A Star Wars Fan Reviews Star Trek 09
May 10I’m savagely unapologetic of my Star Wars fandom, and have been since a young age. A friend of mine has a four year old son who needs to know everything about Yoda, down to what kind of nuts and roots and berries he puts in his stewpot on Dagobah, and I self-identify with that kid pretty heavily.
I’ve never had the same passion about Star Trek. Yeah, I watched it. It was okay. I just never got passionate about it. Never understood the Big Deal. I liked space wizards with laser swords. I liked the bizarre, nonhuman-looking aliens that were just hanging around everywhere – not the staples of action set pieces or important characters, just guys hanging out. I liked the fast pace and the action and the melodrama much better than what I perceived to be the rather mundane proceedings aboard the Enterprise.
For me, Trek has always been the Elvis to Star Wars’s Beatles. Even before 1994, when Tarantino first introduced that forced dichotomy into my brain.
I loved the new Star Trek movie with complete abandon.
Friday morning, I was talking to Matt about the movie, and I realized something very important. Well, two very important things. First, all of the things I said I loved about Star Wars were on full display in this movie, and they did them all better than any of Lucas’s prequels did. Second, a lot of those things were already staples of the series – I just never noticed it because I was too busy being blase’ about the lack of midichlorians or whatever.
It’s easily the best summer tentpole film I’ve seen in about a year. In fact, the last time a movie made me go “I need to go see this again immediately,” it was probably the first Pirates of the Caribbean flick. It’s the best Star Trek movie I’ve ever watched, running neck and neck with Wrath of Khan – the only one of the movies that I’ve actively rewatched several times (as opposed to leaving it on because there’s nothing better on TV).
Just like J.J. Abrams, I went into this movie basically knowing only that Kirk and Spock are the overwhelming OTP among slashfic writers. I knew that people loved Kirk, but I never got it.  I think I get it now.
Free Comic Book Day 2009 – This Year, Theft-Free!
May 05There are several things that we’re less-than-proud of here in the lushly-decorated Alert Nerd Central Office – my multivolume Raker Qarrigat/Arkillo fanfiction, Sarah’s homemade Gambit doll, and the thing that Chris keeps on his mantle and calls Slimer, but Oh God, what is it really?
However, none of those hold a candle to the way we celebrated FCBD last year – the year when Matt broke into his local comic shop, shot five guys and stole all of the free comics. That’s the way it happened, right?
This year, we were much better behaved, and here’s an infotaining after-action report to prove it…
In Defense Of The Expanded Universe
Apr 09In the X-Wing novels, you find out that Wedge Antilles has two giant black circles painted on the nose of his X-Wing. They represent Death Stars.
I had a very caustic, very fannish rebuttal to Matt’s post about how he hates the Star Wars Expanded Universe. It maybe needs some fleshing out, but it’s practically ready to be published.
In retrospect, I’m quite glad that I didn’t press the button.
Not because I’m no longer a fan of the EU; in fact, I’m still way more involved with it than I should be; it’s the friend with benefits of licensed fiction. Why? Because of the moments like the Wedge one I mentioned above. The EU, for all of its structural problems (and there are several structural and tonal problems that date back to the era when Bantam held the rights to publish EU material – this is the age of Star Wars fiction that drives people away from it, with its overreliance on hokey superweapon plots and forced love interests for Luke), has some great moments, from running jokes about Ewoks to Darth Vader’s grandson standing imperiously on the deck of a Star Destroyer, clad head-to-toe in black and looking out into space while being hailed as the galaxy’s new big hero. Chewbacca’s death at the hands of a freaking moon. The entirety of Rogue Squadron resigning their commissions to pursue a private vendetta. From the outside, they’re cliche and silly, but if you are connected to the font that the fiction is springing from, they are also exquisitely resonant. Kind of like comics.
It also flirts with breaking the 4th wall in the most entertaining ways, from the Imperial head of state vowing that the Empire will always strike back to in-character discussions that seem to secretly castigate forum trolls (it’s no shock that a majority of the EU authors are also active posters on TheForce.net). In that sense, the metacommentary and the string of callbacks and payoffs create an appealing and comfortable sense of momentism – writing toward iconography. The Expanded Universe at its best is, in short, the most delicious comfort food you’ve ever had served in a fully-restored ’40s diner.
I’m thirty years old; I don’t know a world that has never had Star Wars in it, and I’ve loved it since probably when I was in the womb. In a very real sense, it is my mythology more than any Greek or Roman myth is. I’m not obsessed with it, but I know it. Some dark corner of my mind regards it as a real story, and knowing that there is a history and a future that lives in the spaces around the films perpetuates that feeling, even if some of the books (The Crystal Star, anyone?) are simply not very good.
If you like Star Wars, there’s a good deal of EU stuff that you’ll like. While there is a canon, it’s not vital to read the whole thing. Just read the stuff that’s good – good not on a ‘licensed fiction’ level, but on a ‘that was actually pretty good’ level. At least, I think they’re good. Books like:
The Thrawn Trilogy by Timothy Zahn
Rogue Squadron by Michael Stackpole
Shatterpoint by Matt Stover
Dark Rendezvous by Sean Williams
I, Jedi by Michael Stackpole
Vector Prime by RA Salvatore
Traitor by Matt Stover
The Unifying Force by James Luceno
The Legacy of the Force series by Aaron Allston, Troy Denning and Karen Traviss
Coming March 30…
Mar 10An event so historic, so massive, so all-encompassing that it cannot be contained on the Alert Nerd internet presence alone.
Conecdote: Canonicity
Feb 08[What’s a Conecdote? It’s an anecdote…from a con. Duh.]
So I’m at dinner in Hell’s Kitchen on Friday night with about eight other people. We’re all talking comics, and someone utters the ‘F’ word: Final Crisis. I’m suddenly the only person in the room defending the book and getting piled on by everyone, including maybe the waiter. “It was ambitious, if flawed, and it has some really amazing moments,” I protest, but nobody wants to hear it. The counterpoints stack like Tetris blocks and I am finally broken. And it is this that broke me:
“‘Darkseid always hated music’? What? Where was that established? What issue did that happen in? Because I think that Morrison just made that shit up.”
Tom Brevoort frequently talks about how it’s better for continuity to serve the story than for the story to serve continuity, and this is a prime example.
A few arguments and/or possibilities:
1. He’s Darkseid. Why would he LIKE music?
2. Pied Piper. Countdown. Just saying
3. Darkseid not actually Dick Turpin, but actually John Lithgow from Footloose. No, wait. That’s dancing. How great would it have been if Superman beat him with the power of dancing?
