#when does this book wide release is it february?

[lilyoffandoms]

Jarek x Trey

It’s the beige love affair he clearly has going on with his clothing for me lol

I feel like I managed to capture them slightly younger still not quite college age young but eh at this point it’s close enough for me haha

My Art Ish Thing Tag (Choices Edition): @storyofmychoices @aallotarenunelma @twinkleallnight @dutifullynuttywitch @loreofyore @peonierose @trappedinfanfiction

[all-about-kyu]

Summary: Jungwoo can’t help that he loves it when you talk down to him. Pairing: Jungwoo x fem!reader (background of poly with Yangyang) Tropes: established relationship au Genre: smut Rating: R 18+ Warnings: language, poly background Smut Warnings: degradation, femdom, sex toys, mommy kink, spit play, dry orgasm, dacryphilia, edging Word Count: 1,203 Note: in the universe of PIP & MKB Host Tags: @sanjoongie @thelargefrye Before You Interact February Filth Masterlist

Listen to ♡ Circus by Britney Spears

“Jungwoo,” you say in a warning tone, “Watch it.”

“What, babe?” Your husband smiles with a seemingly innocent face.

You lower your book slightly to look at him and raise your eyebrow. He knows exactly what he’s doing. You’ve had your legs tossed over his lap while you read for the better part of the afternoon. It’s been a relatively quiet day. Your other boyfriend, Yangyang, is finishing up his last year of university and is off to classes all day. Jungwoo had placed his hand on your knee and rubbed his thumb against the skin of your lower leg for a while at first while scrolling through his phone mindlessly. Now, his hands drag higher and higher on your thigh. His fingertips slip just beneath the edge of your shorts. You wouldn’t be surprised if he tried to push your thighs apart and play with you over your clothing any moment.

“You know what.” You say flatly, “Watch it or I’ll put you in your damn place.”

“Promise?” Jungwoo challenges.

“Don’t be a fucking brat, Kim Jungwoo. Yangie isn’t around to distract me. You’ll be the sole receiver.”

“I see no issue with this. Do you, Mommy?” He purrs out the name with a challenging lilt.

You mark your book and place it on the coffee table before swinging your legs off of him. Standing up, you grip Jungwoo’s jaw harshly and force him to look up into your darkening eyes. You immediately see his reserve crumble as his submissive headspace takes over.

“We’re going upstairs. If Yangyang comes home and hears you crying for mercy, he won’t be any help to you. Understood?”

“U-understood.”

You release his jaw and walk toward the stairs. Lifting your hand, you crook two fingers over, gesturing for him to follow you. You hear his footsteps fall behind yours. The moment you’re in your bedroom, Jungwoo doesn’t wait for your instruction to strip. He takes the liberty himself and sits bare for you at the foot of the bed. He expects you to praise him for his foresight. You don’t, though. You busy yourself in your armoire, finding the perfect toy to use on your bratty husband. Standing up straight again, you hide the toy behind your back. Jungwoo’s eyes are wide and curious as you step closer to him. Your eyes are still dark with dominance and lust. 

“What do you have, Mommy?” He questions, with a tilt of his head. 

“What do you want it to be?” You question back.

Jungwoo nibbles on his lower lip, “Whatever you think is best to punish me with.”

You smirk and knee in front of him, “Good answer. Now, does my brat want me to take care of this?”

You pull one hand up to run your finger along the underside of his cock. His hips jerk at the contact, and he nods intensely. Another smirk touches your lips before you spit on his cock, making it wet enough to use your toy of choice. Your husband squirms and whines as you spread the spit across his hard member. Now you pull the toy from behind your back, letting him finally see your choice. He lets out a shaky breath seeing the fleshlight in your hand. Sometimes it’s his favorite, others it’s his worst nightmare. Today, it’s the ladder. You bring the toy to be in line with his tip. You guide it down to only be wrapped around his tip, swiveling it in circles, causing your husband to whimper and whine at the sensation.

“You’re so easy, slut.” You chuckle darkly, “I’m only playing with your tip, barely even that, and you’re already a fucking wreck. What would our precious sub have to say about this?”

“Y-yangie– fuck– Yangie’s seen me sub before, seen me get in trouble.” He whines.

You push the toy all the way on him, pouting in faux compassion when he lets out a broken whine. Giving him time to compose himself isn’t in your thoughts today. You fuck the toy down on him quickly. His thighs squeeze together, and his hair falls on his face as he bows his head forward.

“He’s seen you be my slut before, yes. He enjoys watching his precious daddy fall apart for me, doesn’t he?” You muse, focusing on how his abs tense and intense with each motion, “He’s always such a good boy. He doesn’t try to play games with me like you do. Only bratty sluts do that. Are you my bratty slut, Jungwoo?”

“Yeah,” he moans, “I’m a bratty slut.”

“Ah, ah, ah,” you tut, “You’re not a slut, your my slut.”

“‘M your slut.” He corrects himself through a sob, “Mommy, I’m gonna–”

You pull the toy off of him entirely, knowing exactly how he was going to finish the sentence. His body shakes and convulses as if he’s cumming, but no cum comes out of his cock. He whimpers and whines at the sensation. He’s always hated dry orgasms. On the other hand, you love how much more desperate your husband and boyfriend get when it happens.

“That’s not fair.” He pouts.

“Oh?” You mock his pouty face and tone, “Is it not fair? Last time I checked, bratty sluts don’t get to cum how they want to.”

“Please, please, plea– fuck!”

His begs get cut off by you pushing the fleshlight back onto his weeping member. His muscles tense, his eyes squeeze shut, and small tears form at the corners. It takes everything in him not to fuck up into the toy. If he did, it would only cause a longer punishment. You continue to degrade him with filthy words, knowing he loved every moment of it. If he didn’t he knew your safeword and that he was able to use it at any point. You edge him a few more times, and each time, he lets out a pathetic sob, begging you to let him cum.

“I’ll be good! I can be good like Yangie is!” He promises, “Please, Mommy, let me cum.”

“Do you deserve it? Maybe I should leave you like this and spoil Yangyang when he gets home.”

It’s a semi-empty threat, though. Yangyang has been extra well-behaved recently. Typically when he’s stressed with his courseload, he gets a bit bratty, but he hasn’t even with his exams. Jungwoo opens his mouth to whine in protest. He closes his lips again when the sound of the alert for the door opening and closing again fills the house. His eyes go wide, and he begs silently. You smirk and start fucking the toy onto his cock roughly. A loud moan rips through the air.

“Baby? Woo? Are you two upstairs?” Yangyang calls through the house.

“We’re upstairs, pretty baby.” You call back, “I’m just handling a brat right now. Feel free to join us when you’re ready!”

Jungwoo jerks his hips up at your offer. Again you pull the toy away, making tears roll down his cheeks. You chuckle, watching how his cock jerks and drips a bit of precum. He was in for a long evening, now with the added fun of your shared boyfriend being home, too it’ll only be more enjoyable for everyone.

COPYRIGHT STARLITMARK 2024© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED — reposting/modifying any fic or piece of original writing posted on this blog is not allowed. Translations are not permitted. 

Networks: @cultofdionysusnet @kwritersworld @k-vanity

Tag List: @bratty-tingz @yeosangiess @minjaeluver @abbietwilight @wooyoungmybelovedhusband

[etymology-of-the-emblem]

Xane / チェイニー

Xane is a Divine Dragon with a penchant for adopting the guises of others appearing in Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light, Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem and their respective remakes. Xane is a rare variant of the name Zane, commonly interpreted as descended from the name John. It is possible that the intent was to reference the "John Doe" pseudonym—a false name used primarily in legal situations when someone's identity is unknown or intentionally concealed. Appropriate, considering Xane kept his background vague in Shadow Dragon and adopts the appearances of others. There may also be references to the Christian figure John the Apostle, believed author of the Gospel of John and the Book of Revelation, considering that Xane is a Divine Dragon and, in Mystery of the Emblem, exposits about the history of Archanea. The choice to use the variant Xane was likely intended to both add a sense of mysticism and resemble the original Japanese name a bit closer.

Speaking of, in Japanese Xane is called チェイニー (rōmaji: cheinī), officially romanized as Cheine. This name is derived from ロン・チェイニー (rōmaji: ron cheinī), famed American actor and makeup artist Lon Chaney Sr. He was one of the most influential actors of silent film, starting in the 1910s. His technical skill with makeup made him fill the role of disfigured characters like Quasimodo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame with ease. Because of his incredible ability to change his appearance to suit a wide swath of films, Chaney earned the moniker "The Man of a Thousand Faces." The inspiration for Xane's Imitate ability is obvious.

It is unknown whether the localization team at 8-4 recognized this inspiration or not while working on Shadow Dragon. Regardless, they likely planned to change the name to something rather different. This remake of the series' progenitor entry released in August of 2008 and February of 2009. This coincided with the end of United States Vice President Dick Cheney and a shift in political power in the nation. With both the actor and the former VP's surnames being pronounced the same—even written with the same katakana in Japanese—any attempts to preserve this allusion were likely scrubbed to prevent interpretation of political commentary regarding conditions in the US.

[lovingsylvia]

!NEW RELEASE!

Title: Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volume 1: 1932-1955

Author: Carl Rollyson

Publication date: 15 August 2023

Pages: 400

Publisher: University Press of Mississippi (UPM)

Image source (cover & description): https://www.upress.state.ms.us

About the book:

“A fascinating investigation into the life and art of one of America’s greatest poets       

Since Sylvia Plath’s death in 1963, she has become the subject of a constant stream of books, biographies, and articles. She has been hailed as a groundbreaking poet for her starkly beautiful poems in Ariel and as a brilliant forerunner of the feminist coming-of-age novel in her semiautobiographical The Bell Jar. Each new biography has offered insight and sources with which to measure Plath’s life and influence. Sylvia Plath Day by Day, a two-volume series, offers a distillation of this data without the inherent bias of a narrative.

Volume 1 commences with Plath’s birth in Boston in 1932, records her response to her elementary and high school years, her entry into Smith College, and her breakdown and suicide attempt, and ends on February 14, 1955, the day she wrote to Ruth Cohen, principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, to accept admission as an “affiliated student at Newnham College to read for the English Tripos.”

Sylvia Plath Day by Day is for readers of all kinds with a wide variety of interests in the woman and her work. The entries are suitable for dipping into and can be read in a minute or an hour. Ranging over several sources, including Plath’s diaries, journals, letters, stories, and other prose and poetry—including new material and archived material rarely seen by readers—a fresh kaleidoscopic view of the writer emerges.

Reviews                                                

"The details in Rollyson’s Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volume 1: 1932–1955 are a dream come true for the reader, fan, and scholar of Sylvia Plath. The seeds of so much of her creative writing are present, but Rollyson deftly does not foreshadow how events impact Plath’s life and when she transforms experiences from life to art. He lets each moment stand on its own importance."

"Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volume 1: 1932–1955 is a must-have book for any reader interested in Plath. Detailed yet highly readable, it paints a portrait of a young woman who would become, as will be chronicled in volume 2, one of the seminal authors in the twentieth century."

"Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volume 1: 1932–1955 fills the lacunae of existing biographies and uncovers new insights into its subject, as when Plath writes about her experiences at Smith, hearing ‘nasty little tag ends of conversation directed at you and around you, meant for you, to strangle you on the invisible noose of insinuation.’ Or her months in New York at Mademoiselle, which grow less mysterious here. Again, Carl Rollyson has provided us with an indispensable book on Sylvia Plath." “

You can order the book through their website or from other online shops.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Todd Beeton at The Big Picture:

We’re more than halfway through June, and the Supreme Court has hardly made a dent in the release of major opinions from this blockbuster term.

Each year, the Supreme Court’s term begins on the first Monday in October and ends with a recess starting at the end of June or beginning of July. With this self-imposed deadline fast approaching, the Court has just 2 weeks left to release decisions in the remaining 23 cases out of the 61 total cases they heard this term.

We should expect a firehose of decisions coming this week and next, with the most newsworthy cases of the term among them. And perhaps that’s by design from a court with a distinct PR problem.

[...]

January 6th

By far the most eagerly anticipated Supreme Court decision of the term is the one the Justices heard last: Trump v U.S., which is described by ScotusBlog as:

Whether and if so to what extent does a former president enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.

This case relates to Donald Trump’s appeal of a February 6 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which thoroughly rejected Donald Trump’s claims to immunity in the four-count criminal indictment brought against him by Special Counsel Jack Smith in the January 6 case.

[...]

Abortion

In its unanimous decision last week to reject the challenge by a group of doctors to the FDA’s approval of Mifepristone, a safe and effective drug used in most medical abortions in the U.S., the Supreme Court did not rule on the merits of the case but rather threw out the challenge based on the plaintiffs’ lack of standing (finding that the plaintiffs in the case were unable to demonstrate any harm brought to them by the FDA’s Mifepristone approval.) 

Justice Kavanaugh’s majority opinion in FDA v. Alliance For Hippocratic Medicine was widely seen as leaving the door open to overturning the FDA’s approval of the drug if the right case—i.e., the right group of plaintiffs—were brought in front of this virulently anti-choice SCOTUS majority.

But the case was not the only abortion case the Court heard this term, with Moyle v. U.S. still yet to be decided.

At issue there is whether Idaho’s near total abortion ban can override the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), a federal statute on the books since 1986 designed to “ensure public access to emergency services regardless of ability to pay.” 

[...]

Guns

Last week, in a remarkably radical decision, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 along ideological lines to overturn a Trump era ban on bump stocks, devices that gun safety advocates argue convert semi-automatic weapons into machine guns. 

[...]

There is, however, one Second Amendment case still to be decided this term: U.S. v. Rahimi, which SCOTUSblog describes as a dispute over

Whether 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8), which prohibits the possession of firearms by persons subject to domestic-violence restraining orders, violates the Second Amendment on its face.

[...]

The Administrative State

As we saw with the bump stock case, this Supreme Court is fond of imposing its own will over the expertise of federal agencies, what Trump and the right derisively refer to as the “deep state” or the “administrative state.” Now the Court may be poised to hugely undercut the power of all federal agencies to interpret congressional statutes when it finally rules on Relentless v. Department of Commerce in the coming weeks.  In a 1984 case, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the Court established the Chevron Doctrine, which basically said that “courts should defer to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statute.”

[...] And in Securities And Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, it could very well “strip the SEC of a major tool in fighting securities fraud.”

With 23 cases left to have opinions released in the Supreme Court later this month and possibly early next month, Todd Beeton writes in The Big Picture a summary of the key cases left to be decided.

Key cases left:

Trump v. United States: Presidential immunity

Moyle v. United States: EMTALA and abortion.

United States v. Rahimi: Guns and domestic abuse.

Relentless Inc. v. Department of Commerce: Chevron Doctrine and regulatory power.

SEC v. Jarkesy: regulatory power.

[korgbelmont]

Goodbye 2023

This is my own personal end of year post, I'll be talking about a multitude of things, looking back on this year and what some of my plans are for 2024 on here.

Undercut due to length of post

Looking Back on 2023: Choices

There have been quite a few books this year, both sequels and all new titles. I will be talking about the Wide Releases rather than VIP here.

First up in January was Guinevere, which was one I really enjoyed. It's always interesting seeing a new take on things like Arthurian mythology. I did like how they switched it to be Merlin as the villain while Morgana was an ally, and I absolutely loved how she was written.

February saw the release of Kiss of Death. I must admit, I never finished this one. There was definitely a Romeo and Juliet vibe to it with MC and Vic being from opposing families.

In March we finally got the release of Getaway Girls. I really enjoyed the multiple POV with this book and all the main characters and Love Interests were a joy to read.

Then in April, Roommates With Benefits began releasing. Like with Kiss of Death, I never finished this one. I do know that it is getting either a spin off or sequel (not sure which).

May saw the release First Comes Love. I only ever played the first chapter of this one and then I kind of forgot about it, so I don't really have an opinion on it.

June we got Crimes of Passion 2. This one felt very different to the first book, but given the different setting, this was to be expected. It was interesting to see how being in Drakovia impacted the relationship between Trystan and MC. Looking forward to BK3!

When The Duchess Affair began releasing in July, I have to admit, it is one I never actually got to, so I don't have an opinion on it.

August gave us Kindred and I LOVED this book, definitely one of my top of the year. MC, Saff, and Maggie were all amazing characters and Rainier and Kaine were also amazing Love Interests. I always have a love for things to do with magic and fantasy, and this was no exception. It's one of those books that I was upset to see was a standalone.

September gave us two books. First up was The Billionaire's Baby, and to be honest, it's best I say as little for this one. I don't condone cheating, and this was a book that didn't need to be an affair book. I'm going to leave it at that. The second book of September was the much awaited Blades of Light and Shadow 2, and with it having not long ended, I can say I definitely enjoyed it, although it did take a bit of time to get going. I liked the expansion of the world and how it brought some of the things mentioned in BK1. Valax was such an amazing addition as both a character and Love Interest! Looking forward to BK3.

Spooky October gave us Dirty Little Secrets, and I have to admit I am enjoying this one. While it is another sex book, the murder mystery element is enjoyable.

November brought us Alpha, and I won't lie, I am kind of enjoying it. I'm curious to see how it will play out. It's interesting how they have managed to make three books with Werewolves, and have them be different in each one.

Our first December book was Ship of Dreams, and to be honest, I'm not sure what to make of this one yet. I'll give it a few more chapters and see from there. There's definitely inspiration from the Titanic film with this one. For the final book of the year, we got The Cursed Heart Book 2, and whilst we've only had one chapter, I am intrigued and interested to see how the world built for this story gets expanded.

Looking Back on 2023: Stories

2023 saw quite a few more fanfics than 2022, including some more It Lives In The Woods stories with Nick and Stacy, including a slight Blades crossover. I must admit, it is one of my It Lives stories that does stick in my mind and it is the one I did for the It Lives Week where I explored what would happen if Jane had survived.

There was also the crossover between Immortal Desires and My Two First Loves in Immortal Desires: Harris, which saw the pairing of Noah Harris and Gabriela Adalhard. I had been debating on which of the two Vamps to pair him with, and whilst I do think he would work with Cas, Gabe felt like the one to go for.

Finally there was The Elementalists: Fire & Water which had my first Choices OC as a lead character in the form of Riley Keegan. There was never any doubt in my mind that if I was to do an Elementalists story, it would be with Shreya, to this day she remains one of my top Love Interests.

With originals, I finally got to completing The Vampire And The Valkyrie II. The whole thing was originally intended to be a standalone, but I got a bit caught up in it and decided to expand it all. It was the same with Pantheon, that was originally meant to be a standalone, but there felt like too much from between Tyr leaving the Norse realms and arriving in the Greek world. It is a problem I have with writing as a whole, I intend to go for a one-off, but then it becomes more. The idea for Pantheon came after God of War Ragnarök released and I had also rewatched Blood of Zeus recently at the time so it all kind of fell together in my brain,

I must admit, with my stories as a whole, I don't do much planning out for them (apart from my comic writing, then there's a bit of planning). Percy is the proof of this as I hadn't intended to write him as he ended up being, but when it came to it in the moment, I thought "hang on a sec", and now he's alive rather than just being a mindless monster who had to be killed.

What's Coming in 2024

In March, the main transparents post will be receiving it's yearly makeover. The image is already made, it's getting harder and harder to decide on characters that range from older books to newer books given how many there are now haha.

Transparents will continue as normal. Earlier this year, VIP exclusive books started releasing, and while at first none of them featured new transparents, The Promise of Forever changed that as it was a completely new book. As decided by the fandom in a poll, they will be uploaded to the folder, and I will do so when the book has finished it's release. I was thinking of having these colour coded like I do with the 17+ books, but then I thought "what if they are a 17+ VIP exclusive??" and deciding against it.

For stories, I do have some original series planned. First up is the return of Pantheon with continuation of Volume II along with an epilogue. Then I have also got planned to write the third and final Volume of The Vampire And The Valkyrie, tying up some loose ends in Callum and Sarah's story.

Also coming is a brand new original series; Son of the Moon. This is a Werewolf story that follows lone wolf Simon. In 99% of my past stories on here, I have featured Werewolves as villains, but this is the first to feature a Werewolf as a hero. As mentioned in a previous post, there is a festive story that was intended for 2023, but due to the fact that I never got to it, so Seasons Hauntings will be posted in time for the holiday season in 2024.

There is also currently one fanfic planned that will be another It Lives In The Woods and Blades crossover. This time, Nick will be meeting Valax. I would like to explore some other Choices books to do fanfics for, Blades is one I would like to explore, just got to figure out what I could do haha.

Earlier in the year, I received this ask about fanfic requests, and the answer remains the same. I'll be willing to give it a go, depending on the pairing.

When it begins again, I will be continuing with my small posts about that weeks Doctor Who episodes. I am really looking forward to more of Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor, he fits the role so well!

That's everything I can think of, hope you all have a wonderful 2024 and I'll see you there!

Keep safe everyone!

[neowitcher]

QUEER ROMANCE TO SPICE UP YOUR VALENTINE’S | RECOMMENDATIONS

In the mood to spend your Valentine’s curled up with a good romance book? Here are some recommendations with non-binary, asexual and sapphic leads.

1. Love & Other Disasters by Anita Kelly | 2022 | 368 p. | f/nb | 🌶️🌶️

The first openly nonbinary contestant on America’s favorite cooking show falls for their clumsy competitor in this delicious romantic comedy debut “that is both fantastically fun and crack your heart wide open vulnerable. (Rosie Danan, Storygraph)

Starting off with one of my favourite romance reads of last year, Love & Other Disasters is a delicious romance in multiple ways. It focuses on the main characters’ struggles and dreams, and you’re bound to be rooting for them the entire way. The f/nb romance is both heartwarming and sexy, and with its competitive setting, it surely is impossible to put down!

2. The Romantic Agenda by Claire Kann | 2022 | 336 p. | ace f/m | 🌶️

Thirty, flirty, and asexual Joy is secretly in love with her best friend Malcolm, but she’s never been brave enough to say so. When he unexpectedly announces that he’s met the love of his life—and no, it’s not Joy—she’s heartbroken. Malcolm invites her on a weekend getaway, and Joy decides it’s her last chance to show him exactly what he’s overlooking. But maybe Joy is the one missing something…or someone…and his name is Fox. (Storygraph)

My second favourite romance of last year won’t reel you in with spicy scenes, but does a rather incredible job portraying intimacy between two gorgeous love interests. Asexual representation is still lacking in romance novels but Claire Kann proves that there absolutely should be more of. The fake dating trope used is the cherry on top for this wonderful romance that I won’t stop recommending. Perfect summery read to start counting down to warmer days. (Full review can be found here.)

3. Mistakes Were Made by Meryl Wilsner | 2022 | 404 p. | f/f | 🌶️🌶️🌶️

A sharp and sexy rom-com about a college senior who accidentally hooks up with her best friend’s mom. What should have been a one-time fling quickly proves impossible to ignore, and soon Cassie and Erin are sneaking around. Worst of all, they start to realize they have something real. But is being honest about the love between them worth the cost? (Storygraph)

Mistakes Were Made is the total package if you want it all this Valentine’s: amazing humor, exciting romance, and an abundance of steamy scenes. Probably the most binge-worthy book on this list, I highly doubt you would need anything more to fall in love. Despite the slightly scandalous romance, the conflict never takes away from the enjoyment. For any MILF lover: this book is made for you!

4. For Her Consideration by Amy Spalding | 2023 | 320 p. | f/f | 🌶️

When an aspiring L.A. scriptwriter falls head-over-heels for a bossy and beautiful movie star after a devastating break-up, the two take a risk on love and cast themselves as the leading ladies of their own star-struck romance in this sweet and spirited love story from critically-acclaimed writer Amy Spalding in her adult debut. (Netgalley, Storygraph)

If you’d prefer to buy yourself a new book instead of reading something, then this is for you! Releasing 21 February, For Her Consideration is a relatable and swoonworthy sapphic romance fully coated in Hollywood dreams and sapphic film culture. It has great plus-size representation and fun side characters, making the book really awesome, both with and without the romance. (Full review can be found here.)

5. Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree | 2022 | 318 p. | f/f

Worn out after decades of packing steel and raising hell, Viv the orc barbarian cashes out of the warrior’s life with one final score. A forgotten legend, a fabled artifact, and an unreasonable amount of hope lead her to the streets of Thune, where she plans to open the first coffee shop the city has ever seen. A hot cup of fantasy slice-of-life with a dollop of romantic froth. (Storygraph)

Last but not least, the perfect cosy recommendation for anyone who loves a cute romance without it being the entire genre. The sapphic romance in this is very slow burn and while they’re slowly falling in love, you’re bound to fall head over heels with the book in its entirety. Nothing better than a book that feels like a hot cup of coffee to cuddle up in bed with.

[mashounen1945]

An interesting Star Wars history essay I saw on Reddit (yes, really)

[Star Wars] The Rise and Fall of the Expanded Universe: How Disney's buy-out of Lucasfilm brought a 22-year era to an end, and split sci-fi's biggest fandom in half.

Posted originally by the Reddit user "TheMightyHeptagon" on February 23rd, 2022.

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

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

How did we get here?

Unless you've been frozen in carbonite for the last decade, you've probably noticed that Star Wars is currently bigger and more ubiquitous than it's been in a very long time. You also probably know why that is: the Walt Disney Corporation bought the rights to the franchise in 2012, and Disney subsequently reignited the series by producing a 7th, 8th, and 9th episode—which seemed nearly inconceivable when the prequel trilogy concluded back in 2005. And you've also probably noticed that the Star Wars fandom is (to put it mildly) a bit divided at the moment. For various reasons, the various Star Wars films and TV shows of the so-called "Disney era" have their fair share of both supporters and detractors, and some recent works are more widely beloved than others.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about today.

If you're a relatively casual Star Wars fan who's generally just content to watch the movies (and there's nothing wrong with that), you might not realize that Disney's buy-out of Lucasfilm in 2012 was also effectively the end of an era for the franchise; the effects of that are still rippling through various Star Wars works to this day, and many fans still have strong feelings about it.

So why is it so hard to talk about Star Wars these days without getting into an argument? Why did the Disney buy-out start hundreds of online screaming matches back in 2012 before Disney even released a single film? And what does it all have to do with the European Union?

To answer that last question: absolutely nothing.

See: when a Star Wars fan talks about "the EU", they're probably talking about the "Expanded Universe". So... what's the Expanded Universe?

"A short time ago, in a sci-fi section not so far away..."

The short version:

In the context of the Star Wars franchise, the "Expanded Universe" is a loosely connected series of officially licensed Star Wars works released in various artistic mediums other than live-action films, which provide information that isn't in the movies that make up the core of the franchise.

Technically, the Expanded Universe is the same world as the Star Wars universe—or rather, it was until Disney declared that it wasn't anymore (but we'll get to that).

More broadly speaking: in modern fandom discourse, the term "Expanded Universe" generally refers to works in a popular franchise released in a different medium than the works that initially made the franchise famous, which may or may not be considered part of the franchise's "official" canon. It's most commonly applied to franchises that began as movies or TV shows, where particularly devoted fans might eagerly consume novels or short stories or comic books featuring their favorite characters while awaiting the next episode or installment.

In general, such works tend to act as a supplement to the main story, and they serve to expand the story beyond its primary medium (hence "Expanded Universe"). When writing such works, however, creators generally avoid writing particularly dramatic or pivotal plot turns that would drastically affect the world of the story—since that might alienate relatively casual viewers who don't necessarily have the time or the inclination to hunt down every work in a popular franchise, and the creators generally don't want to make those casual viewers feel like they're missing out on important plot points.

For a while, the Star Wars franchise was famous for being especially prolific in that regard, which probably shouldn't come as much of a surprise. After all: the Star Wars films are set in a whole fictional galaxy filled with hundreds of unexplored planets, and they're brimming with enigmatic references to thrilling events that the audience never sees. The world that George Lucas created is the perfect playground for sci-fi writers.

But when sci-fi fans talk about the "Star Wars Expanded Universe" (or "the EU" for short), they're usually specifically referring to a series of novels published by Bantam Spectra and Del Rey Books (and a few comic books published by Dark Horse Comics) between 1991 and 2013.

So what was it about that 22-year period that made it such fertile ground for Star Wars stories?

Well, that's where it gets a little complicated...

"We seem to be made to suffer. It's our lot in life..."

According to most accounts, the Star Wars franchise has a bit of an odd history because George Lucas' plans for the series were in a constant state of flux for nearly all of his career. Originally, he didn't even plan on Star Wars being a series at all: he just wrote a single screenplay, but had to drastically cut it down at the studio's behest when it turned out to be way too long for one movie; conveniently, that left him with plenty of material for two more movies when the first film turned out to be a surprise hit, and the studio expressed interest in sequels.

And once he started to make plans for continuing the story after the Original Trilogy, he similarly waffled on how many more movies he wanted to make: some sources claim that he wanted to make a full nine movies (or possibly as many as twelve) before the arduous production of The Empire Strikes Back convinced him to trim it down to just six. Even after that, Lucas still considered taking a crack at making his own Sequel Trilogy a few times after the Prequel Trilogy wrapped, and he didn't completely give up on those plans until shortly before the Disney buy-out. Some plot points in Disney's sequels, in fact, were supposedly based on Lucas' own story notes.

But by the early 1990s, Lucas finally seemed reasonably sure that the Star Wars prequels (which were in pre-production at the time) would be the last Star Wars films, ending the series at six movies. Some fans didn't take that news well—at all.

On one hand: the original Star Wars trilogy does tell a more-or-less complete story with a beginning, middle, and end. On the other hand: it also sets up some rather intriguing questions that easily could have been the basis for a whole new saga.

Did another Emperor rise to power after Palpatine died? Did the Rebels win the war? Did Luke become a Jedi Master? Did he ever train an apprentice of his own? And if the Rebels did win the war, how did our heroes handle the responsibilities of running the galaxy? And did the Jedi ever make their glorious return?

Understandably, some fans were bummed that those questions (and dozens more) might never be answered, and they were really bummed that they might never meet the next generation of Jedi.

With all that in mind, you can imagine why it was a really big deal when fans suddenly learned that there would be a new chapter in the saga of Star Wars after all.

No, I'm not talking about when Disney announced the release of The Force Awakens in 2015. This is a different chapter in the story of the Star Wars franchise—and it begins well over two decades before Finn, Rey, Poe Dameron, Rose Tico and the rest of the gang ever saw the light of day.

See: by the late 1980s, the Star Wars franchise was facing an uncertain future. Once the Original Trilogy wrapped up in 1983, and nobody knew exactly when a new trilogy might make its way to theatres, it seemed entirely possible that Star Wars was finished for good. Sure, Lucasfilm managed to tide young fans over with a pair of made-for-TV films in 1984 and 1985 (both of which were inexplicably all about Ewoks), and a couple of Saturday morning cartoons (one of which was... also all about Ewoks) that both ended in 1986. Even Marvel Comics' popular Star Wars comic book series was cancelled in 1987 after running for a full decade. After that, Star Wars basically went into hibernation. There's a reason why the final years of the '80s are sometimes jokingly called "The Dark Times" by fans.

And then, in the dim twilight of the 20th century, something happened.

"Never tell me the odds!"

The year was 1991. The Soviet Union had just collapsed, Boris Yeltsin had just become the first President of Russia, Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress were negotiating an end to the Apartheid in South Africa, CERN scientists had just unveiled "The World Wide Web", Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls had just won their first NBA Championship, The Simpsons was on its second season, Nirvana had just achieved mainstream superstardom with Nevermind, Will Smith was still the star of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, the Golden Age of Hip-Hop was in full swing... and there hadn't been a new Star Wars movie in theatres for nearly a decade.

And then the news broke: Lucasfilm had just reached a deal with venerable science-fiction publisher Bantam Spectra, allowing them to publish an officially licensed Star Wars novel written by Hugo-nominated author Timothy Zahn, widely considered to be a rising star in the world of sci-fi literature.

On its face, the simple existence of a Star Wars novel wasn't that big a deal. After all: Lucasfilm had been allowing the publication of tie-in novels since the 1970s, when they hired prolific sci-fi writer Alan Dean Foster to write the novelization of the original film, and later tapped him to write the original Star Wars novel Splinter of the Mind's Eye (which was based on a proposal for a low-budget Star Wars television film that never got made). There were also a handful of pulpy sci-fi adventure novels in the '80s following the adventures of Han Solo and Lando Calrissian before the timeframe of the movies. So what was so special about this book?

Simple: unlike every other Star Wars novel published up to this point, this one was going to take place after the epic conclusion of Return of the Jedi. In fact, it was going to skip forward a full five years after the deaths of Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine—because it was going to be all about the beginning of a whole new era in the history of the Star Wars galaxy following the Rebels' pivotal victory at the Battle of Endor. Instead of telling the story of a plucky band of outmatched rebels striking a desperate blow against the forces of tyranny, this story would portray Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Leia Organa as the idealistic leaders of a reborn Republic locked in an epic power struggle with a resurgent Galactic Empire.

Even better: the novel was going to be the first in a trilogy of novels. And in a time when many fans had given up hope that they ever get to see a 7th, 8th, and 9th episode on the big screen, that was exactly the kind of news that they'd hoped for. At long last, fans were going to get to see the next chapter of the Star Wars saga—and absolutely anything could happen.

Within a few weeks, Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire shot to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List as fans across America rushed to their local bookstores to grab a copy. And within the first few pages, they were introduced to the story's new antagonist. His name was "Thrawn"—and in nearly every way imaginable, he was the complete antithesis of everything that fans had come to expect from a Star Wars villain.

Instead of a sinister Sith Lord dressed in a dark hooded cloak or a fearsome suit of black armour, he was a Grand Admiral in the Imperial Fleet dressed in a crisp white naval uniform. He was also an alien (specifically: a member of a newly introduced species known as the "Chiss"), instantly identifiable by his striking bright blue skin and glowing red eyes. Instead of relying on the vaunted power of the Dark Side, he was determined to best our heroes through good old-fashioned ingenuity and cunning. Instead of brutality, he relied on his strategic genius. And instead of earning the obedience of his men through fear and intimidation, he inspired their loyalty through his unmatched charisma—which made it easier for some fans to root for the Empire without feeling too guilty. To this day, Grand Admiral Thrawn remains one of the most popular characters ever to come out of a Star Wars work, and his fans love him just as much today as they did in 1991.

But with every new chapter, the story introduced more twists and turns, taking every opportunity to flesh out the world that fans had come to love. Readers got to see Chewbacca's home planet of Kashyyyk for the first time (since everybody knows that the Star Wars Holiday Special never happened), they got to meet the slippery information trafficker Talon Karrde, they got to see the galactic capital of Coruscant for the first time (the name "Coruscant" originated in the book, in fact), they got to see a clone for the first time in an official Star Wars work, and they even got to meet Emperor Palpatine's alluring Force-sensitive personal assassin Mara Jade—who was teased early on as a potential love interest for Luke.

(Yes, Luke finally got a love interest who didn't turn out to be his sister. It was pretty exciting at the time.)

All of those thoroughly intriguing ideas (and many more) kept fans hooked all the way through Heir to the Empire and its two sequels Dark Force Rising (released in 1992) and The Last Command (released in 1993). Those three books, retroactively titled "The Thrawn Trilogy", helped push the Star Wars franchise back into the cultural spotlight for the first time since the halcyon days of the Original Trilogy, and they showed that demand for a new series of adventures was just as strong as ever.

But were they any good?

Honestly, most fans will tell you that the answer is a pretty resounding "Yes". The Thrawn Trilogy managed the difficult task of feeling like an authentic entry in the Star Wars saga while fearlessly exploring the aftermath of the movies. It had memorable new characters and thrilling action sequences, it explored poignant themes, and it combined a genuine reverence for the films with an earnest desire to build on them.

The Thrawn Trilogy wasn't a perfect story—but in the areas where it delivered, it delivered big. And even though George Lucas wasn't personally involved in writing its story, he took its success as a sign that audiences were eager for more Star Wars movies. According to some accounts, it was the success of the Thrawn Trilogy that convinced Lucas to fully commit to making the Star Wars prequels. So if not for those three novels, Star Wars might never have returned to theatres.

But as fans soon discovered: the Thrawn Trilogy was just the beginning.

"This is where the fun begins!"

Around the time that Heir to the Empire came out, Lucasfilm also reached a deal with comic book publisher Dark Horse Comics, allowing them to publish officially licensed Star Wars comic books. Thanks to that deal, Dark Horse's officially licensed Star Wars miniseries Dark Empire also hit shelves in 1991, becoming the first new Star Wars comic book since the cancellation of Marvel Comics' Star Wars series in 1987. Telling the story of Han, Luke, and Leia battling a resurgent Galactic Empire commanded by a resurrected Emperor Palpatine, it also jumped headfirst into exploring the aftermath of the movies, officially taking place one year after the Thrawn Trilogy.

Meanwhile: Bantam Spectra, eager to build on the success of the Thrawn Trilogy, soon contracted a murderer's row of prolific sci-fi novelists to churn out even more novels exploring the aftermath of Return of the Jedi.

And then, well... Then the dam broke.

Between 1991 and 1999, Bantam Spectra published nearly three dozen Star Wars novels. And that's just the novels aimed at adults; if you count the ones aimed at teenagers and young readers (and there were a lot of them), the full tally is closer to five dozen. And if you also count the numerous comic books published by Dark Horse during the same period, it's even more. The sheer number of Star Wars works to come out of that decade is honestly kind of awe-inspiring, and even the most ardent fans often have trouble keeping them all straight.

There was The Courtship of Princess Leia, which told the full story of how Han and Leia got married. There was Crimson Empire, the story of a former Imperial Guardsman on a mission of revenge against his treacherous former comrade. There was the Jedi Academy trilogy, which told the story of Luke training his first Jedi apprentices. There was The Corellian Trilogy, where we finally got properly introduced to Han's home planet. There was the X-Wing series, where we got to follow the continuing adventures of the brave pilots of Rogue Squadron. There was the Black Fleet Crisis trilogy, where we got to meet Chewbacca's family for the first time (since everybody knows that the Star Wars Holiday Special never happened). There was Shadows of the Empire, where we learned the full story of what happened between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. There was the Young Jedi Knights series, where we got to follow the adventures of Han and Leia's children as they studied the ways of the Force under their uncle Luke.

... There were a lot of freakin' books, is what I'm saying.

So were they any good?

Well... That question's a little harder to answer. Most fans agree that the Thrawn Trilogy started the Expanded Universe off with a bang, but the general consensus is that the subsequent novels and comic books varied wildly in quality. Some were good, some were decent, some were tolerable, and some are widely agreed to be just plain God-awful. To reiterate: Bantam Spectra and Dark Horse published nearly five dozen of the damn things in the 1990s alone, and they were written by a rotating stable of more than a dozen different authors. It shouldn't be too surprising that not all of them were equally great.

But regardless of how good they might have been, they succeeded in bringing about a massive resurgence of interest in Star Wars, which paved the way for the saga's return to the big screen 16 years after Return of the Jedi. The original film may have been a product of the late '70s, and "Star Wars mania" arguably reached its peak in the early '80s, but the franchise's renaissance in the '90s was nothing to sneeze at.

Little by little, the novels exploring the aftermath of Return of the Jedi had blossomed into a vast and epic saga in their own right, with their own expansive cast of characters and their own vast array of original concepts. Fans came to call that saga "The Star Wars Expanded Universe"—or "The EU" for short. By the end of the '90s, the EU had gotten so big that its timeline officially covered more than 15 years worth of stories set after the original Star Wars trilogy. To put it in perspective: the original Star Wars trilogy itself (as epic as it might be) only takes place over the course of about four years. So in effect, the Expanded Universe had grown even bigger than the film series that it was based on.

You probably know what happened after that:

The Phantom Menace hit theaters in 1999, officially kicking off the much-anticipated Prequel Trilogy. It was followed by Attack of the Clones in 2002 and Revenge of the Sith in 2005.

And yet, even as the new movies were hogging most of the attention, the novels just kept coming.

In 1999, the same year that The Phantom Menace made its way to the multiplex, famed sci-fi publisher Del Rey Books (who'd published the first Star Wars novels in the '80s) reclaimed the license from Bantam Spectra. With the publishing rights to Star Wars in hand, the company kicked off the biggest and most ambitious project that the Star Wars Expanded Universe had ever seen: a massive 19-book epic called The New Jedi Order, which told the story of a full-on invasion of the Star Wars galaxy by a hostile race of aliens from another galaxy beyond the Outer Rim. It continued the ever-evolving story of the Expanded Universe, steadily moving its timeline further into the future.

The New Jedi Order was a huge story that saw the deaths of numerous longtime characters and the permanent transformations of many more, and it took the Expanded Universe into progressively bolder and stranger territory as it continued to diverge from the movies. But as imaginative and ambitious as it may have been, it was also one of the most divisive series in the history of the Expanded Universe up to that point, with many instalments getting a tepid reception at best. The series reached its conclusion in 2003, just two years before the Prequel Trilogy concluded in 2005 with Revenge of the Sith. And yet, just as the entertainment press was reporting on the "end" of Star Wars, it soon became clear that the continuing story of the Expanded Universe was still far from over.

Yep: the novels just kept coming.

By 2006, when Del Rey unveiled a new nine-book series called Legacy of the Force, the timeframe of the Expanded Universe had reached a point more than three decades after the events of the movies. By this point, the core trio were well into middle age, Han and Leia's children were nearly twice as old as Luke was in the original Star Wars, and the war between the Rebel Alliance and the Galactic Empire was a distant memory. Out in the real world, the Expanded Universe had been running more-or-less continuously for 15 years, but book sales and critical reception were starting to falter noticeably.

And still, the novels kept coming.

Legacy of the Force, which ended in 2008, proved to be (arguably) the single most divisive series in the history of the Expanded Universe, largely because it took one of the main characters in a bold new direction that proved to be highly controversial among long-time fans. Del Rey's follow-up, the nine-book series Fate of the Jedi, was somewhat better received—but it proved to be rather divisive for its own reasons, and many fans didn't like how the writers handled certain aspects of the lore. Fate of the Jedi, which concluded in 2012, proved to be the very last multi-part series in the Expanded Universe.

And... then everything fell apart.

"I've got a bad feeling about this..."

So what happened to the Expanded Universe?

In short: Disney happened.

In 2012, the year that Del Rey's Fate of the Jedi concluded at nine instalments, George Lucas announced his retirement from moviemaking, planning to step down as President of Lucasfilm after more than 40 years. Before stepping down, he reached a deal with Disney CEO Bob Iger and agreed to sell Lucasfilm to Disney, along with the rights to the Star Wars franchise. He agreed to that deal with the full knowledge that Disney would commence development on a 7th, 8th, and 9th episode of Star Wars as soon as they had the rights to the franchise, and he gave his blessing to the new trilogy with the understanding that he wouldn't be a part of making it. Lucas' longtime colleague and confidante Kathleen Kennedy took over as President of Lucasfilm, now a fully owned subsidiary of the Walt Disney Corporation.

It took a couple of years before fans learned anything concrete about the plot details of the hotly anticipated Episode VII (eventually titled The Force Awakens), which would take place roughly 30 years after Return of the Jedi and feature a full reunion of the original cast. But Disney was clear about one thing from the beginning: their new trilogy would tell a wholly original story—and the new films wouldn't be acknowledging any stories from the old Expanded Universe as canon. Instead, the sequels would be presenting a whole new interpretation of what happened after Return of the Jedi, effectively starting with a blank slate.

As far as the new creative team was concerned: Grand Admiral Thrawn and Mara Jade never existed, the Yuuzhan Vong invasion never happened, and Jacen and Jaina Solo and Ben Skywalker were never born. And Kyp Durron, Corran Horn, Kyle Katarn, Prince Xizor, Talon Karrde, Tycho Celchu, Jagged Fel, Tenel Ka Djo, Allana Solo, Mirta Gev, Natasi Daala (and dozens more) were just figments of the fans' imaginations.

After more than two decades, the Star Wars Expanded Universe had officially come to an end. The 2013 novel Star Wars: Crucible—which was announced as something of a "swan song" to the series—proved to be the very last Expanded Universe work, bringing its story to a close. All subsequent Star Wars novels and comic books would take place in a whole new universe with a whole new continuity.

So... what happened to the old ones?

Simple! They didn't vanish from existence—but in all subsequent printings, they would be released under the new imprint Star Wars: Legends, which served as a reminder to fans that they were no longer canon.

As soon as that announcement went out, a certain contingent of the Star Wars fandom went absolutely berserk.

Keep in mind: not only had the old Star Wars Expanded Universe been around for twenty-two years (which was even longer than many fans in 2013 had been alive), it covered four decades worth of stories. Not all of those stories may have been equally great, but some fans had devoted a lot of time and effort to following them through all of their ups and downs. And to some of those fans, being told that many of their favourite stories never happened was a massive slap in the face.

But as Bart Simpson once reminded the Comic Book Guy: "None of these things ever really happened..."

"I've felt a great disturbance in the Force. As if millions of voices cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced..."

Considering the Star Wars Expanded Universe was around for twenty-two years, it's pretty understandable that some fans grew pretty attached to it over time. But if you look at the big picture, it's also pretty easy to understand why Disney retired it.

It's important to remember: part of the reason why the Expanded Universe grew into such a big and ambitious saga was that most people had every reason to believe that there would never be any Star Wars sequels on the big screen. Because of that, the writers at Bantam Spectra, Del Rey, and Dark Horse effectively had a blank check to go nuts (within reason, of course...) telling the story of Han, Luke, and Leia's continuing adventures without ever having to worry about their stories conflicting with the stories of the movies. Since, y'know... everybody was absolutely certain that there wouldn't be any more movies. (Until there were.)

For his part, George Lucas always made it pretty clear that he didn't consider the Expanded Universe part of his artistic vision. As far as he was concerned, Star Wars ended when the final credits of Return of the Jedi rolled, and the numerous questions about what happened afterwards were destined to remain unanswered forever. The novels and comic books of the Expanded Universe effectively just presented fans with one hypothetical answer about what might have happened next.

So when the Sequel Trilogy was greenlit, the creative staff at Disney were left in sort of an odd bind. Sure, some fans were inevitably pissed when they announced that the EU was no longer canon. But if they'd (theoretically) done the opposite and kept it canon, it would have made it incredibly difficult to make a trilogy of sequels for a general audience.

There's really no getting around it: the old Expanded Universe might have had plenty of fans—but compared to the full-blown cultural phenomenon that was the original Star Wars trilogy, its following was... Well, all things considered, it was pretty niche. And the number of people who successfully managed to keep track of all forty years worth of continuity in the EU is pretty paltry compared to the legions of people who know the story of the original Star Wars trilogy by heart. If Disney had somehow tried to make a trilogy of Star Wars sequels that actually fit into the continuity of the Expanded Universe (which was designed for a completely different artistic medium than the movies), it would have been pretty alienating for the vast majority of people who hadn't spent 22 years keeping track of it.

Seriously, though: can you imagine trying to recap 22 years worth of sci-fi novels in an opening crawl? Exactly.

Disney tried to have it both ways by at least keeping the old Expanded Universe novels in circulation and declaring them an alternate continuity, but a particularly vicious sub-set of the Star Wars fandom continued to loudly insist that Disney had "betrayed" the proud legacy of the Expanded Universe by erasing it from canon, and that refusing to acknowledge the Expanded Universe was the ultimate act of disrespect to the fans.

Because if they really respected the fans, then they "obviously" should have just spent millions of dollars on a trilogy of movies based on a loosely connected series of moderately successful sci-fi novels of wildly varying quality that came out during the Clinton administration, right?

... Right?

What's the Big Deal?

By now, hopefully you've gotten a decent idea of why it sent tremors through the Star Wars fandom when the old EU was officially retired in 2013. For the most part, the arguments that resulted from that development have mostly just amounted to fans yelling at each other on message boards and posting the occasional angry YouTube video. But you could also make a pretty good case that those arguments (as petty as they may be) actually open up some intriguing questions about the enduring legacy of Star Wars and its place in American popular culture.

Even if they're not a fan, most people probably know that the release of the original Star Wars in 1977 was a defining moment in the development of the "geek" subculture. And everybody knows that geeks and nerds love Star Wars. As many disagreements as people might have about Star Wars, everybody knows that it's a "geek classic".

But here's a surprisingly difficult question to answer:

What is a geek? And what is a nerd? And what actually makes a piece of media "geeky" or "nerdy"?

In theory, everybody knows the answers to those questions. But in practice, most of us just sort of know geeky and/or nerdy stuff when we see it. And like with most modern neologisms, the definitions of the terms "geek" and "nerd" have been in flux ever since they were first coined.

Case in point: a "geek" was originally a type of carnival performer, and a "nerd" was originally a fictional creature from a Dr. Seuss book.

(Yes, really. Look it up if you don't believe me.)

Probably the most consistently agreed-upon definition of "geek" is "A person with esoteric interests" ("esoteric" meaning "Not enjoyed or appreciated by the general public"). And one of the most consistently agreed-upon definitions of "nerd" is "A person with an obsessive devotion to their personal interests". So in theory, geeks and nerds are people who like stuff that most people don't appreciate, and get really obsessive about that stuff.

When people talk about "geeky" or "nerdy" hobbies, they're likely to mention stories about Star Trek fans devoting hours of effort to learning the Klingon language, or fans of The Lord of the Rings spending hours learning the Elvish dialects of Quenya and Sindarin. Part of the reason Dune and The Lord of the Rings are considered "geek classics" is that they include 100+ pages of appendices fleshing out the workings of the worlds where they take place, which is perfect for fans who don't mind spending hours diving into the nuances of the lore.

So that settles it! Star Wars is a geek classic because it's esoteric, and most people just don't appreciate it.

... Is it, though?

Lest you forget: adjusted for inflation, the original Star Wars was the second-highest-grossing American film in history at the time of its release, second only to Gone with the Wind. All three movies in the original trilogy were extraordinarily successful, and a lot of people really loved them. So from a certain perspective, they weren't that geeky.

You could also make a case that they're not really that nerdy. After all: at this point, it's pretty well-documented that even George Lucas barely knew anything about the finer points of the Star Wars universe when he first started making the movies in 1977, and he mostly made that stuff up as he went along. In the early years of Star Wars, even the most ardent fans couldn't claim to be "experts" on the lore, because, well... For the most part, there wasn't any. There were just... three very popular movies, which practically everyone in 1980s America had seen.

For better or for worse, the Expanded Universe changed that forever. Thanks to the EU, there was suddenly a hard and fast dividing line between "casual" fans and "serious" fans, and "serious" fans could justifiably claim that they knew more about Star Wars than everybody else. And even at the EU's lowest points, many of those fans took comfort in that—and some of them let it go to their heads.

The unfortunate prevalence of "gatekeeping" in geek culture has been a pretty hot topic for the better part of the last decade, and the evolution of the Star Wars fandom between 1991 and 2012 is often cited as a classic example for good reason. For a while, a vocal minority of Star Wars fans earnestly and unironically believed that the movies were just the tip of the iceberg, and you weren't a real fan unless you had the patience and devotion to keep up with the Expanded Universe too. The movies might have been universally beloved cultural touchstones, but the hardest of hardcore fans had the Expanded Universe all to themselves.

When the Expanded Universe ended in 2012, there were many reasons why some fans weren't happy about it. Some of them were just nostalgic for the Star Wars novels that they'd loved growing up, and were sad to see their favorite original characters go. Some of them truly believed that the sequels would have been better if they'd been based on the Expanded Universe novels from the '90s and the 2000s. And, well... Some of them were angry that their license to gatekeep had been revoked—and for the first time since 1991, they knew just as much about Star Wars as the "casual" fans that they loved to look down upon. Unfortunately, smug superiority is a hell of a drug.

So if you've ever wondered why it's so hard to talk about Star Wars these days without getting into an argument, hopefully that gives you a good idea.

Ghosts of Paperbacks Past

Bottom line: the Star Wars Expanded Universe was a massive undertaking that meant a lot to a lot of people. Love it or hate it, a lot of people put a lot of work into it for a very long time. It's pretty hard to believe that a series could run that long without leaving a legacy behind.

Which is probably why it did leave a legacy behind.

See: when Disney announced in 2012 that the Expanded Universe would be ending, they announced that the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars would still be acknowledged as canon alongside the movies. And in an interesting little footnote: a few storylines in The Clone Wars prominently feature a planet called Dathomir, which is home to a group of Force-sensitive "witches" known as the "Nightsisters".

As any EU fan will happily tell you: Dathomir and the Nightsisters were first introduced in the 1994 novel The Courtship of Princess Leia, which was one of the first Expanded Universe novels ever published. So even though that novel wasn't considered canon anymore, some of its more iconic and fondly remembered concepts were saved from the dustbin of continuity, just because they were included in The Clone Wars.

Similarly: the interstellar crime syndicate "Black Sun" (first introduced in the 1996 EU novel Shadows of the Empire) also showed up in a few episodes of The Clone Wars, meaning that Black Sun still existed too.

Thanks to those little details, some fans were able to cling to the faint hope that their favorite EU characters were still out there somewhere in the newly reshaped Star Wars universe, even if they hadn't been properly introduced yet. And sure enough, their prayers were soon answered.

In 2016, Disney released a promotional video for the then-upcoming third season of the animated series Star Wars: Rebels, unveiling the character who would serve as one of the main antagonists of the upcoming season. He was a Grand Admiral in the Imperial Fleet, and he dressed in a crisp white naval uniform. And as soon as they saw his striking bright blue skin and glowing red eyes, fans instantly recognized him.

It was Thrawn! Exactly 25 years after his introduction in 1991, it was confirmed that Thrawn had survived the demise of the Expanded Universe, and he was still hanging around in the new continuity after all. Even better: Disney soon announced that they had contracted Thrawn's creator Timothy Zahn—the man who effectively birthed the EU—to write a whole new trilogy of novels about the character, which would introduce him to a whole new generation of fans.

He's not the only character who's made a comeback since 2012: just two months ago (as of this writing) the comic book series Crimson Reign name-dropped the fan-favourite character Prince Xizor (the leader of Black Sun), confirming that he also still exists in the new continuity.

For various reasons, the end of the EU remains a touchy subject among Star Wars fans—but now that it's been confirmed that some of their favourite characters from the EU could (and might) still return, many disenchanted fans are crossing their fingers and hoping for the best. I don't know if that'll be enough to stop the online screaming matches, but it's something.

And if it ever turns out that Mara Jade is still around too, it'll probably break the internet.

(Personally, I'm still holding out hope for the one-armed space princess. But that's another story...)

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A selection of enriching comments from the original post:

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"TheMightyHeptagon" (the original poster) said:

Hey guys. Thank you to everyone who's taken the time to read this post! As you can probably tell: this is a big subject to cover, and it took me a while to write. Due to space limitations, I had to cut a lot of stuff out.

For the benefit of anyone who's curious about what actually happened in the 40 years' worth of stories that I discuss here: I also wrote a short(ish) condensed summary of the story of the Expanded Universe.

Please note: this is by no means an exhaustive account of everything that happened in the Expanded Universe between 1991 and 2013 (that would take hours...), but it should at least give you an idea of the highlights.

Beware spoilers ahead.

So... Beginning shortly after the end of Return of the Jedi, the story goes a little something like this:

The war between the Rebel Alliance and the Galactic Empire drags on for another 15 years, but the Rebels rebrand themselves as "The New Republic" shortly after wresting the Galactic Capital of Coruscant from Imperial control. A full-blown power struggle for control of the galaxy swiftly ensues, and the Empire falls into chaos as various ambitious power brokers vie for the vacant Imperial throne in the wake of Palpatine's death. Numerous would-be Emperors come and go, some more memorable than others. In no particular order, the big ones are:

Carnor Jax, leader of the Imperial Guard.

Ysanne Isard, director of Imperial Intelligence.

Grand Admiral Thrawn, commander of the Imperial Fleet. Notable for being of the few non-humans to rise to a position of power in the Empire, he's a member of a reclusive and xenophobic race of aliens known as the Chiss, who dwell in the Unknown Regions beyond the Outer Rim (like I said: for various reasons, he's a huge fan-favourite).

Natasi Daala, an ambitious admiral in the Imperial Fleet.

Warlord Zsinj. He's, um... a warlord named "Zsinj".

Little by little, the New Republic retakes the galaxy from the Empire. Rogue Squadron becomes a top-notch X-Wing squadron under the leadership of Luke Skywalker's old friend Wedge Antilles, and numerous brave space pilots become widely renowned heroes, with Corran Horn (who turns out to be Force-sensitive, and eventually becomes a Jedi) and Tycho Celchu (a former Imperial pilot who defects to the New Republic, becoming Wedge's wingman and best friend) being among the most notable. Things get a little complicated when Wedge's sister Syal Antilles falls in love with his greatest rival—ace Imperial TIE pilot Baron Soontir Fel—but Fel eventually joins Rogue Squadron after having a crisis of conscience and defecting to the New Republic.

The Empire briefly bounces back after Palpatine rises from the dead with the help of cloning technology and dark Force magic, and even manages to turn Luke to the Dark Side—but Leia manages to save his soul and redeem him.

On a more personal front: Leia and Han finally get married after resolving a brief love triangle involving a filthy rich space prince from a kinky matriarchal planet ruled by women (long story...), but things end happily after Prince Isolder falls in love with a sexy space witch from a different kinky matriarchal planet ruled by women (again: long story). The pair celebrate the births of their twin son and daughter Jacen and Jaina, eventually followed by their second son Anakin.

Also: Luke meets Palptatine's sexy Force-sensitive apprentice and secret personal assassin Mara Jade, who was previously assigned to kill him. Naturally, the two of them fall in love and eventually get married.

Also: Han's asshole cousin Thrackan Sal-Solo starts a rebellion on his home planet, and we learn that Corellia is technically a system of five planets artificially kept in close proximity by a mysterious long-abandoned space station built thousands of years ago by an unknown alien race. Since Centerpoint Station is capable of controlling the orbits of entire planets, it has the potential to become the galaxy's deadliest weapon if it falls into the wrong hands—but it's so old that only a handful of people know how to control it (one of whom is Anakin Solo).

Also: it turns out that Boba Fett survived falling into the Sarlacc's pit, since the fans wouldn't tolerate him staying dead.

Luke also starts his own Jedi Academy and devotes his life to training a new generation of Jedi, including the three Solo kids. There are a few bumps along the way—most notably when a troubled Jedi apprentice named Kyp Durron briefly turns to the Dark Side and uses a lost Imperial superweapon called the "Sun Crusher" to murder millions of people before coming to his senses. Kyp returns to the Light Side, but remains the New Jedi Order's resident brooding bad boy, advocating a more violent approach to protecting the galaxy from evil.

Also: Leia's would-be suitor Prince Isolder and his sexy space witch wife (remember them?) have a daughter named Tenel Ka, who turns out to be Force-sensitive and joins Luke's Jedi Academy, where she eventually falls in love with Han and Leia's son Jacen. Jacen also accidentally cuts off her arm in a tragic accident during lightsaber training, but she gets over it.

After a long string of losses, the former Empire is whittled down to a tiny fraction of its former self, and the Imperial Remnant (now led by Thrawn's old right-hand man Gilad Pellaeon) is forced to give up the ghost and sign a peace treaty with the New Republic, finally bringing the war to an end.

Naturally, the peace proves to be short-lived, and the galaxy is soon invaded by a race of horribly nightmarish alien religious extremists from beyond the galaxy called the Yuuzhan Vong, who practice ritualistic body mutilation and treat torture as a religious sacrament. They also believe that technology is an abomination (all of their spaceships and weapons are organic), and exist entirely outside the influence of the Force. The war against the Yuuzhan Vong kicks off with the death of Chewbacca (yes, really) after they use gravity manipulation to crush him to death with a moon (yes, really). Despite the best efforts of the Jedi and the New Republic, the Yuzzhan Vong unleash untold death and destruction across the galaxy, and countless people are killed—including Anakin Solo.

Finally, the New Republic collapses after Coruscant falls to the Yuuzhan Vong, forcing the fugitive leaders of the New Republic to join forces with the Imperial Remnant to drive them off and retake Coruscant. Thus, a new government called the "Galactic Alliance" rises from the ashes of the New Republic, and eventually manages to defeat the Yuuzhan Vong after the Skywalker-Solo clan finds the Yuuzhan Vong's missing home planet—which is sentient, and can travel through hyperspace (don't ask...).

Amid the doom and gloom of the Yuuzhan Vong war, Luke and Mara have a son named Ben, and we learn that Syal Antilles and her husband Soontir Fel (remember them?) have a son named Jagged (yes, that's really his name...), who's grown into a world-class starfighter pilot after years of training among the Chiss (remember them?). With a name like "Jagged Fel", it probably goes without saying that he's a sexy and mysterious bad boy. So, naturally, he and Jaina Solo eventually fall madly in love.

Things briefly quiet down after the war with the Yuuzhan Vong, with the exception of a brief war with a race of insectoid aliens called the Killiks, who turn out to be the creators of Centerpoint Station (remember Centerpoint Station?). In the intervening years, Ben Skywalker becomes a Jedi, and Jacen has a secret love affair with his childhood girlfriend Tenel Ka (remember her?), the one-armed space princess who's also a space witch. One thing leads to another, and the one-armed space princess gets pregnant with Jacen's daughter.

Years down the line, the galaxy is plunged into civil war yet again when Han's asshole cousin (remember him?) leads the five planets of the Corellian system (remember them?) in a bid to secede from the Galactic Alliance, causing a rift between the Skywalker and Solo families when Han temporarily sides with his home planet, and the Galactic Alliance government takes some rather draconian measures to quash the Corellian independence movement. Amid the chaos, Jacen—who was never really the same after the Yuuzhan Vong war—does some pretty morally questionable things in the name of ending the war and preserving peace, eventually going whole-hog and turning to the Dark Side. Along the way, he forms his own special squad of secret police to root out Corellian terrorists, he kills Mara, he unsuccessfully tries to corrupt Ben Skywalker after taking him under his wing as an apprentice, and his relationship with Tenel Ka permanently breaks down. He also accidentally kills Boba Fett's long-lost daughter Ailyn Vel during an "enhanced interrogation" session gone wrong, giving Fett ample reason to want him dead (which generally isn't great for a person's life expectancy).

In the end, Jaina is forced to save the galaxy by facing her brother (now known as "Darth Caedus") in a duel to the death with a little help from an aging Boba Fett, who has a little experience at the whole Jedi-killing thing. We also learn that Boba Fett has a wife named Sintas Vel and a granddaughter named Mirta Gev who are poised to carry on his legacy.

Things mostly go back to normal after Jacen's death, and Jacen and Tenel Ka's daughter Allana thankfully escapes unscathed. Years after that, the Jedi find themselves plunged into a war with a Lost Tribe of the Sith led by an evil entity called "Abeloth", but the good guys win once again, and Jaina and her sexy ace pilot boyfriend Jagged (remember him?) get married.

In the end, Jagged apparently starts a new Galactic Empire with Jaina by his side and declares himself Emperor, it's implied that Allana may or may not be the real Chosen One destined to bring balance to the Force, and Ben Skywalker carries on the Skywalker name as he continues to train as a Jedi. And 100-odd years after that, Luke's descendant Cade Skywalker (a disillusioned former Jedi turned bad boy smuggler) helps save the galaxy from a reborn Sith Empire led by the evil Darth Krayt, a fallen Jedi raised by Tuskens on Tatooine (don't ask...). The details about what happened in between those events are pretty vague—but the important thing is that the good guys win, and the galaxy is safe and at peace. And the Force will be with us, always.

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"ToaArcan" said:

A lot of the most bitter online fighting centred around the missteps the EU had made, with regard to the post-movie timeline. Look into any pre-2014 article about the weirdness of the Star Wars novels and comics, and you'll see a pretty interesting list of things that fans and casuals alike took issue with.

Han and Leia's son turning evil. A million superweapons that make the Death Star not remotely special. The deaths of iconic movie characters. Cloning the Emperor. Luke turning to the Dark Side.

When the EU was jumped, there were people who were looking at the silver lining. Sure, we'd lost Thrawn and Mara Jade and all that good stuff. But we'd also dumped all the really stupid shit like BDSM 40K rejects that whip people with eels, or that time Darth Vader totally had a Buzzcut McWhiteboy apprentice who could kick every other Jedi and Sith's arse one-handed, you guys. Karen Traviss would never again touch Star Wars!

Of course, the dismissal of the EU as a load of trash with one or two bright spots only made the diehards angrier, and that, at least, seemed to be justifiable. It also got pretty awkward when the dust settled on the Sequel Trilogy and we had an evil Solo spawn, an even bigger Death Star and a whole fleet of planet-killing Star Destroyers, all of the original trio dead, an Emperor clone, and a Luke who, while he didn't turn evil, definitely ended up going in a much darker direction than most fans liked.

On the whole, post-Disney buy-out Star Wars has been slow to reintroduce the elements of the EU that fans actually liked, like Thrawn and Boba Fett's survival, but sure as f*** did rehash a lot of the things people used to mock the EU for in the first place. Fortunately no eel-whips yet, but we're never truly safe. And of course, the Disney canon is rapidly becoming another self-referential bloated beast of a franchise, just like its father before it.

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"TastyBrainMeats" replied to "ToaArcan":

[Mention of Karen Traviss]

Beware, lest you summon her weird fanboys.

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"ChristmasColor" replied to "TastyBrainMeats":

I was a fan of her books. I enjoyed her pointing out the Jedi were weird for using slaves.

What makes her so controversial?

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An unknown Reddit user replied to "ChristmasColor":

I think her stuff for the Clone Wars era is mostly liked. She tends to go a little overboard with her "the Jedi were the real villains" shtick, but Lucas is the one who made them weird dogmatic virgins with no compunction whatsoever with using child slave soldiers that some mysterious benefactor just sort of left on their doorstep with no explanation, so it's hard to blame her. She tends to take more of a gritty military fiction approach to Star Wars, which can be somewhat divisive, but I really like that aspect of her work, and I think the EU could have benefitted from a little more diversity of style honestly.

The main reason she's hated is her contributions to the Legacy of the Force series, where her "Mando" fetish really got out of hand. The Mandos got thrown into the centre of the story, despite playing almost no role in the EU after Return of the Jedi up to that point, and Traviss spends half of her books talking about how awesome and better than everyone else the Mandalorians are: they can beat up Jedi without breaking a sweat, their ships are indestructible and specifically described as faster and having more firepower than X-Wings, their culture is loving and inclusive and family oriented but also everyone is trained to be a super-awesome warrior from birth, and so on. It comes across as forced, unmotivated, and disrespectful to the existing lore.

And to cap it all off, it often seems like the only way she knows how to build one of her self-insert characters up is to tear some other character down. The way she shows that Mandos are awesome at hand-to-hand combat is by having them repeatedly beat the s*** out of Jaina Solo when she's training with them, and having Jaina's inner monologue read like "Man, I wish I was a Mando. These guys are so cool and I'm just this pampered Jedi princess who's never had to work for anything in my life" (despite fighting on the front lines of a brutal war since she was like 15 years old and by this point being a 30-year-old decorated fighter pilot, fully trained Jedi, and galaxy-wide famous war hero).

I've never read her Republic Commando books (I've never been all that interested in the Prequel era), but her Legacy of the Force books are full of obnoxious Mary-Sue author inserts, mean-spirited characterizations of beloved characters, and a petty refusal to make her stories flow together with the ones written by Allston and Denning (though she's far from alone in that last sin, as the authors of Legacy of the Force did not play well together for some reason). Apparently, Traviss also had a habit for a while of getting in online flame wars with fans and calling the Jedi "nazis" and shit like that, which rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, but I never heard of any of that until years later.

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"ZeitgeistGlee" replied to "ChristmasColor":

"I enjoyed her pointing out the Jedi were weird for using slaves."

The issue is that Traviss was hilariously one-sided in her criticism, she mischaracterised, picked at or overplayed minor faults or outright wrote new ones in the Jedi Order and their characterisation to justify her (character's) positions, and then handwaved or whitewashed or lionised the toxic behaviour and culture of her Mandalorians and their history.

The "Jedi use slaves" is a good example of that: they didn't "use slaves", they were ordered to take command of the Republic's Clone Army and fight the Separatists, and better authors than Traviss specifically paralleled the experience of the Clones with Jedi (both groups being made up of children raised into service culture segregated from the rest of society).

If I remember correctly, the Revenge of the Sith novelisation specifically has Palpatine monologue that the entire Clone Wars conflict was constructed to destroy the Jedi whether they participated or not. If they fought, then the horrors of a galactic-scale war would break them down psychologically, spiritually and literally, as well as spread them out so the remainder could be killed all in one swoop by Order 66 once Palpatine had seized power; if they'd refused to fight and withdrawn to the Jedi Temple or one of their alternate academy worlds, then they'd have been painted as cowards/traitors who could be executed all in one spot at the end of the war without complaint.

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"ZeitgeistGlee" replied to the unknown Reddit user:

"I've never read her Republic Commando books (I've never been all that interested in the Prequel era), but her Legacy of the Force books are full of obnoxious Mary-Sue author inserts, mean-spirited characterizations of beloved characters [...]."

Her Clone Wars novels after the first one or two are exactly the same as her Legacy of the Force stuff. Kal Skirata was a particularly obnoxious version of her Mary-Sue Mando culture, and then there's Etain, her pet Jedi who dies defending one of the clones assaulting the Jedi Temple from Padawan trying to escape.

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"mxzf" replied to "ToaArcan":

"On the whole, post-Disney buy-out Star Wars has been slow to reintroduce the elements of the EU that fans actually liked, like Thrawn and Boba Fett's survival, but sure as f*** did rehash a lot of the things people used to mock the EU for in the first place."

This is really the crux of it. Disney got rid of all of the EU material and then pretty much only brought back the worst parts of it.

In theory, they were house-cleaning and were able to bring the better parts of the EU back into the fold. But instead, they took the worst parts of the EU and chose to bring them back while leaving the best material abandoned.

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"ToaArcan" replied to "mxzf":

There's been good stuff too. The aforementioned return of Boba, and him being re-canonised as a Mandalorian. Thrawn's still kicking, and while the Old Republic continues to limp on in Legends, they've at least started referencing Revan in canon again. Delta Squad are a thing again, Filoni got them into The Clone Wars and Scorch showed up properly in Bad Batch.

But it's taken a lot longer for those pieces to come back into play, while the movies were quick to jump on some of the worst ideas. Not all of the things they did opt to bring back were bad, but a lot of them were, and the execution leaves a lot to be desired. The Force Awakens played everything extremely safe, too safe. The Last Jedi was bold and challenging, and I enjoyed it very much, but bringing Abrams back for The Rise of Skywalker and having its script mostly written by the comments section of a MauLer video retroactively made it a whole lot worse. And then The Rise of Skywalker itself is just a trainwreck of epic proportions. I still had fun seeing it in the cinema, but I'm in no rush to watch it again.

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"UnsealedMTG" said:

This is a fun memory lane journey as a 1980s-born Star Wars fan. For that generation, Star Wars really did feel like a more niche, albeit common, interest. For our formative years, no movies had been released in theatres since either before we were, like, 3 years old or (for me) before we were born. So Star Wars was just a finished "thing" in a way that it wouldn't have been to people who were born earlier—or to people who were born a little later and had the Prequels and The Clone Wars and everything else come out while they were in the real target age bracket.

Sure, "everyone" had seen Star Wars but being into it was more akin to being really into comic books or fantasy novels than, like, the MCU or Game of Thrones when it was on (to name cultural phenomena that would have seemed practically unthinkable in the 1990s).

And of course as one of those people I have to push my glasses up and make one comment—not a correction, but just another reframing to put you back in the early 1990s:

"(specifically: a member of a newly introduced species known as the 'Chiss')"

It was actually much more mysterious than this! Thrawn's species was pointedly not named in the original. He's just blue and has glowy eyes and is an alien. What species he comes from and how he come to be highly ranked in the human supremacist Empire is left as part of his mystique at that point.

It wasn't until Zahn's much later Visions of the Future—released in 1998, towards the end of that core EU era in the 90s before The Phantom Menace in 1999—that Thrawn's species got a name.

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

Ah, thank you for the correction! I must confess: it's been a while since I've actually read the Thrawn Trilogy.

I can relate! As a Star Wars fan born in the early 1990s, I was sort of tangentially aware of the EU just as it was taking off, but it was all pretty mysterious to me since I was way too young to read most of it at the time. I have distinct memories of seeing all the Star Wars novels on the shelves of my local library and bookstore whenever I went there with my parents when I was about 4 or 5 years old and wondering why I didn't recognize half the characters on the dust jackets. That sense of befuddlement eventually inspired me to take a deep dive into the EU when I was a teenager.

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"UnsealedMTG" replied to "TheMightyHeptagon":

I think that also speaks a little bit to the "geek culture" thing about Star Wars in the 1990s, too. I mean... Now there's Wookiepedia. Anyone with any amount of interest, a smartphone, a few minutes, and the ability to get through Fandom's intrusive ads can know anything about those mysterious characters in the books. There's no barrier of effort.

In the 1990s, if you wanted to gather that knowledge about the Star Wars galaxy, you had to go out of your way and either read the books themselves or go get one of the dictionaries or encyclopedias that they published to dig out that information.

I think that makes it more understandable how people reacted to the transition, even if the transition was clearly inevitable and a lot of people on the "Pro-EU" faction were kind of toxic gatekeep-y dicks. This old EU information was something people had gathered through effort that creates a feeling of meaning. To them, saying it "doesn't count now" isn't just saying that some things that didn't happen... extra didn't happen. It's taking something that they worked to collect and invalidating it.

Now, I'm personally a person who is much more interested in the history of how the stories were told in our chronology than in the details of the actual in-universe world so the canon status/non-status is not a big deal emotionally to me.* But it's at least something that follows logically from the sort of information collector mentality that the Star Wars EU and properties like it really encouraged.

(*Which is why I'm interested in stuff like how Thrawn was originally a "unique blue alien guy" and only later did they introduce a "whole species of Thrawns", and why I get annoyed when finding the history of how the words "Sith" and "Mandalorian" got used in Star Wars is so much harder than it is to find the cobbled-together and retconned in-universe histories of the Sith and Mandalorians)

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"DocWhoFan16" said:

The Courtship of Princess Leia is absolutely ludicrous, honestly a very stupid book, and it is also genuinely one of my favourite Star Wars stories in any medium ever.

In this book, Space Fabio shows up to try and woo Princess Leia. Han gets jealous and tries to win her over by... winning a planet in a card game where she can re-house the refugees from Alderaan. Leia isn't too impressed, so Han's response is... to use the "gun of command", a blaster which essentially shoots mind control, to kidnap her and fly her off to this planet he's won: Dathomir.

Dathomir, as it happens, is deep in the territory of the Imperial warlord Zsinj, but Han doesn't let that perturb him. Then they get to Dathomir and learn that it's this matriarchal society of Force witches. Also, Zsinj has an orbiting network of satellites which, for all intents and purposes, allow him to turn off the sun. Space Fabio and Luke follow them, crash-land on Dathomir and get picked up by one of the Force witches, who has this weird Mills & Boon romance storyline. I'm pretty sure it's implied that Yoda might have shagged a witch when he visited years ago.

All the while, C-3PO becomes this weird matchmaker trying to set Han and Leia up. He tries to prove that Han has royal blood so he can marry a princess, only to discover that Han's supposed royal ancestor is a notorious pirate who was actually a pretender to the throne.

(The most frustrating thing about that last point is that one of the tie-in reference books from years later actually went ahead and revealed that, yes, the ancient prince of Corellia who once dominated the ancient Republic was called... Solo. To me, that sort of missed the point, but I admit I had long since grown out of Star Wars novels by then!)

Is it especially well-written? Not really. But it's creative. It's interested in what Star Wars can be, far more than what it should be (and if I have one criticism of Tim Zahn, it's that he often seemed to lean a bit more in the latter direction). See also: The Crystal Star, in which Space Hitler kidnaps Han's and Leia's children so he can feed them to a gold-plated meat monster from another dimension who has promised to increase his Force powers, and the galaxy is full of centaurs and werewolves and stuff like that.

I think after 1999, when the licence leaves Bantam Spectra and goes to Del Rey and Lucasfilm starts exerting a lot more top-down control (and this is across the board in all media, not just with novels), the Expanded Universe lost a lot of that. I think it became a lot more homogenous, at least aesthetically.

Consider something like the Knights of the Old Republic video games. Those are fairly good games. But they look like the Prequel movies! They're set four thousand years ago, but they look like the Prequels. Compare that with comics like Tales of the Jedi or (my personal favourite) Jedi vs Sith, which look properly ancient while still looking like Star Wars.

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"Lastjedibestjedi" replied to "DocWhoFan16":

You leaving out the Rancor riding in the middle of all this other madness is a war crime.

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"DocWhoFan16" replied to "Lastjedibestjedi":

Yes, and I also forgot that the creatures in The Crystal Star are actually called "wyrwulfs" rather than "werewolves", sorry.

How about the half of Children of the Jedi where Luke falls in love with the computer on a lost Imperial super-weapon which was designed to kidnap Jedi children, except it's not really a computer, it's really the disembodied spirit of an Old Republic Jedi which is trapped in the computer, and at the end of the book, she sort of reincarnates in the body of one of Luke's hot young Jedi students.

Barbara Hambly was specifically instructed that, in that novel, she had to introduce the perfect love interest for Luke Skywalker. Then a couple of books later, nobody likes Callista, and Hambly is back to write Planet of Twilight (the one where Leia has a lightsabre fight with a Hutt) and she's told that this time her job is to get rid of the perfect love interest for Luke Skywalker, which she does in a couple of pages right at the end of the book.

How about the time the Young Jedi Knights met a group called "the Diversity Alliance" whose ostensible ideology was anti-racism and opposition to human supremacism in the New Republic and who are led by a former Twi'lek slave (and because this is the Star Wars EU, this Twi'lek was the sister of Oola from Return of the Jedi BECAUSE OF COURSE SHE WAS), but their real plan is to commit genocide against humans using stolen Imperial bio-weapons. Because the anti-racists are the real racists (IT MAKES U THINK).

Seriously, I appreciate that Kevin J. Anderson in 1998 or whenever it was had benign intentions to do "racism is bad" stories in the YA series, but... Look, it's a faction of villains called "the Diversity Alliance" whose opposition to racism is actually a cover to kill all white people humans, and it's up to Han and Leia's kids to stop them. That sounds like some kind of parody of nerds on the Internet in 2022, doesn't it?

Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy the pre-1999 novels a lot (don't really like the ones on the Del Rey era, but that's neither here nor there; the comics are still good after that point, though), but it's very much a "warts and all" thing.

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"bhamv" said:

"(Personally, I'm still holding out hope for the one-armed space princess. But that's another story...)"

Ah. Ah ha. I am glad that someone else shares my fondness for Tenel Ka.

I was a huge fan of the EU. I didn't read every book, but I read a lot of them, and the sheer depth of the lore was amazing. It was like swimming in a vast ocean that always threw up something new and fascinating for you to see.

In particular, I thought Xizor was a great antagonist, and I'm glad to see that he might reappear in the new canon some day.

EDIT: Also, one of the plot threads suggested in Legends that has unfortunately been abandoned is that the Emperor foresaw the invasion of the Yuuzhan Vong, which is why he took over the galaxy and had the Death Star built. The galaxy had to be united to fight such a foe, so it needed a weapon capable of taking out the Vong's moon-sized world-ships. Stuff like this adds so much depth to the motivations of existing characters, and I much prefer it to the simple "this space station will help us rule by fear" motivation in the movies.

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"Coronarchivista" replied to "bhamv":

Or in Heir to the Empire, where Thrawn speculates that the reason the Imperials lost the Battle of Endor despite far outnumbering the Rebels is that Palpatine was using "battle meditation" to coordinate the Imperial fleet, and when Vader threw him down the shaft, the Imperial fleet was thrown into chaos and routed.

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"FuttleScich" replied to "bhamv":

I always thought the "Palpatine just wanted to help" thing was the worst part of the old EU, and I’m glad it’s dead.

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"DocWhoFan16" replied to "FuttleScich":

It did get a bit of "Hitler just wanted to make Europe strong enough to fight the Soviet Union" some of the time.

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[anitabyars]

🌸 𝐁𝐨𝐨𝐤 𝐀𝐧𝐧𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 + 𝐂𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐑𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐚𝐥! 🌸

Monica Murphy is thrilled to announce her new adult romance 𝐋𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐥𝐲 𝐅𝐨𝐫 𝐘𝐨𝐮 𝐎𝐧𝐥𝐲 is coming February 6th, 2024 with Blackstone Publishing! Plus, this book features a new offshoot of the 𝐋𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐟𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐲!

Though this book isn't part of the Lancaster Prep series, it does feature the same old money opulent vibe you've come to expect from the Lancaster family.

This book is a wide release (not in KU) and will be available at all retailers! Preorder links here >> https://geni.us/P940H

PS - If you preorder this book NOW on the Barnes & Noble website and you can save 25%! Just use code: PREORDER25 at checkout! Must be a B&N Rewards or Premium member but joining the rewards program is free! Sale ends September 8th!

𝐁𝐥𝐮𝐫𝐛:

Young heiress Scarlett Lancaster is delighted when her father tells her he hired a famous pop star and former boy band member to play at her eighteenth birthday. But delight becomes utter disappointment when it turns out he wasn’t talking about Harry Styles. No, Scarlett’s dad hired Tate Ramsey, former lead singer of the band Five Car Pileup, who hasn’t been popular for years.

Tate, after years of alcohol- and drug-fueled partying, is sober and ready for a comeback. He is in top form at Scarlett’s party and blows the audience away with his performance—though Scarlett herself still isn’t impressed. But when they talk after he leaves the stage, their encounter ends in a kiss that surprises them both—and immediately goes viral.

The viral kiss and the video of Tate singing at the party do wonders for both of their burgeoning careers. So after some careful negotiation, the two of them agree to start a fake relationship. But before long they discover their feelings might not be fake after all …

[warrioreowynofrohan]

Today in Tolkien - February 26th

The Breaking of the Fellowship. It has an ominous beginning:

The day came with fire and smoke. Low in the East there were black bars of cloud like the fumes of a great burning. The rising sun lit them from beneath with flames of murky red.

In the morning, Aragorn calls the Fellowship together and asks Frodo for his choice of which direction to take, to Mordor or to Gondor. Frodo asks for an hour’s peace and solitude to decide, but comes no closer to a decision. Sam is the one member of the Fellowship to understand him - he says the same thing to the Fellowship as Frodo says to Boromir. Frodo knows he has to go to Morodor, but is afraid to do it.

But by the time Sam says that, Boromir has already left the rest of the Fellowship found Frodo. When Boromir attempts to take the Ring, Frodo put it on and flees to the summit of Amon Hen and, wearing the Ring, sits in the Seat of Seeing.

Frodo sees signs of war everywhere he looks:

The Misty Mountains were crawling like anthills: orcs were issuing out of a thousand holes. Under the boughs of Mirkwood there was deadly strife of Elves and Men and fell beasts. The land of the Beornings was aflame; a cloud was over Moria; smoke rose on the borders of Lórien. Horsemen were galloping on the grass of Rohan; wolves poured from Isengard. [The First Battle of the Fords of Isen was the previous day.] From the havens of Harad ships of war put out to sea; and out of the East Men were moving endlessly: swordsmen, spearmen, bowmen upon horses, chariots of chieftains and laden wains.

All that we see, in the books and even in the Appendices, is only a part of the full scope of the War of the Ring.

And then Frodo looks at Barad-dûr and suddenly senses the Eye of Sauron becoming aware of him, and looking for him, first to Amon Lhaw on the river’s other bank, then to the pinnacle of Tol Brandir in the middle of the river, tracking towards Amon Hen.

He threw himself from the seat, crouching, covering his head with his grey hood. He heard himself crying out: Never, never! Or was it: Verily I come, I come to you? He could not tell. Then as a flash from some other point of power there came to his mind another thought: Take it off! Take it off! Fool, take it off! Take off the Ring!

The two powers strove in him. For a moment, perfectly balanced between their piercing points, he writhed, tormented. Suddenly he was aware of himself again. Frodo, neither the Voice nor the Eye: free to choose and with one remaining instant to do so. He took the Ring off his finger...A black shadow seemed to pass like an arm above him; it missed Amon Hen and groped out west, and faded.

Two key points. First, the Voice is Gandalf; as he later tells Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli: Very nearly [the Ring] was revealed to the Enemy, but it escaped. I had some part in that: for I sat in a high place, and I strove with the Dark Tower; and the Shadow passed. Then I was weary, very weary; and I wandered long in dark thought. Gandalf briefly overstepped here; he is not supposed to compel, as he was doing in the moment Frodo fels himself poised between Voice and Eye, but to guide and give people the freedom to make their own choices, even in truly dire situations like this one. And that is what he ultimately does: he counters Sauron for an instant to give Frodo a moment to choose, and Frodo chooses rightly.

Second, this is the first moment since Rivendell that Sauron has had clear knowledge of the Ring’s location; he doesn’t know exactly where it is, but he has a good idea. His later decisions are extrapolations from this. He knows a halfling has the Ring; he knows that Saruman captured two halflings and sought to bring them with all speed to Isengard, and that shortly after a halfling looked in the palantir of Isengard. He thinks that Saruman obtained the Ring. But Saruman was defeated, and Aragorn and Gandalf were there; either of them might now have it. Aragorn looks in the palantir, outright threatens him, and then commands an army of the dead - Sauron’s particular power of necromancy. From that time on, I expect he’s quite certain Aragorn has the Ring, right up until the Battle at the Black Gate.

Saruman also strongly suspects the Ring was here at Amon Hen: he was likely the one sending the crows that were watching the Fellowship in Eregion, and has been spying on them with birds on the trip down Anduin. He definitely thinks Merry and Pippin had the Ring at that point; after Éomer’s destruction of the orcs, he fears the Rohirrim have obtained it and so throws all his forces at Rohan. During the parley, at the time he throws Gandalf’s offer of clemency and release back in his face, Saruman may even believe Gandalf has the Ring. Certainly, believing that Gandalf controls and commands the Ents is more in line with Saruman’s attitudes than recognizing them as independent beings with their own priorities.

In short, the plots and plans of all the major figures in the War or the Ring stem from here; and fortunately - because Frodo has loyal friends who insisted on coming along, and thus the Fellowship has excess hobbits - Sauron and Saruman are both mistaken.

So here the Fellowship breaks:

Frodo and Sam row across the lake to the east shore and set off across the Emyn Muil in the late morning. They miss the orc attack entirely and do not know that Merry and Pippin are captured. Gandalf knows that Frodo and Sam set out towards Mordor, but no more than that.

Aragorn sits on the Seat of Seeing but can see nothing of note except “far away...a great bird like an eagle high in the air, descending slowly in wide circles toward the earth.” Gwaihir, certainly - perhaps carrying Gandalf down from the “high place” where he countered Sauron?

Boromir is killed by the orcs, and Merry and Pippin are captured (Merry cuts the arms and hands off several orcs). Pippin awakes in the orc-camp in the evening and overhears the orcs arguing about him and Merry. The orcs fight, killing some of each other, and Pippin is able to cut the bonds on his hands and replace them with loose loops of rope to disguise them. The orcs carry the hobbits like sacks until early night, and by then have reached the far side of the Emyn Muil on the borders of Rohan. The orc scouts report being detected by a horseman. [The horseman brings news of the orc-band to Éomer.] The hobbits are made to run all night, with whips behind them, but Pippin is able to run off to the side and leave footprints and the elven-broach from his cloak to be detected by Aragorn. (He sees every now and again “a vision of the keen face of Strider bending over a dark trail and running, running behind.” The source of this vision is never explained, so far as I can tell.)

Yes, that’s right, Pippin manages both to free his hands and leave signs for trackers on the same day that he is first captured by orcs. What a good hobbit!

Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli tend to the body of Boromir, mourn him, and set off in pursuit of Merry and Pippin to rescue them from the orcs. They reach the Emyn Muil by dusk and continue climbing through them for most of the night.

Additionally, in the aftermath of the First Battle of the Fords of Isen (which occurred the previous day and night), various Rohirrhim who were scattered in the Isengard attack return to the fords. News of the death of Théodred son of Théoden reaches Erkenbrand at Helm’s Deep; he assumes command of the Westfold and send riders towards Edoras with the news of the battle and an urgent request for reinforcements.

[soundsof71]

So, considering you are a passionate fan of music released in 1971, I feel justifiably obligated to ask you what you think of Buffy Sainte-Marie's 'She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina' album. 😂 (Also, it would make me beyond happy if you could post more about Buffy, my friend! Thank you! ❣)

Buffy Sainte-Marie + Crazy Horse - what’s not to love? LOL I confess that it was the Crazy Horse connection that caught my attention first. I had a general idea who Buffy was, had seen her on TV a few times, but I was a big Crazy Horse fan. News that they were her backing band for this album was easily enough for me to scoop it up.

They weren’t doing anything much with Neil Young in 1971 (other than this album, on which Neil also appeared!), but they had released a tasty solo album in February 71, produced by Jack Nitzsche (who also produced this, and would later marry Buffy), and featuring Ry Cooder (also featured here, although did not marry Buffy). 

(btw, the first place that Buffy, Ry, and Jack worked together was on the Nic Roeg film Performance, starring Mick Jagger. People obviously remember Mick in that, but musically, Buffy was the best part!) 

She Used To Wanna... also features Jesse Ed Davis, a Native American guitarist and singer who was a frequent “usual suspect” at these sort of “sure, invite everyone!” jam albums of the era, and played a prominent role at 1971′s biggest concert (at least in the US), The Concert for Bangladesh on August 1.

(I know you know  RUMBLE: The Indians Who Rocked The World, the documentary about indigenous music’s influence on rock and roll, which has chapters on both Buffy and Jesse Ed. I just watched it again recently, and love it! A reminder of Buffy’s pivotal role in classic rock history. Not mentioned in the film: she relentlessly championed the work of her fellow Canadians Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen, helping them get their first record deals.)

I haven’t listened to She Used To Wanna Be A Ballerina for a while, so I definitely need to do that, along with posting more pictures of Buffy.  (I can’t believe I’ve only posted two!) 

But I’ll tell you what still stands out to me about that record years later. “Smack Water Jack” is an underrated track from Carole King’s Tapestry that got a ton of airplay at the time. Quincy Jones did an instrumental cover as the title track for his terrific 1971 album, too, but it has somehow faded to obscurity since then. Buffy takes a playful trifle, and turns it into a powerful fable of men of color who explode into violence in response to the violence visited upon them, and self-satisfaction of whites in authority who answer their demands for better living conditions by killing them on the spot. 

No need for a trial when you can murder them in the streets, right? “You can't talk to a man when he don't wanna understand / And he don't wanna understand” hits different when Buffy sings it, and in 2020 for that matter. 

It’s also just a terrific performance whose combination of soul and rock and roll and driving piano in a sort of Old West-sounding context would have made this sound right at home on a record like Elton John’s Tumbleweed Connection  or something by The Band. I’m limited to five video embeds per post so I can’t embed it here, so I'm linking instead: anyone who hasn’t heard this definitely needs to.

Her cover of Neil’s CSNY track “Helpless” has things I like even better than Neil’s original, including Merry Clayton standing in for CSN. Buffy’s version is more muscular (thanks again to Crazy Horse), and taps even more deeply into the isolation of the song that the star power of CSNY somewhat obscured. 

Buffy’s version also made a brief but memorable appearance in the 2018 film Hotel Artemis, starring Jodie Foster. A weird little movie that I loved maybe more than it deserved LOL but I recommend nonetheless:

I know that this album gets attention because of the unusual number of covers, including one by Leonard Cohen, and a cover of a cover that Leonard had made famous on top of that, called "Song of the French Partisan” (hers is the far superior version imo, a song of French resistance to Nazi occupation from the perspective of a woman hiding a resister), but there are a couple of standout originals too. 

I love the title of this record, and the title track is a delightful little stomper that playfully cautions against equating the intentions of grown women with the childhood fantasies they’ve grown out of. More Merry Clayton goodness here on backing vocals too. 

“Soldier Blue” is a powerful song first written for the 1970 film of the same name, billed at the time as “The most savage film in history” -- and maybe it was. It used the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre as a metaphor for Vietnam, and it's still shockingly brutal. It was the third-highest grossing movie in the UK in 1971, though, and the single became a top-10 hit for Buffy there. 

It didn’t do as well here, either the song or the movie. Perhaps not shockingly in retrospect, Soldier Blue was pulled from American theaters after a few days, the Vietnam metaphor not at all lost on the Nixon administration. 

As horrifying as it was, this is about when I was reading Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee (first published in 1970), and Soldier Blue resonated with me in a whole lot of ways. Here’s the song in the opening credits of the movie.

I was also really struck by “Moratorium”, which is the story of “Universal Soldier” (from her 1963 debut, but a bigger hit for Donovan in 1965), coming from the opposite direction. In the earlier song, she blamed war on the soldiers who think that fighting is honorable, but here, she has empathizes with the young men, boys really in many cases, who’ve been lied to by their countries, their parents, and even their friends. They’re not vainglorious. They’ve been duped by people they trusted. 

(I don't think she takes enough into account how many men sign up to fight because they want to embrace and celebrate their worst, most violent impulses, which was of course an undercurrent of “Universal Soldier”, but I appreciate her empathy here. More than one thing is true at a time.)

Buffy goes even farther, though, calling on soldiers to support and validate demands for peace as explicitly supporting them, summed up in the unforgettable cry, "Fuck the war and bring our brothers home!" 

1971 was the peak of antiwar demonstrations in the US, with the biggest crowds ever seen in this country until the 2017 Women’s March. The May 1971 demonstrations pretty much shut down Washington, culminating with Vietnam Veterans Against The War throwing back their medals on the steps of the US Capitol, incredibly powerful stuff to see on TV in my formative years, and Buffy was right there in it. Anti-war songs were a cottage industry for sure, but nobody was writing with the nuance and empathy that Buffy was.

Here’s a 1972 performance of “Moratorium”, Buffy and a piano, and more emotionally bare than that:

There’s obviously lots more to say about Buffy, far outside the realm of protest music that was actually just a small part of her musical palette -- her pioneering experiments with electronic music, her educational philanthropy starting in her 20s, Sesame Street, you name it. Her commercial peak was still in front of her, and while I can’t say that this is my favorite of her records, it does have some of my favorite songs of hers, and 1971 and She Used to Wanna Be A Ballerina is definitely where I went from knowing who Buffy Sainte-Marie was to being a fan. 

I'll also note as I do now and again that while this blog started as an offshoot of a book on 1971 that I’d started but abandoned, I mostly listen to music released now. That’s always been my policy, including in 1971. When 1972 rolled up, I was mostly listening to music from 1972, music from ‘80 in ‘80, ‘91 in ‘91, 2018 in 2018, etc., to name just a few other favorites. (Plus The Beatles, okay? LOL I still listen to The Beatles every day. No apologies.) Honestly? It took me until 2011, in my fifties, when a whole bunch of 40th anniversary editions of 1971 albums got released all at once that made me think, “Wait a minute, this was maybe THE pivotal year in classic rock history!” 

So yeah, the historian in me dug into 1971, but even though I happened to be alive and enthralled by music in that year, what I’m doing here has nothing to do with nostalgia, or any idea that that was the *best* year in music, even if for the narrow slice of music that is classic rock, yeah, it absolutely is. For soul/R&B too, and for the explosion of women artists outside the even narrower confines of pop as well. This is not subject to debate. No year like it, before or since. It's just that classic rock is a such a narrow slice, and I like my slices wide. LOL Which is also why my blog has less and less 1971 content as I go along. 

While my general policy is that my favorite year for music is THIS year, this particular year hasn’t left me as much energy as usual for listening to music. Some of it is These Trying Times™, some of it is my bipolarity and schizophrenia getting the better of me in waves, as is the way with these, uhm, things. (Keep taking those meds, kids!) I listen to music and post about the people making it as a creative act, not a passive or reflexive one, and I just haven’t felt as creative as usual.

(This is also has everything to do with why so many Asks have been piling up unanswered. I apologize if you’re one of the many kind and indulgent souls who’s gotten in touch, but I swear I’m gonna get to ‘em all!)

To get an idea of what I’m ACTUALLY passionate about right now, my “to be edited later” running list of 2020 favorites randomly added to a playlist as I encounter them, to be properly curated later, is at Spotify, cleverly entitled “2020″ -- 94% women, which is about right. LOL 

But since I do in fact listen to old stuff (by which I mean 2019 LOL), I made a list of mostly 2020 bangers from women rockers with some tasty treats from 2019 that I haven’t been able to let go of just yet, inspired by a post I saw at tumblr saying that punk music by women is just plain better (also beyond debate), called “Women Bangers: A Tumblr New Classics Jam”. I’ll be posting an essay with a YouTube playlist soon, because god forbid that I only talk briefly about anything LOL and most of these women need to be heard AND seen.

Like Buffy Sainte-Marie, whom you'll both see and hear more often on my blog soon. Thanks for the reminder! Always a pleasure to hear from you and be challenged by you. :-)

Peace, Tim 

[fatehbaz]

A long few months of increased violence, resource extraction, and subjugation at He Sapa / Paha Sapa leading up the arrests of Lakota demonstrators and the US president’s visit:

(1) Before the project was suspended in the US in 2012, the Keystone XL pipeline was going to be built near Rosebud Sioux reservation and Pine Ridge (the pipeline will mostly be constructed in eastern Montana and western South Dakota), which many Lakota were vocal about opposing. The pipeline (as of July 2020, currently already undergoing construction) will also be built on the border of the Fort Peck reservation (in Montana), where it will cross the Milk River, Missouri River, and, a few dozen more kilometers away, the Yellowstone River.

(2) In March 2019, South Dakota’s governor, Kristi Noem, abandoned the Oglala Lakota and Pine Ridge people during catastrophic local spring flooding which cut off access to schools, healthcare, and food resources.

(3) In May 2019, Oglala Lakota leadership unanimously voted to ban Governor Noem from entering Pine Ridge over her enthusiastic support of state legislation partially advised by fossil fuel company interests which would severely punish and criminalize protesting against fossil fuel pipelines. The legislation is referred to as “riot-boosting legislation,” which criminalizes the act of even supporting or “urging” protests, and which would charge demonstrators with a felony. The legislation was widely perceived to specifically target Native organizers/activists. (Following the Standing Rock confrontation on South Dakota’s border, and Houma and Black confrontations with Bay/ou B/ridge pipeline in Louisiana, these anti-protesting laws began being passed in states across the Great Plains.)

(4) In October 2019, a judge struck down South Dakota’s extreme anti-protesting legislation, after which Noem and South Dakota state institutions implied that they would to be nicer to Pine Ridge.

(5) In November 2019, the South Dakota state tribal relations secretary refused to answer whether or not the governor and state legislature would make another attempt to introduce more riot-boosting/anti-protesting legislation.

(6) In December 2019, the South Dakota Water Management Board continued to discuss issuing water access permits near Pine Ridge and Rosebud Sioux land to Keystone XL pipeline developers, despite Keystone XL having been a defunct project since 2012. Why?

(7) In January 2020, some Lakota leaders and communities pointedly refused to attend or participate in South Dakota’s formal “State of the Tribes” event hosted by Noem, and instead they held their own “Great Sioux Nation Address.” At about the same time, the South Dakota Water Management Board issued a couple more water access permits to Keystone XL. Again, why, if the pipeline project has been defunct?

(8) Surprise: Less than a week later, also in January 2020, the US presidential administration fully revived the Keystone XL pipeline, announcing construction would begin almost immediately.

(9) Another “surprise”: Also in January 2020, and again less than a week after the US announced the revival of Keystone XL, Governor Noem reintroduced the severe anti-protesting/riot-boosting state legislation which targets Native organizers/demonstrators.

(10) In February 2020, the South Dakota state legislature passed the extreme anti-protesting laws as multiple Native groups demonstrated at the capitol and across he state. Then, in March 2020, South Dakota also reclassified “property damage” or fossil fuel infrastructure vandalizing which happens during any gathering of 3 or more people as a felony “riot.”

(11) In March 2020, in the midst of pandemic and quarantines, the Keystone XL pipeline began construction at the Montana-Saskatchewan border as the nearby Fort Belknap Indian Community declared a state of emergency, partially in response to the influx of pipeline workers moving into the area.

(12) In April 2020, Keystone XL begins staffing workers camps in Montana in South Dakota. Fort Belknap Indian Community and the Rosebud Sioux learn in court, after viewing TC Energy/TransCanada maps, that the corporation was fully aware that portions of Keystone XL will actually be built on Rosebud Sioux-administered land. 

(13) In May 2020, Governor Noem threatened legal action against Cheyenne River and Pine Ridge reservations over roadway checkpoints established on tribal/reservation land, designed to protect Native communities from covid during the expected seasonal increase in out-of-state tourism to the Black Hills, Six Grandfathers, etc. Noem sent a letter to the US federl DOJ and the president’s office, asking the US president to intervene in subjugating the tribes to South Dakota’s will.

(14) The first portion of the new Keystone XL project located within US borders (a short stretch of the pipeline at the Montana-Saskatchewan border) completed construction in May 2020, as TC Energy began stocking a pipeline worker camp next to Cheyenne River reservation in South Dakota

(15) Also in May 2020, worldwide stock prices of uranium surged in response when the US president’s office released a report, about one year in the making, stating their intent to greatly expand US uranium processing, and the Department of Energy provided a major press release announcing the establishment of a “Uranium Reserve” to reopen uranium mining within US borders. Both uranium mining and processing within the US had slowed almost to a total halt in recent years, but the president promised tens of millions of dollars of investment in the US’s 2021 budget, and the DoE announced: “the next 5-7 years will be a whirlwind of nuclear innovation.” (Historically, much US uranium mining and processing -- and subsequent mass poisoning -- happened on Navajo, Hopi, and Ute land.) In response, a Canadian mining company reaffirmed plans to establish a significant uranium mine on Lakota territory in the Black Hills. The 10,600-acre Dewey-Burdock uranium mine would use 8,500 gallons of groundwater per minute, and seeks to extract 10 million pounds of ore.

Then, in July 2020, for “Independence Day,” the US president hosted the “Mount Rushmore” rally thing in the Black Hills at Six Grandfathers.

-------

Pine Ridge was the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre in late December 1890, the event, in imperial history books, marking the so-called “end of the Indian Wars.”

A little over one year since Lakota leadership banned South Dakota’s governor from Pine Ridge, they announced that the US president also be banned from Six Grandfathers.

[violethowler]

The Greater Your Shadow Becomes

A recurring pattern in the Kingdom Hearts series is how often it misleads and misdirects us. We are told that Nobodies do not have hearts only to learn several games later that this was a lie. Our knowledge of Xehanort’s backstory has changed from one game to the next. The series itself even acknowledges its dishonesty, with the Master of Masters telling Young Xehanort that “the truth is what you see with your eyes, not what you hear[1],” while explaining that anything he says about his motivation and identity should not be trusted. 

So despite Kingdom Hearts III, Back Cover, and Union X appearing to position the Master of Masters as the next main antagonist, I remain suspicious that the role the series seems to be setting him up for will ultimately be filled by another. A big part of this has to do with the patterns I have noticed among stories that follow the Heroine’s Journey. 

In a Heroine’s Journey where there is a direct antagonist whose actions must be overcome in order to resolve the story’s conflict, that antagonist has commonly been presented as a narrative foil to either the protagonist or their Animus. In storytelling, a Foil is one character who is contrasted with another in order to highlight the other’s traits[2]. Most stories will emphasize the protagonist’s noble qualities by contrasting them with a character with similar personality traits or a similar backstory but who lacks the qualities that make the protagonist heroic. More often than not, these literary foils function as Shadow figures to the protagonist, and in many cases embody the negative elements of the story’s main themes.

For example, Gaston is put on a pedestal by the people around him as a paragon of what their society considers desirable. He’s handsome, skilled, and charismatic. Yet he constantly disrespects Belle’s agency and intelligence, not caring whether she’s willing to marry him or not. This positions him as a foil to the Beast, who is rude, monstrous, and has to learn how to perform basic tasks like eating with silverware. Despite his gruff exterior, he respects Belle’s intelligence and agency, holding her to the terms of their deal while also growing to prioritize her happiness above his own desires. 

Something that the overarching antagonists of every Heroine’s Journey I know of all have in common is that the audience is made aware of their existence very early on in the story. Their motivations may change over the course of the story, and when we learn about their goals can vary, but we generally learn of their existence before the end of the first act. 

We meet Gaston in the opening musical number of Beauty and the Beast. 

Dr. Facilier from The Princess and the Frog also makes his first appearance in the opening musical number of his film. 

President Snow gets at least a mention in the background in the first book of the Hunger Games trilogy even if Katniss doesn’t meet him face to face until the second one. 

High Priestess Haggar is introduced in the first (technically second) episode of Voltron: Legendary Defender Season 1. 

Meanwhile, the Master of Masters was only introduced near the end of Act II in the overarching narrative of Kingdom Hearts. Likewise, his goals are still unclear, in contrast to other Heroine’s Journey antagonists whose objectives are given to the audience at some point during the second act. So unless he turns out to be a familiar face under the hood, I find it unlikely that the Master of Masters will be the main antagonist of the next act. He’ll certainly play an antagonistic role, and definitely a major one, but everything I know about story structure is telling me that the “Big Bad” of the next arc is ultimately going to be someone else. 

The repeated emphasis on prophecy, fate, and destiny in Act II of the series creates a strong undercurrent of defying fate being a major theme of the final arc of the Kingdom Hearts story. Sora’s ability to connect with others has enabled him to pull off feats that should be considered impossible up to the point of rewriting the fated defeat of the Guardians of Light at the Keyblade Graveyard in Kingdom Hearts III. So it stands to reason that the main antagonist of the final act will be a character who either tries to defy fate in a negative way, or a character who does things because fate dictates it be done. 

So the major antagonist of Act III will most likely be someone who expresses the themes of fate and whether to defy or accept it in a negative way. Someone who serves as a foil to Sora. And someone who was introduced to the audience during Act I - meaning the original game, Chain of Memories, or Kingdom Hearts II. Given the amount of focus he has received since his introduction and how important Kingdom Hearts III revealed him to be in the lore of the series, there’s really only one person who qualifies: 

[Image Description: Luxu stares at the camera after taking off his hood in front of the Foretellers, revealing the face of Xigbar. End Description.]

As someone noted after the release of KH3, there are many similarities between Luxu and Sora when you sit down and think about it[3]:

Back Cover portrays Luxu as a young teen curious about the world, just like Sora. 

Much like how wanting to be with his friends is shown to be one of Sora’s major motivations, Luxu’s Secret Reports in Kingdom Hearts III portray him as wanting nothing more than to be with the people he cares about[4].

Both of them take up these cosmically significant roles with no idea of what lies ahead for them - all the pain, separation, and loss. But they cannot stop or rest and go home until they finish their task because people are counting on them. 

Where the two diverge is in their circumstances and how they reacted:

While Sora stumbled onto the mantle of a Keyblade wielder by accident and chose the responsibilities that came with his mission on his own, Luxu was given his by the Master as part of a greater purpose, and he carried out that role at his mentor’s instruction. 

Both of them hide their pain and weariness under a playful façade. 

Sora has spent his journey in the company of his friends and has relied on their support. Luxu has always been alone, relying only on himself. 

Sora holds onto his connections with others even at significant cost to himself, while Luxu casts aside his bonds and puts his mission above all else.

In addition to his narrative connections to Sora, there is also his connection to Riku as well. 

The scene where he reveals his face to the audience for the first time in Kingdom Hearts II begins with Sora initially mistaking him for Riku. 

In Kingdom Hearts III, he’s paired with Dark Riku at the Skein of Severance, a combination that stands out in contrast to the obvious narrative meanings behind the choices of the other boss groupings in the Keyblade Graveyard. 

Series producer Shinji Hasmimoto has said that Sora and Riku are the core of the story[5], so it would make sense, then, if the primary antagonist of the final act is someone with already established narrative connections to both characters. 

Tetsuya Nomura had the end of the Dark Seeker Saga outlined since Kingdom Hearts II was finishing development[6]. This indicates that everything done with Xigbar across the entire series was planned with the Luxu reveal in mind. The fact that he chose to give Xigbar such a significant part and planned it that far in advance signals that our dear Number II has a major role in the overall narrative of the series. Between the implications of the reveal setting him up as a foil for Sora and the patterns exhibited by major antagonists of other Heroine’s Journeys, I’m confident that role will likely be that of the overall villain of Act III. 

There is always the possibility that I could be wrong and that the Master of Masters will be the primary antagonist of the story’s final act. His influence of others and his writing of the Book of Prophecies appear to set him up as the author of our characters’ fates, which satisfied the narrative pattern of the antagonist reflecting the negative side of one of the story’s themes. 

However, as I said, he was introduced much later in the narrative than is common for the overarching antagonist of a Heroine's Journey. I also have my doubts that it will be that obvious, as Kingdom Hearts has pulled that kind of bait and switch before. The first game initially sets up Maleficent as the main antagonist, only for Ansem to step out of the shadows and take the stage as the Big Bad for the remainder of the game after her defeat. Given how many parallels to the first game are found throughout Kingdom Hearts III, Xigbar being unmasked as Luxu and the information that came with it in the Secret Reports have the makings of an excellent parallel to that switch on a series-wide scale.

Sources:

[1] Kingdom Hearts III Re: Mind; Square Enix; 2020. 

[2] Foil (fiction) - Wikipedia.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foil_(fiction)

[3] Galaxy Brain Take: Luxu and Sora Parallels; February 12, 2019. https://strangefellows.tumblr.com/post/182774246545/galaxy-brain-kh3-take-luxu-and-sora-parallels

[4] Kingdom Hearts III; Square Enix; 2019. (Secret Report #13: Observations, Excerpt 3)

[5] “How Kingdom Hearts III Will Grow Up With Its Players.” September 24, 2013 https://www.ign.com/articles/2013/09/25/how-kingdom-hearts-iii-will-grow-up-with-its-players.

[6] “Kingdom Hearts III Ultimania interview with Tetsuya Nomura”; March 12, 2019 https://www.khinsider.com/news/Kingdom-Hearts-3-Ultimania-Main-Nomura-Interview-Translated-14763

[poetunias]

It's February 2017. The world...well, it isn't great, but at the very least world-wide pandemics are confined to the history books. We live in a blissful state of ignorance, but mostly everyone is excited for Valentine's Day, when renowned musical duo (and iconic couple) Jana&Jon release their second studio album, Storybook.

As part of the lead-up to release, Jana's blogging every day, starting on the 1st - fourteen blog posts on fourteen days for fourteen new songs.

Relive yesteryear! Build your excitement! Storybook is coming.

day 1: ice cream and daydreams

This project started when I was going through old diary entries in preparation for the interview circuit. It’s hardly been a year since we started working on the album, but reading through my own words felt like reading a whole other story. The album’s theme - as you might expect from its title - is a story itself. But really, there are three stories to this album: the one we told, the one you hear, and the one we’re still writing. That last one is what I hope to share with you over the next two weeks - the story of our lives. The story behind the story.

I think you will discover that I am both very blunt and very opinionated. Our manager (my sister) was initially hesitant to approve this idea because she was convinced it would only turn people off purchasing the album. But as much as I dislike cliche, I do think that honesty is the best policy. Giving you a look at how we write these songs will hopefully give you better insight into their meaning. Even better, they might inspire you to write your own.

Because Jon and I were - and, honestly, still are - the kinds of people who scrabble the internet for interviews with our favorite artists. We’ve always been desperate to know how music came to be. People say you have to separate art from the artist, but I don’t think you can. Music is a very human thing. 

We did most of this research snuggled in a tiny booth at an ice cream parlor in LA. It was a family-run place, a bit grimy at the edges, with tiled floor and neon signs and swirling tubs of ice cream. It reminded us of home, a small town called Candlewood in Illinois. There was something both grounding and exciting about sitting in this homey, retro diner and looking out at the great buildings and busy people. We started writing the lyrics to the very first song we ever released there, in a corner booth we still sometimes visit for nostalgia. Something about that place or that view or that ice cream, maybe, made it seem very possible, with a lot of hard work, to “make it big.”

We were ultimately very fortunate. I don’t want to demean the incredible things that have happened to us. I can’t claim that we’re not happy. But the funny thing was that while we were gallivanting across the country and touring and living our dreams, our daydreams darkened. Instead of hopeful, they were frightening. It seemed like the only way forward was down or that every choice was only an opportunity for a terrible mistake. We explored the idea in our EP, daymeres, the success of which only worsened our fears. There is nothing more simultaneously fulfilling and frightening as praise. People told us that we were great, to which we alternately thought “we are!” and “are we?”

It is very easy, when writing a story, to wrap everything up in a nice bow and present it to people with a smile on your face. It’s like a performance: people applaud and you bow and the curtains close and everyone is happy. Jon and I were adamant to avoid this sort of thing, because we’ve got hardly anything figured out and neither does anybody else. And so, as we revisit the idea in this new album’s opening track, we renew our fears and lay them out for you to see. Yet at risk of jinxing our hopes and dreams, I think we are in the headspace to reapproach the topic with a more optimistic perspective - or at least a less pessimistic one. This first song is about fear, but also about dreaming again, rediscovering the wonder of what we do and the excitement of nervousness and the joy in adrenaline.

see all the posts here!

[clansayeed]

WIP Wednesday ft. Bound by Destiny II, part 2 ― Chapter 7

WORD COUNT: 1,160 RATING: Mature (this series is rated MATURE for graphic violence and adult content) FEAT: Nadya Al Jamil (MC), Jax Matsuo, Serafine Dupont CONTENT WARNINGS: language, spoilers for book 5

NOTE: Because I feel so bad about having to put book 5 on hiatus again, here’s a treat for WIP Wednesday! It’s not much, but any more would have been too many spoilers and I wanted to keep the suspense.

So enjoy this little snippet from the middle of Chapter 7 in the mean time, and once again I wanted to thank everyone who has been so supportive during this hiatus!

Bound by Destiny II, part 2 Chapter 7 releases February 10th!        *Bound by Destiny II and the rest of the Oblivion Bound series is an ongoing reimagining project of the Bloodbound series and spin-off Nightbound. Check out the first 4 books in the Oblivion Bound series, linked below!

⥼ ABOUT OBLIVION BOUND ⥽ | ⥼ FIC MASTERLIST ⥽

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“I still can’t believe you just called the guy up.”

Jax has barely paid any of it a second glance; not the journey or the destination. He’s stayed in pretty much the same position the entire drive; arms never uncrossing from his chest and, to literally no one’s surprise, with his sword never leaving his lap.

“How would you rather I have gone about arranging this little parley then, hm?”

The two vampires stare one another down in silence. Suddenly the cabin feels a lot more cramped and heated than it did just a moment ago. Nadya tugs at the collar of her shirt in discomfort.

“I’m not saying I had a plan, but if I’d had time to make one it wouldn’t be walking through his front door.”

But the younger’s irritation only seems to amuse Serafine, who purses her lips into a thin line to keep from smirking at him too obviously.

“Ah, oui. I suspect you would have gone looking for a secret entrance of some kind… perhaps a sewage tunnel by which to secret yourself in and out undetected?”

Jax just shrugs. “Can’t say I wouldn’t.”

“I can.”

Two words and just like that all the mirth is sapped from the air around them. Nothing fills the void left behind; it stays hollow and empty with foreboding.

“If such a passage did exist, which I can assure you it does not, would the Order not have used it long ago in much the same way?” She raises a single eyebrow at Jax, continuing before he has a chance to answer her.

“While your modern methods are indeed a fresh eye on an old war, Jax, they seem to blind you to the full scope of the kind of life we have lived here for all these centuries. Safety is but a fleeting dream to us. No shadow goes undisturbed for signs of the enemy. Every shelter — from a boarded-up chapel on the wayside to a sprawling manor house such as this — has been deemed safe only after proceeding with the utmost caution.

“Even someone as brazen as Vlad would not dare risk his own life by doing anything else.”

Nadya swears she can hear Jax’s teeth grind in his set jaw. That may be the gravel under the tires though.

The limo starts to slow down as they pass through a break in the hedges to reveal a wide arcing roundabout that stops just shy of the castle’s imposing front doors.

“So what you’re saying is if this goes to shit tonight there’s really no escape plan, huh?” Jax finally asks, and with a much softer voice than either Serafine or Nadya would have expected.

It makes the vampiress throw him a sympathetic look. One he pointedly ignores, but when has that ever stopped her before?

“Have you such little faith in my charming disposition?”

It’s a meager attempt to lighten the somber mood at best, but it’s enough to at least ease his suddenly white-knuckled grip on the sheath of his katana.

“More like a lack of faith in your judgment.”

“Inspired by?”

“Whatever the hell you see in Raines.”

It’s as though the driver has been taking his sweet time waiting for a break in their tension to finally get there. Which can’t possibly be the case; since the partition has been up from the moment they pulled away from the hotel and the ones they left behind… can it?

He cuts the engine abruptly. Something about the reigning silence makes Nadya’s heart start to inch its way up into her throat. Jax, sitting closest to her and no doubt hearing the spike in her pulse, reaches out and squeezes her shoulder.

“You okay there?”

She gives a noncommittal shrug, glad when he doesn’t drop his hand. “Situationally or existentially?” The joke, unfortunately, doesn’t quite land.

“At least this one is above ground.” He tries to reassure her. But apparently neither of them are allowed the luxury.

“The parts you can see…” Serafine says; her last words before the door opens to signal their arrival.

The night air is cold and makes Nadya’s eyes water as she steps out between her companions. She would have rather had Kamilah or Adrian at her side but that just wasn’t possible.

Serafine had made a point that couldn’t be denied. Between Kamilah’s assumed death and Gaius’ known ability to hold a grudge longer than most modern civilizations had been around, those two were pretty much screwed if anyone just so happened to recognize them. With Antony and Isseya off the radar since Kamilah’s return and none of them having any hint or clue as to whether or not Gaius had started extending his reach overseas yet, they were better off housebound (metaphorically speaking) for the time being.

As it is they’re risking enough bringing Jax along, but apparently the fact he hadn’t made “much of an impression” on Gaius, to put it in Kamilah’s own words, was to their benefit. They were playing safe over sorry with Lily and her newly-acquired quirks too.

It was easy to write off the fact that Serafine hadn’t even allowed Cadence to volunteer before shooting him down as being, well, Serafine and Cadence being Serafine and Cadence. But there’s still a lot they don’t know about whatever had happened to their friends when the group split up — whatever it was though was enough to ease that tension in ways nobody would have expected.

“The intention is to meet with Vlad as quickly as possible, and ideally without arousing suspicion from him or any who might be in his entourage.” Serafine had explained. “Seeing as Cynbel of the Trinity has been famously dead for over a century now, seeing him suddenly reappear in the midst of Gaius’ ascension might as well be the definition of suspicious.”

The argument was fair and valid and lucky for them to have that kind of forethought, honestly. But when Nadya thinks back to the vague air of their talk back at Ahmanet in London and pairs it almost absentmindedly with the way Serafine and Kamilah exchanged a long and almost nervous glance at one another when Cadence’s back is turned…

Let’s just say at this point she’s just waiting around for the other shoe to drop. Or the other-other shoe. Like the kind of shoe an octopus might wear or something.

All of that and only Nadya is left; always the odd one out. But the Bloodkeeper can’t not do this, so what choice does she have?

They just have to hope Kamilah was right when she assumed Gaius would want to do everything in his power not to let Nadya’s name and face spread too far or wide. That he wouldn’t dare run the risk of someone else getting to her before he could.

Neither option appeals, for the record. But at least she’s not the only one risking her neck.