First, a little history. A long time ago on a website far, far away, I started a feature called EU Roundtable—wherein I would pick a few people from the Jedi Council Forums that I enjoyed talking to, and we would meet up in a chat room of some sort and discuss various Star Wars topics for eventual publication. Empire vs. Republic, Super Star Destroyer lengths, you know—simple stuff. In addition to being a rough prototype for this site in a way (ETE staff writer Jay was even a guest once), the goal of EU Roundtable was “to showcase the nitty-gritty of fandom – interesting, straightforward debates, typos and all”.
I was very happy with the way the roundtables turned out, by and large, but at the time I was beginning to drift away from my writing duties at TheForce.net, and ultimately the feature became a casualty of my waning devotion. While I would’ve loved to see someone else take over, alas, it was not to be, so I’ve decided to take the initiative of resuscitating the concept here at ETE—now known as Aggressive Negotiations, because let’s face it, “EU Roundtable” was hardly inspired. The goal of this first…volume? incident?…was partly to discuss the given topic, and partly so readers could get to know our staff’s individual voices (except for Ben, who is British and needed to sleep) in as raw a context as possible.
There is no spell-check here. No second drafts. And in my case, very little capitalization. What there is, on the other hand, is unapologetic adult language—so keep that in mind. As for the topic, well…
Final note: in honor of Rebels’ stated Ralph McQuarrie influence, I asked everybody to pick out a favorite McQuarrie image to include in this article. We’ll discuss our picks near the end. Enjoy!
Mike: Okay, first things first—obviously TCW was the show that launched a thousand discussion threads, but for better or worse…are we at peace with how it ended? Did it at least deserve another season to wrap up, or was cut-and-run as good an option as any? Read More
