Star Wars, Geek Culture, and Power Converters
We’ve got the first entry for the Replace the Catsuit Contest! Gorram Girl checks in with a lovely piece of fanart.
Now doesn’t this look way more functional than a banthahide catsuit? Love the jacket. Really, really dig the headscarf.
Thanks for submitting this entry! And remember, the new deadline to help costumers out is August 15th. That should give you plenty of time to get something put together for the late summer convention season.
One of the most popular responses, Winter Celchu
There’s no getting around it. It’s been another slow news spell and really, things have been dry since the Internet’s Bad Star Wars-Themed Pun Day. Which is why we decided to crowdsource blog content to you. Again.
This week’s Twitter List asked you to tell us your favorite non-Force sensitive Star Wars Expanded Universe characters because we firmly believe you don’t need a connection to the Force to be a badass. To the jump!
All of those awesome new shirts and items that Ashley Eckstein and Her Universe have been previewing for the last several weeks officially went on sale at the site today. Some of these new products include …
Clockwise: Looking For Love In Alderaan Places tee, Sith racer back tank, Calavera Vader Scoop tee, and the Self-Rescuing Princess children’s tee.
To purchase one of the above or to check out the other new offerings, head on over to Her Universe.
In this week’s batch of endnotes, author Jason Fry talks stormtroopers and women among their ranks.
A Female Stormtrooper Remembers: The femtroopers you see at cons are serious fans and work as hard on their costumes as anyone else does. Check out the work of Sith Vixen: Yes, she looks amazing in femtrooper gear, but she also looks great as Maul or a Kaleesh warrior, costumes that demanded an enormous amount of work.
That said, midriff-baring stormtrooper armor always struck me as a bit unlikely in-universe — I figured the Empire had female troopers, but I was pretty sure they weren’t wearing armor that looked like that. With this in mind, “female stormtroopers” was one of the first things I wrote down when beginning to work on the outline for Warfare.
This batch of notes has a lot of great material about stormtroopers in general. For more, head on over to Jason Fry’s Tumblr.
You can be forgiven if you’ve written off the live-action Star Wars television series.
Rick McCallum says that the project is still on the table and scripts have been written. The issue remains the cost of production. There’s an incredible amount of visual effects they want to work in, more than any of the films they’ve done in the past. Sadly, I think that this series just isn’t going to happen unless Lucasfilm is willing to scale back on the effects. Fans aren’t looking for a visual masterpiece in a television series, they’re looking for regular installments of story and characters. You don’t have to squeeze blockbuster-grade visuals into a 45 minute television episode.
Perhaps the showrunners should call up Ron Moore for a consultation.
News just dropped that Palpatine himself will be attending the Star Wars convention to end all Star Wars conventions. From the official site:
Ian McDiarmid, the actor who unforgettably played the evil galactic mastermind and the ultimate villain of the Star Wars saga, will be making a rare convention appearance atStar Wars Celebration VI, appearing on-stage and signing autographs.
In 1983, McDiarmid embodied the full depth of the dark side as the Emperor in Star Wars: Episode VI Return of the Jedi, his face hidden under ghastly makeup and his eyes concealed behind sickly yellow contact lenses. When his true face was revealed as the apparently kind and helpful Senator Palpatine in Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace (1999), he projected a different kind of evil — a subtle manipulator of galactic events, a villain hidden in plain sight. As the prequels progressed, so too did Palpatine’s plans until finally, in Revenge of the Sith (2005), McDiarmid got to play evil at its fullest, and revealed the true power of Darth Sidious.
This will be McDiarmid’s first time at a US Star Wars Celebration (he made a brief appearance at the opening ceremonies of Celebration Europe), and his first time ever signing at the Celebration Autograph Hall.
McDiarmid will be joining the likes of Peter Mayhew and Carrie Fisher at Celebration VI this August.
For those of you fortunate to be in the Orlando area for Star Wars Weekends at Disneyland’s Hollywood Studios, you’ll be happy to know that schedule for the first weekend has been posted.
For those of us who aren’t lucky enough to be in the Orlando area, we’ll be able to keep tabs on what’s going on thanks to Nanci. Who is fortunate enough to attend.
I’m not jealous. Really. I’m not.
On this day ten years ago, Attack of the Clones released released to theaters. Given that I was twelve and at the mercy of my parents disdain for going to the cinema, I didn’t get to see it until about two weeks later when a friend offered to take me. In our house, I usually didn’t get to see something until it released on VHS or DVD.
My memories from the first time I saw it are somewhat vague. Something something Fetts something something look at all those lightsabers something something HOLY CRAP YODA HOLY CRAP DEATH STAR SCHEMATICS.
Meet Korra. She’s awesome.
I honestly hadn’t planned to chime in on this.
By now I imagine most of you are aware of the Great Gender Kerfluffle of 2012 that cropped up in the Star Wars fandom over the last few weeks with much being said about the need for more well-developed female characters in this franchise. Emily chimed in last week and eloquently put things into perspective. Frankly, people far more knowledgeable and better with wordy-like-thingamawhatsits than I am said what needed to be said. Still, as I was reading through things on the sidelines, I ran into one comment in the Club Jade post that got my gears turning. I can’t even remember what exactly it was or who posted it, but it set off a bit of something in my head that needed to be addressed. Well. Three things, specifically. A trio of arguments that I’ve seen recycled numerous times during the recent dustup and over the years.
While I was turning these arguments over in my head, another thought hit me. There’s a television show, a current one, that has addressed these points that were troubling me. Then it all clicked.
Star Wars has a lot to learn from The Legend of Korra.
Welcome to another edition of Trope Tuesday, where we hit up the black hole of productivity and investigate a literary theme or device that helps our favorite entertainment chug along. This week, we’re hitting on one that many Expanded Universe fans are intimately familiar with: Retroactive Continuities, or Retcons.
Reframing past events to serve a current plot need. When the inserted events work with what was previously stated, it’s a Revision; when they outright replace it, it’s a Rewrite. The ideal retcon clarifies a question alluded to without adding excessive new questions. In its most basic form, this is any plot point that was not intended from the beginning. The most preferred use is where it contradicts nothing, even though it was changed later on.
While the term comes from comic books, dating to All-Star Squadron #18 in 1983 and shortened to “retcon” by the end of the decade, the technique is much older. Often, it’s used to serve a new plot by changing its context; however, it’s also done when the creators are caught writing a story that violates continuity and isn’t very plausible.
In Marvel Comics, the person who pointed out the problem and at the same time provided a plausible explanation was awarded a Genuine Marvel Comics No-Prize
by editor Stan Lee, a tradition that was kept alive by other editors after he became publisher.
See also Ass Pull, which is something that was not properly set up before it is sprung on the audience. It is related to Deus ex Machina. Some but not all retcons are Ass Pulls, and a good retcon can actually improve the current narrative. A good way to get away with a retcon is to reveal new implications or motivations for events that have already been established.
Where do you even start in Star Wars? This is a franchise that ties itself into knots trying to explain away any minor-to-major inconsistency that crops up whenever a new book accidentally invalidates something an older book said. Or when The Clone Wars television series simply steamrolls swaths of the Expanded Universe. The latter (among other things) got author Karen Traviss to ragequit right before she was scheduled to start writing the Fate of the Jedi series.
You know retcons are important to a franchise when they hire a guy to keep tabs on all of them. Hello, Leland Chee, the Keeper of the Holocron.
Granted, all sorts of series in all sorts of mediums have needed to resort to retcons to keep things straight. The Other Star Franchise, anyone? No one, however, seems to be in the same league as Star Wars when it comes to making sure anything and everything fits into a lone canon.