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narkinafive · 5 years

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this one’s a doozy

(i feel like i should have done sth like this for the prequels/the clone wars but oh well. i'll get around to it eventually! maybe! gotta do something while waiting for ix right lol)

oh, rebels. rebels rebels rebels. i know it's probably unbelievable, but i was so gutted by the clone wars cancellation that i really Did Not Like rebels at. it took... idk about two years for me to give it a real chance (and i was still deep in a previous fandom hole, so i didn't really get into it until like. the start of s4) (if you can guess what fandom it was you get a cookie) i am so glad i tried it again.

of course, ezra bridger is, was, will always be my favorite boy. i really did not expect him to waltz away with my heart! anakin has always been my favorite (and he still is, tbh), bc that kind of character and that kind of arc is so on brand for me, like. i LOVE my dark tragic messiah demigods, i really really do!!! but then this doofy dumbass kid with big blue eyes and a big blue heart and his many cat friends just punched me in the gut!

it's been a year and i've had time to digest the whole package. let me preface by saying that rebels is absolutely 100% perfect and my favorite piece of expanded sw media by a LONG mile. NOW. that doesn't mean that there weren't things i didn't like (going under a cut!)

many times, it tried too hard to tie into the greater saga - bringing in palpatine, the wbw, all the saga cameo characters, like... some of them worked better than others. the r2d2 and c3po cameos were the worst, w obi wan coming in at a close second. the best saga character cameo was definitely mon mothma (and bail). i really liked leia's episode, but. idk. it still felt a little shoehorn-y

i wish ezra's descent into the dark side had been more ... present? he gets some great, great moments. but it's kind of sudden (i've touched on this before so i won't keep going)

someone else has brought this up (and i ................. do not remember who sdfkjlsdfjlk) but pushing aside the Great Rivalry of thrawn and hera for the force stuff is... idk. that's a whole other thing

now i love the force shit. like i LOVE it. but i think rebels might have been stronger if it focused less on force shit and more on the early war effort, in the same vein as rogue one. i know it'd be more difficult to fill out four seasons rather than one movie, but as it got into s4 and closer and closer to episode iv... idk, put the force shit at the beginning of the season? idk. i really love how they did it, but... idk! it's complicated

oh, and speaking of complicated - maul. i love what they did with him, i love this sad garbage pile and watching him recreate his trauma onto others as a way of dealing with it... but i think it was a weird choice. maul is so... idk, grimdark? for such a lovely sweet show

kallus going to lira san better be bc he's being tried for war crimes lmao

sabine staying on lothal is... a choice. not one i hate. but i still don't quite understand it

and my biggest gripe, ironically one of my favorite parts of the show: ahsoka lives.

dont' get me wrong; i was so happy that ahsoka lived, i nearly threw my computer across the room when ezra yoinked her into the spacetime continuum. i am a diehard ahsoka fan and i will fight somebody to defend her honor. THAT SAID. the narrative of ahsoka going down at the hands of her former master? as he desperately tries to erase every part of his former identity? the great commander tano, clone wars veteran, an early casualty of the rebel alliance? it's so good. it's SO good. having her story end there would have been just some phenomenal shit. just superbly poetic. i'm glad she's alive! and the emotional impact is still the same, even with her coming back, but my god.

now. the things i love.

the character arcs. all of them. ezra bridger, war orphan, street thief, cast out by his people, finding he is stronger than he ever thought could be possible, giving his life for his people because he forgives them, and because it's the right thing to do. kanan jarrus, jedi knight, reclaiming his heritage and his jedi legacy (and yes, watching him die still hurt just as much as the first time aroundd) (and also, thanks to @aspiringwarriorlibrarian and @greatlakesrebel for pointing out many many many things, but first and foremost tonight, that dume the wolf was of course voiced by fpj) (i’m slow ok shut up). hera syndulla, who unfortunately had to learn the hard way how to balance love and war so she didn't become her father, pushing away everyone she loved for the greater cause. zeb orrelios, finding his people, learning he's not the last of his kind, leading the refugees to their ancestral home. sabine wren, forgiving herself and freeing her planet from oppression. and not just the hero arcs - the villain arcs, too!!!! darth maul's single minded obsession that kept him alive for 30 years ending in a 3-hit fight on a backwater planet because he just couldn't sustain that hate for so long. all of thrawn's cleverness couldn't predict the force. i don't have an issue with a single one of these!

THE FORCE (TM)!!!! there is so much delicious crunchy force nonsense, i could DROWN in it

among my many, many issues w the old EU, one of them was demystifying the force, quantifying and trying to label it too much. some things were quantified bc they needed to be (the holocrons, the sith code, etc) but most of it was kept as vague and nebulous as possible, which is GOOD. when it comes to mystical magic, less explanation is mostly always more

i love that we don't have clear cut answers for the loth wolves and the lothal temple, i could ponder that shit for WEEKS and never get bored

it does feel like a mostly self contained story. "been there made history" can get overused very easily (see: hbo rome) but rebels used it just enough to fit it into the larger saga

having rex survive both the clone wars AND the galactic civil war??? fuck yeah

kanan and ezra. kanan and ezra. there is so much i could say about kanan and ezra. it's everything to me. war vet finds plucky young orphan and adopts him? sign me tf up!! their relationship as it grows from mentor/mentee to peers is really really well done

and speaking of growth, ezra and sabine going from obvious romantic interest to battle forged siblings is not something that i was expecting but is definitely one of the best parts of the show

kevin has some really incredible tracks in this show: top of the list is 100% kanan's end credits, followed closely by it's over now. wow

and speaking of, the entirety of the last ten minutes of twilight of the apprentice deserves its own bullet. that shit is right up there with vader v luke round 2

the planet designs, mostly malachor and lothal, but when hera and sabine launch the dome, and the lothal sky suddenly turns to blue as the pollution is leeched out and destroyed... that shit is breathtaking

and so much more. like so much

this show holds such a special place in my heart :") now if only dave could bring back my son... like. PLEASE

see you all in rogue one!

#the pre ix rewatch

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headspacedad · 6 years

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luciferspit

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voltron: Post a picture wearing a Merch By...

Please explain in what way you think they treated Shiro badly in season 7.

well, its late and I’m not going to be at my peak for answering. If you’re honestly curious, there are people that have stated it all much better than I could and you can check my ‘seven salt’ tag for their very excellent points as well as my own when I am more awake (and Shiro wasn’t the only one whose story was poorly treated in season seven). But let me try to summarize my points as best I can and I am only doing the points that apply directly to my comment about Shiro being a PTSD amputee war vet and will not even cover the other representations he stands for and how those were misused and mistreated as well. Also I am including the clone in this summary because while he was not Shiro he too was a PTSD amputee war vet in all the ways that mattered and his experiences, while different, also reflect on the invasive message the show has regarding that.

where to start? Because the treatment didn’t start in season seven. It just culminated there. Should we start where the writers killed Shiro without any explanation despite the fact Zarkon took a flaming sword to the chest in the same battle and lived? Should we point out the way the clone of him was treated - through multiple cries for help that included: vulnerably confiding in Lance and also writhing and screaming in incredible pain in front of Pidge on a mission - that were never addressed or brought up by the team members that could have tried to find out what was wrong or help him? Should we point out the way the team immediately turned on the clone before they even realized he was the clone, going so far as having the writers make Hunk of all people ask if they should even go after him ‘since he wasn’t Shiro anymore’ even though no one knew what was wrong and the clone had been a supportive and consistent team member up to that point and they all knew what the Galra had done to him the last time they’d had him? Should we count the way the team was willing to violate the clone’s unconscious body and push another soul into it without even questioning the morality of it? Maybe we’ll skip right ahead to season seven where the loss of his arm seems to be the only canon difference (dying technically shouldn’t matter since canon showed us that Zarkon also died and was brought back to life while retaining his bond with Black and it was by something a great deal less benevolent than Allura) in the Shiro of season one and two, black paladin of Voltron, and season seven where he’s suddenly not only not flying the Black Lion but its never mentioned as if its not important at all (because? the viewers aren’t supposed to care why he’s not Black Paladin anymore? Is he so unimportant to the writers that they can’t even include an answer to what should be an obvious audience question?). Should we point out how he was constantly left aside in the writing for the first half of the series, to the point that a handcuff attached to his belt was enough to keep the same man that threw himself at Sendak with both hands chained behind his back in place while a fifteen year old was threatened with torture? How Keith left Lance in charge of the team despite Shiro being right there? Can we point out he didn’t make the game show that was supposed to only be for ‘people with great destinies? How about how - when they finally get to Earth - for some reason he actually flat-lines while they’re hooking him up to a new arm? Because dying for the second (or fourth) time in the show is really the route to go with someone that’s spent a year of his life tortured and fighting for survival to the point he lost a body part over it. Let’s skip ahead to the fight with Sendak, someone he’d fought to a stand still previously with what, one would hope, was a less advanced arm and in a body that was wracked by whatever muscle disease canon had given him and still, despite the new positives of a new arm and a healed body to his account, had his self-agency taken away from him and failed to even complete the basic story arc of a victim being able to win the fight against their oppressor. Maybe we can end it on the fact that, while the entire team wakes up surrounded by family and friends, Shiro is shown alone surrounded by lions he can’t connect with anymore, giving encouragement to others instead of having any for himself? The fact that he is shown to have one relationship that ended badly (when the person it was with told him to choose between them and his career choices, which I’m sure, I say in a completely dry and sarcastic voice, no soldier in a military relationship has ever heard before) and even that person wasn’t left for him to see again when he came back to Earth? The fact Shiro isn’t shown with any family at all and isn’t even shown with his team at the end?

Even if you can come up with answers that are suitable to you for all of these things, it doesn’t change the fact that you had to come up with reasoning for them in the first place. You had to fill in blanks to make these things ‘not bad’ because the writers didn’t even bother.

At what point did Shiro’s story have a fulfilling arc past season two? You can see Atlas as a positive, and the writers certainly want you to, but that doesn’t change all the other ways he was punished, pushed aside or written out of things without any story explanation (and the executive producers throwing out headcanon afterward to try to cover the holes in their story doesn’t matter if the majority of their viewers are never going to hear that.) To anyone watching, and judging the story by the story alone, the message is very clear

that an amputee without a prosthetic is ‘useless’ (Hunk can fly a lion while asleep, but the one armed man can’t?).

That a war vet isn’t allowed to form bonds with a group of friends or have a family,

that the ‘friends’ of someone dealing with PTSD will always be expecting him to turn on them for no reason and will abandon him when he does.

Keith is great but no one person should be the entire lifeline to someone else, that’s not healthy. At the end of season seven we see the war vet isolated from everyone he cares about, pep talking others. I can’t condone that kind of message and I won’t encourage other people to watch a show that preaches it by giving them free advertising on social media wearing a product I would have paid them money to own in the first place.

As said, those aren’t the only issues with his treatment in season seven. But I’ll let other people that he represented or who felt that their own experiences connected in other ways I haven’t talked about have their turn. I am also going to reply to you this way. I stated my stand on things once on @voltron‘s post in direct response to them asking me to promo their product. That was feedback. Filling up their promo/advertisement post with a barrage of tag and reply posts would be harassment however and that’s not how consumers upset with a product should react. Which is why I’m replying this way instead of directly to your reblog.

#luciferspit #seven salt #and now I"m going to sleep

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jasonfry · 7 years

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Author’s Notes: The Secret Academy, Pt. 1

WARNING: These notes will completely spoil Servants of the Empire: The Secret Academy. Haven’t read it? Stop and go here.

(Go here for notes for Edge of the Galaxy, here for Rebel in the Ranks and here for Imperial Justice. )

Part 1: Zare

Imperial Justice was torture to write, but The Secret Academy was actually fun! Final chapters are like that ... if you’ve put in the work. I’d spent three books establishing the characters and their motivations, laid the groundwork for the themes I wanted to explore, and then layered in complications and reversals. The fourth book was the chance to make all that pay off, and I enjoyed doing it.

Rather than alternate chapters as I had in Imperial Justice, I split Zare Leonis’s and Merei Spanjaf’s stories and followed them one at a time, without intercuts. I’d considered doing that in Imperial Justice, rejected the idea, but now thought it made sense.

I had a dopey reason for doing that, and a smart one.

The dopey reason: I was still annoyed at not being able to end Imperial Justice with Zare running into Beck Ollet inside the tower – a cliffhanger that had made me cackle happily. Splitting Zare and Merei’s stories would give me a second chance at that moment.

The smart reason: Imperial Justice had separated Zare and Merei and concluded with Merei’s discovery that Zare’s transfer to Arkanis wasn’t a reward but part of the Inquisitor’s plan. Taking away the intercuts was a way for the reader to feel a little bit of that separation and anxiety.

One challenge in The Secret Academy was unexpected. Story Group sent back my outline for Books 3 and 4 with a note that by the time Zare got to Arkanis, the Inquisitor would be dead, killed off in Rebels’ Season 1 finale. That would certainly change my story! I scrunched the books’ timeline a bit and was able to get the Inquisitor and Zare to briefly overlap on Arkanis, but that was the most I could compress things.

So I leaned into it. I reasoned that the Inquisitor’s offstage demise fit with an idea I’d been playing with – that Zare, for all his bravery and determination, also gets a bit lucky. In Imperial Justice, Zare decides he won’t follow another immoral order even it means he’ll never find Dhara, and is saved from dismissal when Oleg’s warehouse raid goes awry. The Inquisitor’s death would be another bit of luck, as his plan is to return to Arkanis and break Zare. I don’t think that undercuts Zare or his quest – one thing I like about Zare is he isn’t a Jedi, a veteran commando or some kind of superhero. He needs a little luck; most heroes do.

One idea I continued from Imperial Justice was Zare’s “shadow story” – a not too different tale in which Dhara was never kidnapped and Zare remained the loyal young Imperial officer he’d assumed he’d become. Arkanis essentially resets Zare’s cadet career and the shadow story culminates with the training exercise on Sirpar. Those scenes are some of my favorite in the book – they show Zare as a young officer who improvises intelligently, drives himself and his troops to accomplish unlikely goals, and earns those troops’ loyalty and affection. He’s come a long way from the kid impatiently killing time at AppSci.

But as in Imperial Justice, Zare eventually has to ask himself what he isn’t willing to do to find Dhara. In the previous book, being ordered to take children into protective custody is his breaking point; in this one it’s being ordered to murder a fellow cadet.

No aspect of The Secret Academy attracted more interest than the revelation that Brendol Hux’s Commandant’s Cadets are forerunners of the First Order stormtroopers overseen by Brendol’s son Armitage. The funny thing, to me, was that the connection with The Force Awakens came late and was a lucky break.

I’d known since Edge of the Galaxy that Dhara was being held in a mysterious tower on Arkanis, that Zare would try to get inside, and that Beck’s unexpected reappearance would ruin everything. From a storytelling point of view, the Commandant’s Cadets were merely the mechanism that would get Zare into that tower at the right time for the hammer to come down.

But why did they exist? I was up against a problem that’s common in richly detailed fictional universes. I wanted the Cadets to have a purpose and be more than a generic bunch of Imperial “mean kids,” but if that purpose never affected any other Star Wars story, readers would know from the beginning that the Cadets had failed to achieve their goals.

In November 2014 I visited Lucasfilm for meetings about DK’s The Force Awakens – Incredible Cross-Sections and got a synopsis of the upcoming movie, accompanied by on-set photos. Finn’s origins reminded me of both clone troopers and the Jedi; a few minutes later, it struck me that General Hux was awfully young.

Somewhere between those two thoughts I saw an opportunity: what if the plan to raise children as stormtroopers dated back to the Rebels era, and came from Hux’s father?

Story Group’s Pablo Hidalgo liked the idea and ran it up the chain. I braced myself for a reason the answer had to be “no.” When I got a “yes” instead, I wrote as fast as I could and then crossed my fingers.

The connection made sense within the Star Wars galaxy: the elder Hux had served alongside clones and Jedi during the Clone Wars, seen the deficiencies of the stormtroopers, and imagined a better way that drew on his wartime experience. That program began in secret and was taken up by his son to create the First Order’s soldiers.

It also solved my plot problem admirably and turned a weakness in The Secret Academy into a strength. Before the release of The Force Awakens the Hux connection would spur interest in the book; afterwards, new readers would see the Commandant’s Cadets as a real threat, because they’d know that Hux’s program had succeeded beyond his fondest dreams.

Notes on Part 1:

The first scene was the original ending of Imperial Justice, but I decided I didn’t want to introduce a new planet that late, and preferred ending with Merei and Tepha wondering if they’d ever see Zare again. Moving it was an easy change, at least.

I wanted Arkanis to be something new for Star Wars – a waterlogged world that I likened to what you’d find if you turned over a log. I also wanted the Academy and its surroundings to feel plucked out of a gloomy Gothic tale. A lot of things in The Secret Academy are pretty shameless goofs on a well-known Gothic novel and movie, in fact.

it was a pain ensuring Zare’s cadet service fit the chronology of the first two Rebels seasons. The initial idea was that Rebel in the Ranks and Imperial Justice would cover a full academic year, with the top cadet earning a transfer to Arkanis for the next year. Chiron would back Zare, while Roddance supported Oleg. But I couldn’t figure out what to do with Zare and Merei over that second summer, and feared readers would get impatient that Zare wasn’t trying harder to rescue Dhara. Fortunately, Rebel in the Ranks had introduced the possibility of a midyear transfer – an offhand line that became critical once the Inquisitor’s death forced me to speed things up. But how to get Zare to Arkanis? The obvious answer was for Merei to slice a transfer into the system, but that struck me as a lazy, unconvincing solution. I got so lost in blind alleys that I missed the solution Story Group found: the transfer wasn’t a reward but an unexpected order from some Imperial. I realized that Imperial should be the Inquisitor: it was plausible, solved my chronology problem, let me have a confrontation with Zare on Arkanis and added to the story’s tension. Whew!

Contrary to what’s stated here, the journey between Lothal and Arkanis isn’t a short one. That was my fault: I was working off the idea that Lothal was near Kessel, a bit of head-canon I’d gotten used to and so failed to vet. There was no reason to define that here; doing so led to an unforced error.

Note that Colonel Julyan challenges Zare with a question about grav-ball and leadership, as Sergeant Currahee did in Rebel in the Ranks. In the earlier book Zare ducked the question; now he gives Julyan a thoughtful answer that reflects his experiences.

Julyan’s lessons reference Legends material: Admiral Screed, General Romodi (before his appearance in Rogue One), the Order of the Terrible Glare and the Empire’s campaigns in the Western Reaches. Much of this was taken from The Essential Guide to Warfare and additional material written for it. It seemed ready-made for Julyan’s teaching and unlikely to confine future storytelling, so why not use it?

I invented the diplopod as a mount for Sarco Plank in The Weapon of a Jedi, only to see my beastie get subbed out in favor of the happabore, appearing as an Easter egg for The Force Awakens. I liked the critters, so I put them aside for some future project. The Secret Academy gave me an opportunity not just to use the diplopod but also to kill one in a gross way.

I liked the bit where the Inquisitor invites Zare to come out of the weather and into the shelter of a stasis projector. In that context politeness seems decidedly menacing.

Scaparus Port was fun to write – equal parts Treasure Island and some gloomy town out of Cthulhu, what with its salt-encrusted gloom and fisherfolk missing limbs and scarred by sucker marks. Arkanis is just a nasty place.

Scaparus was the right place to bring back the jogan fruit, or more specifically its scent, which makes Zare remember Beck Ollet’s orchards on Lothal. Scent unlocking memory is a theme throughout Servants of the Empire, working up to its critical role in the climax. Here, it’s a heartening renewal of the connection between Zare and Merei that suggests their break might not be final after all.

I never explicitly stated it, so I’ll leave it to Wookieepedia to work out the canonicity, but Gesaral Beta is supposed to be the planet where it rains razors of glass on Ania Solo in Dark Horse’s Legacy series.

I enjoyed writing the demented beach scene with Hux and the cadets debating how to raise nerfs. The sea monster is an homage to the great Jack Vance, who imagined a similar predator in Ports of Call. (If you’ve never read Vance, fix that posthaste!) Note that Zare’s reaction to the nerf’s death is quite different than the casual cruelty shown by the other cadets.

Sirpar was another attempt at a new setting. Its heavier-than-standard gravity is noted in Legends depictions of the planet; I added making the light so intense that the cadets had to take precautions against it. Light would vary dramatically from planet to planet, another Jack Vance idea I didn’t recall seeing in Star Wars. I decided to try it and liked the results.

Note that the accident set to befall Penn Zarang will be dismissed as a “slight weapons malfunction.” I’m all for little nods like that as long as they don’t interrupt the story or distract a casual reader.

Perhaps emboldened by my success tying the Commandant’s Cadets to The Force Awakens, I looked for an even stronger connection. Might Anya Razar and Captain Phasma be one and the same? I decided that was a dumb idea and never proposed it, but did suggest a scene with DDM-38 pushing a red-haired baby in some kind of space pram. Lucasfilm shot that down, and rightly so – less was more. There’s awesome fan art out there of a baby Hux in the arms of his creepy nanny droid, though.

My original treatment had Zare, Chiron and Roddance all transferred to Arkanis as part of the “valedictorian” storyline. When that idea got abandoned I decided we’d explored that triangle sufficiently on Lothal, but did need to bring Chiron back for the finale. I liked dropping him into the middle of Zare’s dilemma about the Commandant’s Cadets as a tempting but dangerous lifeline. That was also a bit of misdirection: since Chiron can get into Area Null, he’s a potential route to Dhara that would let Zare escape having to kill Penn.

We’ll see Cass again in A New Hope, as an aide aboard the Death Star.

Next time: Speaking Bocce and the Case of the Missing Bounty Hunter. Right here!

#author's notes #star wars #servants of the empire #writing #storytelling

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healthcaretipsblog · 6 years

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A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away there was a very special place where countless books, comics, and video games all lived under the same canon. Spanning millennia, these tales allowed your favorite space opera to live on and grow outside of the films you know and love. It was a world where your most beloved heroes had children and most hated villains had entire art galleries dedicated to poor souls trapped in carbonite. It was a wild space where anything was possible… Boba Fett even lived!

For over 35 years, it was the playground of Star Wars fans and creators alike. Welcome to the Star Wars Expanded Universe.

The Beginning

George Lucas’ Star Wars was a cultural phenomenon like no other. The film went from an unpromising release to a critical and commercial smash that overtook Jaws to become the highest grossing film of all time. So it’s unsurprising that fans were desperate for more of the imaginative galaxy that Lucas had created. And in the rush to answer that call, the Expanded Universe (EU) was born. Though there was a Star Wars novelization published by Del Rey (who still produce and publish canon Star Wars books to this day), the first widely recognized EU book is Splinter of the Mind’s Eye by Alan Dean Foster in 1978. Set between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, the story focuses on Luke and Leia as they hunt down a mysterious force sensitive gem that’s in the grip of the Empire, drawing from an early script for A New Hope.

The EU had begun and it blossomed over the years. Arguably, it wasn’t until a decade later and the arrival of three new pieces of mixed media canon that its full crossover potential was truly discovered. The spark that ignited the EU fire was Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game in 1987, which heralded a level of detail and background that had previously been unseen in the canon. Next came Dark Horse’s seminal Dark Empire comics. Set directly after main trilogy, they turned the galaxy on its head by introducing a Luke Skywalker who’d fallen to the Dark Side. The final key was Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire, the first of his so called Thrawn trilogy. Marketed as the official sequels to the classic Star Wars movies, the series was a massive success and led to an explosion in the world of Star Wars fiction.

The Stories

It would be impossible to cover every single EU title here, but there were certain stories that stood out, series that stood the test of time and made a huge impact on millions of fans. Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire was a powder keg, quickly becoming a New York Times bestseller, and is still to this day seen as the peak of what the EU had to offer. Set five years after the end of Return of the Jedi, the book introduced a new foe for our favorite heroes, a blue skinned strategic genius named Admiral Thrawn… and we’ll get back to him later.

The book showcases some of the things that the EU did best. The novel format gave space for the characters to have interactions and experiences that 100 minutes on screen would never allow. Heir of the Empire introduced a number of key parts of EU canon. Aside from Thrawn, it also introduced Mara Jade, who would later become Luke Skywalker’s wife and the mother of his child, Ben Skywalker. Yup, Ben. You heard that right. Zahn also debuted two characters who’d become a central part of the EU canon: Princess Leia’s unborn twins.

Jaina and Jacen Solo – two of Han Solo and Leia Organa’s three children – were first hinted at during Heir of the Empire, but would later become the leads in a 14-story series called Young Jedi Knights. Again, this series showcased the vast breadth of storytelling potential that the EU gave creators and fans alike. It introduced the pair and their friends – including Chewie’s nephew, Lowbacca – as they trained under Luke Skywalker to become the next generation of Jedi. Though the books were all released within three years, Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta crafted an expansive piece of Star Wars fiction that attracted a whole new generation of fans. Just like Heir of the Empire, this series would end up shaping the future of the Star Wars franchise.

After decades of the Empire being the primary foe in the world of Star Wars, the overlords of the EU decided to shake it up by introducing the Yuuzhan Vong. A rare alien species from outside of the galaxy, the Vong were a brutal, evangelical culture who enacted a prolonged invasion on the galaxy and the Republic. Under the banner of The New Jedi Order, this storyline ran from 1999-2003 and took place under the strict eye of George Lucas after being planned by Lucasfilm, Dark Horse, and Del Rey. Taking place over 19 books, three short stories, and three online novellas, the huge event saw multiple characters from the main Star Wars canon and Expanded Universe teaming up to fight the invaders.

How Did it Work and Why Does it Matter?

The Expanded Universe was overseen by George Lucas under the rule that he could take whatever he wanted from the stories and make it canon, as well as being able to retcon or contradict anything that occured within the EU. The level of oversight changed depending on the project or period, with events like The New Jedi Order having to fit strict continuity whilst others with less impact were just allowed to breathe and exist. When the videogame The Force Unleashed was in production, it became part of the EU and had to be vetted heavily and approved by Lucas himself as it introduced a huge new canon character: Starkiller, Darth Vader’s secret apprentice.

For so many of us, the Expanded Universe was a massive part of our Star Wars fandom, allowing us to fill the gaps in between rewatches. It gave us a place where our favorite characters could live outside of the rigorous constraints of three blockbuster movies, and then later three more. In that way, there’s nothing else quite like the EU, a space where characters who might’ve otherwise just been a cameo lived entire lives, and where the ones we didn’t want to leave behind were allowed to live on or even allowed to die. The strengths of the EU came from this universe-building, some of which was so strong that its impact was still felt when the Expanded Universe was officially de-canonized in 2014.

After the EU

When Disney purchased Lucasfilm, fans were terrified about what the notoriously controlling company would do with the sprawling back catalogue George Lucas left behind. Those fears were completely founded as Disney de-canonized the EU, creating the Legends banner to explain away the 30-plus years of history. But that wasn’t the end of of the EU. Since Disney has restructured and relaunched the Star Wars universe, they’ve echoed many fan favorite stories in the new incarnations and brought in a particularly beloved villian from EU history.

Even if you haven’t read any of the books mentioned above, you probably noted that some of the stories, ideas, or characters seemed familiar. That’s because Disney, whether they know it or not, are taking some very direct influences from the EU in the new iteration of Star Wars. Princess Leia’s twins were a huge part of the old canon, and when the time period of the The Force Awakens was announced, many fans assumed that the film would introduce Jaina and Jacen Solo. Obviously, those iterations of Han and Leia’s children didn’t happen, but we were introduced to their son, Ben Solo, who not only shares a name with Luke’s EU son, Ben Skywalker, but Ben Solo’s arc also looks very similar his EU counterpart, Jacen. Both boys train under Luke and both end up falling to the Dark Side. Ben Solo became Kylo Ren whilst Jacen became Darth Caedus, who was eventually killed by his own sister, Jaina.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars was created under the banner of the EU, but it was deemed canon-worthy by Disney. It stands alongside a one-shot Dark Horse comic, Darth Maul: Son of Dathomir, as the only EU stories to be part of the new canon. The Clone Wars was also a great place to experiment with some of the more outlandish ideas that the EU introduced, including Force magic, space witches, and Sith Inquisitors. Beloved characters like Ahsoka Tano even managed to avoid the cull by being a part of The Clone Wars universe. Disney’s animated follow-up to the Clone Wars, Star Wars Rebels, has also been used to reintroduce a famous EU character who was thought lost forever on the proverbial cutting floor of Disney corporate: Grand Admiral Thrawn.

The blue-skinned bad guy introduced in Heir of the Empire all those years ago – who went on to star in multiple books, video games, and comics – was sorely missed by fans after it was announced he would be culled from canon. There were multiple fan petitions and campaigns, only for creator Timothy Zahn himself to come out and say in 2016 that fans needed to give up on any hope of seeing Thrawn return. But mere months later, it was announced that the Grand Admiral would be returning in the third season of Rebels. That made him the first official character brought back into canon by Disney. He also received a canon novel at the beginning of 2017, which was a fittingly strange moment in the journey of a character from a movie franchise who never appeared in any movies, who was in popular books that were disregarded, was then re-introduced in a TV show follow-up to a show that fit in with the disregarded books, and was then finally given a book that’s officially in the world once again.

So there you have it, a very brief look back on construction and deconstructions of one of the most influential and important pop culture phenomenons of the past 40 years. The Expanded Universe shaped one of the biggest franchises in the world before being wiped from revised canon like a smear on a Corellian YT-1300 light freighter’s window. If you love Star Wars and have yet to discover the EU, there’s an entire forgotten reality for you to explore. Maybe it’ll even give you some hints on where the franchise might be headed as it flies into the future.

The post A Brief History of the ‘Star Wars’ Universe That Once Was appeared first on /Film.

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