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swan2swan · 4 years

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It is with a heavy heart that I now declare the Sequel Trilogy non-canon.

I’ve done it before, and I’m doing it again: none of this counts. None of this matters.

Because what are we losing by cutting it out?

Finn’s character growth and mastery of his Jedi powers? Rey Palpatine? Straight Poe? Rose Tico’s character? Han and Leia’s good parenting? Leia’s fulfillment of her promise that no other planets would suffer Alderaan’s fate? Luke Skywalker’s green lightsaber? Bloodlines? (Fun Fact: Bloodlines by Claudia Gray is no longer canon because the movie retcons certain facets of Leia’s character! That’s right! The only competent piece of Sequel-Era writing was nullified by the movies!). A rare occurrence of an on-screen romance between a black male lead and a white female lead in a blockbuster film?

There’s nothing in the movies that’s lost if you sacrifice them. If you say “Okay, all I’m taking is George Lucas’s films because those tie into his original vision.” If you want, you can envision a world where Kelly Marie Tran played Kira, the young girl who finds Luke’s hiding place and learns the ways of the Jedi from him (yes, KMT is Vietnamese and Kira would probably be best as a space-Japanese character, but Kelly deserves SOMETHING). And I’m sure Daisy Ridley would take no offense, because I feel like Daisy Ridley is one of the people who is going to loathe the direction these films took the most, and I wish her the best in the future.

The actors deserved better, but they got their screentime and they got their paychecks, so I’m sure they’ll be fine if I say “I don’t view the sequels as canon and everything ended happily at the Ewok village.” It honestly allows for a richer, more fulfilling vision in the imagination: what happened next? Surely there were other wars, other beings, other people they found and fought. It’s a fairy tale from a galaxy far, far away, and as with many fairy tales, sometimes storytellers get it wrong.

Is it awful that it came to this? Yeah. But I think it’s how I’ve found peace. Like Beast Machines, Game of Thrones, and whatever else has happened in the DC movieverse outside of Aquaman and a few other bits, I’m just going to let my eyes pass over the merchandise and imagery in the aisle and understand that other people will watch it. Like the Yuzzhan Vong before them, the First Order and the Sith Armada of Planet-Destroying Star Destroyers all pass into the “well now you’re just stretching things out to keep selling stuff” void.

And I hope, wherever she is in the galaxy, Asajj Ventress is enjoying herself (it’s Dathomir, and she’s not, she’s very busy training Nightsisters, sometimes Ahsoka stops by with supplies and stories, one time Luke and Leia came there because The Force Told Them and Asajj took one look at them and said “Oh kriff no you look just like him” but she relented and let Leia stay and then she realized that Leia was the Anakin and that she’d made a huge mistake meanwhile Luke just chilled in space with a stowaway Nightsister child who wanted to see what space looked like and he let her push the buttons and read the charts and eventually wound up teaching her how to fly the ship, it was a tremendously fun adventure and maybe Leia got a kyber crystal for a lightsaber, who knows, it’s up to YOU).

#star wars #the rise of skywalker #it's like they did everything people hated from the legends verse #I'm starting a conspiracy theory that this is why the movie was so bad #just to nuke the fandom and make it so everyone goes and plays on their own #use your star wars toys #keep them #have FUN #canon doesn't matter because IT DOESN'T EXIST #I'm free

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geoffreytoday · 2 years

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Ewoks! Get yer Ewoks here!

We've arrived at Return of the Jedi. All aboard the merchandising train!

My first memory of seeing a film in the theater is Return of the Jedi. We had tickets to a preview screening put on by a local radio station. I've still got the invitation card somewhere, it's very spiffy.

I remember my mom being grossed out by Jabba the Hutt, and whispering to her to not be afraid because he was just a puppet.

As a kid, Jedi was far and away my favourite Star Wars movie. Which isn't surprising, it's very much designed to appeal to kids. It had cool aliens and monsters, rad space battles, crazy fast speeder bikes, adorable ewoks, and the hero defeats the villain and saves his father and the galaxy. Talk about a crowd pleaser!

As I got older, my tastes changed, and while my love for RotJ will always remain strong, I began to see its shortcomings more clearly. Eventually I came to regard it as the weakest entry in the orig trig. That shouldn't be taken as condemnation though. That's more akin to saying it's my third favourite flavour of ice cream.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with my edit honestly. There aren't any useable deleted scenes, so I'm pretty much confined to the material that's there. I do have it in mind to use some scenes from the prequels in a few key spots as flashbacks. Not full on flashbacks necessarily. I may try to find a way to superimpose them, semi transparent, into the scenes I want to use them in. That might not look good though, so I'll have to experiment and see if I can find a tasteful way to incorporate them.

I'm thinking I'd like to use the scenes of Anakin's transformation into Vader while Obi-Wan is talking to Luke on Degobah, "He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."

I'd also like to incorporate some scenes of Leia being taken to Alderaan when Obi-Wan is explaining how the twins were separated to protect them from discovery by the Emperor.

When Leia talks about her memories of her mother, I'd like to include some shots of Padme.

I don't know if I can make any of that work, but I'll give it a shot.

I might try to restructure the first act of the film. Luke's plan is pretty convoluted and has a lot of potential failure points. I'm going to have to think about possible ways that first act could be restructured. Maybe Luke's rescue attempt is a response to the other's failed plans, as opposed to all that stuff being part of Luke's plan.

I do have one kinda ambitious idea for an edit, I don't know if I can pull it off though. I'd like to move the Emperor's throne room from the Death Star to the super star destroyer.

Here's my reasoning: The whole throne room sequence is kinda meaningless if it takes place on the Death Star. If Luke falls to the dark side, it doesn't matter, because he'll only be evil for a few minutes before the death star gets blown up and they all die anyway. The stakes of the scene are much higher if they're not on the death star.

If Luke is turned, and they aren't killed in the destruction of the Death Star, he becomes a greater threat to the rebellion than the death star was, because he knows all of their secrets. He knows where they are, their strengths and weaknesses, security protocols, he probably has a numbers of passwords and security clearances. As either a direct threat, or a subversive one, Luke Skywalker fallen to the dark side could potentially wipe out the entire rebellion.

On Endor, I'm going to try to do some judicious editing to make the ewoks a little less silly and cutesy, and make their scenes a little more grounded, and try for a little more emotional weight, like in that one ewok death scene.

The movie 1000% ends with Yub Nub, none of that galaxy wide celebration crap :p Just because the Emperor died doesn't mean the Imperial government instantly dissolved. The galaxy is still under imperial rule. There's going to be a lengthy processes of deposing the Imperial government as it splinters without the Emperor.

That's not important though, what's important is that we end the movie singing Yub Nub, as nature intended.

#star wars #the reformation cut #fan edit #And Anakin's force ghost is an old man again #no more creeper Anakin leering #seriously why did they choose that specific shot of Anakin for the force ghost?

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cassatine · 7 years

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Hi! Can I ask what makes West End Games the "genesis point" of Star Wars old cnaon? Isn't it just the movies?

MY TIME HASCOME. Have a [tl;dr] of my notes on WEG.

Okay so - are the WEG games the genesis point of the old canon or is it the movies is the kind of question I’m not super interested in, so i’m more going to focus on what makes West End Games key, and the part they played.

Let’s dothe time warp – we’re in the mid-eighties, let’s say 86. Return of the Jedi was released in 83, the movies have been adaptedin as many forms as possible. There’s been children books, storybooks, activitybooks, nonfiction, etc. There’s been magazines and strip comics in newspapersand two trilogies of novels published by Bantam, plus Foster Splinter of theMind’s eye, there’s been Atari games and toys beyond counting. There’s been publishedscreenplays and artbooks, a Guide to the universe compiled by a fan andofficialized, some odds and ends I’m notcounting, and that list may seem long, but it’s ten yearsof content – the rate of release was nothing like today’s or the nineties’. Towrap it up, between 84 and 86, there’d been the Ewoks and Droidstv series, as well as the Ewok movies (I think a lot of kids loved them, but olderfans, not really) but the overall release rhythm was winding down: Kennerstopped producing SW figurines in 85 (they’d start again in 95); in 86 theMarvel run of comics ended (they published two spin-off series til 87, Droidsand Ewoks, tho). Star WarsInsider, still the Lucasfilm Fan Club Magazine at that point, would start its runin 87, but it featured little about SW for years - outside of themerchandising pages at least. Fandom was certainly active, but the rate of official content had dwindled next tonothing, and nothing new was on the horizon.

In myperiodization, that’s the end of the First Legends Era, and at this point SWwas basically dying, nevermind the Ewoks and Droids stuff. Again, I don’t meanthe core fandom, but without regular new content the wider audience was justlosing interest.

Somethingchanged that of course, otherwise I wouldn’t be here typing this, and somethingwas West End Games, a small company who, until then, had mostly publishedhistorical and fantasy RPGs. They could buy the license because… well, no onewas interested. Again, Star Wars had stopped being a hot property.

That didn’tlast long, and West End Games kicked off the Second Legends Era, expandingon the universe in a way none of the previous spin-off products had.

Their firstpublication was Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game in October 1987, covering thefirst movie’ events. It was followed a month later by a Sourcebook and until the license changed hands at the end of the nineties, WEG released over ahundred books, sourcebooks and miscellaneous stuff, including the Adventure Journal, which arguably kickedoff the long tradition of SW short stories that other official magazines wouldlater continue. Many of these first short stories were later reprinted, mainlyin the Tales anthologies - and a lot of people were angry when some of the Special Editions changes invalidated bits of these stories (the very first Canonpocalypse). The West EndGames material also started the tradition of in-universe works; most of theirguides and sourcebooks had in-universe passages, but some of the sourcebookswere fully written from an in-universe point of view.

There’s anumber of factors behind the success of the WEG Star Wars line; for thecore fandom, it came at a time when there was very little new content: WEG’s shortfictions were the only new fictional content (bar Ewoks/Droids stuff) from 86to 91, and with the Lucasfilm Fan Club Magazine, WEG was basically the only regularsource of content. It was also an encyclopedical exploration of the GFFA, more on that below. It was aninteractive kind of fictional content; a way to become an active participant in the galaxy-sized storyof Star Wars rather than remain a passive audience, more accessible thanthe electronic games of the times.

And it wasgood. Like, critically-acclaimed good.

The WestEnd Games publications had a hugeimpact on the franchise in their time, and their products remained being ratherinfluential in later years. They’re still being so, as that “roleplayinggame material published in the 1980s” alluded to in the 2014 Canonpocalyseannouncement – i.e., the source from which the Inquisitorium, the ISB andSiennar Fleet Systems, and a great many other elements since, were pulled andbrought to the NEU.

But to goback to your actual ask, there’sa reason for looking at the West End Games products specifically as a the base of the old Legends canon (and also a source ofelements and concepts for the NEU). The RPG outlook is a very specific one; oneof statistics and numbers and rules that users learn to navigate the setting ofthe adventures. To create a RPGfrom an already existing world,you’d define a number of categories and subcategories for worldbuildingelements, break down those elements to measurable characteristics – but alsoelaborate on context and fill in many blanks. It’s a very methodic way to doworldbuilding, one oriented towards a specific purpose.

Inpractice, that meant the West End Games books, although not planned as such,doubled as a set of incredibly detailed reference books, something without equivalent at the time. Althoughthe first publications centered around the movies and, once the ExpandedUniverse really took off in the early 90s, some of the novels, comics and games,the company had soon started to create as much as adapt, branching out to new,unexplored grounds. With the adventures came details about the galaxy’sgeography and history, its inhabitants and its technology, the inner workingsof the Empire and the Rebel Alliance. And if some of these publications tied tothe movies or other products, this was no-one way relationships: from theTarkin initiative to COMPNOR, the ISB or foundational texts such as the Declaration of Rebellion and otherelements great and small, the galaxy was laid out in West End Games’publications, comprehensively and extensively.

Thing is, if many of the books featured pre-written adventures or “adventure seeds”, the fundamental goal of sourcebooks and the overall worldbuilding of the WEG stuff was to create a universe for the players to tell stories – stories in which the narrator has no control over the characters, but stories nonetheless. In a way, the sourcebooks were reference books intended for storytellers.

Which is why they became the base of the “old canon”, when it took off in the early 90s, with the Dark Horse comics and Zahn’s Thrawn trilogy – and make no mistake, the only reason these happened at all was because WEG had made Star Wars a viable brand again. Their success had proven there was a market.

And as we’ve seen, they’d already done the worldbuilding, extensively; Lucasfilm has always had final approval on the WEG books too, so the content was considered as “official” as could be, and continuity already mattered (if always with the caveat that Lucas could invalidate it if he came back to SW, as finally happened). It’s well known Zahn was sent WEG sourcebooks by Lucasfilm (who would later develop an internal “canon bible,” way before the holocron database, but wasn’t there yet), and over the years, writers used the sourcebooks as resource materials; I wish I could give you a list but I’m working on it. Recently Jason Fry said he still used the sourcebooks. Hidalgo talks about them here and there.

Moreover, anumber of Legends (and NEU) writers, of fiction as well as of nonfiction, first contributed to StarWars through WEG; Troy Denning, later to write novels for the franchise,authored two “gamebooks,” i.e Choose your own adventure books, and a sourcebook;Bill Smith wrote and co-wrote a number of books for WEG before writing twotitles for the first series of Essential Guides ; Daniel Wallace alsowent from WEG to the Essential Guides, though he only contributed to thefinal published issue of the AdventureJournal, and the rest of his RPG writing was done in the context of Wizardsof the Coast publications. Peter M. Schweighofer, who would also go on to writefor WOTC, wrote or co-wrote a number of WEG books; he also edited the Adventure Journal and wrote a number ofshort stories. Pablo Hidalgo went from playing the WEG games to writing forthem before joining Lucasfilm. There’s more but I’m still working onthat list.

#star wars #meta #star wars history #west end games #canon #legends #my notes are way messy so this is messy too #anon #ask

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periodicreviews · 7 years

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Star Wars Celebration 2017

A long time ago

In August of 2010, I was about to start college at UCF. August 20th was move in day for on campus housing. The weekend before that, Star Wars Celebration was going to coincidentally be held in Orlando. I remember being excited but I think I ended up not going just because it was that weekend and the timing would be inconvenient. I honestly don’t know why I didn’t go but maybe my interest in Star Wars was already starting to wane. (It happened again in 2012 in Orlando, so then I really didn’t have an excuse except maybe money?)

Fast forward to 2017 where all I do is go to conventions and I just barely convinced myself to go to it in Orlando. I picked Friday since I had a floating holiday at work and getting to see a preview of the new Star Wars movie, The Last Jedi, would be neat. After I bought my ticket, I almost immediately started second guessing myself. Was I still a big enough fan? Was I “that” kind of fan that went to conventions? Maybe it’s just because I wasn’t a big fan of The Force Awakens and Rogue One that those questions started to creep in. I haven’t asked myself those kinds of questions before, at Megacon 2013 for example, when I paid maybe too much money to listen to the full Star Trek Next Generation cast.

Thursday morning I was checking Twitter before work and saw #SWCO was trending. I thought to myself “Wow, even at 7am a lot of people are excited for Day 1.” The first few tweets were complaints from people who had slept overnight at the convention center and still didn’t get a ticket to the 40th anniversary event. I was very confused by these tweets, “Did people actually sleep outside at the convention center all night? And that wasn’t enough to get in?” I learned that for certain panels, 40th anniversary and The Last Jedi, you had the option to sleep inside the convention center in order to be first in line, before they opened the doors at 5am. At this point I thought to myself “Would it be fun to say I slept in the convention center?” I legitimately considered this as an option during the day on Thursday as I continued to think of myself as a “fake fan”.

I didn’t end up sleeping there, but by the time I drove over and made it past security on Friday, all tickets were gone at 7am.

The two panels I was able to get tickets to were Warwick Davis’s Small Talk (he played an Ewok in the originals) and Mark Hamill’s Tribute to Carrie Fisher. I didn’t even get into the actual Mark Hamill panel, just into a room that had the livestream playing. At that point, that kind of defeats the purpose since the whole thing was live streamed. They could have used bigger rooms, though if you’re 2 miles from the stage, is there any difference between seeing it on the screen in the room it’s happening in and seeing it on a screen in another room?

From there I got in the “entry line,” another first for me at a convention. I guess the purpose being that there was merchandise that would sell out or other things to get in line for inside the convention. Being earlier in this line would make it easier to get a good spot in another line, like the “Official” convention store. Once our section was let it, I watched as people ran past me frantically to some unknown objective and I wondered if I should be running too.

Part of my existential con crisis may have just been that I didn’t know enough. I had tried to do my research before all the schedule/details were released and I didn’t bother looking up any past reviews of the convention. Then I remembered to do it the day before and once I found out about the sleepover portion, I kind of gave up.

I wandered around the dealer area, which was felt surprisingly sparse. Maybe it was a large amount of stuff, it was just very spread out to accommodate the large crowds that had yet to arrive. I wasn’t planning to buy anything and I didn’t see anything that I felt compelled to buy. I already have enough junk in my apartment as is. In fact, it’s currently slowly suffocating me as I write this.

Panels

I checked out a few fan panels as well, but none of them were very engaging. Two of them had what felt like very long intros where the panelists would go down the line with introductions. This was neat for the droid builders because they explained how they built their first droid and what they are building now. But for another panel that was described as looking at lightsaber battles and how they’re influenced by real battles, they spent a little too much time talking about themselves. Maybe I just misunderstood what the panel was really about.

The big Mark Hamill and Warwick Davis panels were great and interesting. I’m especially glad that Warwick had pre-written questions to substitute for when audience members would ask horrible questions. When it was a good question, he could play it off as his ego that he had a better one. When it was a bad question, it worked as a lifeline to save the audience member from embarrassment.

The Star Wars Show

While waiting for Mark Hamill’s panel, I watched the Star Wars Show that was playing on screen. I had never seen it before so I didn’t hang out where they were filming it in the dealer room. There were a few weird things that caught my attention as a first time viewer.

During what I assumed were commercial breaks, they would play Star Wars songs as the camera panned over the crowd. After the 6th time hearing the Cantina theme, I really just never wanted to hear it again. Noticeably absent were any Force Awakens or Rogue One songs, except for maybe one, though it was mostly the more popular tracks anyway.

One segment discussed “Forces of Destiny”, a new series focusing on Star Wars heroines. They also gave a run down of the action figures that would be available. At first, I didn’t really understand why they would have multiple animated projects at the same time. I thought more about the timing and it seems logical that after the controversy of Rey not being included in Monopoly and the general lack of female characters in the Force Awakens merchandise (aside from the crucial Captain Phasma), they began to plan this show and its merchandise. There happened to be a younger girl sitting next to me so I bounced this theory off her and she seemed to think it was reasonable. So obviously, it’s confirmed as truth.

The last segment I watched was an interview with the head of an auction company who was in possession of the dress that Carrie Fisher wore during the throne room scene at the end of A New Hope. The Princess Leia theme was playing in the background and the CEO of the company was describing the process of what they do, where they got it, etc. But for me personally, the interviewer came off as just way too excited and upbeat. We don’t have to mourn continuously for Carrie Fisher’s death, but any kind of segment involving her should be handled a little differently than introducing a new trailer, at least at this first Celebration without her. I wish they had either chosen a different song or told the interviewer to tone down his excitement.

As I mentioned before, my current sentiments towards conventions heavily impacted how I perceived SWCO. I don’t want anyone to think I have something against Star Wars fans in particular. I’m glad I went, even if I didn’t enjoy it as much as I had hoped to. The lack of cosplayers was a little surprising but it could be that this is just more of a “mainstream” event nowadays. I’m curious as to how this compares to the big Star Trek conventions. I’ll probably cut back on conventions in the future unless there’s something really appealing about the event since otherwise it’s just wasted money.

#swco #star wars celebration

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