#Enjoy this picture taken on my dad's TV

[autobotmedic156]

GUESS WHO JUST GOT ROTB ON DISK?? AND WATCHED THE EXTRAS

M E

[w2soneshots]

Announcement -W2S

words: 0.6k+

warnings: pregnancy.

summary: you and Harry announce your exiting news to the sidemen in an interesting way.

notes: hello my babies! I haven’t done a dad!bog fic in forever and this brought back all my baby fever🥹. Here’s the request. Enjoy!!🧸💓🫶🏼

Today me and Harry are announcing our pregnancy to the boys. We've been keeping it our little secret for just over four months and it has been difficult but we've loved it. I'm not an official member of the sidemen but I'm always in their videos so morning sickness and the crazy hormones have been hard to hide, along with the fact I now have a bump. I haven't worn anything tight fitting in weeks. We wanted to do something funny and casual with the boys so when we found out that they were filming a photo roulette for more sidemen we knew that was our chance.

"You nervous?" I asked Harry as we drove. "Not really, I'm just excited to finally tell everyone." He replied with a smile. We told our families a few days ago and they were all ecstatic. "I feel the same. Also we're gonna need to tell Faith ASAP because we both know Ethan can't keep any secrets from her." Harry chuckled, knowing I was definitely right.

When we arrived outside of the building and Harry parked we made our way upstairs. "Hey! Feeling better?" Tobi asked as we walked into the studio. Last week I had to leave a side plus shoot early because I started to feel nauseous. The boys were concerned but Harry reassured them that I was fine, since he knew that it was just because I'm pregnant. "Yeah." I smiled with a light nod of my head.

Once we sat down to film we began with a few other videos then finally after around two hours it was time. "Hello and welcome to 'sidemen photo roulette', with y/n!" Simon announced to the camera. "Everyone has sent in a random amount of pictures from their camera rolls and you'll all have to guess who sent it in." He explained. Simon was going to be able to see the pictures so I was just hoping he would stay silent.

We got started and we saw some really funny and random photos. As the game went on my hands were fidgeting as I anticipated what was going to happen. "Ok and the final pic." The picture me and Harry had taken of our dog with the baby's first ultrasound in his mouth popped up on the tv. The room went silent. "Is that? Oh my god!" Ethan jumped from his seat, looking straight at me and Harry. Everyone quickly began to catch on and cheers filled the room.

Once everyone said congratulations we sat back down. "How many months are you?" JJ asked. "Five." I replied. "Twenty weeks?!" Vik exclaimed. Harry chuckled. "Uh yeah. We kept putting off telling everyone. Before last week only me and y/n knew." He explained. "So you-" Ethan pointed down to my stomach, which was covered by one of Harry's oversized hoodies. I nodded then slowly lifted it over my bump. All six of their eyes flickered from my stomach, to me and then to Harry. "So the other week you-" Tobi began. "I smelt something weird and it made me feel nauseous." I laughed.

Later that night I sat between Harry's legs, my back leaning on his chest. He ran his fingers over my bump as we sat in a comfortable silence. "I think they were a bit shocked that we waited so long to tell everyone." I whispered. Harry smiled, even though I couldn't see him. "I like that we kept it a secret. But it feels good to be able to talk to people about it, since it's like the biggest and best thing that's ever happened to me." He replied quietly. I hummed as my hands traveled to land on top of his. "Want me to run you a warm bath?" He asked. "Only if you join me." I smiled. "I was already planning on it."

[totaly-obsessed]

hey i couldn’t find a rules list of what to ask so feel free to ignore this if it’s outside your comfort zone!! could you do a mary x reader where an anniversary of reader losing someone (or just anything bad that could’ve happened if you don’t want to write about that) and they are feeling kinda numb and just need mary to comfort them, which of course she goes above and beyond to make them feel as loved and safe as possible

Anniversary

Mary Earps x reader request

-> Mary helps Reader get through the anniversary of her mother's death

-> Talk of death and grieving

-> I hope this is okay, @ anon!

➳ Masterlist

•─────⋅☾ ☽⋅─────•

Mary knew that today would be hard. A heavy red ‘x’ in the calendar marks the day. It had been one year since your Mum had tragically passed. She had been healthy, some would even call her active or fit for her age. She had been fine – until she wasn’t. A stroke during which she fell down the stairs.

You were the one to find her – picking her up for your usual Saturday stroll around the market in the town square.

It wasn’t even needed to step in – she was just lying there in the middle of the hallway when you opened the front door. Shocked you called an ambulance after checking for breathing. There was none, also no heartbeat. She was cold, her skin a pale blueish color.

You still couldn’t get the picture out of your head.

It had been a hard year. The middle of November, being very close to Christmas, meant that the first holiday without her came fast. Your birthday was just as hard – a usually loved day by you, passing like any other.

But today marked one year without her. And while you thought of her every day, today was especially hard. Mary knew that you would put on a brave face, trying to force yourself through the day – but she wouldn’t allow you to do that, knowing that you would hate yourself for it later.

She truly was a saint. Mary – your Mary. The goalkeeper had been your rock through the incredibly tough grieving process. She never got frustrated with your way of coping but she tried to help you do it in a healthy way instead of ignoring your own health.

Your girlfriend had taken the day off from training, even though you had told her not to. She wanted to be there for you – she needed to be.

Working in a good environment meant that your boss insisted that you had some time off, ignoring your pleas to let you work.

The morning was weird. While Mary was usually the first one up and starting the day, she couldn’t find you anywhere – your side of the bed was already cold. But it didn’t take the blonde long to find you on the couch. You weren’t doing anything, you just sat there, staring at a dark TV.

A gentle kiss to your forehead ripped you out of your daze. “Good morning my love, let’s make some breakfast, huh?” She pulled you up by your hands as gently as she could, nudging you into the kitchen. Mary handed you an assortment of fruits, gesturing for you to wash and cut them, while she made pancakes.

Your Mum’s favorite breakfast.

After your very controlling dad had left the family when you were younger, your mother enjoyed her newfound freedom and meal choices, opting for pancakes with tonnes of sirup and fruits every Sunday. It had become your little tradition over the years, and Mary understood that. She understood that it was your thing so she usually made oatmeal for breakfast.

But today was different. Today was already emotional and in honor of your mother and her rituals, she made pancakes – even using the recipe that your mum had given her when you started dating. It brought tears to your eyes, seeing your favorite football player taking such care of you.

Breakfast was spent in silence but you could feel her concerned eyes burning a hole into your head. You knew that she was just concerned, but it was still unnerving, being watched like this. There was barely a dent in your pancakes but Mary coaxed you into eating a little more – rewarding every bite with a gentle kiss to the side of your head.

Usually joined showers were giggly with Mary spraying water into your mouth whenever you wanted to speak, making her laugh so hard that she could barely breathe while you pouted, trying to get all the shampoo out of your hair. But as with many things, today was different. Your girlfriend took her time, gently massaging your head as you stood in the water stream with closed eyes. It was as if your body was there, but your mind was not – it complied with moving however Mary wanted you to, but you didn’t really notice anything.

By noon both of you were dressed in warm clothes, ready to go on a walk that would ultimately lead you to the cemetery your mother was buried in. You stood on the porch for a second, waiting for Mary to join you when a bouquet was extended towards you. “Oh Mary….”

She could see the thankfulness in your eyes as they teared up once again, struggling to get the words out. “They were her favorite.” She had remembered how you insisted on getting Asters instead of Lillies for the funeral because your mom loved them so much – so here she was, with a pretty blue and purple Aster bouquet.

Quiet conversation occupied most of the walk, Mary telling you a story of something that had happened at an England camp not so long ago to lift the spirit when you got closer and closer to your destination.

The gates of the Manchester southern cemetery seemed daunting as you stood in front of them. “When do you want me to join you?” A couple of weeks ago, when you were still able to cope, Mary made a deal with you – you would enter alone, do your thing, and after that, she would join you. “Maybe ten minutes?” With a soft kiss and a squeeze of your gloved hands, she lets you go – flowers in hand.

Ten cold minutes later, your girlfriend started her walk to your mother’s grave, finding you kneeling in front of it. With gentle hands she helped you up, dusting off some loose stones from your hands.

While this wasn’t the first time being here, as you took care of the grave every two weeks, it was very different. It was like you could feel your mother watching over you as you cried.

“M’sorry baby, I can’t stay.” Your girlfriend understood as you left her standing, making your way back to the gate.

It took her a couple of minutes to gather the courage and sit down on the ground as she pulled out a little box out of her jacket pocket. “I’m gonna ask your daughter to marry me. I know I already asked you last year, but I figured I would just do it again. You mean everything to her and-“ Now she started to tear up as well, trying to be strong for you when she was sad as well, was hard. “And I just wanted to make sure, that you knew. I wanna ask her in March – she loves spring, you know?”

The footballer felt a little crazy talking to a grave – but she wanted to make sure that your mother was okay with the two of you marrying, even if she had given her (very happy) okay before she passed.

Walking back to your joined home was a slow process, stopping every now and then to hug Mary, who tried her best to wipe the never-ending tears that streamed down your face.

The rest of the day was spent in bed, watching you and your mother's favorite films, while Mary went above and beyond to make the day go by as well as possible but all you really needed was her and her cuddles.

[desceros]

i saw on your queue list that you’re wanting to do a papatello au!!! wondering if you would spare some headcanons????

ps your writing is great!!

[with heavy sarcasm] oh no, not someone asking me to discuss one of my favorite fic ideas, the absolute horror

after a terribly unfortunate incident (donnie learns he has a breeding kink and doesn't check to see if the two of you are biologically compatible before enjoying it, thoroughly, over a long period of time) it is discovered that you are pregnant. oops

after a days-long conversation where he freaks out because he's terrified about your safety when he runs some tests and the fetus is very much going to be a turtle with a shell inside of you, the two of you decide to... try. to try and keep it. it feels a bit like a miracle, after all, though he's very very careful to monitor the entire time. and well he should, as it's a difficult pregnancy; they actually end up taking her out a little early and putting her in an egg-like incubator for the last month or so when he starts getting concerned about some pain you're having.

the two of you name her lavinia, after splinter's naming conventions. but very quickly, mikey shortens that to lavi. she's very much a softshell turtle mutant, but she has your smile and (as she grows older) black hair just like papa splinter from having more human DNA.

lavi is the actual poster child of being a daddy's girl. from birth, she favors him for almost everything: being held, being fed, being bathed; if donnie's not doing it or close, she's fussy.

donnie is the actual poster child of being the world's most obnoxious father in the entire world. he's that guy who will insert his kid into every conversation, bending or even snapping its relevance to shoehorn her in. he has pictures upon pictures. videos of lavi doing absolutely nothing except being cute.

and she is so fucking cute. but she's also a bit of a demon, just like her father. wicked smart and always getting into trouble. worse still, if she gets caught, she just looks at donnie with big eyes like 🥺 and it's over. she's not getting in trouble.

lavi also really loves her uncle raph, and she has taken to stealing his catch phrases because she thinks they're funny. you have a video on your phone of her running agilely away from donnie with something very fragile and important, giggling and yelling 'stealing LIKE A BOSS' as donnie chases her, teeth clenched and hands outstretched, going 'lavi, dearest, sweetest little bug whomst i love endlessly and forever, please give that back to papa Right. Now.'

her favorite uncle tho is probably uncle leo. he has cool comic books and watches fun tv shows. she likes to climb onto his shell and curl up to take a nap. a picture of leo crying the first time she did that remains your contact photo for him for a long, long time.

this whole au is just an excuse for me to dump cute headcanons about donnie being the best dad in the world and no one has stopped me yet, so. yeehaw

[tloubraininfection]

I have no idea how I ended up in this rabbit hole, one second I was researching something about the second game and the next I was crying my eyes out watching that part where Ellie goes back to Joel`s house and ho boy! When I tell you I went through all the stages of grief all at once I mean it. And now I have to process this, cause I have thoughts!

This always gets me, cause look at all those flowers and cards! Joel was LOVED, people in that town knew him, cared about him and now they are grieving him. Not only that, they know and care about Ellie too and they want to support her through this awful time, show their love. They both live in a community that cares about their own. There are no words to make a loss like that better, nothing could possibly fix it, but having people care and be there for you? It still makes all the difference.

And now we go in, the house looks so peaceful and inviting. And it’s just a small thing, but I love the figurines on the coat rack. At this point Joel is gone, but you can feel his presence at every turn, as if he`s about to step into the room and invite you for coffee. There is so much personality in that house.

I love the living room, there is so much light and space and it`s filled with books and art and things to enjoy with other people. And there is the TV! So that means this is where the movie nights were held! And that table is perfect for board games. And on the mantel there is Ellie's drawing of Joel. He actually framed it and displayed it in the central place of the most public room in his house, you know, like a proud dad!

Also at this point I have to bring back this gem! May I present to you Joel's drawing of Ellie. I guess it`s safe to assume that the talent skipped a generation. (It was a collectible that never made it into the actual  game, but I love it so much I just kind of ignore that fact!)

And right next we have a dining room, with a big table and another fireplace. It’s a room ready for entertaining, for friends, for family, for dinner parties and game nights. And in the corner there is a  bar cart and a wine rack with some fancy looking bottles. There is also a nice tea set and an electrical kettle (although why would it live in the dining room and not in the kitchen beats me).

There are also two jars labeled “beans” and “seeds” on the shelf for some reason and one that I`m scared to ask about. I guess you need snack with all that alcohol?

We also have this photo, it looks like it was taken at some sort of party, Christmas perhaps? We can see Jessie, Ellie, Tommy, Maria and the fifth person that kinda looks like Joel? His general outline and the flannel would suggest its him, but why is he seated so far away from Ellie? Unless it was taken sometime during their estranged. Or Joel was sitting on Ellie`s right and was actually taking the picture. If the first I have so many questions!

Now that’s a huge ass kitchen! And it`s so well equipped, I don’t have half of those appliances in mine. It looks like a kitchen of someone who not only knows how to cook, but also enjoys it a lot. Also that to-go coffee cup is killing me, don’t ask me why.

Nothing to see here, just a girl crying over an owl mug. Let’s move on!

I love all of those details, because they show how much Joel was taking care of his house and himself. He was keeping it nice and clean, the things have their proper place and he was doing or planning on doing some DIY projects or remodeling. It`s all so intentional and comes from a place of care. Also he has linen shelves and even an iron and an ironing board. You better believe all those flannels were always nice and ironed.

I`m going to repeat myself, but I love this house and how bright and specious it is. And the fact there are painting all over, mostly of horses, it’s just so Joel. And on the landing we have this photo of Miller brothers.

This is my favorite room in the house, it always moves me so much, because there is something so human about it. Once Joel was no longer forced to burn all his energy on survival he turned towards arts almost immediately. He spent over 20 years barely being human at all, refusing to live, refusing to see the world. And now he`s healed enough to search for beauty, to let himself be surrounded by it. You can survive without it art, but you can’t live without it. And I like to think it gave him some peace.

I just wanted to include this too, because Joel and Ellie`s studios mirror each other so much, just like the artists themselves. And it always makes me cry that Ellie kept that rodeo figurine, Joel`s very last work of art…

Just a quick detour into this bathroom, because it`s just another way to show that Joel took really good care of himself, he spent time on his grooming routine and he wanted to look presentable.

(Although the twigs have me baffled again, what are they for?)

I also had to include this, cause it’s the most contraaactor thing, just look at this contraption! I bet it works like a charm!

Joels closet, with all his jackets and his pack. I wish we got to see him rocking that pink-sleeved jacket! I mean, c`mon!

Just a quick look into the second bathroom, because it’s a very silly place and I need a breather before we do the next part. There is a mirror missing here for some reason (I have a hunch it`s the one Ellie has in her garage house thing) and there are some mysterious bottles in the bathtub and a pot on a counter for some reason? And it sits on an electric cooker? What is going on here? What are you cooking, Joel? Meth?

Okay, this place really pulls on my heartstrings. The photo of Sarah, that once upon a time Joel was unable to even have in his possession, let alone look at it, is now on full display. He is able to live and be reminded of her every day and for those memories not to kill him, but rather hold him. He`s finally able to look at that photo and feel something other than pain. And right next to it, there`s a photo of him and Ellie (and a horsie, Shimmer perhaps?), Ellie looks very young in that one, so it`s most likely from their early years in Jackson. And both of those photos sit on a dresser right next to his bedroom, so he sees them every day right after he wakes up.

There is also a candle right next to Sarah`s picture and I believe it`s for both of his daughters. In memory of Sarah and as a guiding light for Ellie, to help her find her way home.

Joel`s bedroom is such a cozy place, he has a nice chair for reading and listening to music and he even has one of his guitars there. I also really love that wooden Texas outline, I bet he carved himself. And he has a silly throw pillow, we have so much in common!

And it`s time for some more crying, because “Space for Dummies” and reading glasses. They were 2 years into their estrangement and Joel was still not losing hope that someday she`d come round, that they’d get a chance to repair what was broken in their relationship and just hang out again. And then he would impress her with all his fun space facts? You know? He never lost hope…

And just to round this trip up let’s get outside for a sec and see the backyard. I think the vegetable garden is a nice detail since Joel cooks and fresh produce right form his own backyard would come in handy! And of course the back porch, the one for playing guitar and having heart to heart with you daughter.

Also I need to include this, because fishing. Ever since I read "Catch and Release" by SentientMassTransit (I can’t recommend it enough, go read all of Ellis`s stories they are brilliant!) I have fishing brainrot and just looking at this thing makes me so happy, just imagine Joel and Ellie going fishing! They are so so lucky, they have all the time in the world to chill and be happy, right? Right?

Anyways, I love this house and how it tells you a whole story about Joel and his journey. Because this is a house of a person who cares about themselves and their space, a person who knows how to live, how to enjoy fine alcohol and a fine meal, how to throw a party, how to make art, how to listen to music, how to create, express and enjoy.

Compare it to his apartment in Boston:

How dark, empty and desolate it was. I know it`s not really fair, since a lot of things that are possible in Jackson would never, could never happen in any QZ, but I still think that those two places represent Joel a lot. And they tell you a story about his growth, his change and his healing. A difference between those two spaces is a difference between a man surviving and a man living a full life.

It wasn’t time that did it, it was his relationship with Ellie that set in motion this whole process. And it was crucial, but it was just a beginning for him. Everything that followed was his decision and it required a lot of hard work. He rebuild his relationship with Tommy, he had a meaningful role in the community and he made friends! And after his falling out with Ellie it would`ve been incredibly easy for him to go back to his old patterns, but he fought against it, held onto life, art and people. He chose every day to live, to take care of himself and his house and he had enough passion for life to turn it into art! It shows how much he`s healed, how much he`s grown and how far he has come.

In this house we belive TLOU2 ended here actually, he went on fishing, playing guitar, making art, spending a lot of time with his daughter and even becoming a grandpa! He`s very happy, thanks for asking!

Most of the photos come from this page: https://thelastofus.fandom.com/wiki/Joel%27s_house

[zethsmo]

ˏˋ°•*⁀➷ introduction *ೃ༄

heya!!! I just noticed i’ve never made an intro for my tumblr, so here i am !! You can call me Ethan / Zeth / Zara, I’m a teenager, I go by any pronouns, I’m an aroace lesbian, I am genderqueer, my mbti is infp/intp, and i am an artist! (self taught)

■ Socials ::

✦ Tiktok (multi) [ @zethsmo ]

✦ Tiktok (JC avatar) [ @zethansm ]

✦ Instagram (multi) [ @zethansm ]

■ More about me ::

✦ I am a multi/rarepair/crackshipper so don’t be surprised if you see some content of that nature lol

✦ I am definitely big on making queer and race headcanons for characters

✦ I’m pretty openminded with ships and relationships between fictional characters (if they’re not proships of course) like for example i like [these characters] as a romantic pairing, i also like them as friends, platonic partners etc. (I like aus what can i say)

✦ I have liek,,, multiple personas that depict my different personalities and it’s also like life lore i think it’s neat

✦ The content i post is (of course) my art, sometimes i post skits that i made for tiktok

✦ I wear glasses!! (astigmatism), I am anemic, I have synesthesia and i am definitely an avid maladaptive daydreamer

✦ I got two cats!!! they’re both ginger and i love them veryy much

✦ I joke around a lot and a lot of the stuff i say shouldn’t be taken seriously (unless if im using /srs) I’m just a sarcastic person in general

✦ I get obsessed with a piece of media every two weeks like,, every two weeks its a new thing and you can clearly tell what i am currently into depending on my profile picture, the drawings i post etc. (also a heads up for those who follow me for content from a certain fandom, i switch interests very often !!)

✦ Avid kids shows/movies watcher (to be fair i guess i am said shows/movies’ target audience)

► Favs // Likes

✦ Green, Blue, Red, Purple

✦ Paleontology, Archeology, Zoology, Meterology, Geology, Animal biology, Anthropology, Ancient history

✦ Parasaurolophus, Therizinosaurus, Quetzalcoatlus, Cats, Spiders

✦ Drawing, Reading, Sculpting, Painting, Watching tv shows/movies, Listening to music, Journaling, Having discussions about my interests

► Fandoms / Media i enjoy ::

✦ James Cameron’ avatar, The last kids on earth, How to train your dragon, Tales of arcadia, Arcane, Sweet tooth, The Spiderverse, Jurassic park, Carmen Sandiego, Hello neighbor, Bendy and the ink machine, All tomorrows, The hollow, Glitch techs, Salad fingers, Sally face, Minecraft, Minecraft story mode, Team fortress, Kindergarten, Among the sleep, Dinner with an owl, Granny, 60 seconds, Young sheldon, The fancy pants adventures, The willoughbys, Dan the man, Raising dion, Coraline, Kubo and the two strings, Paranorman, Boxtrolls, Missing link, Draw a stickman, Total drama, Nanny mcphee and the big bang, My dad the bounty hunter, The amazing adventures of morph, I have no mouth and i must scream, Jelly jamm, Charlie and lola, Shaun the sheep, Sarah and duck, Monster house, Baldi’s basics, Clangers, Mister maker, Pocoyo, In the night garden, Twirlywoos, Wooly and tig, Timmy time, Go jetters, Om nom, little misfortune, Franbow, Ice age, Gorillaz, Wreck it ralph, Mr bean, Dibo the gift dragon, Pink panther, Canimals, The good dinosaur, The croods, Minions/Despicable me, Rio, Little nightmares, Anpanman, Dumb ways to die, Atlantis the lost empire, Big hero 6, Tarzan, Megamind, Corpse bride, The nightmare before christmas, Spies in disguise, Luca, Book of life, Klaus, Oggy and the cockroaches, The sea beast

► Music artists i listen to ::

✦ Lisa ono, Hana Stretton, Gorillaz, The ink spots, Slaywitme/siouxxie sixxsta, Freddie dredd, Ella fitzgerald, Yameii online, C2d, Ayzha nyree, Amaarae, Kanii, monte booker, MF DOOM, Lil uzi, Kali uchis, Rico nasty, Cochise, JELEEL, Bktherula

■ DNI ::

✦ Basic dni criteria

✦ Anti xeno/neopronouns, Anti multishipping/crackshipping, NSFW accounts

✦ Gorillaz shippers, Carmen Sandiego x Graham Calloway shippers

[ohforficsake]

ASK TIME!

You are to be marooned on an uninhabited island for one year. You may choose one of each of the following to accompany you:

- A book

- A movie

- A television show

- A food or meal

- A fictional character

- An item from your home (not an electronic)

Assume your survival is guaranteed but your comfort is not. Choose wisely.

Oh man! When I tell you I have been thinking about this for half the day…

A Fictional Character: I'm going to start here because this was the easiest to answer. Francisco Morales. My dearest Frankie. That man is capable. Smart. A strong swimmer. Good with his hands (read that however you will). Trained in wilderness survival. He could build a fire. He could build a shelter. I trust his judgment. I trust that he can do what needs to be done. He's also not afraid of silence.

Book: My dad has a big old book of the complete works of Shakespeare that I think would be perfect. I actually do enjoy his work and I feel like in a year I could read and re-read. Memorize. Analyze. Chew on and see new interpretations of the material. Honestly a year with downtime to do that would be absolutely lovely.

Movie: Skyfall. I happen to be a JB fan, but Skyfall is also an objectively perfect film, I will not be taking questions.

TV Show: Old UK Top Gear with the original hosts. Huge back catalogue. A great laugh. I feel like Frankie would enjoy it too. And he could explain car stuff to me, which would be hot.

Food: If this is like, an infinite supply, hot and ready when you want it situation—french fries. If not—potatoes. So I could grow more potatoes and make french fries. I cannot live without potato. Potato is life.

An Item From Your Home: I'm tempted to be practical here. A comforter. A bush knife (don't worry about it). A pocket knife. Let's assume that Frankie brought knives (because he's always prepared). In that instance, I could not stop myself from being a sentimental fool and bringing a picture of my cat. That's my little man. My rock. Seeing his sweet face and knowing that he's taken care of with food in his belly and a warm place to sleep would get my heart through.

Thank you so so much for this ask! What a fun exercise!

[ruminate88]

Being Triggered? Healing Journal 07/03/24

I never even understood the meaning of the word “triggered” truly until I’ve been learning about emotional abuse. You nonchalantly hear stuff as a kid, no matter if it was from family members, school or tv. You hear things but you don’t always understand it unless you yourself experience it.

It’s always the ones closest to you, that hurt you. Remember that! My last two relationships were manipulative and gaslighting but I had no idea till years later and it’s impacted me in ways I never dreamt it would! Mostly impacting my marriage now.

Since knowing what gaslighting is now, I feel like I recognize it more but fear of being lied to or taken advantage of again in my relationships with people! I subconsciously compare my marriage to my exes and easily get stressed out or worried. I always have to talk myself off the ledge…. I’m always frustrated thinking can I trust my husband, when he seems so nice and hard working? My ex Andrew seemed mostly nice to me but I didn’t realize he was actually putting me down because of the fog I was in with him. I would never manipulate to get my way so I didn’t recognize it back then at all!!

YESTERDAY, was a bad trigger but I quickly got over it: Going back days earlier, I had a conversation with my husband about my mom and nephew’s bday party today. I say if he doesn’t want what my mom is cooking, he can maybe order a couple pizzas because my dad also doesn’t like what my mom is cooking. (My mom has cooked this meal before and both my dad and husband ordered pizza more than once) My husband has been on a diet but says maybe for one day he could cheat and have a pizza…. Didn’t say he was for sure ordering it, just that he could if he wanted to. I then ask my dad if he would like pizza with my husband. My dad says yes but to let him pay for it!!

NOW, yesterday I say to my husband, “my dad also wants pizza with you but wants to pay for it.” My husband then says, “I never said I was bringing pizza…..” 🥸🥸🥸 Right away my mind goes to “is he gaslighting me ????” I know he didn’t say yes he’s for sure getting pizza but said he could cheat on his diet and acted like he did want pizza. I am NOT CRAZY! Deeper than that, my husband has never loved this particular meal my mom makes and neither does my dad. Yet, my husband says yesterday, “I never said I didn’t like that meal. It’s not my favorite but I’ll eat it.” WHAT?!!! 🤨 y’all always get pizza cuz you don’t like this meal. He has ate this meal before but I KNOW he doesn’t care for it.,.

So I’m racing in my head, overthinking, over analyzing, telling myself I am not crazy and why is my husband acting like that…. However, we continued to have a pleasant evening and I kept saying to myself, “Stop comparing him to Andrew. Your husband isn’t trying to gaslight you or manipulate you” 🫠 Feels like every moment in my marriage is a stressful one and a struggle. I’m always on my guard, ready to defend myself and fight!!!

When does this get better??? ❤️‍🩹 When do I stop over thinking every conversation or every mood with my husband. Last night and this morning my husband seemed a tad moody and I believe it’s becuase of social anxiety and knowing he’s gotta go to this bday party today but what if I’m wrong? Either way, I was feeling defensive AND telling myself, “You gotta enjoy yourself despite his moods and if he doesn’t love you, let him move on” BUT my husband does love me…. Why do I question him at every turn????? It’s exhausting and I feel I can’t enjoy myself!! I feel like I’m all alone because my past two relationships were one-sided. Many Friday nights I sat on my phone crying over Andrew because I know he’s at the frat house partying with sorority girls AND he wouldn’t Snapchat me till 3am and send me a selfie of himself saying “hey ….” And it was always by himself too. Never looked like anyone else was at this party BUT yet on Facebook, he’s posting pictures of himself with all these girls at the party and it’s almost like he was doing it to make me jealous!!!

Once I calmed down yesterday and didn’t blow steam, I was able to have a good evening with my husband AND I downloaded Pokémon go just so I can stop questioning him when he leaves to go play and he was totally ok with me joining him and even helped me get going on the game. My husband is NOT my enemy. Andrew was. Andrew was the one low key putting me down and making me feel “crazy” but then why sometimes situations arise in my marriage where I am transported back to that feeling of “crazy”??? I KNOW if I don’t trust my husband, our relationship can’t thrive. I trusted him when I married him because I had sex with him and moved in with him…. Yet over time, I lost trust and once I learned about “emotional abuse”, wow…. It’s like I really closed off from the world. I felt so unsafe and troubled that the whole time andrew was deceiving me.

I mean, I knew Andrew lied to me and things were confusing with him but couldn’t explain it or name what was happening. I tried to love Andrew so hard and be a good girlfriend to him but I always felt like I wasn’t pretty enough, smart enough or adventurous enough!!! I saw his ex girlfriends on his old IG post and uggggh I compared myself to them and questioned why in the world Andrew was paying me any attention at all 😭😭😭

Now I feel awful when people do nice things for me and buy me stuff randomly. I feel so bad asking for anything or asking for help. I feel I have to do everything on my own and that I can’t go to anyone to talk about Andrew because what if they don’t understand or what if the make me feel bad for loving him?? Was it so bad to love Andrew as much and as long as I have???

Does ruminating about Andrew make me a bad woman and wife?? 😓😓😓

[meredith-harper81]

Part Of Your World🫀

Welcome to Hollywood

CHAPTER 1

Pairing: Chris Evans x Elyse Harper

Word Count: 3k

📍April 2015

Elyse Pov

"DAMN!! Perfect, that's the one, Elyse," I hear Haley say.

I am too zoned out to even care what's going on.

"What is?" I say as she comes out of the other room walking towards me.

"Elyse the dress...It's the one, the perfect dress! I'll go tell Laura," Haley excitedly says, rushing off to go tell Laura, my stylist.

I'm standing in the fitting room, trying on dress after dress for the Oscars.

I had taken a red-eye flight from Miami to LA this morning. I have spent the past 48 hours in glam running the walkway for a Versace show, and now my body is starting to pick up on the exhaustion.

Once I wrapped the show...I headed to the airport to take part in this torture.

Two weeks ago, Haley informed me, that I would be co-presenting an Oscar, and I needed to get some fittings done. Not only are the Oscars two days away.

I also didn't listen to her earlier... I didn't want to do this, I've only been to the Oscars once and didn't enjoy myself... but without a choice, I have to do it again...

I sigh and stare at myself in the mirror. My hair is in a ponytail. My eyes are bloodshot red. All I want right now is my bed and some sleep. I've been working non-stop this month and I'm craving a good night's rest in my own bed, not some shabby hotel room.

I'm wearing a gorgeous YSL gown. It's gold, with long sleeves and a V-neck.

I for the first time feel beautiful in a dress. I smile as Laura walks in and notes down some alterations that were needed.

I thank her, and she tells me she'll see me later,  the day of the Oscars.

Soon enough after Haley helps me out of the dress she offers to drive me to the house.

As Haley is driving, I look out the window as we pass through traffic...

"Who am I presenting the award with?"

Haley's eyes pop out and she gives me this look as if I hit my head on a wall, or as if aliens appeared on the 101.

"Seriously Elyse, Chris Evans... You're Presenting with Chris Evans," she says all excited.

"Chris Evans as in Captain America?" I question as I roll my eyes.

"Yes! Elyse, Captain America, you'll be presenting the best picture movie this year," she says as she takes the exit towards my place.

"UGHHHH!!! Another hotshot," I groan loudly.

"Don't worry, it will be a quick in and out.. I promise you," Haley says, smiling.

"Yeah, right, once you spot Leo or someone, you'll forget all about me," I mumble under my breath, smiling back at her.

I am not looking forward to this weekend at all and I decided to text my best friend, Dakota Johnson.

I met Dakota through our dads... My dad was her dad's dentist and we would always have playdates, so we go far back.

I haven't seen Dakota in a while with her packed schedule.

She's flying back today from wrapping up a film.

I texted her to come over tomorrow and hang out, maybe catch up. It's been a while, and she can convenience me it won't be as bad.

I hope she is also attending and can help me with this misery.

...

Haley drops me off and tells me to rest.

"Yeah, yeah, Haley, I got it. Thanks," I say, rolling my eyes as I get out. Don't get me wrong but I like Haley but she can get on my nerves at times.

She smiles and waves as she pulls out of the driveway.

I grab my duffel bag and look at the house. I call my dungeon...

I hope it's not a full house and I can head to bed right away.

I open the front door and head inside and look around and it is too quiet after placing my bags on the steps of the stairs I walk around and look for Maria.

She's probably in the kitchen.

I sigh as I see a piece of paper on the entryway table. This can only mean one thing. I squeal on the inside.

Gothel and Scar are not home.

I pick up the note.

"Elyse, Tony, and I have gone on a little trip to the coast. Make sure you put your cheque in the box in our room. And we expect to see you on TV at the Oscars. DON'T MESS THIS UP!!! Don't expect us back so soon, also don't fuck this up, or you know what will happen".

I just stare at the note, expressionless at this point, but I'm glad Emily and Tony aren't here right now.

I'm used to them spending my coin, to go on trips and buy ridiculous things. I just need to get out of the stupid contract and end this.

After my parents passed, I really didn't have another choice as the word spread quickly through the news of my parents.

Elizabeth was my manager at the time and was quickly manipulated by my aunt and turned against me and the rest is history.

Emily and Tony started using me for my fame trapping me in deals and campaigns and would abuse or hurt me... I was just the puppet, and they had control of the strings.

They would place me in ads, movies, shows, or campaigns without consenting with me first, and call all the shots.

Emily and Tony seem to be really good at acting their love for me out of the house, for the most part. We seemed like a happy family on the outside but in reality, it was far from that.

I mean, the only people who work for me are Haley, my publicist and assistant, Laura, my stylist, and my manager, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth mostly stays in contact with Emily now. I rarely see her around the house or on a red carpet.

She's in charge of what job or modeling assignment... negotiating numbers more of behind-the-scenes stuff.

My team never beats an eye at Emily. In fact, they  all call her Medusa. I mean, I see it. Hell if I try to avoid Emily as much as I can through my days.

This year things have been a little different and they are not at the house as often or I am away from work.

When I do see them, it is either to scold me or ask for the next pay cheque.

The only family figure I had was probably Maria.

Maria was our housekeeper. She looked after me. Maria is a sweet lady in her late 50s.

I can't even remember how old I was when Maria came to work for us. She slowly became aware of the abuse she tried to help me.

Eventually, she stopped and would do anything to help me or avoid something bad coming.

As I walk further into the living room Maria spots me.

"Elyse, come sit I made your favorite soup, mija," Maria says pulling me deep out of thought.

I smile and nod "Thank you, Maria," I say as I walk towards her and sit at the table.

As I finish my dinner. I let Maria know maybe Dakota will visit tomorrow morning.

...

I moan as I scrub some shampoo into my hair and give myself a little head massage.

I continue to clean my body.

The shower is probably one of the safest places where I feel.

It's like a warm hug to me, it reminds me of my mom's hug and how I used to feel safe.

I hum as I finish showering. I put my robe on and head to brush my teeth and hair out.

As I'm running my hands up and down my body rubbing lotion.

I graze under my left rib cage area. I have a long scar from when I was 13.

Tony whipped me with his belt since I didn't want to do this one bikini shoot. I was the only thirteen-year-old on set with older men and I was not comfortable.

It resulted in me needing to get some stitches... But leave it to Uncle Tony to pay off the doctor and stop the investigations. Money can truly buy everything.

I travel a little down to my right hip, where I touch the cigarette burn.

I have one on my right hip from Aunt Emily. I was told I was a toddler at the time when our families were close and I was playing around our play structure in the backyard.

Long story short Emily was not paying attention with her hands and burned my hip as she carried me inside, which was one of the reasons for why the family split.

I cringe at the thought that these scars are the only marks of "love" I have from my so-called family.

Nobody knows about these marks. I often think about how disgusting they are and maybe they define me.

I shake my head, trying to get these negative thoughts out.

I finish up and head to bed. As I'm lying in bed, I get a message. It's from Sebastian.

Sebby: Hey Ely :) How are you? I just got back from filming! I heard from Dakota you're attending the Oscars I'm excited to see you!!!

I smile as I read his message.

I met Sebastian way back when he was modeling.

We were both shooting a perfume campaign at the time, and he walked in on a break out between me and Tony about something stupid, about my scars, not covering up correcting for the shoot.

For only Seb to walk in with my eyes bloodshot and Tony yelling at me with broken glass every wear from the broken vase that was on the floor now.

When Sebastian saw the scars, I asked him to stay out of it and to promise me he wouldn't tell a single soul. Like- take it to his grave. He promised me but told me he's worried about me... He even helped cover my scars on the screen with his hand placements. And we've been good friends since then.

He keeps in touch, checking in from time to time.

Honestly, I wish it was Sebastian presenting with me and not Chris. I've never met the man, but he is always been in the media ever since becoming Cap.

Elyse: I'm doing better. The trolls are out of town so can't complain. I'm not looking forward to presenting, but you've lifted my mood now that I will see you in attendance!

Sebby: I'm glad to hear that! Don't worry Elyse, Chris is amazing at his job, Don't listen to the Hollywood gossip. He's much better than that. Try not to stress too much!! I'll see you on the red carpet. Goodnight.

Elyse: See you soon. Goodnight Seb!

I put my phone down and stare at the ceiling daydreaming about how I crave a different life than this. I've always been a reserved person. I don't like a lot of physical contact scared it will only hurt me more. I'm scared of getting hurt. I've built a wall around me.

I often think about if this is my forever life. I'm happy when I'm not here in LA and filming, or away on a shoot. Where I can play a different character and turn this all off. Get away from this hellhole called my "home".

I wonder if I'll ever be capable of loving someone who loves me back

From a young age, I was never allowed to date or be spotted with anyone in the media...Anytime a reporter would ask a question about my love life my team would shut it down immediately so I get it... I must be a freak or people threw themselves at me for my looks. I wonder if there is someone out there to love and accept me for who I am, and not just for my looks or money. I turn the fan on and turn over and close my eyes as exhaustion starts to set in.

Chris Pov

I check the time on my watch. I should make it to Ma's home just in time for dinner. I've just landed back in Massachusetts after filming for Avengers: Age of Ultron. I'm super tired and annoyed and the only thing I'm craving more than anything right now is Ma's made homemade food.

I'm fed up with eating only takeout and salads. I need some food made with love and Ma's French food has been calling my name ever since I landed.

I sit back and refresh my phone to find it exploding with messages and articles now just realizing about my current breakup.

I roll my eyes and open Twitter after Megan texts me, notifying the outcome of everything. It's been over five weeks since the breakup and it's coming out just now.

I see my name trending in so many hashtags and questions. If I'm off the market now? If it was my fault? Or if Willow, my ex, cheated?

Before going to Atlanta to film the last few scenes of the movie ... I drove to my girlfriend Willow's house to ask her if she wanted to come with me. Only to walk in on her cheating on me, I found her in bed with some hotshot guy from her friend group under her. I cringe at the memory.

I told her it was over, and to take her shit out of my house in LA... Rumors started to spread fast as she was seen by pap's leaving the house with a suitcase.

I sigh and sit back and wait for this car ride to be over. I searched my name on Google and to my surprise, it's trending.. "Captain America newly single." "Why did he dump his girlfriend?" Click our link in the bio to find out"... I groan.

I really hope Ma is home alone tonight...

As the driver pulls into the driveway. I see the lights are on and Carly's car is outside, which means the kids are here, which leads to the whole family.

"Great.. Full house" I mumble as the driver comes to a full stop.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I love my family, but knowing I'm going to see them after a while, and also mentioning I broke up with my girlfriend, I'm going to get a lot of crap from them.

...

I walk in, leaving my luggage in the mud room.

" Hey Ma," I shout. As I walk through the living room into the kitchen, it is indeed a full house everyone is already sitting at the dining table.

"Chris," Ma says, shocked.

" Uncle Chris, Uncle Chris! " Ethan shouts, and soon enough, all three of my nephews and niece attack me.

" Oh, Uncle Chwis, I missed you so much," Miles says. " I've missed you too buddy," I say as I give them each a big hug.

They lead me to the dining room, where everyone is getting ready for dinner.

Ma makes her way to me. " Oh honey, I thought you were going straight home, well this is a sweet surprise". She says this as she hugs me tight.

" I know Ma, but I was craving your food". I said, a little ashamed. She laughs.

" Lucky for you I made lasagna your favorite". I smile and slowly make my way around, greeting everyone.

We all sit down and start to enjoy dinner. They ask about how filming went. Ryan tries to get some info about the movie but, my lips are sealed... I explained how I wouldn't be staying long as I had to go to LA for the Oscars...

Everyone is quiet and starts to look around wondering who is going to be the lucky date this year.

" AHEM," Scott says, looking my way trying to get my attention. We all stare at him.

" Who are you taking since you broke up with Willow? " He says looking my way trying to get an answer out of me.

I sighed while rolling my eyes and looked down at my plate.

"Ow," he says as Shanna kicks his leg from under the table.

"No one... I'll be going alone. In fact, I am a presenter this year so it'll be a quick in and out," I say, taking another bite of some lasagna.

" Awww, that's too bad, Uncle Chris, Mommy, and Uncle Scott bet on who you're taking this year," Ethan says, smiling.

Everyone bursts out laughing as my family always ends up taking bets on my relationships as If it's some kind of game.

"Well, that reminds me Ma, you owe me some money," Carly says while laughing. I just look unfazed and roll my eyes and go back to eating.

...

Soon enough, everyone finishes dinner, and I say goodnight to the kids. Soon Carly leaves, and Shanna and Ma go to sleep as they have a big day at work tomorrow.

So I'm left in the living room with Scott.

" So who's the lucky presenter you're presenting with," Scott says as he brings me a beer,

"Well," I sigh taking the beer from Scott and taking a sip.

"I think it's Elyse Harper," I say as Scott starts choking on his beer.

"Are you okay?" I ask Scott and his eyes pop out.

"WHAT!" He says shocked.

"The supermodel Elyse Harper?"

"I think so," I shrug taking a sip of my IPA.

"Chris, how could you not tell me? I could have met Elyse.. Chris," Scott whines taking another sip of his drink.

I look at him, giving him a funny confused look.

" REALLY!... You don't know who she is do you?" He exclaims.

" No, I don't Scott," I say now annoyed.

"You are missing out bro... Chris, she's a supermodel, an actress, and only what like 4 years younger than you. How do you not know about her... She's in Fast and Furious, and Transformers?" He says.

I look at him and grab my phone, and do the only thing one would do.

I decided to Google her.

As the page loads, Scott grabs my phone out of my hands.

"Hey give that back," I say now even more annoyed than before.

" Chris, look at her," He says looking through the pictures.

I grab my phone out of his hand...and holy shit, I swear, I felt my dick twitch.

"She's beautiful," I say a little too loud for my liking.

" I told you, you were missing out... I may be gay but like wow...where have you been.. Get your head out from under the rock man". Scott now states proudly.

I'm staring into her green eyes on the screen, I slowly look at other features: she's tall, has a great ass, her hair is a light brown color, she has a light skin color, and her eyes her bright green eyes. I could get lost in them.

I hear Scott clear his throat. "Chris, you're drooling," he says.

I hit his arm. I wonder if she's single, and actually, a genuine person or if she just all looks.

Scott interrupts me, as I am deep in my thoughts.

" Chris, I know that look... All the best and you better not fuck this up,"

I sighed and put my phone away. I looked at the time and saw it was getting late.

After a few more beers Scott offers to take me home since he hasn't been drinking so much as me.

After Scott dropped me off...I head inside and to my room. I decided to take a shower before sleeping. I get in the shower and can't get Elyse out of my head. I don't even know the woman yet she has this effect on me.

I get out of the shower, brush my teeth, and look over at the empty sink to my right, and empty drawers in the cabinets. I can't help but feel sad.

I walk into the closet grab a pair of shorts and go lie in bed. I turn the lights off and get under the covers.

I'm staring at the ceiling thinking about how I need to get my life together and how lonely I feel. I can feel the anxiety creeping on me slowly.

I mean, I'm only 34, but I want all the things that life has to offer. I want to come to a house that feels like a home, and not barge in on Ma every time.

I want someone who loves me and waits for me. I want the bathroom sink to linger with her products and the closet to get out of control, someone hogging the whole bed... stealing the comforter from me at night, wanting to cuddle.

This is getting really getting old coming home to an empty house. This house doesn't feel like a home. It is missing something... maybe I should get a dog for now. I'm pulled out of my thoughts as my phone pings.

It's Megan, my publicist.

Megan: Chris, hope you had a safe flight home. I hate to break it to you, but we need to be in LA tomorrow afternoon for some fittings. I'm sorry... I'll call you in the morning. Have a good night.

I groan as I read the message, Great. I look at the time as it's 1:00 in the morning now. I roll over, trying to get some sleep.

I just end up tossing and turning. I can't sleep. She's still on my mind. I open up Google again and look her up  again. I see she has a few interviews on YouTube, so I decided to watch a few. She's funny and has a natural charm, doesn't try to stand out too much, but her smile doesn't always reach her eyes in most photos, or press junkets.

I sigh, as she doesn't seem to be an attention seeker. Damn, she's too pretty. She's got to have a boyfriend right?

...

I groan as I shut my alarm. I don't remember what time I went to sleep last night. I check the clock on the wall and it reads 6:35...I get out of bed, brush my teeth, and head to the basement to work out.

Soon after I had a quick shower and breakfast. I'm getting ready to head out the door when my phone starts ringing, and it's Megan.

"Morning Chris, how are you doing? She asks.

"I'm good, a little tired," I laugh

"Yeah, Well I'm sorry to hear that. I've booked the ticket for LAX. You leave in an hour. I'm sorry Chris but I tried to get a later flight...,"

"It is okay thank you Megan I'll see you real soon, Take care," I say as I hang up the phone.

I head back inside and pack a little carry-on bag for a few days. I only bring the necessities, since I have most things there.

...

I walk into Ma's home. I smile, as it smells like home.

I enter the kitchen and I see Shanna and Ma finishing their breakfast.

"Hey Shanna, Morning Ma," I say as I grab myself water.

I explain to Ma what's happening as she and Shanna are both running a little late to the theater.

They both wish me a safe flight, to enjoy myself and not overthink and that they'll see me on TV. I smile and hug them both.

I call an Uber and head to the airport. The driver parks on the airstrip, and as I head inside, I'm greeted by the pilot and the flight attendant.

They tell me the flight is on time, and I should get ready for take off.

I lie back in my seat and try to read a book, but I just think about her. I can't wait to meet her in person, and soon the plane takes off.

...

[mashounen1945]

Another interesting Star Wars history essay I saw on Reddit (yep, I'm serious)

[Star Wars Expanded Universe] A Tale of Two Clone Wars, or: The Original Star Wars "Canon" Crisis

Posted originally by the Reddit user "DocWhoFan16" on May 13th, 2022.

[Link to the original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/up16zw/star_wars_expanded_universe_a_tale_of_two_clone/]

--------------------------------------------------

I love Star Wars and I always have. I decidedly don't love talking about Star Wars on the Internet, mostly because I find it a chore to keep straight which parts I'm allowed to love and which parts I'm supposed to hate. It's no way to enjoy something, of course, but such is the nature of "being a fan" in the 21st century.

Nevertheless, the sad thing is that I can't seem to help but do it anyway, which is why I'm making this post (having threatened to do several times in various "Hobby Scuffle" threads) in which I have written five and a half thousand words about decade-old Star Wars fan drama that many people may have forgotten about, if they even knew it existed in the first place.

But maybe you will enjoy reading about it.

A Long Time Ago...

This is a story about the Star Wars Expanded Universe. I anticipate that most of the folks reading this will know what that was: the great mass of novels, comics, games, cartoons and more which took place in the fictional world of Star Wars, revealing "what happened next" for the protagonists of the movies, exploring its ancient history (a dark time in which the Jedi are hunted by the resurgent Sith Empire) and far(ish) future (a dark time in which the Jedi are hunted by the resurgent Sith Empire), and explaining how the extra with the ice cream machine who appears on screen for about three seconds in The Empire Strike Back was actually a Rebel sympathiser and the ice cream machine was actually a computer memory core containing sensitive information which he was trying to hide before the Empire could completely take over Cloud City.

When George Lucas sold Lucasfilm and Star Wars with it to the Walt Disney Company, the Expanded Universe found itself in limbo for a couple of years until Disney confirmed that, other than the six movies and the computer-animated Clone Wars TV series (in other words, the things in which George Lucas himself had taken an active and direct hand in creating, writing, producing and directing), all Star Wars stories produced prior to its acquisition would be rebranded as "Legends" and would not form part of the larger fictional story of Star Wars going forward.

My recollection is that most fans were more disappointed than angry. Of course, some people absolutely were angry, some of them were very, very, very angry, and many of those angry folks are still angry today, but I imagine most people had realised that this was an inevitable outcome from the moment the sale and acquisition was announced.

The Expanded Universe was now "non-canon".

However, I think the picture is a little more complex than that. I'm going to try to explain why.

Star Wars and "canon"

Oh, good grief. What a can of worms. This is a really easy topic to get bogged down in and it's almost certainly going to happen here, but I think it's pretty important to the overall story, so I'll wade through it.

My understanding has always been that "canon" in Star Wars prior to the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney vaguely operated on a kind of tiered system. At the highest level, you had "G" canon, which was anything George Lucas himself had taken an active and direct hand in creating, writing, producing and directing. This encompassed the movies, obviously, but also flippant off-the-cuff remarks ex cathedra pronouncements such as Obi-Wan's home planet being called "Stewjon", which Lucas "revealed" in an incredibly obvious dad joke when he was asked during an interview with Jon Stewart at a convention in 2010 (for the record, this is still "canon" — we shall see if it comes up in the Disney Plus series soon enough).

The lower levels of "canon" encompassed essentially everything that was licensed; in other words, everything Star Wars that George Lucas had no input on. This material was counted as "canon" to the extent that it did not contradict anything at the George Lucas level and, in some cases, some of it could even be "promoted" to that level if Lucas himself included it in one of his own productions.

The most famous examples of this phenomenon have been much-trumpeted over the years but were ultimately pretty minor things: "Coruscant" as the name of the galactic capital planet was first used in a Star Wars story by Timothy Zahn (who has always complained that nobody in the movies pronounces it correctly) in the first "true" EU novel, Heir to the Empire, and may have originated in the West End Games role-playing supplements he was provided with and instructed to use as background material for his books; the Jedi characters Quinlan Vos and Aayla Secura, who originated in the Dark Horse Star Wars comic series, made it into the prequel trilogy seemingly just because George Lucas liked how they looked.

However, I think when you take a closer look, it becomes pretty clear that this entire multi-level system was more of a Lucasfilm creation than it was a Lucas creation. Lucas's own views on the Expanded Universe and whether it was "canon" are much less complex, and I think his most succinct comment on the topic (which I believe he first used in 1998 or 1999 when he was promoting The Phantom Menace) is that he regarded the novels and comics and everything else as a "parallel universe". He claimed he had never even read any of the Star Wars novels and that he didn't really count them as "real" Star Wars, because he didn't make them: "real" Star Wars was his movies; everything else was licensing.

Indeed, one of the stock funny factoids is that Lucas apparently didn't particularly care for even some of the most popular elements of the EU. Perhaps the most notorious example is the character Mara Jade, a former Imperial agent and long-time fan favourite created by Timothy Zahn for Heir to the Empire, who subsequently becomes a romantic interest for Luke Skywalker and eventually marries him and has a son, Ben, with him. According to J.W. Rinzler, Lucas "loathed" Mara and objected to the idea that Luke would ever get married and have a family, because it didn't match his view that Luke would become a kind of ascetic monk who practised a strict life of celibacy after Return of the Jedi (something which Mark Hamill, during the press tour for The Last Jedi, also claimed Lucas told him while they were making the original trilogy).

Nevertheless, the impression I have always taken away, as someone who has enjoyed experienced varying degrees of participation in the Star Wars fandom in general and the EU fandom in particular for close to 25 misspent years at this point, is that it became a widely accepted "fact" of the hardest core of the Star Wars fandom that the EU was "canon" and on an equal footing to the movies.

If I may speculate, I think there are two really key reasons as to why this perception became so widespread:

First, for many years, the EU was in the rather unique position of being the only new Star Wars material that was being produced at all and, because Lucas didn't really express his opinion on the subject of whether the EU was "canon" or not until it was pretty firmly-established, so nobody had any reason to believe it wasn't "canon" (and in the absence of widespread Internet access, any remarks Lucas made may well not have reached as many ears as they would today in any event).

Second, I think that most people were fairly cognisant that, whatever his true level of substantive involvement, George Lucas ultimately had to sign off on all of this stuff, giving it his approval (if not his endorsement) in the same way he would approve any other piece of Star Wars tie-in merchandise, and this may have created an (inaccurate?) impression that Lucas considered all of it to be just as "canon" as the fans did, and just as "canon" as what he was creating himself.

I will say, though, I did think sometimes that most fans understood, at least on some level, that the idea the EU was "canon" was a sort of legal fiction, that Lucas would have the final say and that there was likely some distance between what Lucas probably thought and what many Star Wars fans probably thought. Still, as long as nothing Lucas himself was creating contradicted too much of what EU writers produced, or at least could be easily reconciled to and harmonised with it, the illusion was maintained. However, that position would soon become untenable.

The Clone Wars, Version 1

Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones came out in 2002 and the Clone Wars storyline, first mentioned in a single line of dialogue all the way back in Star Wars in 1977, officially began. Between 2002 and 2005, the story of the Clone Wars unfolded in a new multimedia mini-saga which took in the entire EU.

Star Wars returned to the small screen for the first time since 1986 with Star Wars: Clone Wars, a brilliantly kinetic and dynamic "microseries" from Genndy Tartakovsky which introduced a new Dark Side rival for Anakin named Asajj Ventress and debuted a new villain who would be appearing in the forthcoming Episode III, the Jedi-killing droid General Grievous. The ongoing Dark Horse Star Wars comic, initially conceived as a kind of anthology book featuring the new Jedi characters introduced in Episode I, was retitled Star Wars: Republic and spent the next three years telling stories from the Clone Wars.

Del Rey, which had assumed the Star Wars publishing licence in 1999, began a bespoke line of Clone Wars novels which really ran the gamut from pastiches of Apocalypse Now (Matt Stover's Shatterpoint, in which Mace Windu plays the Captain Willard role) and M*A*S*H (Michael Reaves and Steven Perry's MedStar duology, in which Jedi padawan Barriss Offee joins a field hospital on a remote but strategically important planet) to more conventional Star Wars adventures (e.g. Stephen Barnes's The Cestus Deception, which teamed Obi-Wan with popular background movie Jedi Kit Fisto, or Sean Stewart's Yoda: Dark Rendezvous). Of particular note was a computer game tie-in book called Republic Commando by a writer named Karen Traviss.

This will be important later.

I don't even know where to start with all the games that came out, but suffice it to say I don't think there was ever a more productive period for Star Wars games than this one, and a fair few of them (Bounty Hunter, Jedi Starfighter, The Clone Wars, The New Droid Army, Galactic Battlegrounds: Clone Campaigns, even the campaign mode for Battlefront II) were Clone Wars tie-ins.

Quality varied across the board, as you may expect. And although Lucasfilm did creditable job of keeping things fairly consistent, at least to the extent that the stories in each medium weren't stepping all over each other too obtrusively, the whole line ended up in the awkward position of having three "official" lead-ins to Episode III which didn't really fit together. The comic miniseries Obsession, the novel Labyrinth of Evil and the final season of Star Wars: Clone Wars each managed to place Obi-Wan and Anakin at three separate remote corners of the galaxy simultaneously as the attack on Coruscant which opens the movie begins, and all end with them racing to join the battle from three completely different locations! Similarly, the novel and the cartoon showed two different versions of General Grievous kidnapping Chancellor Palpatine and the cartoon and the comic showed General Grievous suffering two completely different critical injuries (Mace Windu drops a STAP on him in the comic and uses the Force to crush his organs in the cartoon) which caused his cough in the movie!

However, that was splitting hairs. At the time, between the books and comics and games and the cartoon and everything else, it really felt like the EU was telling the entire story of the Clone Wars from start to finish, with Episodes II and III as the bookends.

The story of the Clone Wars, it seemed, was complete.

"Seemed" being the operative word.

The Clone Wars, Version 2

George Lucas's next Star Wars project after Revenge of the Sith was supposed to be a live-action television series called Star Wars: Underworld, which fell through when it became clear that producing as many episodes as Lucas wanted at the level of quality he envisaged was impractical on a television budget. Thus it seemed that, just as it had been between 1991 and 1999, the EU was going to be the primary source of new Star Wars stories for the foreseeable future (although unfortunately, I think this is generally regarded as a period of mixed fortunes of the Expanded Universe; that's certainly my own recollection of the time).

However, once it became clear that the production of the live-action series had hit that roadblock, Lucas shifted his focus and work commenced on a new animated feature, which would be released theatrically and serve as the pilot for a new Star Wars animated television series, which would have a whole new multimedia mini-saga around it in books, comics and games, which would tell the complete story of a decisive era of Star Wars history.

It would be called Star Wars: The Clone Wars and it was going to tell the story of... er... the Clone Wars.

As I recall, the immediate reactions to the announcement and the first trailers were somewhat mixed. I have quite distinct memories, for instance, of people complaining that it looked "childish". When the movie came out and featured Anakin going on an adventure to rescue the vile gangster Jabba the Hutt's cute little baby son Rotta, over whom the murderous crime boss lovingly coos and to whom he refers as his "punky muffin", this initial impression was not exactly shifted. Likewise, I also recall a lot of particularly pronounced ill-feeling among Star Wars fans towards a new main character the show was going to introduce, a young female Jedi learner named Ahsoka Tano, who would end up being accused of being too perfect, too powerful and, you guessed it, a Mary Sue.

However, bubbling beneath all of this fairly predictable surface-level criticism was a certain element of suspicion: the EU already did the Clone Wars, and pretty comprehensively too! You say you're going to do it again; are you going to... replace the original one? Somewhat surprisingly, Lucasfilm actually gave assurances that this would not be the case. Supervising director and executive producer Dave Filoni, whom George Lucas had been hand-picked to oversee the new series, and other folks at Lucasfilm insisted that they wanted to take the existing EU continuity seriously, to supplement rather than supplant the existing "canon" of the Clone Wars and to respect what had gone before.

However, it was made abundantly clear that this was George Lucas's series, and his word was going to be final.

When the series began, it's true that there were a few small things which were inconsistent here and there: for example, the Jedi master Eeth Koth appears in an early story arc, contradicting a comment from an Attack of the Clones reference book which said he died on the Battle of Geonosis; but that was only a reference book, not an actual story, so that was an acceptable discrepancy and one which was easy to ignore without much fuss.

I know there were still plenty of folks who dismissed it as a disposable product for children (as opposed to the many mature, sophisticated dismemberments scenes Troy Denning was writing in Star Wars novels at the time, I suppose), but I'd say The Clone Wars found an audience who appreciated it pretty quickly. Maybe it had a somewhat shaky start, but it was and is a good show: it was able to thread the needle of tackling complex themes and plots while staying simple and straightforward; it had strong characterisation and great performances from its three lead voice actors (Matt Lanter as Anakin, James Arnold Taylor as Obi-Wan and Ashley Eckstein as Ahsoka); it managed to add some depth to one-note characters like Asajj Ventress and did a great job of characterising the clone troopers as distinct individuals in spite of their identical DNA; and it has to be said that there were few cartoons on television that looked better at the time, because Lucas was apparently putting his own money into it to ensure that its animation would be top-notch.

Is it perfect? Of course not. Does it still have its flaws? Absolutely? Is it still kinda distracting that we're asked to accept Anakin as a basically good person here when he's already ethnically cleansed a whole village of indigenous people in the previous movie? Well... For me, it kinda is. But it still evens out as a really good and very fun wee series. And most importantly for some fans, it felt like it was siloed off in its own little corner of the EU, to be safely ignored if you preferred, not intruding on anything else and not threatening the integrity of the "canon" of the original Clone Wars.

Then, on 15 July 2009, they published The Art of Star Wars: The Clone Wars.

The Drama Awakens

There's probably few Star Wars novelists more controversial than Karen Traviss. I'm not a fan of her work or her take on Star Wars and must confess I never have been, but that's a whole other thing by itself and not what I'm here to talk about, I'm decidedly not a "hater" and I will do my best to be even-handed. What you need to know is that one of the things Traviss had become very well-known for was her seeming fascination with (some might say fixation upon) the Mandalorians. After writing the first Republic Commando novel, Traviss took it upon herself to develop the history, culture, customs, society and language of the Mandalorians. I'm not sure if "Space Gurkhas" would be the most accurate way to sum it up, but that's where my mind tends to go. Again, not something I'm especially interested in (Boba Fett was always infinitely more compelling to me before we knew what was under the helmet) but loads of people love it and that's cool.

When The Art of Star Wars: The Clone Wars came out, it included some information regarding a trilogy of episodes which would be part of the then-forthcoming second season: "The Mandalore Plot", "Voyage of Temptation" and "Duchess of Mandalore". It explained that Mandalorian society had once been warlike in the past, but by the time of The Clone Wars had embraced a pacifist philosophy and rejected their bellicose history, with the only holdouts against these values being the mysterious terrorist gang known as Death Watch (itself an adaptation of an older EU idea from the W. Haden Blackman Clone Wars tie-in comic Jango Fett: Open Seasons) who sought to overthrow the benevolent rule of Duchess Satine and return Mandalore to the old ways. The Mandalorians themselves resided in futurustic cities amidst the barren, blasted wastelands of their home planet.

All of this, to one extent or another, directly and irreconcilably contradicted much of what Traviss had created in relation to the Mandalorians. As you might expect, Traviss was extremely unhappy. In fact, she was so unhappy that she quit Star Wars completely and left, never to return, claiming that she felt she and her work had been disrespected and disregarded by Lucasfilm and that she no longer wished to work under such conditions. (While it is understandable that she would be upset, as many have noted over the years, this was and still is regarded as a bit rich, because another thing Traviss had a bit of a reputation for was claiming that she didn't read anyone else's Star Wars novels, but would still take characters from them and use them as she pleased. More to the point, many other Star Wars EU authors - Tim Zahn, Steven Perry and Kathy Tyers among them, off the top of my head - had been pretty clear that they understood they were playing in someone else's garden and recognised that, from Lucas's perspective, their work wasn't really "canon" in the first place.)

But if Traviss was unhappy, EU fans generally (and fans of Traviss's work in particular) were probably even unhappier. Their worst fears had been realised. Lucasfilm had reassured them that the "canon" status of the EU would be respected and, bluntly, it hadn't been. One of my most distinct memories of this entire drama was the front page of Wookieepedia rather bitterly putting up a George Lucas quote on its front page, in which he denounced making changes to other people's work. Overnight, Dave Filoni became a kind of hate figure for fans, accused of being "smug" or "arrogant" or denounced for "butchering the canon" of Star Wars, for trampling over the work of other (and, implicitly, "better") creators, for being a "prequel apologist" (back when that was a mark against you), for "ripping off Karen Traviss" and then "forcing her out of Star Wars", and probably some other invective that I've forgotten.

As it transpired, though, this was only the beginning.

Begun the Clone Wars Wars Have!

It's kind of fascinating to look back at how that event seemed to open the floodgates, because in the remaining seasons of The Clone Wars, the position of the Expanded Universe was made absolutely clear: the idea that it was ever "canon" was and always had been at the sufferance of George Lucas, and if George Lucas wanted to change it, George Lucas was going to change it.

You see, according to comments from Filoni himself in later years, a lot of the stuff around the Mandalorians which had so incensed Traviss and a lot of hardcore EU fans, apparently came directly from George Lucas. Lucas, he has explained, began to become increasingly involved with the creation and development of the series storylines from the second season onwards, contributing ideas and sometimes even full outlines for episodes or multi-part story arcs. The Mandalore trilogy in season two was, from what I understand, one of the first times he did this.

They were small changes, in some ways, but nevertheless, they had a pretty fundamental impact on the integrity (for want of a better word) of the Expanded Universe, because they were changes which couldn't be reconciled to the existing EU. Here are some examples:

The planet Ryloth had always been characterised in the EU by its status as a "tidally-locked" world where one half was a scorched desert always facing its sun, the other half was a frozen desert always facing away from its sun, and the native Twi'leks inhabited a narrow twilight band around the middle; when Ryloth appeared in The Clone Wars, it seemed to be a fairly generic world of rolling plains and hilly grasslands (and all the Twi'leks were French).

The Dugs (Sebulba from The Phantom Menace is one) were the natives of the planet Malastare, and the established position in the EU was that they had been subjugated and enslaved by the colonising Gran (the three-eyed goat-faced dudes; you'd know them if you saw them) species. When the Zillo Beast story arc appeared in The Clone Wars (another major example of a direct Lucas contribution; he was keen to do an homage to classic kaiju movies), it took place on Malastare... where the Dugs govern themselves and there is not a Gran in sight.

Darth Maul, a character that George Lucas had killed off in the most definitive manner possible precisely because he knew people would want him to come back from the dead and he didn't want that... came back from the dead, apparently at Lucas's own suggestion! Not only that, but he came with a hitherto unseen evil secret brother and a whole new backstory, which tied into...

The planet Dathomir was one of the better-defined worlds of the EU: a matriarchal society of Force-sensitive barbarian witches who rode on the backs of tame rancors; the sinister Nightsisters as witches who had mastered the dark side of the Force. In The Clone Wars, some of the basic elements of this are retained, but they are reimagined so as to form the basis of the new origin story of Darth Maul (now portrayed as a "Nightbrother"), as well as that of...

Asajj Ventress, now portrayed as a native of Dathomir and daughter of the Nightsister leader, replacing the origin developed by John Ostrander in Star Wars: Republic which placed her as the daughter of murdered freedom fighters on a remote planet who was trained in the Force by a stranded Jedi and turned to the dark side and conquered her homeworld after he was killed by her political enemies.

One of the most significant changes involved the character Barriss Offee, one of the background Jedi introduced in Attack of the Clones. Usually appearing alongside her master, Luminara Undili, Barriss had generally been portrayed as roughly the same age as Anakin, featured as a main character in the aforementioned MedStar novels and was generally agreed to have fought alongside her master throughout the war and died during Order 66. In The Clone Wars, Barriss is reimagined as a younger character, closer in age to Ahsoka than Anakin, and in the final arc of the initial broadcast run in 2013, she falls to the dark side, betrays the Jedi Order and frames Ahsoka for a terrorist attack that she perpetrated herself.

Quinlan Vos, a Jedi master who walked the line between light and dark, was one of the most popular characters of the Expanded Universe, the main character of Dark Horse's Star Wars: Republic whose stories chronicled his struggle with the dark side as he infiltrated Count Dooku's inner circle, allowed himself to be guided down ever darker paths in the name of maintaining his cover and his ultimate rejection of the darkness out of love for his family and friends. He makes a guest appearance in The Clone Wars, and he's honestly kind of a surfer dude, not really feeling much like the same character he'd been in the comics at all. (This is one that I remember people being particularly frustrated with.)

Character deaths: the two most significant which occur to me are the Jedi masters Even Piell and Adi Gallia. The former is killed in the Clone Wars episode "Citadel Rescue" from 2011, when he is mauled by a nexu during a prison break... but he'd already been killed by clone troopers during Orer 66 in the novel Jedi Twilight in 2008. The latter is killed by Darth Maul's evil secret brother Savage Oppress in the Clone Wars episode "Revival" from 2012... but she'd already been killed seven years earlier by General Grievous in the Dark Horse comic Obsession from 2005!

Examples of smaller —but still significant— changes to characters include the portrayals of: Aurra Sing, an Episode I background character who had become a major villain in the Dark Horse comics as a former Jedi padawan who fell to the dark side and became a prolific Jedi-killer, portrayed in the series as Boba Fett's mentor as a bounty hunter with no indication that she has the Force; Dengar, who had been a rival of Han Solo and became a bounty hunter after a near-fatal accident in a speeder bike race against him in the existing EU, is now portrayed as having been a bounty hunter since the Clone Wars, potato sack on his head and all; and like Dengar, Greedo (seriously!), who previously in the EU had been a rookie bounty hunter with a grudge against Han Solo when he appears in Star Wars, is also established here to have been active as a bounty hunter since the Clone Wars.

And most offensively of all, now General Grievous had always had a cough the entire time!

For better or worse, the cat was out of the bag. The new Clone Wars wasn't just overwriting parts of the original Clone Wars, but entirely different parts of the Expanded Universe altogether. Filoni, to be fair, did try for a few years to make the case that it all fit together in some way, that the new Clone Wars was looking at the old Clone Wars "from a different point of view" (this is Star Wars, after all). I think it's always been pretty clear that Filoni is a fan of the EU and all of the references he made then and continues to make in his Star Wars work today reflect his appreciation for it; the many, many, many claims that he actually hated it and his fans seem completely without foundation to me. However, as the position became less and less tenable, he would eventually give an interview to Star Wars Insider in 2012 in which he came right out and said that the Clone Wars animated series and the EU "don't live in the same universe". And it was clear which one was "supposed" to "count".

Here's a clue: it's the one that George Lucas was helping to make. The creator of Star Wars was actively creating new Star Wars "canon", and this time, it seemed to the EU's longtime fans that these new additions had little to no regard for the existing "canon" at all.

Conclusion

By far the most tangible and shocking outcome of this drama was the exit under a pretty dark cloud from the Star Wars universe of Karen Traviss. I've said I didn't like her work at all, but the fact remains that many, many fans loved and valued what she contributed to Star Wars and still do to this day. In the years since Disney purchased Lucasfilm, we have seen creators walk away from or find themselves "forced out" of Star Wars for one reason or another, whether that's Phil Lord and Chris Miller, Colin Trevorrow, Chuck Wendig and others, but I don't think any departure was quite as divisive within the Star Wars fandom as was that of Karen Traviss. Karen Traviss wasn't fired over creative differences, because she wanted to take her work in one direction and Lucasfilm wanted it to go in another; Karen Traviss quit because she felt that she and her work had been disrespected by someone else's work (that "someone else" ultimately being George Lucas) and she made abundantly clear that this was why she had made the decision to exit.

But the more significant outcome was much quieter. I don't think fans had fully appreciated that it had happened at the time and (perhaps due in no small part to some of the misconceptions which I think still exist around George Lucas's own views on "canon" in Star Wars which I mentioned above) to a large extent, I'm not sure that many of them really appreciate it even today. The Clone Wars blew the Star Wars EU wide open in a very fundamental and irreversible way. For the first time, here was George Lucas himself helping to create something which said (or, at least, was perceived to say), in a very direct definitive manner, in a way that couldn't really be reconciled or ignored like it always had in the past, that all the comics and games and novels that you liked "didn't count" as "real" Star Wars, because that's what this was meant to be. Whenever people say that "Disney made the EU non-canon", it is only reasonable to acknowledge that George Lucas kind of did that first.

Of course, attempts were still made. I understand that the Fate of the Jedi novel series (which I have to emphasise I never read and never have read) gamely tried to incorporate some of the new Force mythology from The Clone Wars (specifically the Son, Daughter and Father characters; mysterious personifications of the Dark Side, Light Side and Balance of the Force respectively) into its storyline regarding the Space Cthulhu Force creature Abeloth, but I feel that it was a bit of a lost cause by that point. If Lucasfilm's decision to introduce the Legends branding was the end, then The Clone Wars, whether we realised it at the time or not, was the beginning of the end.

My own opinion on the matter is that Disney didn't "invalidate" the Expanded Universe; they just didn't validate it.

Final Thoughts

I think there are two great ironies that came of all of this.

The first is that a lot of Traviss's contributions to the portrayal of the Mandalorians were actually kept in the long term and, to varying degrees, remain part of Star Wars today. A lot of the stuff you see in The Mandalorian (a series co-created and co-produced by none other than Dave Filoni) seems to owe at least as much to some of the language and concepts that Traviss introduced as it did to the developments in relation to the Mandalorians which occurred throughout the Clone Wars cartoon.

And the second is that Dave Filoni, once one of the great hate figures of the Star Wars fandom, is today regarded as one of its heroes, the protector of "George's legacy", the "only man who really understands George's vision", the Chosen One who will "save" the series he was once accused, incessantly and often virulently, in the kind of terms that you have to literally be Rian Johnson to have thrown at you today, of "selfishly" and "arrogantly" trying to destroy. Let me be absolutely clear, I think Filoni is a talented writer and artist and I'm always keen to see what he does next in Star Wars, but forgive me if I find all the hero-worship a bit two-faced, because I remember very clearly when the shoe was on the other foot.

Perhaps the decision that The Clone Wars, alone of the EU, would be "canon" after Lucas sold to Disney was a blessing in disguise. It didn't matter if it had contradicted and overridden "canon" any more, because now everything it had supplanted was "non-canon" in a much more definitive way than it had arguably been before. You could go back to it and enjoy it for what it was rather than hating it for what it wasn't, and I'm pretty sure that a lot of people who did so recognised its accomplishments on its own merits because it deserved recognition, not because it was or wasn't arbitrarily "canon".

Or, perhaps, the people who rejected it the first time around, who would fill message boards with so much invective about how "the canon" was being vandalised with every new secret evil Darth Maul sibling or inconsistency with this or that comic or novel, had all left with Karen Traviss.

Whatever the case may be, that's the Clone Wars. Both of them.

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A selection of enriching comments from the original post:

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"UnsealedMTG" said:

I'm going to ramble a bunch but I want to put upfront the funniest "HobbyDrama" part of this, and what I first heard about the conflict, having checked mostly out of the Star Wars fandom at the time: Karen Traviss referred to the people who opposed her work as "Talifans", comparing them to the Taliban because liking the Jedi too much made them like oppressive theocrats; her own faction went by "Fandalorians".

Awesome post! I remember a lot of this, though I was mostly checked out of Star Wars for much of the Clone Wars era, bopping in to read some of the newer Timothy Zahn books and to watch the totally sweet Tartarovsky cartoon. (I've since seen the 2nd Clone Wars cartoon, and yeah, it's pretty great overall if uneven for sure. Shout out to Dee Bradley Baker for his awesome voice work as all the clones, balancing their sameness with their individuality.)

I agree with your takes and just want to add some notes/thoughts.

The official Lucasfilm canon system for the EU was a little more complicated than even addressed in this post, and some of that kind of relates to this dispute. Any stuff from a lower level was kind of "true unless contradicted by a higher level", at least officially.

As mentioned, the top level was G Canon, meaning "George Lucas". It referred to specifically the 6 live-action films (before the Disney buy-out), the radio dramas, the film scripts, and comments by George Lucas.

The 2nd level was T Canon, meaning "Television". That included only the CGI Clone Wars series. So, CGI Clone Wars notably was not quite officially the top level. But it trumped books.

The 3rd level was C Canon — this was your core EU stuff.

The 4th level was S Canon, for "Secondary canon". This was basically old or weird stuff that wasn't really consciously integrated into the EU, either because the EU's idea hadn't been developed yet or because it was games-related. Examples are the Star Wars Holiday Special or the MMO Star Wars Galaxies.

Finally, there was N "Canon", which was non-canon material like the comedy issues of Star Wars Tales or the Star Wars Infinities comics, which were like the Star Wars version of Marvel's What If? (I genuinely love those even if they have dumb stuff, like the one set at the end of Return of the Jedi, where Vader survives but turns Light-Side and shows up in his Vader armour... coloured white now). Sometimes, when people are like "Look at this absurd thing that was canon in the EU!", they are talking about N Canon stuff that was never intended as canon and it bugs me. Wookiepedia encouraged this — multiple times I've encountered people saying it was canon in the EU that the droid that blows his motivator up in the original Star Wars was really Skippy the Jedi Droid, who went on to protect people on Tatooine as a ghost. That comes from an 8-page joke comic by Peter David from Star Wars Tales. It is a pretty good parody of the EU's tendency to turn every minor character into a secret Jedi, but it is a parody and it is not quite fair to the EU to treat it as real.

"Nevertheless, the impression I have always taken away, as someone who has enjoyed experienced varying degrees of participation in the Star Wars fandom in general and the EU fandom in particular for close to 25 misspent years at this point, is that it became a widely accepted "fact" of the hardest core of the Star Wars fandom that the EU was "canon" and on an equal footing to the movies. If I may speculate, I think there are two really key reasons as to why this perception became so widespread [...]"

I have a slightly different memory/perception. I always got the sense that people understood that the movies trumped the EU. And the EU stayed well clear of the Prequel era before the Prequels came out because they knew Lucas might want to eventually fill that in.

What I think was more controversial was the TV show trumping the other EU items since, even if there was some involvement from Lucas in the show, it still wasn't a movie so it seemed weird to give it the status close to or equal to a movie. It seems less weird now that the new canon has been built around the TV show, but at the time, it was all "not the movies" and it felt weird that some "not the movies" stuff could trump another.

I also have a couple of other thoughts about the why of canon expectations for the EU:

This is hard to imagine today given, on the one hand, what a cluster the EU became, and on the other hand, how used to integrated multimedia franchises we are now. But in fact, the EU was galaxies ahead of other licensed media in terms of coherence. Before Heir to the Empire, I don't know of any prominent franchise that even tried to get its licensed material to agree with each other. So when you read a Star Trek novel in the 90s, you just understood that anything not directly from a show wasn't "real" and wouldn't be referred to in a book by a different author. The fact that Star Wars made the effort was really ahead of its time, and once you saw that Mara Jade was going to be in books not only by Timothy Zahn but Kevin J. Anderson as well (not that she's all that recognizable between those two), the idea that there was a canon followed naturally.

There were plenty of reference works published that referred to all this EU canon. I remember a pre-Prequels Star Wars dictionary with a proto-version of the elaborate canon hierarchy. Anything from the movies was marked with the Rebel Alliance symbol, meaning movie material. Anything from the EU was marked with the similar but distinct New Republic symbol. Stuff like that created the idea of a two-tier system that, again, the 2nd Clone Wars cartoon seemed to upset by barging in at a second tier above the other EU stuff.

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"DocWhoFan16" (the original poster) replied to "UnsealedMTG":

"The fact that Star Wars made the effort was really ahead of its time, and once you saw that Mara Jade was going to be not only in the books written by Timothy Zahn but also in the ones written by Kevin J. Anderson (not that she's all that recognizable between those two), the idea that there was a canon followed naturally."

I think the tricky thing here is that there was a bit of a dispute right at the start of the EU when they decided that, even though the novels seemed to be the "official" continuation of Star Wars after the movies, the comic Dark Empire was going to "count" as well.

The thing is that Tom Veitch had been pitching Dark Empire since around 1986 or 1987 (to Marvel, originally, since they were still publishing Star Wars comics at the time) and it was imagined as the "what happened next" story to follow the movies.

When Bantam Spectra announced they'd be starting a series of novels, one of the options they considered was asking Veitch to write a novelisation of his comic, which he was up for doing. But then they opted to go with Zahn's story instead, because Zahn had a growing reputation in science-fiction and was under contract to them already.

Zahn developed the story for the Thrawn Trilogy completely independently of Veitch developing Dark Empire, and it's my understanding that when he was asked, he flat-out refused to include any Dark Empire references in his book, largely because he didn't like the story of Dark Empire. Essentially, the Thrawn Trilogy and Dark Empire were "supposed" to be two alternatives rather than stories that both "happened" within each other's fiction. Zahn gave Han and Leia a twin son and daughter in the Thrawn Trilogy; Veitch gave them one son in Dark Empire. It was never "planned" for them to have three kids: they had two in the novels and one in the comics.

The "problem" (such as it was) arose when Kevin J. Anderson wrote the Jedi Academy trilogy and, later on, Darksaber, because Anderson and Veitch had compared notes and found they shared a similar idea of Star Wars and Anderson ended up including references to Veitch's comics in his novels, effectively making them part of the "canon" of the EU when their position had previously been a bit murkier. So (just for example), whereas the novels had been moving forward with the assumption that Han and Leia had these two kids, now they had a third one to account for!

(Indeed, an RPG supplement eventually "revealed" that the assassination of Grand Admiral Thrawn by the Noghri was somehow orchestrated by the cloned Emperor from Dark Empire, which I suspect is probably the kind of thing Zahn pointedly wanted to avoid)

That's my understanding of it, anyway, though of course I may have the wrong of it.

"There were plenty of reference works published that referred to all this EU canon. I remember a pre-Prequels Star Wars dictionary with a proto-version of the elaborate canon hierarchy."

Sure, that may also illustrate an earlier, non-drama-causing example of this phenomenon: I remember devouring The Essential Guide to Characters as a child... and being confused about why none of the stuff from the old Marvel comics (which Dark Horse had reprinted and I'd read in that format) was in it!

I will say, I think that getting online circa 2002 and having rude people tell me I was wrong to think the Marvel comics "counted" was probably what started me down the path to not really caring about "canon" that much, LOL. :p

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"UnsealedMTG" replied to "DocWhoFan16":

I believe that's all generally correct. In my mind, there were some textual changes to Dark Empire to sort of make it fit with the new idea that it was later than the Thrawn Trilogy, but that might have been my mind inserting that because I already "knew" the "official" timeline which put Dark Empire well after Thrawn.

It was definitely messy from the beginning, but what was kind of novel and helped create the concept of a true multimedia franchise was that they made the effort at all. That created a kind of expectation —certainly not always met— of consistency in stuff like the timeline for Star Wars that wasn't common in other media.

I remember Marvel editor Jordan D. White, who edited the new Marvel Star Wars comics for some time, talking about the sort of culture shift from other comics fans —who are used to the sort of general handwaving of Marvel's shifting timeline that defies any real one-to-one timeline (this is how Peter Parker can simultaneously be in his early 30s but have comics with him 17 in the 1960s still be canon, or how the war during which Tony Stark was kidnapped can keep moving forward in time without a full reboot)— to Star Wars fans who want, like, a month-by-month timeline.

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"thrashinbatman" replied to "UnsealedMTG":

It is. Dark Empire was originally supposed to take place before or around the same time as the Thrawn Trilogy, but since Zahn refused to acknowledge them, they were set about a year later. Kevin J. Anderson's acknowledgement of Dark Empire in the Jedi Academy books creates a really silly scenario where, off-page, the New Republic loses Coruscant, is forced back into more of a Rebellion situation, then takes Coruscant back and reestablishes the status quo from the Thrawn Trilogy. It's really dumb, but actually is one of the few major incongruities in the EU outside of the massive ones created by Lucas and Dave Filoni that were discussed in the original post.

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"Raxtenko" said:

"literally be Rian Johnson to have thrown at you today"

Ha, maybe that's why Filoni and Rian Johnson seem to get along: commiseration over bad fan reactions.

I'll admit that I internally rolled when I saw the EU tag. I'm sick to death over all the anger and drama. But this is a very fair and neutral write-up. Good job.

I remember reading Zahn's trilogy some 20+ years ago and absolutely loving it. In the void after Episode VI, it was a great sequel trilogy and I gobbled them up. I remember how disappointed I felt when the Prequel Trilogy came out, and the slow disappointment I felt when the differences between it and Zahn's works popped up. I think I realized then that Lucas didn't really consider the EU to be canon in his universe.

I still kept reading the novels, but probably something inside me broke and I didn't really enjoy them anymore, coupled with some very silly DBZ-level power jumps. I left it behind when I saw Starkiller pull that Star Destroyer out of orbit.

I was still on my hiatus when the Karen Traviss thing happened. I only watched the Sequel Trilogy because my wife loves Star Wars. After that, we watched The Clone Wars at her suggestion. It spun off into Rebels and the live-action stuff after. I'm firmly back now in the fold for better or worse, but I believe with all my heart that there has never been a better time to be a Star Wars fan.

And looking back on it, I'll always have the good memories of Rogue Squadron, Kyle Katarn, Zahn and everything else that I enjoyed from the EU. Those memories won't go away and they can't be taken from me. A small petty part of me will always take some glee that the parts I loathed aren't "canon" anymore, though. It really doesn't matter to me, but some fans will twist themselves into pretzels if things they like don't have the vaunted canon status, so they can suffer and be miserable instead of focusing on the positives.

And I'll also always have Hera and Kanan (best Star Wars couple; fight me, Rebels haters), and The Mandalorian and The High Republic are looking pretty good too.

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"mdp300" replied to "Raxtenko":

Dude, you sound a lot like me. I was a huge fan in the late 90s, then kind of drifted away for a while, and got back into it with the CGI Clone Wars series. I was fine with Disney starting things over because a lot of the EU was bad. And anyway, I still have my old Rogue Squadron books in the closet.

I think a lot of weird contradictions about the Jedi come from the fact that, up until The Phantom Menace in 1999, we knew very little about the Jedi other than the fact they were cool. So writers had a lot of different interpretations of them, a lot of which ended up being wrong.

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"DocWhoFan16" replied to "mdp300":

"I think a lot of weird contradictions about the Jedi come from the fact that, up until The Phantom Menace in 1999, we knew very little about the Jedi other than the fact they were cool. So writers had a lot of different interpretations of them, a lot of which ended up being wrong."

I think the most significant one was the not-unreasonable assumption that Jedi could marry and have children and that, if you were a Jedi, chances were your parents were Jedi as well. And if you only have the Original Trilogy to go on, you'd be hard-pressed to say you had the wrong end of the stick. Who's the main Jedi of the Original Trilogy? Luke Skywalker. And why is Luke Skywalker a Jedi? Because his father was a Jedi. He says it in Episode VI: "The Force is strong in my family".

So you have a book like Children of the Jedi, which has at the centre of its premise the idea of an old Imperial battle station which existed for the purpose of tracking down and kidnapping the children of Jedi knights (collateral to this was the widely-held supposition among EU writers that the Empire had been around for much longer than would turn out to be the case and had been running the show for a while before they decided to wipe out the Jedi, rather than the Jedi purge being the start of the Empire). Or the character Corran Horn, whose backstory is that his grandfather was a Jedi knight during the Republic.

The Prequels upended that assumption, although I'd argue not to the same degree as Clone Wars Version 2 did, because they had recourse to a mostly neat workaround that characters like Corran Horn's dad had just been breaking the rules!

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"thrashinbatman" replied to "DocWhoFan16":

Yeah, you mention that Lucas hated Mara Jade and the concept of Luke being married, but I don't think he always held that opinion. He was actually fairly involved in the EU in the 90s. I don't think he really read the novels, but at least he skimmed the comics and most story ideas went through him. He at the very least approved Veitch's idea to bring Palpatine back (some accounts go as far as saying he proposed the idea, but that could just be a misunderstanding), and his suggestion to the crew writing The New Jedi Order that they should "get creative" was what led to the Yuuzhan Vong. Near as I can tell, it seems that The New Jedi Order was the last EU project he was really involved in prior to the CGI Clone Wars show (and the lack of any oversight really shows with EU storylines after The New Jedi Order in my opinion).

All of that is to say that, if Lucas really didn't like the idea of Jedi having families and Luke being married, he had plenty of opportunities to nip that in the bud. He had no issue putting rules for the authors in place (no major Original Trilogy characters could die, no one could be more powerful in the Force than Luke or Palpatine, no stories could be set during the Clone Wars era) and totally could have instituted a "Luke cannot have b****es" rule, but he chose not to, as well as he didn't institute such a rule for any of the other Jedi characters: he sat by as Corran Horn(y) spent half of I, Jedi ogling the female characters and every author created a competing OC for Luke to be with.

Another thing Lucas seems to be notorious for is changing his story. Lord knows his take on how many movies were supposed to exist changed from interview to interview. I fully believe he only began to feel that way about Luke and Mara after he came up with the celibacy rules in Attack of the Clones. There's no way he could have felt that way about the Jedi in the 90s because, again, he had plenty of opportunity to establish it much sooner.

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"AdmiralScavenger" replied to "DocWhoFan16":

George Lucas answered questions for the writers of Tales of the Jedi and he never mentioned Jedi could not marry or have children. Nomi Sunrider is a Jedi knight who was married to another Jedi and whose daughter became a Jedi. Even The Phantom Menace doesn't say you can't be married, that didn't happen until Attack of the Clones. Even the Return of the Jedi novelization has Anakin, after Luke removed his helmet, think about his wife for a moment. Anakin's backstory always was that he was married.

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"cricri3007" replied to "Raxtenko":

"I still kept reading the novels, but probably something inside me broke and I didn't really enjoy them anymore, coupled with some very silly DBZ-level power jumps. I left it behind when I saw Starkiller pull that Star Destroyer out of orbit."

Okay, to be fair to Starkiller: if I remember right, the Star Destroyer was actually already damaged and crashing, he "just" made it crash faster so it wouldn't crush the entire city.

Still ludicrously powerful, of course, but at least more believable, if only slightly.

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"ToaArcan" said:

One of the funniest things about this whole saga, in my view, is that the first half of the Battle of Coruscant is still a tangled unknown.

Whereas the EU had multiple contradictory stories about what exactly went down when Grievous launched his attack on the Galactic Capital and made off with the Chancellor, the new canon has... very little. It just uses the broad-stroke attempts to marry the contradictory material together from Legends.

For all that most of the EU has been superseded by new material, the Gordian knot that is the EU's take on the Battle of Coruscant continues to linger on, being confusing.

It's somewhat understandable, though. With the exception of Season 7 of the actual Clone Wars TV show, Disney has been somewhat reluctant to revisit the Prequel era — Disney Star Wars is basically all Original Trilogy and things that look like the Original Trilogy. The Sequel era also got basically dropped off a cliff after The Rise of Skywalker stumbled into cinemas and we went right back to Original Trilogy fanservice. And with them only having so many episodes, I can see why Dave Filoni and Co. didn't cover Coruscant.

Maybe they just couldn't think of a way to convincingly show Lucas's laughably incompetent version of Grievous achieving something as audacious as kidnapping Palpatine.

(Honestly, Grievous is the funniest thing about this whole mess to me: Lucas gave Genndy Tartarovsky, the people at Dark Horse, and whoever was doing the books at the time, nothing but a character design and a vague idea of what he did, and they all decided that General Grievous was the coolest f***ing thing ever; then, Lucas came in two years later and said "Actually, he's the galaxy's biggest loser and all he does is cough and run away", and the fandom have been pissed about it ever since)

"Is it still kinda distracting that we're asked to accept Anakin as a basically good person here when he's already ethnically cleansed a whole village of indigenous people in the previous movie?"

I think I said in the previous Star Wars write-up we had that this is one of those things where the way the Tuskens are framed in older Star Wars material is extremely wonky — Everything the movies showed us gave them all the nuance that a 1st Edition D&D book would give to Orcs. All we know about them from the films is "They ride in single file to hide their numbers, they've been known to murder Jawas for little established reason, they shoot Podracers and kill the pilots for kicks, and they kidnapped a random civilian woman, crippled her husband when he tried to rescue her, and then slowly tortured her to death over the course of weeks because she was... standing right there?"

Tuskens, as portrayed by the movies, are cartoonishly evil. But since then, the "Wait, these are people" thought process has become more common, and that just makes what happened in Episode II even worse. Like, it was already bad, but now it feels more real.

I do think that the decision by the new shows of the Disney era to opt for a "These are victims of colonialism, actually" approach was probably a bit of a dodgy move, though. Nothing says "victim of colonialism" quite like torturing a random woman to death, especially when Shmi Skywalker was only on Tatooine in the first place because she'd been brought from off-world as a slave.

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"Terthelt" replied to "ToaArcan":

I do want to push back a tiny bit on Grievous being a complete loser in the 2nd Clone Wars show. There are actually quite a few episodes where he's depicted as being an unstoppable, menacing general, like the arc in which he wages genocide on the Nightsisters, who aren't exactly pushovers. It's just that he's only able to be the biggest fish in the pond when he isn't fighting any Jedi, and the minute any lightsabres kick on in his direction, he immediately starts to coward out and go for cheap backstabs.

The point is: it totally would've been possible to depict him staging a competent and cool assault on Coruscant, as long as Filoni and crew devised a way to keep every single Jedi on the planet away from Palpatine's office.

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"DocWhoFan16" replied to "Terthelt":

I guess it's hard to get out of the shadow of that very first appearance in the last episode of the 2nd (?) season of Tartarovsky's Star Wars: Clone Wars, where you have Grievous taking on four or five Jedi at once and winning until reinforcements show up and chase him off.

A tough act to follow!

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"radwolf76" replied to "DocWhoFan16":

"[...] where you have Grievous taking on four or five Jedi at once and winning [...]"

And one of those Jedi is essentially Scooby-Doo's Shaggy except with a lightsabre. Admittedly, the story was animated before the full extent of Shaggy's Power was widely understood, so he's kind of a pushover.

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"Lastjedibestjedi" replied to "ToaArcan":

I think the original Tuskens were heavily based on Bedouin tribes.

They were the original inhabitants, didn't especially like Jawas, were very tribal (no central or single group) and would steal your shit with no problem if you were in their territory.

It wasn't until the Prequel Trilogy that they were also slavers and torturers (and I believe it was implied they were rapists as well).

It was a heavy about-face.

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"OmegaPunchers" said:

So… after this and the previous EU write-up, I'm wondering: what exactly made the stuff written by Karen Traviss so divisive?

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"SkyeAuroline" replied to "OmegaPunchers":

Karen Traviss seriously does not understand the media that she writes for. Her Halo books constantly sidetrack into her railing against the parts of the Halo universe she doesn't like, and she stripped down a ton of characterization that was well-liked in favour of a creator's mouthpieces or pointless filler. On top of that, she was constantly f***ing up all the tech and political/social background of the setting. I'm less familiar with her Star Wars work (and only passingly familiar with her Gears of War work, on account of every fan I've encountered saying to stay away from it at all costs); but it's the same sort of phenomenon where she pushed the things she was interested in as the objectively best/correct parts of the setting, belittled anyone who didn't fit into that and warped existing lore to fit what she was pushing.

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"fnOcean" replied to "OmegaPunchers":

In addition to what the other commenter said about her pushing her interests and warping existing lore to fit that, her Mandalorian culture is... pretty racist and sexist. I re-found a post on Tumblr [currently preserved here: https://www.tumbex.com/notallthosewho-wanderarelost.tumblr/post/682272039920435200/] that talks about the issues with her series (and why the clones being Mandalorian doesn't make sense), but the TL;DR is: Traviss wrote Mandalorians as thinking every non-Mandalorian is soulless and needs to assimilate into their culture and forget their own, women are expected to get married at 16, women can't fight unless the men are all gone, and so on; portraying a society like this wouldn't be bad per se, but she also seems to think those are all positive things for a culture to be, and any changing that is bad.

On the non-writing side of things, I can't double-check this because I don't have Twitter, but her likes are apparently full of transphobia, COVID denial, and white supremacy, which definitely illuminates a lot about how she wrote the Mandalorians.

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"RadioactiveOwl95" replied to "fnOcean":

Despite having never read her stuff, everything I heard about her takes on the Mandalorians always gave me a bad vibe of fetishistic militarism that I couldn't quite put my finger on. Can't say her other views are too surprising in that light.

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"DocWhoFan16" replied to "RadioactiveOwl95":

"a bad vibe of fetishistic militarism"

You could make the case that the EU in general could sometimes be a bit... Well, let's look at it this way: at one time, the EU seriously countenanced the idea that Palpatine only created the Empire and set up an oppressive military regime which exerted its authority through terror because he wanted to make the galaxy strong enough to fight the Yuuzhan Vong, and there are many fans who embrace this idea even today.

I mean, leaving aside the fact that this kind of suggests the heroes from the movies were in the wrong for resisting the Empire in the first place, it's a bit like saying Adolf Hitler "only" set up Nazi Germany because he wanted to make Western Europe strong enough to fight the Soviet Union, isn't it?

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"iknownuffink" replied to "DocWhoFan16":

The way I remember it being talked about was that people like Thrawn were explicitly trying to make the galaxy orderly, unified and, most of all strong, enough to withstand their impending invasion. But Ol' Sheev Palpatine was still fully on the "It's all about me, and being cacklingly evil for funsies" train. He wasn't truly worried about the Vong, because he was arrogant and considered himself superior. Though it did provide another explanation for why there was always a new Secret Super-Weapon of the Week that Palpatine had his wrinkly hands in.

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"Inevitable_Citron" replied to "DocWhoFan16":

Oh man, the Yuuzhan Vong. That was a trip and a half.

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"wendigo72" replied to "DocWhoFan16":

I mean... Han Solo in the books of The New Jedi Order calls out that the “The Empire was good because of the Vong” idea was incredibly stupid.

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"ThunderDaniel" replied to "DocWhoFan16":

Oh man, I'm not even a Star Wars fan, but every time I hear nerds justify Palpatine's actions as being done to unite the galaxy against a future threat outside the Star Wars galaxy... Well, I kinda laugh knowing that they take it unironically. It feels like a revisionist cop-out that is so hard to believe in if you understood at all who the Emperor is in all the movies.

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"DocWhoFan16" replied to "Inevitable_Citron":

My understanding is the Yuuzhan Vong were the backup plan, because the original idea was that the extra-galactic invaders would be the Sith coming back to take some more revenge; George Lucas shot that down in the planning stages when ideas were sent to him for approval, arguing that it would be impossible for a Sith society to survive long enough to travel between galaxies because the Sith are inherently treacherous and any society they created would inevitably collapse when they destroyed each other and themselves.

Not an unreasonable position to take, though it is a little surprising, in light of this, that Tales of the Jedi, Knights of the Old Republic, Legacy, the MMO The Old Republic and Lost Tribe of the Sith were all allowed out when they all portray (mostly) functioning Sith societies!

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"DocWhoFan16" replied to "wendigo72":

Sure, but it doesn't stop Star Wars fans from taking the idea at face value, does it?

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"DocWhoFan16" replied to "ThunderDaniel":

Same deal with Grand Admiral Thrawn, to be honest, though at least Thrawn doesn't have the whole "obviously evil space wizard" thing going on. Even so, I sometimes feel like cheering on Grand Admiral Thrawn is a bit like cheering on Claus von Stauffenberg or Erwin Rommel, you know what I mean?

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"GoneRampant1" replied to "OmegaPunchers":

Her Mandalorian books involved a lot of... How do I put this nicely...? Wanking of the Mandalorians and shunning the Jedi by painting them in an unflattering light. Traviss wore her biases on her sleeves and would warp canon in order to have her mouthpieces talk about how the Mandos could totally beat the Jedi in the battleground of ideas using superior Facts And Logic.

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"moorlu" replied to "GoneRampant1":

The Legacy of the Force series really showed her single-mindedness regarding the Mandalorians. They cycled between authors for every book, and while the other two would leave Mandalore behind, you could rest assured that the next Traviss book would take us straight back there to show us how flawed the Jedi were and how the Mandalorians were the only hope to save the galaxy from Darth Caedus. It got tiresome fast.

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"ReverendDS" replied to "OmegaPunchers":

To preface this, I'm a huge Star Wars nerd and have been my entire life. I've read every book multiple times (seriously, every few years I re-read the entire Star Wars chronology), I've played every game, I've watched every episode of everything. And I've been doing this for nearly 40 years. And I'm a huge Republic Commando fan and won't try to hide my bias in this regard.

The first part of the drama is that Karen Traviss, in everything she writes — in any IP she writes for, sticks to a very "things like morality aren't black and white, they are muddled and gray and shifting" approach and constantly calls out things that are objectively evil — even when the intentions are pure or for the good of all.

Unfortunately, most audiences don't have the emotional maturity to deal with things like nuance or to be able to approach a fictional work and pick up more than the most obvious and subtle-as-a-brick-through-a-window of themes.

Karen Traviss used the extremely egalitarian society of the Mandalorians to train the clones of the Grand Army of the Republic, and then further used that society to point out the inherent wrongness of the Republic and the Jedi of that time.

None of her characters are "good" people, and she doesn't shirk from showing that and the consequences of it. But they try to do right by their code, which can put them at odds with the trite "good vs evil" that is so prevalent.

She called out a lot of the hypocrisy of the Jedi, often with the blunt hammer of having Jedi characters being the ones to face the decisions and make the choices.

Due to the audience's aforementioned lack of emotional maturity, she was labeled a "Jedi hater", despite the fact that two of her characters, as Jedi, are some of the best examples of the Jedi philosophy out of any other characters that exist in universe.

She does have pieces of her books that could be interpreted as problematic, but to be honest, I've never particularly cared if there are themes and situations in a fictional universe that would be problematic in the real world — my experiences growing up have shown that way f***ing worse happens in the real world on a daily basis.

People call out the early-twenties Jedi woman sleeping with and being impregnated by the chronologically ten-year-old clone, like it's some kind of endorsement of pedophilia, instead of reading what was actually on the page and realizing that the ten-year-old clone was being treated like a full fledged adult by the military and Jedi. You can't have it both ways, and Karen Traviss used that situation (and the surrounding context) to highlight the fact that despite being literal brainwashed child soldiers, the clones that made up the GAR were also adult men and had their own passions and desires, and how utterly insanely evil it was to treat them like wind-up soldiers.

Yes, her books are often set in extremely popular IPs, and she uses her books to point a huge mirror at the universe she's writing in.

The second major problem is that Karen Traviss engaged with the public and happened to be a woman. A lot of the Karen Traviss hate at the time was coming from the same folks (and type of folks) that jumped into GamerGate with both feet.

I'm not saying that all criticism of her and her work stems from this, but most of the criticism you'll ever see about her does, present-day Twitter stuff excluded as I've not kept up with her on that front. It's very similar to some of the more prevalent hate of the Sequels. Sure, there's some legitimate criticism in there, but a lot of it is covered up in a weird misogynistic wrapping.

And the third part is, much like a lot of the Twilight hate, the vast majority of the online critique comes from people who haven't even bothered engaging with the media in question. They are primarily regurgitating the criticism of others but haven't actually read it themselves.

Hell, even on Star Wars subreddits or even people I know in offline life; and I acknowledge that it's purely anecdotal, but from the people I've talked to about it, when they lay into the Traviss hate, they haven't actually read anything she's ever written. At best, they've read a couple of snippets that include a hundred words or so, used by some Tumblr post to "prove" something while ignoring the wider point.

So yeah, is she the best author in the world? No. Did she do more to flesh out the characters and drama of the Clone Wars in a mature and nuanced way? F*** yeah, she did. Is she outspoken about her contributions to the universes that she criticises when she writes for them? Yeah.

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"superfam" said:

"Likewise, I also recall a lot of particularly pronounced ill-feeling among Star Wars fans towards a new main character the show was going to introduce, a young female Jedi learner named Ahsoka Tano, who would end up being accused of being too perfect, too powerful and, you guessed it, a Mary Sue."

Ahh, Star Wars fans and misogyny, a tale as old as time.

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"VortixTM" replied to "superfam":

This is ironic, considering that, in the Original Trilogy, while barely 2 women exist in the galaxy, one of them is a badass princess who ends up mostly rescuing herself despite the heroes, and the other was the freaking leader of the Rebel Alliance.

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"Mike_Ropenis" replied to "superfam":

I was a huge Star Wars fan because of the Original Trilogy and the EU novels, and lukewarm on the Prequels. After Disney, I'm not a huge fan of the Sequel Trilogy, but I think Rogue One was awesome and casting is the only thing they got right in the Sequel Trilogy (Driver, Ridley, Isaac, Boyega, Gleeson... Amazing cast).

I piss off a lot of people whenever I say this on Reddit, but Luke Skywalker is basically a male Mary-Sue — he literally blows up a Death Star the first time he flies a starfighter in a vacuum — like... Ok, he flew T-16 on Tatooine so he's able to navigate the Death Star trench the first time he flies an X-Wing in space? LOL. And Anakin pulls the same shit in The Phantom Menace! A ten-year-old who pod-raced on Tatooine is suddenly an expert pilot against an army of droids.

Like... The whole series is a bunch of overpowered plot-armoured main characters. Either you love all or you hate all, but picking and choosing which are unrealistic and which aren't is embarrassing and often comes from a sexist place.

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"diluvian_" replied to "Mike_Ropenis":

Capable, powerful, or gifted characters do not constitute a Mary-Sue.

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"Mike_Ropenis" replied to "diluvian_":

I mean, I essentially agree — either all those characters are, or none of them are. I just think it's funny that some loud fans think only the female characters are.

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"ToaArcan" replied to "Mike_Ropenis":

It's a term that's lost all meaning, it basically just means "Female character that I dislike" now.

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"Dayraven3" replied to "ToaArcan":

Seems to me that when the emphasis was on the character being an author-identification figure, it got applied quite freely to either gender. The shift to meaning ‘too perfect’ was accompanied by the term becoming strongly sexist.

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"UnsealedMTG" replied to the 1st reply of "Mike_Ropenis":

What are you talking about? How could the character of Luke Skywalker possibly be some sort of power fantasy self-insert in a series created by George Lucas? That's absurd!

(More seriously, I think this is a great illustration of how the concept of a "Mary-Sue" makes sense in fanfiction, where it originated: the idea that a story is being warped around a self-insert OC that solves all the problems and Kirk and Spock both fall in love with — to the point where it seems pointless for anyone other than the author. In original fiction —where the main character is the main character—, there is no similar objection. But if George Lucas were to write Star Wars as a fanfic for a serious space fighter pilot show, Luke would be the Maryest of all possible Sues.)

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"Dayraven3" replied to "UnsealedMTG":

I guess it's generally more of a glaring issue in fanfiction, but I'd say it's still quite possible in original fiction to have a blatant author identification figure who's pointless for anyone else.

Or, to put it another way, I’ve read some of Robert A. Heinlein's later novels.

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"Smoketrail" replied to the 1st reply of "Mike_Ropenis":

"I piss off a lot of people whenever I say this on Reddit, but Luke Skywalker is basically a male Mary-Sue [...]"

If you really want to upset hardcore Star Wars fans, say that about Thrawn.

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"balinbalan" replied to "Smoketrail":

Thrawn's abilities are almost magical and I'm surprised the old EU didn't make him force-sensitive, since virtually anybody with any competency ended up becoming a Jedi.

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"blisteredfingers" replied to the 1st reply of "Mike_Ropenis":

"Either you love all or you hate all, but picking and choosing which are unrealistic and which aren't is embarrassing and often comes from a sexist place."

This is exactly what we're seeing now with the Obi-Wan TV series and Moses Ingram, who plays Reva: people are saying her doing jumps and flips is "too unrealistic"; meanwhile, she's hunting down f***ing Obi-Wan, who's having PTSD flashbacks of his own jumpy & flippy fight with Anakin from Revenge of the Sith.

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"AndrewTheSouless" replied to "superfam":

Ok, but to be fair, she did kinda suck at the beginning, like "you go back to the early seasons and think '¿Oh shit, was I just blinded by nostalgia'" kind of bad.

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"DisserviceToVanilla" replied to "AndrewTheSouless":

Also, to be frank, I didn't watch the show, but my friend did and we would watch the "behind the scenes" videos put online with showrunners and others talking whenever they were especially ridiculous. The only one I really remember is one where the guy thought Ahsoka cutting a square instead of a circle in a wall with her lightsabre to break in somewhere was the height of intellectuality, and I'd swear he'd had an edible before that interview...

So, I think that's where early Ashoka was coming from, LMAO.

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"ToaArcan" replied to "AndrewTheSouless":

I kinda like that she started out a little bratty and impulsive, and matured rapidly over the course of the first couple of seasons. Her development is one of the high points of the show.

I do find it extremely funny that the same people that were calling her the worst character ever back when the show started are now among the stans. Like... I saw very few people complaining about how much Season 7 focused on her.

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"mdp300" replied to "ToaArcan":

I hated Ahsoka at first. Not because she was a girl, but because she was this plucky teenager that seemed like she was only there to appeal to tweens, and I was watching the show as a Very Serious Adult (I was like... 23 and an edgy moron).

By the end of the series, Ahsoka was one of my favourite characters in the whole franchise.

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"Silas13013" replied to "superfam":

They ended up being completely right though, at least for Season 1. I only recently got into Star Wars and watched The Clone Wars all the way through, and it was only at the insistence of my friend that I got past Season 1. Ahsoka is an arrogant brat who is good at everything without trying and a constant source of irritation for everyone around her, including the audience.

The creators took this criticism to heart and completely reconstructed Ahsoka's character in Seasons 2 and 3. She learns patience, composure and respect. She experiences loss due to her own actions which get characters killed, and grows from it. She becomes confident, not arrogant, and eventually a teacher herself, and in my opinion, goes from being the worst character in the show to the best.

Someone else compared her to Anakin and Luke and I feel the comparison is really only relevant to Anakin. People weren't upset that Ahsoka was a Mary-Sue, they were upset that she was an annoying Mary-Sue. Same reason baby Anakin is hated: he's an irritating child. Luke is at least likeable and we want him to succeed. Young Anakin could splat against the wall for all I cared about him.

(Note this is only for people who watched the show. People who made up their minds before seeing it are butts.)

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"FonzyLumpkins" replied to "superfam":

Saying the hate for Ashoka in the initial Clone Wars movie is sexism for a terribly written and annoying character is disingenuous. People loved her when she was actually written well. She was really annoying at first impressions, and it wasn't until later works that she actually had a personality where she became awesome.

The hate for Anakin having the personality of cardboard in Episode II, was that sexism as well?

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"Stanakin__Skywalker" replied to "FonzyLumpkins":

The biggest problem with Ahsoka is, and always has been, that she was way too important a character to retroactively insert into the saga. It makes zero sense that Anakin would have a padawan, who is never even alluded to in the movies and did not appear in any of the dozens of Clone Wars stories that existed at the time. She could not reasonably exist in the established Star Wars universe. That is why EU fans hated her so much, not because they were all bigots.

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"InSearchOfGoodPun" replied to "Stanakin__Skywalker":

Well, it's still happening with The Mandalorian, right? She seems like kind of an important person to have sat out all of the events of the Original Trilogy and never be mentioned here (there is probably some dumb excuse they'll make for this, but it's beside the point). This is the problem with trying to create so much content that orbits a "main" storyline (all nine movies) but cannot actually directly interact with the main storyline. The whole project often feels like Gilbert & Sullivan Are Dead!, except it's not a joke.

Edit: there is a ridiculous title mistake above, but I will leave it for humour value.

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"TiffanyKorta" replied to "InSearchOfGoodPun":

The whole project often feels like Gilbert & Sullivan Are Dead!, except it's not a joke.

I think you mean Tag & Bink Are Dead! (though you're probably thinking of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern).

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"Quintaton_16" replied to "Stanakin__Skywalker":

There's only one movie that could even allude to it, which is Revenge of the Sith, and the fact that she's not mentioned there only establishes that she probably isn't his padawan anymore by that time. Something The Clone Wars in no way contradicts.

Also, saying that you can't introduce a new, dynamic, interesting character because her appearance would contradict some tie-in comic is, in my opinion, a much better argument for nuking the idea of canon than it is for hamstringing your own ability to tell a story.

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"jaimeoak" said:

Thanks for sharing this wonderful insight into the war of the Clone Wars and the fickle nature of Star Wars canon :D

I came into star wars fairly recently, and after watching the 6 main films which were out at the time, my next watch was the 2008 Clone Wars series. It is honestly one of my favourite shows and I love its mix of character & political stories. (Although I suppose I do also prefer the Prequels over the Original Trilogy. Scandalous, I know!)

In all fandoms with "official" novelisations/comics, I've always presumed that the stories are officially commissioned but non-canon fanfiction which is just there to serve as extra content for fans to consume — I'm always surprised when they do turn out to be canon.

The Star Wars EU seems so grand it's hard to tell where to start, but I look forward to eventually making my way through it and experiencing the stories involved — With the passion people have for it, there must be some great stuff!

Thanks again for the write-up, it's a really interesting piece of fandom history!

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"page0rz" replied to "jaimeoak":

The Star Wars EU has 3 (well, 4, maybe 5?) pretty distinct eras to go through: the original Del Rey books, which are just classic space adventures starring Han Solo & Chewie or Lando and have basically nothing to do with the Star Wars canon; then, the Bantam Spectra era starting in the 90s, which is what most older fans think of as the EU, and then the Del Rey era when they picked up in the 2000s, which is The New Jedi Order and the Clone Wars

The most important distinction is that, during the Bantam Spectra era, Star Wars was just a book license. Any author was free to make a pitch to the publisher for basically their own OC that could take place at any time (except the Clone Wars) and involve any characters, with no real mandate to collaborate with other authors or their canon. Most tried to anyway because they thought it would be cool, but it's still haphazard. Someone would write a book that takes place 5 years after Return of the Jedi, then someone else would write something set 12 years later, then another person would start inserting stuff in-between or go off in a totally new direction. It got weird and messy all the time, but there's still some worthwhile pulp in there.

When the license changed hands again, Lucasarts took up a role that predicts modern EUs. Instead of having authors pitch ideas, they had editors create a long-term narrative, then hired individual authors to write books around each major beat.

Honestly, if you want to dive into the non-Clone-Wars stuff, I think it works best to look at the Bantam Spectra run as a loose introduction series, then the later series (particularly The New Jedi Order) as a crossover event. That's how the publishers went about it, as The New Jedi Order really did pull from all corners to create something "big", digging out some real deep cuts while trying to use everything from before in some way. The overarching narrative also helps them avoid the "Super-Weapon of the Month" problem that the other books had because everyone wanted to use their own personal toys and OC villains.

I think a lot of people will tell you to just stop after The New Jedi Order, to avoid that Han Solo Syndrome, but that's obviously up to you.

I picked up a trunk (literally) of Star Wars novels once and had a lot of time on my hands.

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"ToaArcan" replied to ""page0rz:

What's the "Han Solo Syndrome", exactly?

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"page0rz" replied to "ToaArcan":

Han Solo was originally meant to die, but producers didn't like losing one of their stars, so he finishes his character arc and then just awkwardly hangs around without much to do. This is an unfortunate fate for many Star Wars characters, as The New Jedi Order was supposed to be an end to the original generation, handing things off to the kids, and Luke especially had this growth and change over a dozen books, leading up to a very satisfying final act, while Han and Leia effectively fly off into the sunset together.

But because the license holders wanted more books and they thought the only way to sell them was by putting the original trio on the covers, they all had to keep hanging around in every new series "just because", cheapening their arcs and drawing attention away from the new characters.

The same thing happened when they eventually made the Sequel movies. Harrison Ford only agreed to come back at all if they would finally kill Han off like they were supposed to do in the first place.

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"iknownuffink" replied to "page0rz:

"Han Solo was originally meant to die, but producers didn't like losing one of their stars [...]"

If I remember correctly, Lucas is also on record saying he wanted a more positive/happy ending for the Original Trilogy, and killing Han would have been counter to that and made it more bittersweet (which Harrison Ford and possibly the director were pitching).

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[aestheticvoyage2023]

Day 150: Tuesday May 30, 2023 - “Ramblin Boy”

It was after midnight when we all pulled in to the Finca, having used every single minute of the long weekend, out there on the run.  All three of us were sideways because of it.  It sure took a lot of effort, but it was a very memorable run.  The next 24 hours would be about resetting, unpacking, and reflecting.  I so enjoy going back through all the photos after a weekend haul like this, remembering and sharing with Mama all the little stories that get swept up in the excitement of the days:

Williams love for up-er-downs and escalators and showing Mama in Milwaukee how he’d learn to ride the escalator all on his own.

That awesome afternoon nap with the Cardinals on the Tv from Ballpark village, having finally made the overnight here after so many bonked attempts.

Seeing Ben and Eve at the Bottleworks - the fourth time Ben has seen William before he turned 2 earns that special distinction that William reminds us of - its “Uncle Ben”. Bacon Wrapped Hot Dogs always help the sentiment.

The look on Williams face when he saw that train coming out of the tunnel to pick us up and blowing its whistle.

The hellish first flight where after we got up at 330am, William decided not to sleep at all on the whole 3.5 hours to Milwaukee and wiggled the whole entire way.  The dad next to me told me I did a good job.

Sunday brunch at Hammerstones where I got a new mug, and made William think he’d have to eat that whole slinger on his own....  oh yea! That must be why I had such bad heartburn!

3 more runs going through TSA with a toddler on my own - I definitely level up every single time.  I’ve always taken pride in how efficiently I can go through security, like its some kind of itinerant cowboy merit badge - but you’ve not done it, until you’ve done it with a stroller, diaper bag, and baby.  Luckily William is a worthy teammate - we’re growing in our shared chops for what needs to get done to get us to where we need to go.   I hope he keeps being so easy in airports.

Speaking of airports - oh man Mama. Did you see all that construction at Lambert and all those excavators and trucks lined up on the runway.  You would’ve noticed if you were on our plane as William was glued to the window screaming DADDDDYYYYY! LOOK!  over and over and over again.   Geeze this boy gets enthusiastic for trucks. I turned to the person next to me - “at least he’s not crying!”

The Pub in the overnight in Milwaukee had those old school wooden booths and crayons and coloring though what William really wanted to do was run around outside and pound on the windows at the people looking in.  He got these little corndogs, but really all he wanted to eat was the cup of Ranch.  He sure got a lot of play in Milwaukee.  Looking back over all the pictures I took of him at the play area at the Brewers game were my favorite from the weekend.

And oh that view we had in our hotel in St Louis, looking down on the old courthouse, where we could see half the arch.  After we got William to bed, we turned out the lights and pulled up chairs to the window, had drinks and enjoyed our place in this space.  Special time. Special place.

On the go for three days straight takes a toll, and burns a lot of steam.   Wow was I tired today. But going back through and remembering all these little things and little stories and bits and pieces is replenishing.  He’s a good little traveller and while we filled his memory bank with a lot of signature experiences, its the little things that filled the gaps that are really what it was all about for me.

Song: Ellie Holcomb feat Bear Rinehart - Sweet Ever After

Quote:  "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime." ~Mark Twain

[dt365-2024]

4/9/2024 7:10PM

I woke up this morning with my chest feeling heavy. I didn’t sleep till 4am. I woke up at 9am. Late to bring Mason to school. In my head, I thought well that’s the first failure I’ve done as a single mom. Could I do this? Eric woke me up with a call asking if I brought Mason to school and I said I will but he would be late but he would need to be here by 10am to drop off Mikayla’s ballet shoes from his car. I thought about how Eric must be reveling in how hard it’ll be for me being a single mom and how he’s just waiting until I come back to him. He could have taken Mason to school. He could have taken Mikayla to ballet this morning but he didn’t even offer. I made his take Mason to school anyways because Mikayla was running late for ballet. I felt heavy when I was there. Was it the lack of sleep? I didn’t know. I felt numb, achy. Like something stuck in my throat. I was able to watch her recital performance from the inside and I recorded it but I struggled to enjoy it. I still felt the same as I did when I was with Eric. I wondered if I had made the right choice. Tammy texted me, I didn’t respond back. I didn’t want to talk about it. I thought about talking to Lani or biggie, but I couldn’t do it. I felt so empty and heavy beyond words. I took Mikayla to McDonald’s for a happy meal then went home to eat her lunch. I took a nap before I had to get Mikayla ready for school, I woke up still feeling heavy after I dropped her off to school. I forced myself to go to Sam’s Club and get two more books in the ACOTAR series, and then forced myself to visit a cafe I’ve always wanted to go since I haven’t eaten yet. I went to Gäbi coffee house. It was cute. There were a lot of tourists there, people with accents. I found a seat and read a few chapters of ACOTAR. I’m almost at the end. I ate avocado toast and a green tea latte. I spent $25. Expensive, but I needed to treat myself. Afterwards, I felt a bit refreshed. Still a bit heavy, but better. I listened to Landslide as a I drove to the kids school to pick them up- Maelyn and Marshall spent the day with Eric btw and he took them to the park and sent me pictures of them with the ducks at the park. I thought about how if I made the right decision again. How I should be there for the kids. But I have to accept that I won’t be there the whole time anymore. And then I thought about how this was his intention-to make me feel that guilt, that jealously, all a plot for me to get back together with him. I picked the kids up and took Mikayla to Walmart to pick up what she wanted for her bday. She got a bike, helmet, toy phone, and I got the kids and her classmates some stuff too. Spent over $200. But it is her birthday after all. 5 is a big number. I should have hosted a party but I can’t afford it because Eric isn’t working. And I have to pay for his registration. It makes me angry. How I have to pay for his car, insurance, registration - and I get it. He doesn’t work. But he won’t even offer to take the kids to school or pick them up. I have to do it still. Little traits like this, I realize how selfish he is. How selfish he has always been. He brought the two kids over to drop them off. He could have watched them overnight at his parents but he didn’t. Again. Selfish. He picked up some clothes to wear tomorrow. I asked for help to move the broken TV and worn down tv stand but he didn’t help. He just left. Again. Selfish.

We talked a bit about his plans for getting a job and studying. How he’s considering himself a single dad. He’s not begging for me back. He isn’t sad. Literally took him fast to recover. I wonder sometimes if he truly loved me or if he just loved the vision of what we represented-a complete family. But the answer doesn’t bother me. It doesn’t hurt like it did two years ago.

[thatrandombatgurl]

Venting after the read below

Tw: depression & negative selftalk & suicidal ideation

To lay the background, I live with my mom in a house that has a separate apartment that is connected to the rest of the house & my dad passed away in October.

I’m not currently paying rent on the apartment, but I pay some of the bills, get the groceries for us(started buying them a month ago), pay for the dog poop to get picked up (I have a dog & she has a dog), do the dishes, cook or pay for most of our meals, drive her everywhere, etc. while working a full time job and doing online schooling full time.

Now I’ve always had a weird relationship with my mom bc she is definitely undiagnosed with something. I have anxiety and major depression. & she definitely gave me body image issues as a kid, by making me do weight watchers when i was a preteen. She’s always swapped her emotions on a dime & she always denies saying mean/bad things.

Anyways to the present. For about a month she has been in the anger stage of grief and I am most commonly the victim. For example, I went to a concert a few weeks ago and she kept guilting me about me going starting that morning even though she had encouraged me to go for about a month leading up to it. this ultimately led to me being upset and worried the whole time & having a panic attack, thus ruining this once in a life time thing, which she then talked down to me about how I need to just learn to have fun. I didn’t tell her the full reason for not enjoying it, just that I had a panic attack.

Currently she is out of town for the weekend and I am at the house with the dogs. The issue at where she is at is the wifi isn’t working so she can’t watch tv and I tried to facetime her to help & it didn’t work. Then my brother went over today to fix it and it didn’t work. While my brother was with her, my sister came over for a bit & we ended up cleaning the spice cabinet & pantry bc there was an insane amount of expired stuff. We found stuff that expired in 2010! We have moved 3 times since then. Anyways, we sent her a picture of how nice it looks and she was pretty angry but I figured that she would have gotten over it by now after we explained that it was all expired & it’s been about 6 hours.

Anyways she just texted me about something that I already tried to help with over the phone on Friday, Saturday, & this morning. Then as I’m calling her, she texts saying not to call her. Then when I text saying that I have looked everywhere and cannot find the info that she needs, she resent the thing she needs in all caps. And I know that it was probably just the fact that she is older and her texts almost always come off passive aggressive, but it just hit me really hard & I’ve been crying the past 30 minutes and am just really upset & want to run away or do something bad to myself. Luckily knowing that she won’t be back until late tomorrow so the dogs wouldn’t get taken care of is stopping me from doing bad stuff to myself, but I’m just so done. It just makes me so upset and feel like a failure. Which I already know that I am, I fucking dropped out of college and moved home and barely have any irl friends my age who haven’t moved and I still haven’t gotten my degree and i’m an anxious idiot and I’m messy and I’m overweight and I just can’t do anything right.

She acts like she is the only one allowed to grieve my father. Yes, they were married for 26 years, but I knew him my whole life & we were really close. I miss him so much…it’s his birthday on Friday and we are supposed to go to one of his favorite lakes and spread some ashes and spend a few days there just the 2 of us and I really don’t wanna go now, with her pulling this shit.

Anyways sorry i just needed to get this out there…

[squirrelpudding]

January 7th, 2024

When I was a little kid I used to ridicule my parents for needing to use a headlamp to see their keyboard when using their computer at night, but now, as I write this in bed, I find myself needing the handy little button that makes my keyboard light up. Anyway, I haven't blogged in a few days because all I have done is go to work and watch tv. I haven't taken any pictures with my digital camera recently, and I told myself when I started this blog that I would use the photos from that camera and not photos from my phone. But here we are. Using photos from my phone. Today started a new art project and I went to dinner with my dad. The art is a collage that is supposed to be Jeremy Allen White in his Calvin Klein ad, but you cant really tell that it looks like him unless you see the reference picture. But I am having a lot of fun making it! It is very stress-free because usually I am worried that I will ruin my art if I do something new. Like when I paint I usually worry that any new stroke I add will mess it up, but for this it is all just scraps of paper and I can see how things look without committing to it. As with all of my other artwork I make, it looks a lot better in person than in the photo. In person the placement of the paper kind of looks like it is there on purpose, like I meant to put it there, but in the photo it doesn't really. Sometimes I wonder if I got good enough at art I could sell my work. I wouldn't want to do it as my main job, but it would be nice to earn money from doing things I enjoy.

For dinner my dad (does "Dad" have to be capitalized? I think only when I am speaking to him and saying it in place of where a name would go, but as a title it doesn't need to be capitalized? Like I wouldn't capitalize "cousin" unless I was Ricky from "The Bear" and I was saying cousin as a nickname.) and I went to a nice restaurant that had signs in the front advertising that they were considered good by Michelin. They didn't have any stars, but just that they were considered good. I thought they were good, but my dad said that to earn a Michelin star they would need to have much smaller portions (i thought that was funny). My dad is a funny fella. I think the idea that the tire company "Michelin", with the Michelin Man as their mascot, is in charge of the most snooty restaurant rating system in the US (or the world ?) is just silly. I always used to think that the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters was the same guy as the Michelin man. I now know they are different. At this restaurant we went to, we got pizza (it was a pizza place) and brussels sprouts. I just found out that brussels sprouts has an "s" on the end of "brussels". I've been pronouncing it "brussel sprouts" my entire life. While we were walking to a bookstore down the street from the restaurant (side note: I have never spelled restaurant correctly I always have to use autocorrect), there was a store with maps in the window, so of course my dad wanted to look at it. I feel like all dads like looking at maps. Its funny how similar people are. Anyway, there was a sign in the window that said "No Loitering" (see last picture), which is so funny because that was exactly what we were doing.

One thing I forgot to say about the restaurant is they gave us bread with olive oil/balsamic vinegar dip. Its funny how something so simple can bring so much joy. Also, earlier today I had Naan and Hummus as a snack. That is also something that is so straightforward, but so delicious. I love that in every culture there is some form of bread and dip/sauce, and they are all the same but all very different.

[alsjeblieft-zeg]

536 of 2023

I own a hoodie that isn’t black. I’m afraid that I won’t have enough money in the future. I’m afraid that I’ll never find someone to be with forever. I’ve smoked more than one cigarette today. I hung out with a friend today. My best friend’s name starts with a J. (let's say, my husband's middle name starts with J) I’m not sure if I like someone right now. The cheerleaders at my school suck at cheerleading. I hate how on Firefox, you can’t use ctrl+B to bold things. I’ve used a typewriter. I never liked the Spice Girls. I still don’t like Britney Spears. I thought Kristen Stewart did a terrible job acting in Twilight. I think Jasper’s hotter than Edward in the movie, too I want to see Four Christmases. I often think that I would get along well with characters in movies, books, TV shows, etc. We have senior projects at my school. I haven’t taken my SATs yet. Hardly any colleges around here have my major. I want to major, or I do major, in English. My birthstone is a shade of green. I hate winter. My favorite month is May I’m friends with someone three years older than me or more. I’ve seen dirty pictures on a friend’s cell phone. I have weak knees. I love Jalapeno Cheetos. Salsa is better at restaurants than when you buy it in jars. The mall closest to me has only a few good stores. I think reindeer are cute. I never really cared for the movie Bambi. I don’t think I would enjoy pool quite as much if the balls weren’t so colorful. I like Rosie O’Donnell. But I got really tired of hearing about her. My car has no bumper stickers. I don’t own any key chains. I like my homeroom teacher more than any of my other teachers. I own a pair of purple gloves. I had soup on Thanksgiving. I don’t like marshmallows. I have a Deviant Art account. But I never put pictures on it. I used to love Eminem. But now I don’t really like him that much. I know all the words to Baby Got Back. I know someone who’s never heard of Katy Perry. I actually like some country. I hate American Idol. It’s only entertaining when the singers are really bad. My mom sings, loudly & terribly, all the time. It’s embarrassing. I know someone who’s at least eighteen & doesn’t have a driver’s license. (yeah me) I know someone who doesn’t have a middle name. I wonder what the point of Leap Years is. My mom’s birthday is in July. My dad’s birthday is in January. My sister’s birthday is in February. My brother’s birthday is in April. My birthday is in August. I have half siblings. I wish I lived somewhere warmer. I was born in March. Batman is my hero. I’m very ticklish. Loud music makes me happy. I get stage fright very easily. I’ve never been to New York City. I draw hearts on the side of my paper when i’m bored. I’ve dropped my cell phone numerous times.

[quite-right-too]

Get To Know Me

I'm going to go ahead and tag @demdifferentstories-29 @thirdeyeblue and @deardiary17

What is your name? My name is Cody.

For how long have you had this account? I just hit 8 years yesterday!

Favourite food? I can't say I necessarily have a favorite but I do really love sushi.

Favourite drink? I am a simp for those VitaminWater drinks.

Do you have any siblings? I have three brothers and a sister (and I'm the youngest).

Do you have pets? I do! I currently have 4 dogs (Dante, Brekker, Zagreus, and Kavik) and 5 cats (Middie, Cricket, Basil, Sage, and McRib).

How old are you? 20, turning 21 in December.

How many languages do you know? I know English and have taken both Spanish and Japanese (but I'm awful at both).

What's your all time favourite movie/tv show? Doctor Who, obviously. But otherwise, it's Grey's Anatomy.

What are you enjoying to do in your free time? I play music mostly during my free time. Otherwise, I'm usually writing or working my dogs.

Are you an introvert or an extrovert? Extrovert all the way.

Your favourite music genres? Midwest emo, folk punk, and pop-punk.

Your dream place to visit? I have a lot of places I want to visit, but I think London is one of them.

Something you wish you were better at? I wish I was a bit more advanced in terms of my vocal ability, but it just takes practice.

How long do you take to respond to texts? I try to respond immediately, unless I'm asleep. Then you get a response as soon as I wake up.

Do you have any tattoos? If not, would like to? I have one for now. It's a quote that says "victory stands on the back of sacrifice", surrounded by a laurel wreath. I have some more in the works but tattoos are expensive.

What's your sexuality? I'm bisexual.

Do you like reading? If yes what's your favourite book? I don't have a favorite book but I'm working on reading Uprooted Americans, a book about Japanese Americans and the war relocation to internment camps during World War II. This is partly because my father was part of the group that was brought to Manzanar in California.

Have you ever been in love? I am currently in love with my wonderful wife.

What's your relationship status? Married!

Have you ever been heartbroken? Yes, many times. Not necessarily romantically but in many different contexts.

Best memory you could think of? So I have a brain injury, resulting in a significant amount of short-term and long-term memory loss. There are a lot, especially regarding my wife. If we choose my earliest memory, it would be when I was in preschool. It was during pickup time and I was waiting for my mom to come get me since it was getting late. My mom didn't walk in, but my older brother did. I didn't see him often since he lived with his dad so I ran up and hugged him since I was just so excited for him to be there.

Worst memory you can think of? Ah, there are also a lot here. Probably my parents' funerals. Sad, I know, but don't feel too bad about it. They were a while ago and I've worked through the trauma.

Do you have any fears? Without getting into deep psychological fears, I really don't like spiders. Too many legs.

Are you a morning or a night person? I'm a whenever-I'm-awake person.

How many pictures you have on your phone? Currently 1,480.

Who was your favourite childhood crush? My wife definitely.

Are you a romantic? Not necessarily. I like the romantic aspect in theory, but I have a hard time applying it.

What’s your dream date? Probably going somewhere adventurous. Theme parks are one big idea.

What are your hobbies? Like I said, I'm a musician. I also write, train dogs, and used to fly small planes for a bit.