway), it so happens that I didn’t write an official review of my own, nor will I now. Jay’s piece from last week more or less speaks for me, but I will quickly say this myself for the record: it’s great. I’m the textbook example of a Star Wars fan who turns up his nose at the notion of a sports story, but EotG excels at making its extensive sports content easy to follow, compelling, and most importantly, in service of the larger themes of the book. I can’t wait to read Rebel in the Ranks and see Zare’s appearance in Rebels from his point of view, and to see where his story goes from there. It’s not a good Young Adult story, it’s a good story, period.

One of those themes, crucially, is prejudice. The Empire of the new canon is still xenophobic, but not in an over-the-top, moustache-twirling way; aliens can exist in this system, even prosper, but it’s not enough to just do well—you have to be excellent. Athletic Director Fhurek claims not to be prejudiced himself—heavens, no—he’s just concerned about how other people might see those two aliens on Zare’s team, so better to get them out of the way, y’know, to placate those other people.

It’s a pitch-perfect subplot, and sets just the right tone for how I hope this sort of element is handled in future stories. It’s also a decisive part of Zare’s burgeoning anti-Imperial sentiment, without being preachy or oversimplified. He wants to stand up for Frid and Hench because they’re his friends, but doing so could sabotage the lives of his several human teammates, and they’re his friends, too. Fighting a prejudiced individual is easy; fighting a bad system is infinitely more complicated. Read More

Escape Pod: Ossus

Posted on November 10, 2014by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

As I’ve previously noted, I pretty much checked out of Episode VII rumors—ah, I’m sorry, make that The Force Awakens rumors—a month or two ago. Before that, the rumors were coming so fast and wild that I was happy to glance through them without taking anything so seriously as to feel like I’d been spoiled. But one thing seemed to come up pretty consistently (spoiler alert, I guess): at the start of the film, Luke is out of the picture. Maybe kidnapped, maybe in exile. Maybe for ten years, maybe for thirty.

Indeed, it’s possible we have a clearer picture of this situation now than the last time I looked, but one possibility that was being entertained was that Luke was off either on a Force pilgrimage of his own or training new Jedi recruits. Another consistent rumor was that there isn’t really an active New Jedi Order when we start off, and to my mind Luke having gone off the radar to start an academy feels nicely in line with both of those scenarios. Read More

On Tarkin, and the Novel as Reference Material

Posted on November 3, 2014by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

—–WARNING, MILD SPOILERS AHEAD—–

tarkin-head

Ladies and gentlemen, I have a shocking and terrible confession: I have never read an Essential Guide.

Oh, I own them—every single one. Even at their blandest, they’ve given me hours of amusement from aimlessly flipping around, admiring the artwork, and back in the dark ages, actually using them for reference. At their best, they transcend matters of fiction and continuity and become simply interesting books to leave out on one’s coffee table, as the Essential Atlas is in my home.

But I’ve never actually made it through one from cover to cover. And as I neared the end of Tarkin, right around the time a character stops what he’s doing to give an extemporaneous three-page summary of a piece of the title character’s backstory, it occurred to me that this must be what it feels like. Read More

The Anatomy of a Spoiler

Posted on October 13, 2014by

catwalk

Well, it took a good long time, but after more than a year of gleefully picking apart the rumors coming out around Episode VII, I finally had to make a judgment call. A couple weeks ago, Making Star Wars ran a spy report detailed what they claimed was the film’s “I am your father” moment. I’m not linking directly to it, but it should be easy enough to track down if you desire. As I’ve explained before, my standard operating procedure is to immediately assume all rumors are bullshit, simply because of the thousand mitigating factors between what someone says online and what’s actually going to appear in the finished film fourteen months from now. Even if you assume the rumor reports are coming from people who genuinely believe them, there are just too many variables in play to hang your hat on anything not released officially by Lucasfilm (or, in other words, pretty much anything at all).

But the whole “I am your father” thing gave me pause. Despite not seeing the Star Wars films as a child, one of the exceedingly few things I knew before I finally did see them—and to put this in perspective, I can distinctly remember a time when I thought Harrison Ford played Luke Skywalker—was that Darth Vader was Luke’s father. It’s almost impossible to exist in modern western society and not know that, even if you don’t have an iota of context for that information. Read More

For the Fan Who Wants Everything – A Collector’s Guide to the New Canon

Posted on October 8, 2014by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

rancho-obiwan

If there’s one thing Expanded Universe devotees can understand, it’s completionism. Even now, in the wake of the reboot, I’ve seen and heard from several people who are doggedly trying to scoop up the last of the Legends material they don’t own yet—or even, in at least one case, actually starting up their own Legends collections. In a way, the end of that continuity was the biggest gift Lucasfilm could’ve given the completionists, because you can’t complete something that’s forever ongoing. Now, though, they have a target.

But I’m not here to talk about those people. Another group of fans (but let’s be honest, I’m sure there’s plenty of spillover) is seizing on the reboot as a second chance to own Every Star Wars Book, without chaining themselves to forty years of old newspaper strips, Spanish-language cartoon spinoffs, adventure journals, and whatever the hell this is. The same way I’m using it as an opportunity to start a new diversity database from scratch, these people—many of whom likely dabbled in the EU but realized it was ultimately beyond their depth—are finally able to indulge their own completionist sides, and brag to their friends that they’ve read the entire Star Wars library—no, not that one, the current one. Read More