#Luke crashed his Snowspeeder on Hoth

[tomthefanboy]

There's really no need to mention Force sensitivity. Nobody else has moves like these.

If you need a qualifier, just say "Best Pilot in Canon".

#HERA SYNDULLA IS THE BEST NON-FORCE SENSITIVE PILOT IN THE GFFA #STILL NOT TAKING ANY ARGUMENTS ON THIS

[theladyfromplanetx]

"In all the galaxy there are few who can fly and shoot like Dash Rendar. Many years ago, as a cadet at the Imperial Academy, he continually impressed his superiors with the ability to push vessels beyond their usual limits, executing maneuvers his ships were never meant to perform. He held great promise as a future Imperial officer until a freight vessel piloted by his brother malfunctioned and crashed on Coruscant, destroying a private museum that housed many of the Emperor's treasures. Though the mishap was not the pilot's fault, the Emperor banished Rendar's family and had Dash expelled from the academy. Given his bold disregard for regulation and arrogant confidence, it is doubtful that Dash would have fit in well within the ranks of the Empire anyway. He never hesitates to boast of his skills as an expert pilot and gunner. After his dismissal from the academy, he began a career as a thief and gambler, but soon discovered that his exceptional flying skills were a great asset in the smuggling business. He quickly became very successful, making his services expensive but guaranteed for the right price.

Rendar flew a snowspeeder as a mercenary during the Battle of Hoth, and Princess Leia later hired him to protect Luke Skywalker from the dark Prince Xizor's ruthless bounty hunters. He played a significant role in the effort to overcome Xizor by destroying numerous Black Sun starships with his state of the Outrider starfighter. With Rendar at the helm, the vessel is one of the quickest and the most fearsome fighting machines in the galaxy."

- From the Shadows of the Empire Kenner toyline, (1996).

[lj-writes]

The Last Strike of the Empire

For the individual writing ESB into TLJ…

First things first, the cast of characters. Luke=Rey Leia=Rose Han=Finn Chewbacca=Poe C-3P0=BB-8 Vader=Ren Piett=Hux Boba=Phasma Emperor=Snoke Yoda=Luke And, to round out the cast, early introduction of Ackbar and Mothma as Leia and Holdo respectively.

Plot Changes: 1.) The movie starts where ANH left off. Imperial Star Destroyers converge on the Rebel Base on Yavin IV. Ackbar orders Gold Squadron to take out a destroyer but a lot of people die, so he slaps Chewbacca, who was leading the charge.

2.) Han says he’s leaving, since this isn’t his rebellion. Leia tases him and brings him on board one of the fleeing ships.

3.) Obi-Wan tells Luke to go to the Dagobah system, and that Yoda will single-handedly save everyone.

4.) The Emperor uses the force to beat up Piett and yells at Vader to take his ridiculously iconic mask off. For the rest of the movie, Vader’s bald head is exposed to the audience (to humanize him!)

5.) Bald Vader attacks the Rebel Fleet with TIE bombers (but only once). He has a sad flashback to him and Ackbar in the Clone Wars together, but his cronies blow up the bridge anyway.

6.) Ackbar, being a fish, swims back on board and passes out for the rest of the movie. Mon Mothma is put in charge, which gets Chewie’s goat.

7.) The Empire is tracking the Rebellion, slowly, and Mon Mothma has done nothing but stand still for three hours. Han and Leia decide to fly to Bespin to find a master codebreaker to magically disable the Imperial ships, and they bring C3P0 with them.

8.) Luke finds Yoda and tries to give him his lightsaber, but Yoda throws it into a bog. Also, there’s like, little birds everywhere.

9.) Cloud City has slavery and animal abuse, the latter of which is a big problem for Leia, but Han loves the place until he sees a tauntaun get smacked.

10.) Instead of getting Lobot, they settle for Lando, whom C3P0 broke out prison using his coin launcher.

11.) Luke mopes around on Dagobah, but Bald Vader makes contact with him and they begin a creepy back and forth, complete with a shirtless scene and Luke getting over Vader’s killing of Obi-Wan.

12.) Yoda trains Luke, but Luke gets angry when he finds out Yoda tried to kill Bald (only used name for Vader at this point) after he massacred children on Coruscant.

13.) Lando is offered money and betrays his new allies.

14.) Boba Fett shows up, but Han takes him out.

15.) Luke joins Bald on the Star Destroyer, where Bald kills the Emperor across the galaxy, and they fight Imperial Guards in an admittedly visually stunning scene.

16.) Bald reveals he’s Luke’s father, but Luke leaves.

17.) Mon Mothma activates her omega-beam to destroy all of the ships, but she waited too long and the rebellion, out of gas, crash lands on Hoth.

18.) Wedge tastes Hoth and says, “Snow.”

19.) Han, Chewie, and Leia fly out on snowspeeders to stop the AT-ATs, but most of them give up before they get halfway. Han keeps going so Leia shoots him down to give him a line about when they go low we go high. Also, she loves him. Han didn’t know.

20.) Our Rebels safely make it back inside Echo Base, and Bald beats up Piett some more.

21.) Yoda Force projects onto Hoth.

22.) Luke lands on Hoth and every single surviving member of the Rebellion climbs on his X-Wing to fly out of there.

Obviously, make it your own fic, but please do share when done. (Moth)

[eomao]

I’m from the 90s so I missed the idiotic 80s, but I got the end results of the things started in the 80s. Some of my favorite stupid old Star Wars canon stuff:

-EVERYTHING is canon, including contrivances from the medium that are usually overlooked. So you get my favorite “legends” character Kyle Katarn, from a series of first-person-shooters, who canonically hauled around dozens of guns at any one time wiping out hundreds of stormtroopers. Imagine Luke doing that. (Dark Forces and Jedi Knight games)

-Chewbacca being killed by a moon crashing into a planet he was on while saving people from said moon. Moon might have been flung into the planet by BDSM aliens from another galaxy that fly living asteroid spaceships. (Vector Prime novel)

-Luke’s kid is training as a jedi along with Han and Leia’s kid, and one of their adventures leads them to fight IT from Stephen King (Galaxy of Fear YA novels, might be Spore but wikipedia’s summaries are not helpful)

-The snowspeeder pilots on Hoth are actually all the best pilots in the galaxy and expand their ranks, including an Ewok that speaks galactic basic (Rogue Squadron novel series, which also had a game series)

-Any of the dozens of tie-in pieces of media surrounding The Phantom Menace, especially the learning games aimed at kids. For example, Watto, the walking (flying?) antisemitic stereotype setting up mazes in his junkyard to... test the capabilities of pit droids and how well they can color coordinate? (Pit Droids video game)

-Luke gives up his jedi ways while Palpatine, in a resurrected clone body, attempts to take over again from a secret place in the galaxy with a huge army including tons of planet-destroying weapons. Sure would be idiotic, right? (Dark Empire graphic novels I and II)

To be fair, this isn't the first time that Star Wars has been fucking omnipresent. There was a time back in the 1980s when there were Star Wars comics on every newsstand and a bunch of weird spin-off movies about Ewoks and two separate, concurrently airing Saturday morning cartoons and a licensed tabletop RPG you could buy in mainstream bookstores (which incidentally ended up accidentally creating like two thirds of the Expanded Universe because George Lucas couldn't be arsed to produce a setting bible and just gave writers copies of the RPG instead, and the RPG didn't distinguish between the bits that had actual sources and the bits it made up to pad its sourcebooks). The difference is that there was no real centralised oversight and most people involved had very little idea of what they were doing, and as a result, nearly all of the Star Wars material that emerged from this era was deeply, deeply stupid. I think that's what the present state of affairs is missing.