Tag: Better Know a Fan

Hello folks — I’m here to bring you an exclusive from the show floor of New York Comic Con. No, it’s nothing as banal as a news scoop or announcement. Instead, I’ve got the transcript of an interview I conducted this past Sunday with the one and only Veers Watch. If it sounds like I’m crazy, then you probably haven’t visited or followed his Twitter account. He has a very specific brand, which consists of watching/reading various Star Wars products and then announcing whether or not they contain an appearance of General Veers.

Riveting stuff, no? His dedication is certainly something to wonder at, and he’s kept it up for a while now. But who is Veers Watch? What makes him tick? Why Veers? And is there something else to him other than an admiration for a well-executed ground assault? Well, let’s find out! My questions below are in bold, his responses are in plaintext except for my interjected text in brackets.

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Why is Veers your favorite character?

Well, one of the reasons I love Veers is that he’s one of the only Imperial officers to actually survive the movies, which I thought was a lot of fun. The actor, Julian Glover, his ubiquitousness across a lot of series is also a huge draw. But I just love that out of all the Imperial officers, he always struck me as the most competent. He has his job, he gets it done. You know, he’s able to not necessarily stand up to Vader, but he offers his own insights. I thought that was a huge draw. And I like Imperials in general, so.

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I began my interview series Better Know a Fan almost exactly one year ago as a method of engaging directly with Star Wars fans who had very different backgrounds and points of view than myself; people whom I respected but couldn’t quite get my head around without a little extra work. If you follow this site on Twitter, you’ll know that there’s no one I struggle with more often than Eric Geller, current writer and editor for the Daily Dot news website, and like myself an evacuee of TheForce.net.

I’ve never told Eric this, but part of the reason I mix it up with him so often is because he reminds me of myself at his age—restless, hyperopinionated, and as he would say, thirsty—except I didn’t have anything approaching the microphone your average young and excitable Star Wars fan has now thanks to the ubiquity of social media. Eric’s already gone much further as a real journalist than I have as a fake one (he met BB-8, for god’s sake), and while I feel compelled to impart upon him some of the humility and composure I’ve picked up in the last ten years, the fact is I’m also just a teensy bit jealous. Nevertheless, he indulged me with this interview. Read More

In my interview series Better Know a Fan, I find people I know outside of the Eleven-ThirtyEight staff who I nevertheless find interesting—either for their unique point of view, their tone, or their overall personality. My subject this time, Tracy Gentile, has already made her stamp on ETE in the form of last year’s guest piece The Case Against Mara Jade Skywalker.

While that piece was without a doubt one of the most controversial things I’ve ever run here, Tracy justified my faith in her both in the article itself and her patient engagement with the intense feedback. To those of us who know her at the Jedi Council Forums as anakinfansince1983, she’s a lively debater whose opinions are nothing if not intense themselves, but like my last two interviewees, I’ve never seen her take an honest disagreement personally or blow it out of proportion. As a member of the original Star Wars generation, after all, Tracy’s got nothing if not an abundance of perspective. Read More

As I explained in the intro to my last Better Know a Fan interview, sometimes I get to know people online who defy even my hardest-earned assumptions and expectations. While I’m an outspoken contrarian by nature, I’m occasionally even a contrarian against myself, and when I meet someone who brings a very different background and point of view to their Star Wars fandom, but who nonetheless earns my respect, I like to use ETE as a venue to show that I don’t think everyone I disagree with is a bad fan—often they’re just as deserving of a little attention as anyone else.

This time around, I spoke at considerable length with Brandon Rhea, outspoken fan of the open-source encyclopedia format both in an official capacity as an employee of Wikia and unofficially as a regular contributor to Wookieepedia. I’ve had my own mixed feelings about the wook over the years—and we get into that a good bit—but in his recent guest piece, Brandon made a fair case for its continued existence, and for himself as a friendly and level-headed guy who’s always willing to listen, even when the first thing he hears from you is “it’s time to start over“. Read More

Now 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