Star Wars, Geek Culture, and Power Converters
It’s nothing short of a crying shame when a good comic comes to an end but Kanan #12 by Greg Weisman and Andrea Broccardo is a well written finale that not only lets the book go out with not only a bang but includes a fantastic character appearance.
Spoilers after the jump. Continue reading
Variety has the the press release from Disney stating that Indiana Jones will be returning for a fifth epic adventure.
Steven Spielberg, who directed all four previous films, will helm the as-yet-untitled project with star Harrison Ford reprising his iconic role. Franchise veterans Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall will produce.
Perhaps not entirely unsurprising as there have been rumblings of a new Indy film since the Disney purchase. Get ready to see the fedora and bull whip again!
In the interest of full disclosure, former ForceCast hosts Saf and Megan are contributors here at Tosche Station by way of hosting Western Reaches, one of our network’s podcasts. Because of that, I don’t want to speculate on any motivations as to why things unfolded the way they did. I want to cover the timeline of events as they unfolded as this has caused a tremendous amount of confusion among fandom. Additionally, I want to use the readily available information to pinpoint where things went wrong.
Logging this timeline gets tricky, because in addition to announcing the end of the ForceCast, all of the shows social media touchpoints were deactivated. Still, this is important to write down and have a history of. The ForceCast was one of the most important fandom touchpoints in not just Star Wars fandom, but all of genre entertainment. As such, there’s a need to document what led to its demise.
Ed. note 3/14: There’s been (understandably, I might add) some confusion over how this post was written. This post is broken down largely into two sections, a recap of the events and a post mortem analyzing why those events happened. The first section contains posts, tweets, images, and verbiage from the actors involved. The post mortem are my thoughts.
This week on Tosche Station Radio: The network launches a new podcast, Nanci’s busy writing books, Brian’s busy reading books, THIS IS MADNESS returns, Bob Iger confirms water is wet, and Lucasfilm’s Pablo Hidalgo joins us to talk about the finer points of coffee (and The Force Awakens Visual Dictionary, a look back at sixteen years at Lucasfilm, and more).
You can find Pablo on Twitter and hear him on the all new podcast IT CAME FROM THE DEPTHS OF NETFLIX. Be sure to grab your copy of the excellent Star Wars: The Force Awakens Visual Dictionary.
Tosche Station Radio is the official podcast of Tosche-Station.net and a part of Majestic Giraffe Productions. If you like what you hear, please leave a review on the iTunes Music Store. We can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.
Nanci and Brian are the co-founders and writers of Tosche-Station.net. You can find Nanci on Twitter with the handle @Nancipants and you can find Brian with @LaneWinree.
This podcast has been brought to you in part by Her Universe and your support on Patreon!
Perhaps better than any other Star Wars film so far, the lightsaber duels in The Force Awakens tell a story and establish who the characters are in that moment. Only the duel between Luke and Vader in Return of the Jedi even comes close to telling this sort of tale via clashing blades. At first glance, the duel between first Kylo Ren and Finn and then Kylo Ren and Rey is brutal and it doesn’t get any less brutal after repeat viewings. Gone is the elegance of the Prequel Trilogy and with good reason. Kylo Ren doesn’t have the benefit of training with a Jedi Order who has perfected the weapon over millennia and Finn and Rey have never even held a lightsaber before that day. Every swing of a saber has meaning and you don’t need to have seen a single other frame of the film to get what sort of people these three characters are.
Finn has the least training with these sorts of weapons and it shows. He gets in a few good blows but it comes off as more beginner’s luck combined with a Kylo who is far from being at his best. (More on that last part later.) With any sort of sword fighting, a raw beginning can sometimes have more luck than someone who has trained, as they do not react in a way that is expected. In other words, someone who has even basic training will be more likely to attack and block in a way that utilizes more standard stances and responses that will be easier for someone else with even more training to counter. Unfortunately, it’s just not quite enough to help Finn last more than a few minutes despite his determination to help his friend.
Kylo Ren’s responding actions speak louder than any words could. He doesn’t take Finn as a serious threat. A traitor? Sure but he’s clearly familiar enough with Hux’s training program to know that there’s no way FN-2187 knows enough to be more than a nuisance and it shows. He toys with Finn especially at the start, dodging some of Finn’s more wild swings with a distinctive ease and even knocking him to the ground and turning away instead of pressing his advantage and ending it. Turning your back to an enemy is an insult. It’s not until Finn lands a blow that actually hurts him that Kylo steps up his game and decides to end the fight now. This time, he’s not content with disarming Finn and follows it up with an injury that ensures the former stormtrooper will stay down.
Making a game in 48 hours seems a massive task, yet it’s something tens of thousands of people do every year at Global Game Jam, an international game jam for developers of any type and skill level to come together and create something new.
Though game jams—gatherings of game devs to create games in short spans of time—can vary in size and the given amount of time, Global Game Jam is the world’s largest physical jam event, this year taking place in 78 countries.
This was my first year doing GGJ, and my first year doing a game jam in general (I have since done one more, where I co-created a card game!), and I was honestly hesitant about the whole thing, because what am I, but a writer? I thought there was nothing I could possibly contribute to such a short game. Turns out narrative can be pretty important to even a game made in 48 hours, who knew?
Okay, yeah. Everyone knew.
Continue reading
Welcome to Western Reaches! The latest podcast on the Tosche Station Network revives and rebrands one of our older shows, Women of Odd Enthusiasms, with new hosts Megan and Saf. Tune in for a grab bag geek discussion every two weeks covering everything from Star Wars to video games.
Note: A dedicated feed will be coming soon for Western Reaches, but for now you can also catch the show on the Tosche Station Mega Feed!
You can find Megan on Twitter with the handle @blogfullofwords and you can find Saf with @Wanderlustin.
This podcast has been brought to you in part by Her Universe and your support on Patreon!
“Shroud of Darkness” starts right in the middle of the action, with Kanan and Ezra fighting the Inquisitors. They took the Phantom to find a new base, and somehow the Seventh Sister and the Fifth Brother managed to track them. They’ve been tracking them for a while, actually, and Kanan decides it’s time to ask the Force for guidance. Thus Kanan, Ezra, and Ahsoka head off to the Jedi Temple on Lothal.
It’s no secret I don’t usually care for Force-centric episodes, which is ironic considering my favorite scenes in the Original Trilogy involve Luke’s Jedi training and confrontation with Palpatine. The “luminous beings” speech from The Empire Strikes Back is my favorite in the entire saga. At some point, I feel like The Clone Wars and Rebels went overboard with Force mysticism, to the point where it’s just too weird for me. Your mileage may vary, of course, but I prefer to interpret events like Mortis as happening in the Force, not in real life (or ignore them completely).
This is a long way of saying I probably shouldn’t have liked this episode, but I did! I liked it a lot, actually, mostly because of Kanan and Ahsoka’s plot lines. I love Kanan having to deal with the implications of training Ezra, and that he might fail in doing so. I love him facing the Temple Guard and realizing the answer is not to fight. His insight is very similar to Luke’s in Return of the Jedi (and makes me really excited to see Episode VIII and why exactly Luke decided to leave the galaxy). Kanan being a full Jedi Knight has a ton of implications and I’m really excited to see how this affects the show going forward. The revelation that the Grand Inquisitor was once a Temple Guard was a bit predictable, given what we’d heard in behind the scenes interviews, but made me wonder if that’s how the Emperor got all of the Inquisitors.
I also loved Ahsoka dealing with her suspicion that the Sith Lord they faced is actually Anakin Skywalker. Hearing Matt Lanter’s voice again was awesome, not to mention a knife to the heart. Ezra seeing Yoda was a nice touch, but I’m much more interested in Kanan and Ahsoka. Sorry, I know people love Ezra, but he’s just not my favorite. The idea that Ezra might go dark, however, intrigues me a lot. I can’t lie.
The Inquisitors track our heroes to the temple, but the Force helps them escape. Vader arrives at the temple too late to catch them, but he has some insights of his own. Insights that will most certainly spell certain doom for some of the Jedi. (It should spell doom for all of them, but that’s another blog post.)
We’re nearing the end of Season 2, and this episode made me really excited to see how things wrap up. I also can’t wait to see Ahsoka confront Vader again, because I’m masochistic like that. Overall, “Shroud of Darkness” was a great episode, with little to complain about. I just hope we get more with the other characters throughout the rest of the season as well!
Coming up on Tosche Station Radio: Brian and Nanci have been reading books, a new book club has been started, there’s a bunch of new comics coming, and the hosts talk about diversity in Episode VII and what Episode VIII can improve on.
Tosche Station Radio is the official podcast of Tosche-Station.net and a part of Majestic Giraffe Productions. If you like what you hear, please leave a review on the iTunes Music Store. We can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.
Nanci and Brian are the co-founders and writers of Tosche-Station.net. You can find Nanci on Twitter with the handle @Nancipants and you can find Brian with @LaneWinree.
This podcast has been brought to you in part by Her Universe and your support on Patreon!
Kieron Gillen and Salvador Larroca are back with the next installment in the Darth Vader as the book takes its turn as a political maneuvering story. Or rather, it’s a story with political maneuvering and a wrench called Vader in the middle. Despite his history with Shu-Torun and Queen Trios, Vader doesn’t really care about the planet and its unique political system. He’s more concerned with making sure it remains loyal to the Empire and that he gets the job done. Everyone is working around him towards their own goals with varying levels of success.