An Academic’s Defense of Fanfic

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Hi!  No, I’m not Brian.  Or Nanci.  Or Shane.

My name’s Emily, and I’m Shane’s other half, among many other things.  Among those many other things, I’m a graduate student close to finishing my Ph.D. in English at a university which has a very open department that is well known for studying popular culture. I’m also a huge nerd, which one would have to be if one is to marry Shane.  I’m also a fan of fanfiction.

Let me preface this discussion with the following: I despise Twilight for many reasons, I’ve not really been keeping up too much with the E.L. James and Fifty Shades of Gray hullabaloo, as I’ve been studying for exams lately, but I’m still plugged in enough to hear about all of the incredible flak that’s been going around and aimed at the fanfiction community, primarily by the mainstream media.  I’m not going to get into the intellectual property issues here—I’m most assuredly not a lawyer.  I don’t even play one on TV.  What I want to talk about is the flak that’s attacking the fanfiction community as a group of deviants who are solely concerned with the erotic possibilities fanfiction offers.

But like so many other things, the mainstream media once again has it all wrong.  They’re only telling one side of the fanfiction story.  It’s time to shatter some of the preconceptions about fanfiction and start dealing in facts.  So, I present to you an academic’s defense of fanfiction in layman’s terms. Continue reading →

Children of the Jedi, Part 4 and Conclusion

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There are a few things that I expect when I’m reading a published book from a major series from a major publisher.

One of those things is editing.

Another one of those things is that when I read it, I don’t feel like I need to be proofing this for my fourteen-year-old brother for a freshman English assignment. The writer submitted this, which is one problem. The second problem is that someone then approved it.

And I just want to make this clear: at this point, I am not talking about the things I talked about before—story elements that don’t make sense, characters not acting like they should, etc. I’m talking about literal technical writing ability.

My expectations were obviously too high.

Continue reading →

Trope Tuesday: Red Shirt

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It’s another edition of Trope Tuesday, the segment where we highlight a literary theme or device that makes our favorite fictional entertainment work. On the docket this week is an old standard: Red Shirts. Hit it, TV Tropes!

 The color of shirt worn by the nameless security personnel on the original Star Trek series. Their only job was to get eaten, shot, stabbed, disrupted, sped up and killed, frozen, desalinated, or turned into a cuboctahedron and crushed. Their death would give William Shatner and DeForest Kelley a corpse to emote over, and Leonard Nimoy a corpse to, well, not emote over.

A Red Shirt is the Good Counterpart of Evil Minions and Mooks — set filler for our heroes’ side. Their purpose is almost exclusively to give the writers someone to kill who isn’t a main character, although they can also serve as a Spear Carrier. They are used to show how the monster works, and demonstrate that it is indeed a deadly menace, without having to lose anyone important. Expect someone to say “He’s dead, Jim“, lament this “valued crew member’s senseless death“, and then promptly forget him.

As you can tell, the trope namer is That Other Star Franchise. Isn’t that right, Ensign Ricky?

This trope tends to be used a great deal in the Star Wars Expanded Universe to prove that the heroes are in grave mortal peril (even though the only way the Big Three will ever die is if The Maker allows it to happen). Michael Stackpole’s X-Wing novels loved this trope. See someone new on the roster that wasn’t there in the previous book? Chances are fair that character is going to suffer a Red Shirt Death.

Of course, Star Wars has also subverted the Red Shirt once or twice …

via Kevin Bolk

Paul R. Urquhart Talks ‘Essential Guide to Warfare’

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Were the endnotes from Jason Fry not enough for you? Suvudu has a lengthy piece from Essential Guide to Warfare co-author Paul R. Urquhart discussing all sorts of fun little details that went into crafting the book.

But what do you do when you’re writing a book that needs to describe the technicalities of how an Ewok defeats a Stormtrooper? You have to come up with straight-faced explanations that don’t seem completely crazy or compromise the inherent fun and lightness of the saga.

That’s the situation I found myself in when I was asked to co-write Star Wars: The Essential Guide to Warfare – a new guide to the warriors and weaponry of the Star Wars saga. Of course, I jumped at the chance, and thus, I became a sort of kilted Boba Fett sidekick to lead author Jason Fry’s baseball-bat-wielding Darth Vader.

And then I realized just what I’d gotten myself into.

How do you describe the technicalities of how an Ewok defeats a Stormtrooper?

The authors clearly had fun putting this book together and you do have to admire how they straddled the line between taking things too seriously and preserving the often amusing absurdities of the epic space opera. Occasionally the Expanded Universe feels like its too caught up in making itself edgy and dark. Essential Guide to Warfare is a lovely change-of-pace.

For more, head on over and read Paul Urquhart’s first Suvudu post.

What Scoundrels Could Mean for the EU at Large.

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I’m going to pitch an idea here that goes against my fundamental theory of Star Wars.  In my head, Star Wars is about the asymmetric struggle between two powers for control of the galaxy and good and evil and all that jazz.  Now, I may tend to come down on the side of what most people might consider ‘evil’ most of the time, but I will someday tell you why Palpatine may have been evil and how it might have been a good thing for the galaxy.  Suffice to say that evil sucks but it is efficient.

But like I said, my favorite SWEU stories are reflections of the movies and how they worked.  The original Thrawn trilogy is still my favorite EU narrative ever, and it perfectly mirrors the Original Trilogy, one relatively small group of people fighting for what they believe is right against a larger, more powerful group.  It just so happens that the small group is Thrawn’s fleet and the larger group is the Republic.

But that doesn’t mean that these kinds of stories always work, I have some serious problems with stories like Jedi Academy, where it’s still there, but it’s a rehash.  And some books that are really different from the formula I’ve enjoyed, like Allegiance or Choices of One.  So, obviously I’m willing to make some exceptions for good books.  Another one that I’m sure will win that exception is Scoundrels.  I can rest assured it’s going to be good because it’s Timothy Zahn and he’s never done anything to upset me in the EU.

But Scoundrels got me thinking about this whole idea.  It’s a particular kind of story, isn’t it?  It’s the heist story.  The most common thing it’s being compared to is Ocean’s Eleven but at the same time it’s really similar to The Italian Job or Gone in Sixty Seconds.  It’s a genre.  What does this kind of book mean for the continuing narrative of the EU?

Continue reading →

Facebook Chat with ‘Scourge’ Author Jeff Grubb This Week

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Another week, another Facebook chat with an Expanded Universe novel. This time, it’s Jeff Grubb to talk about his latest release: Scourge. 

We’re very pleased to announce that we will be hosting a chat with STAR WARS: SCOURGE author Jeff Grubb on our page this Thursday, April 19, at 4:00 EST. SCOURGE (on sale next Tuesday) is Jeff’s first STAR WARS novel and he’ll be answering all your questions about Hutts, Jedi, the galactic underworld, and what it’s like writing a galaxy far, far away for the first time. Please stop by and welcome Jeff to SWBooks

The chat will take place this Thursday on Star Wars Books’ official Facebook page. Once again, remember that this isn’t the place to ask about post-Fate of the Jedi plans or when Karen Traviss will come back to the EU (she won’t).

Via Star Wars Books

Revised ‘Star Wars: Ultimate Visual Guide’ Coming Soon

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DK Publishing announced today that Ryder Windham’s Ultimate Visual Guide will be updated and expanded.

Among the new additions to the book is a foreword by Ashley Eckstein, voice of The Clone Wars’ Ahsoka Tano and the mind behind Her Universe.

For more information, visit the official Ultimate Visual Guide page.

Third Batch of ‘Essential Guide to Warfare’ Endnotes Hits

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Over the last week, EG to Warfare author Jason Fry has been releasing notes from the book’s development. The trend continues this week as he posts a third batch of end notes.

Whenever an author is working on a comprehensive guide that has to seamlessly fuse together numerous eras and writings from other countless authors and publishers, things tend to go sideways as far as canon continuity goes. One area where the canon often contradicted itself was the tricky subject of just what constitutes a capitol ship in the Galaxy Far, Far Away.

All the systems agreed that capital ships began with corvettes (100m-200m), after which came frigates (200m-400m) and then cruisers. Above cruiser, things were fluid in terms of which names to use and where to divide the classes.

My first stab at the Anaxes War College System divided cruisers into three subclasses:light (400m-600m), medium (600m-900m) and heavy (900m-1,600m), followed by battlecruisers and dreadnoughts (4,000m and longer). In addition, I proposed a shorthand system of three generic classes – gunships, cruisers and battleships – that I imagined would be used by officers in the heat of battle. The generic classifcations were good cover for a host of contradictions from the movies and books (lots of things are called “battleships” in lots of sources), made the all-over-the-map use of “cruiser” slightly more sensible, and meant I could stop writing things like “big capital ships” in Warfare.

As a self-professed fleet junkie, I was thrilled to see Fry put together such a clear and concise classification system. Sure, this might trump some obscure canon in already-written books, but authors finally have a reference to go to moving forward.

For more tidbits from the third batch of notes, hop on over to Jason Fry’s Tumblr.

Two More Guests Confirmed for Star Wars Weekends

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Last week the initial guest list for Disney’s Star Wars Weekends hit. As of last Friday, you can add two more names to the lineup.

Star Wars Weekends takes place from May 18th to June 10th at Disney’s Hollywood Studios theme park in Orlando, Florida. As someone living on the other side of the country, let me just tell those of you in closer proximity that I’m insanely jealous of you all.

Trouble On The Horizon for ‘The Old Republic’ Publisher?

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A disappointing 2011 at video game publisher Electronic Arts may be leading the company to lay off anywhere from 500-1000 employees. The rough year was headlined by declining subscriber numbers to their flagship Star Wars: The Old Republic massively-multiplayer online game, the departure of their CFO, and the expensive acquisition of PopCap games. To cap it all off, gamers angry with the ending of Mass Effect 3 flooded Consumerist’s March Madness style tournament to name EA the Worst Company in America.

Even for a company the size of Electronic Arts, those kinds of layoff numbers would be a rather eye-opening five to eleven percent of their workforce. A few years ago it was Activision that couldn’t seem to escape bad press and bad news. These days, EA seems to be the company in the industry that can’t escape the negative publicity.

Electronic Arts has somewhat denied that there are layoffs upcoming: “There are no lay-offs as such, we always have projects growing and morphing. At any given time there are new people coming in and others leaving. EA is growing and hiring and building teams to support the growing demand for digital games and services.”

Not exactly the most confidence-inspiring statement for those working at the publisher. News outlets covering the industry expect something definitive to happen within the next week or so.

Via CNET