#half the things tagged as star wars rebels is clone wars or prequels stuff

[augustspage]

Is it just me, or does anyone else dislike how the star wars fandom brushes aside the ghost crew?

Like how in a episode full of moments of ezra's hubris, and kanans fear and BLINDING, all everyone focuses on is ahsoka and Vader's duel (still great just overplayed)

Or how thrawn is not just there to be cool and calculating, but as a foil to hera, as a contrast to show what it'd look like if hera continues to focus on what's most effective for the mission, not her love and passion for her people and her family.

Even non ghost crew characters have their other relationships forgotten like Rex's conflict with kanan or Hondo's becoming a kooky pirate uncle to ezra, for scenes of those characters reminiscing on their pasts.

It's frustrating.

[bedlamsbard]

I know you have had a lot of little ideas for random Rebel's AU's that haven't made it past concept writing -- is there a reason that Backbone made too full story vs any of the other concepts? I know time can be a huge limiting factor for which ideas get more fleshed out so I was just curious. How do you pick which stories to write full out when you have so many awesome ones?

This is actually a weirdly complicated story because it depends on a lot of factors, of which the various concepts are the least of them.

Back in late spring/summer 2015, it was either going to be Backbone or Trade All Your Tomorrows, the Kanan and Hera time travel story, which actually preceded Backbone’s earliest concepts.  (You can still read the Tomorrows concept writing, if you like.)  Checking the dates, it looks like I started doing concept work for Tomorrows right after the Rebels S1 finale aired.  (And my earliest Rebels fic was a follow-up to Call to Action.)  There were a couple of stories I started but didn’t go anywhere -- a Kanan and Hera story set after AND, and then the werewolf AU, which was just for fun and which I never intended to potentially fill out into a full story.  There was another story about Kanan having to go undercover as an Imperial officer that never even made it to the concept stages.  (You can find any of the posted concepts in my cut scenes and concept writing tag.)

Now, what was going on at the time is that Queen’s Gambit was actually still in progress, because I didn’t wrap up Gambit until June 2015.  As I recall, I wrote about 30K of Tomorrows in March 2015, then dragged myself out of Rebels hell because I needed to finish Gambit.  This was in about late April.  The earliest Backbone stuff I started doing was in late May, and then Gambit wrapped up at the beginning of June.

I had always intended to take a break between Gambit and Watchtower, and there is actually a completely different story I meant to write then, because as originally planned, Gambit was going to wrap up around the end of summer 2014.  Now, obviously this did not happen, because I moved cross-country and started graduate school.  The story that I had planned to write was a TCW AU where the chip triggered early in a lot of clones and Anakin ended up framed for that and had to go on the run with Rex.  Well, Rebels started airing in fall 2014, and over the course of the following eight or nine months I got really into Rebels, and in the run-up from Call to Action to FatG I decided that I really wanted to write an Inquisitor!Kanan story, somehow, someway.  But I just didn’t really have a route to that that I was really interested in at the time.

In late May 2015, as I was half-crazed from (a) finishing Gambit and (b) taking a summer course in French, I had my “wait, what if it is ISB Agent Hera and Inquisitor Kanan?” breakthrough.  So I was turning that over and turning that over and talking that out at various people, but at that point I still intended Tomorrows to be my next big story.

In the meantime, several different things happened.

Lords of the Sith came out -- well, it actually came out in late April, I just did not read it until the end of May.  “Siege of Lothal” aired at Star Wars Celebration Anaheim, and I got a friend who had attended to tell me how much it contradicted the Tomorrows and agents of the Empire concepts.  And, most crucially for Tomorrows, Kanan - The Last Padawan began in April 2015.

Now, if you’ve read the Tomorrows concepts, you know that Depa Billaba’s clone troopers play a major role.  However, because I did up all the Tomorrows concepts before TLP came out, those clones are all OCs.  TLP also very plainly lays out how inexperienced Caleb was at the time of Order 66, so all my background for Caleb and my clone OCs all got very quickly jossed by canon in one fell swoop.  I did keep working on Tomorrows for a while after that, but I really dislike writing at a moving target, which TLP was at the time, and then Tomorrows got set aside so that I could finish Gambit.  I’d also done some plotting and some concepts for something that was called the post time travel story, which dealt with Caleb and Hera and the repercussions of their time travel years after Tomorrows had wrapped up.  (It looks like the latest dates on that are mid-April 2015, so about the same time as Tomorrows.)

When I finished Gambit I was still weighing Tomorrows and the story that didn’t yet have a title, but which I was calling the agents of the Empire AU.  Now, Gambit isn’t a time travel story, but its prequel, Wake the Storm, is, and I was really unwilling to write two time travel stories so close together.  (Wake wrapped in February 2014, but Gambit is essentially a straight continuation of Wake.)  And the other thing is that with Tomorrows while I had the concept, I actually did not have an action plot.  I like action plots.  I like them a lot.  It’s really hard for me to write a story without one, and Tomorrows was essentially a whole mess of emotions but no plot.

However, I did have an action plot for the agents of the Empire story.  (And this plot has actually consistently remained the same for the past two years, though it got filled out a lot.)  And I also had people who were willing to talk about it, which is a really good way to get enthused about a story.  For a while after Gambit wrapped I was alternating working on Tomorrows and agents of the Empire concept writing, but Tomorrows eventually trailed off as I got more into the agents of the Empire story, and eventually it got shelved entirely and I dug into what later became On the Edge of the Devil’s Backbone.

Now: a lot of things that were originally written for Tomorrows ended up in Backbone, like Alecto Syndulla, her sister Clotho, and I believe that Cham’s sisters Seku and Aleema were originally conceived of for Tomorrows as well.  Tomorrows was written with a much darker backstory for canon!Hera that involved her entire family being murdered, and for those that were in the Rebels fandom back in S1 and before the bulk of S2 aired, you may remember that there was a lot of discussion about what Hera’s backstory actually was -- if her father was dead, if she had been enslaved and that’s where her markings came from, what had happened to Ryloth after LotS, and so on.  If you look at the Tomorrows concepts, you can see some of this there in the Hera scenes.  When I was doing the backstory for Backbone, I didn’t want to go with any of that because I am a pretty contrary person and it had just tipped over from “plausible” to “I am very contrary and am going to do the exact opposite.”  Which is why Backbone!Hera’s mother is still alive while Tomorrows!Hera’s mother is dead, along with most of the rest of the family.

Now!  “Homecoming” didn’t air until February 2016, and if I remember correctly, the S2 trailer that aired in summer 2015 didn’t feature Cham Syndulla, though I think the special features from the S1 DVD/Blu-Ray release mentioned that we would see Cham Syndulla in S2, but that wasn’t until September 2015, at which point Backbone was already in progress.  The omnibus Rise of the Empire, which includes Tarkin and A New Dawn, also includes a short story about a fifteen-year-old Hera, but that didn’t release until October 2015.  Backbone started posting in July 2015, and at that point between LotS and AND there was NOTHING that dealt with Ryloth, so I had a relatively free hand to work.  I wanted to do some things that I knew canon would never do -- I mean, beyond the fact it was an Imperial AU -- which is why the Free Ryloth fleet exists and why Hera’s extended family is featured so prominently.

So that’s the backstory for Backbone.

Now, over the past year and change I’ve done a lot of smaller concepts, and none of those were ever intended to make it to a full story stage, because if you look at them closely, you’ll notice that they’re all actually Backbone AUs in one variation or another.  I don’t multitask well, which is why I haven’t done any concept writing for Watchtower yet and why I haven’t done any concepts for non-Backbone-based Rebels stories.  Like, do I have some that I have ideas for?  Sure; there’s a “post-AND Kanan and Hera meet Baze and Chirrut on Jedha and have an adventure” story that would be cool, and there’s a “pre-Wrong Jedi arc Caleb drags Ahsoka and Rex into an adventure on Coruscant” story that would be adorable.  But if I do that, knowing my brain, there’s a really good chance that I won’t go back to Backbone, and come hell or high water I am going to finish this story.

(There is one piece of concept writing for the sequel to Backbone that will not be written, but I try not to do sequel concepts because things change in progress.)

[jp17stout-blog]

Film Review

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/movies/star-wars-rogue-one-review.html

Rogue One: a Rogue Star Wars Story

 Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is the perfect title for this film. This film “goes rogue” in the star wars universe. While most people in the U.S. have seen and even own the original trilogy and the prequels, many fail to understand the concept of Rogue One after watching it for the first time. Simply put, Rogue One contains too much information. It is impossible to recognize anyone in the film based on prior knowledge to the other star wars movies, besides Darth Vader, Grand Moff Tarkin, and a select few Rebel leaders. Unless you have read the books, or summaries on the time between episodes 3 and 4, you will be totally lost when the film starts. The only thing that kept me in my chair in the movie theatre was that I was a big star wars fan and paid some money to see this.Within the first 20 some minutes of the film, we are given a backstory of some girl whose father had ties to the empire but quite to be a farmer and her mom gets killed and she goes and hides out underground, waiting for some scary looking guy to find her and help her fulfill her destiny. Yep, that’s just the intro. Not to mention travelling to a few planets that I’ve never heard of before like: Lah’Mu, Rebel Massassi Outpost, Jedha. I still have a difficult time trying to remember what happens where.

Besides all the different places you get to see in Rogue One your also left with a bunch of new characters: Jyn Erso, Cassian Andor, Galen Erso, Chirrut Imwe, Saw Gerrera, General Merrick. Exactly, I’ve never heard of them before either. The few that I did recognize had very minimal screen time, so for most of the movie I was trying to figure out how the hell all these people showed up and where did they come from.

Enough with the information overload stuff, at least, most of it. Let’s talk about how well Rogue One ties into the other star wars films. The original trilogy was a BIG hit and it’s what kicked star wars off into utter excellence. A small rebel fleet destroys the empire in a science fiction realm, that was the beauty of the original trilogy. Rogue One does a pretty good job with telling us how Princess Leia got the plans to destroy the first Death Star (opening scene of episode 4). A bunch of rag-tag rebels go down into one of the planets in the star wars universe (I can’t remember which) that is controlled by the empire. It is the location of the Death Star building plans and that is what the Rogue One Rebels are trying to get their hands on. They end up getting the plans to the ship that we see in episode 4, but all of the fighters including Jyn Erso and Cassian Andor (the one’s who actually got the plans) end up dying on the planet after it gets destroyed by the Death Star. All of the action at the end of the movie was absolutely terrific! I now understand how the rebels got the death star plans, I just don’t know all the people that did the work to get it. We get nothing from the prequal trilogy besides the empire, which is o.k. because episode 3 was the only good thing to come out of the prequals, but that’s a different debate. All-in-all, Rogue One does a pretty decent job in tying episode 3 into episode 4, thanks to the last 40 minutes of the film.

Positives from the film? Yes, there are some. The best part of the whole movie (now I know this is going to sound kind of rabid) is at the end when Darth Vader is slicing his way through rebel fighters to get the plans back. Unfortunately for him, the rebels ended up getting away with it. Purely, Awesome. Another thing I liked from the film was the comic relief from the rebel droid, K-2SO. He was sarcastically funny, not to mention it made me sad when he got shot up by the stormtroopers (yes, they actually hit something, and it had to be one of my favorite characters from the movie). [JP1] I also enjoyed the whole “I am one with the force, the force is with me” thing from that blind guy and his friend who had that machine gun. I know, very informal, but I don’t remember their names thanks to information overload. There were many aspects to this action packed sci-fi film that made it a little enjoyable.

Rogue One was a decent Star Wars film. Better than the prequals at least. There’s just too many new characters and too much explaining being done to understand the movie right away. Unless you read star wars comics/books/magazines or have seen both clone wars and rebels, your going to have a hard[JP2]  time following along with the first half of the movie. Despite this overload of the force of information in Rogue One it is still an action-packed star wars film that all star wars fans should probably see (even though absolutely unnecessary). Out of five stars, I would rate Rogue One at 3.5 – action packed but too much explanation is needed to understand the rogue star wars story.  [JP3] 

General info on the film: set immediately before the events of the original Star Wars film, Rogue one: A Star Wars Story was directed by Gareth Edwards. It came out in 2016 and is an American Sci-Fi epic space opera. Disney is the distributor and it was produced by Lucasfilm.

 [JP1]I like how you talk to your reader in a comical manner.

 [JP2]

 [JP3]I like how you organized you’re your review and you summarized the movie well without giving to much away.