Category: Simple Tricks

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

Portrait of a Disgruntled Fan

Posted on April 17, 2015by Interviews

roguelogoNow that Celebration Anaheim is underway and some portion of our audience will be reading this on their phones surrounded by other Star Wars fans, I thought it would be a good time to begin a new recurring interview feature whose title I’m shamelessly ripping off from Stephen Colbert, Better Know a Fan. While I pride myself on this site featuring a healthy range of opinions among its regular staff, I occasionally come across people whose perspectives are interesting to me but not necessarily in an editorial context—this will be my vehicle to offer those people a moment at the microphone. If you’re familiar with the Literature boards at the Jedi Council Forums, my first subject will be very familiar to you—in only a few years of posting, he’s become a fixture there, and while we may not always agree with him, we all know exactly where he stands.

Zachary Skaggs, known at the JCs as Zeta1127, could be listed in the dictionary under the word “consistent”. Despite being relatively new to the online community, he makes no bones about his view that Star Wars’ glory days are well behind it, thanks to the editorial direction of the last several years of “Big Three” novels and now the continuity shakeups of The Clone Wars and the sequel trilogy. While normally I’m content to keep incessant fan negativity at arm’s length, especially here, Zachary isn’t your typical complainer. As, frankly, unreasonable as his views of Lucasfilm can be, the man doesn’t have a trollish bone in his body—no matter how much some of us roll our eyes or even outright tease him for being such a downer, he takes it all in good humor and never gets petty or personal, which in my view warrants respect. I wanted to find out what makes him tick, and he was gracious enough to oblige me. Read More

The Astromech Version: Chopper’s Star Wars Rebels Episode Guide

Posted on April 1, 2015by Feature Articles

chopper-space

Hey losers, C1-10P here. If that’s too complicated for your spongy flesh brain, don’t strain yourself on my account—just call me “Chopper”. I’m told that today is the day Earth humans celebrate their own cluelessness (just one day a year? Pretty charitable if you ask me), and because there’s nothing I love more than clueless humans, the fine people at Eleven-ThirtyEight asked me to share my reflections on the first season of Chopper and Friends—huh? What Wars? Who the **** said—okay, I’m being told that’s not what the show is called. Let’s just move on.

I guess I should start at the beginning—no, not when the kid showed up, the real beginning. I’m doing a deep-cover op on Nar Shaddaa, right? Deep cover’s my specialty, because us astromechs are reeeaal patient, and no one pays much attention to us. So I spend three months as a server in this crappy dive just shy of dirtside, waiting for a runaway moff to amble his way in, when word comes from the big guy that he’s got a new job for me. Says there’s a wayward Jedi padawan hooked up with an equally-wayward rebel agent. The reb’s a real piece of work—intel said her father was some anti-Republic big shot on Ryloth back in the Clone Wars—but she’s not my job, the paddie is. Read More

The Bantha in the Fridge: Our Reactions to Heir to the Jedi and You-Know-What

Posted on March 27, 2015by , , and Aggressive Negotiations

nakariIf you’re new-ish to Eleven-ThirtyEight, this may be your first exposure to Aggressive Negotiations, our occasional chat-session format. Aggressive Negotiations are just that; fast-paced, live discussions among members of the ETE staff (and others), often focused on hot-button topics like the earliest previews of Star Wars Rebels or Dark Horse Comics losing the Star Wars license. This time around the gang got together to dish on Heir to the Jedi, in particular the big spoiler at the end of the book—so consider this your warning on that score. Remember, this format is about fandom at its most raw; no censorship, no second-guessing, and a bare minimum of copy-editing. Cheers! – Mike

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Jay: hello folks

Lisa: hey

Jay: I can’t stay too long, so hopefully Ben arrives shortly

Lisa: he’s got 10 minutes

Lisa: :p

Jay: yeah

David: here i am as well

David: all fresh and clean

Lisa: so fresh and so clean

Lisa: Did you like the book?

Lisa: I think we need Ben cuz I’m pretty sure he hated it

Jay: eh. It was a real struggle to even read it

Lisa: really? That’s interesting

David: I actually hated it, so I might fill that role :p

Lisa: perfect Read More

Who Should Own Star Wars?

Posted on March 18, 2015by , , and

luke-southpark

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