Category: Simple Tricks

One of the founding hypotheses of this website is that even in a post-reboot landscape, readers of the Expanded Universe are uniquely positioned to recognize the pitfalls and possibilities of continuing the main story of Star Wars beyond Return of the Jedi—and that understanding that landscape makes our insight valuable in the Sequel Era even if our beloved stories no longer “happened”. As staff writer Alexander Gaultier put it in the first of his six-part series A Case for Starting Over:

“…it is beyond any doubt that the galaxy far, far away will have undergone a great number of significant changes [in the thirty years since Jedi]. The Rebel Alliance will likely have restored the Galactic Republic, or at least founded a successor state of their own. Luke will have reestablished the fabled Jedi Order and begun training a new generation of Jedi Knights. Our heroes will have children, who now go on to face their own challenges. All these things have occurred at one point or another in the Expanded Universe that has been growing since the day A New Hope was released.”

Over the following several months, Alexander would break down the framework of the EU from many different angles, highlighting what worked, analyzing what didn’t, and suggesting all sorts of new avenues by which we might at arrive at even the most foregone of conclusions. He added:

“Given the complicated nature of the early development of the Expanded Universe, I don’t think its vision of the galaxy after Return of the Jedi is a bad one. I do, however, believe that we are fully capable of doing better, and that the sequel trilogy offers us the perfect opportunity to demonstrate that.”

Each part of the series can be reached below, or you can click the link at the top of this post to view the entire category.

• Part I: The Road to Coruscant
• Part II: A New Republic
• Part III: Heirs to the Empire
• Part IV: Guardians of Peace and Justice
• Part V: Passing the Torch
• Part VI: Happily Ever After

In addition to this week being Eleven-ThirtyEight’s anniversary, a few days ago I got a notification that I’d officially been a member of the Jedi Council Forums for—wait for it—fifteen years.

There aren’t many of us around those parts with registration dates in the 20th century, but staff writer Ben Crofts is a part of that fraternity as well. And while fifteen years for me is almost half my life (and almost the entirety of my Star Wars fandom), Ben had the benefit of already being in his twenties in July of 1999, and of being a SW fan since 1983. What I mean to say is, for all the myriad experiences I’ve tried to bring to bear in my writing here, Ben’s experience trumps mine by a country mile.

So he was uniquely qualified to process fans’ all-too-predictable reactions to the Expanded Universe reboot a couple months ago, and group them into discrete categories as he did in Reboot Strategies, part of his then-ongoing Fleeing the End series. With his characteristic British joie de vivre, Ben calmly laid bare the range of camps us EU fans would be slowly filtering into—even as we were still figuring it out for ourselves—including the so-called “Lebowski Strategy”:

“All the Dude wanted was to keep Luceno’s work in, man! It really tied the EU together! And the Dude has a point. If Luceno, one of the best going at working collaboration, especially in the wake of Allston’s death, gets deemed non-canon, nothing’s safe. For this strategy, a certain laid-back attitude is essential. The Dude may well consider Star Wars: Tarkin an adequate replacement, if he gets it dirt cheap or free or talks Kathleen Kennedy into giving him a free copy, as it really ties the EU together.”

For the record? I’m a Senecan. Find out your own type at the link above and let us know which camp you’re in in the comments below.

Oh, and fifty points to anyone who can explain why I used the above picture.

One of the first casualties of the Disney purchase was perhaps the most predictable one: after years of increasingly-questionable business practices and increasingly-desperate attempts to marry the gaming zeitgeist to a shiny Star Wars veneer (see above photo), LucasArts was officially put out of its misery in April of 2013—less than six months after the new owners moved in, and nine months before Dark Horse officially lost the comics license (though their existing contract may have prolonged that moment beyond what would otherwise have been the case).

Pundits from both the franchise and gaming sides of the tracks were quick to write their own post-mortems—one of the best, for my money, was this piece in Game Informer magazine—and most of those were quick to point to the alleged lack of imagination in even LucasArts’ bigger hits like The Force Unleashed as a sign of their impending demise as an independent game studio. Eleven-ThirtyEight guest writer Ben Wahrman disagreed, however, writing that “Star Wars video games have been derivative and unoriginal in a lot of ways since their very inception, and some of the most popular Star Wars games of all time wear their influences on their sleeves just as brazenly as TOR and TFU do.”

In Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V: LucasArts, Inspiration and Appropriation (and slow clap for that title, am I right?), Ben went on to cite several further examples of copycat games from LucasArts’ more respected years, from Republic Commando‘s Rainbow Six influences all the way back to the X-Wing series and Dark Forces—which you might know by its original title, Doom with Stormtroopers.

So if “appropriation” was part of LucasArts’ Star Wars strategy all along, what ultimately brought it down? Follow the link above for Ben’s take.

Part of being what I’ve called a “wonk-friendly” Star Wars fansite is being willing to dive into even the most granular political messages embedded within the story, and trusting readers not just to keep up, but to care.

Those of us who have gotten to know ETE staff writer Jay Shah over at the Jedi Council Forums know him as “Grand Admiral Jello”, a died-in-the-wool Palpatine loyalist who wouldn’t spit on Mon Mothma if she were on fire. Don’t tell him I said this, but in truth, Jay’s as big-hearted as the old Chandrilan herself, and the Grand Admiral shtick is a means to both indulge in his genuine love of imperial pageantry and, I suspect, force people to reconsider a lot of their assumptions about just what the Empire would’ve been like (see: Running on Time, Trains), and what kind of people would’ve been operating within it.

One long-held pet peeve of Jay’s is the Expanded Universe’s hasty assumption, chiefly in the form of Admiral Daala, that since the Empire was a bunch of white guys who discriminate against aliens, they must naturally have discriminated against women, too. In Senseless Sexism in the Galactic Empire, Jay argues that misogyny “never made much sense as being one of those defining traits of the Galactic Empire.” He continued:

“Sexism in fiction generally has two authorial justifications: first, as a reflection of actual historical sexism in the setting of the story and second, as an attempt to engage and criticize contemporary sexism through the lens of a fictional story. Since Star Wars is an invented universe, the first justification is a bit of a reach despite the historical inspirations for the Galactic Empire, and the second justification is unconvincing because of the EU’s failure to adequately address in-universe sexism in a constructive fashion.”

Agree? Disagree? Click the link above for more.