Another Tuesday, another plunge into TV Tropes. This week we’re looking at a trope that’s particularly relevent to the Expanded Universe: The Expansion Pack Past.

Sometimes, characters just have over-complicated origins. They may start off reasonable, but slowly and surely, different writers swoop in and reveal more and more of their past via Flash Back until it’s a confusing muddle of nonsense and clutter.

This tends to happen to characters with a Mysterious Past. The writers explain a bit, but not all of it, so they can milk the Mysterious Past some more. Unfortunately, they then repeat this trick so often that there’s practically no room left for even more mysterious-pastness. It’s unclear that the character ever had time to have a mysterious past with all the revelations we’ve already seen; and it’s ironic that, for all their supposed mystery, these characters tend to have more backstory than any of the other characters.

In extreme cases, when the bits of the backstory simply cannot be chained together, we get a Multiple-Choice Past.

To some degree, this is a risk of the Expanded Universe, particularly early on with some legacy characters. Take a look at Boba Fett and the Mandalorian culture in particular. At one point he was just a mysterious bounty hunter that (somehow) managed to get out of the belly of a gigantic wormy monster thing. The Mandalorians were just a race or group of proud warrior folks. Or maybe just mercenaries?

That was all well and good early on, but the trouble comes in when multiple creative entities start pulling out the expansion packs to give these characters and cultures backstories. You have some authors going in one direction and then you have show writers going in another direction. It’s not impossible to link these different expansions together, but it does create quite a bit of a continuity headache. Sometimes you wonder if things would have been better off if they had been left mysterious.

Of course, this is the franchise that gave backstory to this guy …

It’s Tuesday, which means you’ve survived the first day of the work week but still have another four days to get through. It also means that it’s time for our weekly soujourn into TVTropes.org. On the docket this time around: Uniqueness Decay.

In many series, something or someone is first introduced as special – new, awe-inspiring, mysterious, utterly unique, unparalleled, or some combination of those things. Sometimes, either later in the series or in related works in shared universes, that specialness seems to fade without much explanation or get outright retconned away. The unique example becomes just one of many, the mystery somehow gets thoroughly documented, the new arrival turns out to have a long history in the area, the unparalleled turns out to be a footnote, and the awe becomes…ehn.

This is a form of Continuity Drift, perhaps sometimes due to They Just Didn’t Care or careless research on Long Runners. It can be justified if enough time passes and the once unique aspect is spread due to analysis/teaching/reverse engineering.

Remember when super weapons were unique? When there was just one maniacal overlord menacing the Galaxy with a fully armed and operational battlestation capable of turning an entire planet into an asteroid field? It meant something to have a weapon of mass destruction capable of inflicting total xenocide in a matter of seconds.

Then the Expanded Universe happened and every Durron, Daala, and Durga had one. They weren’t even elegant! Some were just superlasers with engines strapped on the back. But really, someone ought to regulate these things. How can you inspire terror and fear when another big, honking super-weapon is being built between a couple black holes?

It used to mean something to have a Death Star, you know.

Prepare for the ship war.

It’s Tuesday morning and I’ve already published four posts and I’m getting tired of the WordPress editor. It’s also the time of week where we dive into TV Tropes to take a look at an amusing literary theme or device that makes our favorite pop culture interesting. This week, we look at a trope called Ship-to-Ship Combat:

AKA Shipping Wars. Nothing to do with naval warfare (or space warfare for that matter). Or UPS vs. FedEx.

Many fans ship. Some of them have a distinct ship that they like over all others, while some of them support several, sometimes contradictory, pairings. Some of them like to debate a pairing while keeping in mind its status in canon, while some of them discuss it believing their pairing iscanon (or will inevitably be). Now throw in the power of the Internet to connect everybody (and everybody’s opinions) with everybody else…

Shippers tend to become emotionally invested in their pairings, and Internet shipping discussions can be quite difficult to keep peaceful. All too often, they can’t help but devolve into heated quarrels where preferences are insulted, ad hominem attacks are thrown, and comparisons to Nazis are made (though, to be sure, the latter aspect is just as capable of arising from anysubject of disagreement currently known to exist).

These Flame Wars are known as Shipping Wars: verbal arguments between people with different opinions about romantic relationships between fictional characters. There are those who bash whoever doesn’t like their ship of choice, those who bash whoever likes a certain ship, and those who do both, usually basing their attacks on how canon/Fanon the discussed ship is.

Gather ’round children and let me tell you a tale. A tale of the dark times. Before Vision of the Future. Now, I was not there to witness the events first-hand, but the records are seared into the very memory of the vast wasteland known as the Internet.

Kids, you might know that your favorite Jedi Master Luke Skywalker married a spunky ginger by the name of Mara Jade. Destiny, some would say. They were perfect for each other and certainly everyone could see that. Oh, but child, if you only knew. If you only knew.

You see, there was another woman by the name of Callista that vied for the hand of Master Skywalker. Some fans felt that Luke and Mara were destined to be together. Some felt that  Callista was the one. Others felt that Luke was a monk and shouldn’t get married at all, but those folks were largely ignored by the shippers.

Child, the Ship War of the 90s were a frightening time. Tempers flared. Ranty missives were composed. Fan fiction was written. Oh the fan fiction. All of the fan fiction. They were frightening times. But they were merely a precursor of things to come when a fifteen-year battle raged over three men that fought to court one Jaina Solo.