Matt’s post<\/a> about how he hates the Star Wars Expanded Universe.\u00c2\u00a0 It maybe needs some fleshing out, but it’s practically ready to be published.<\/p>\nIn retrospect, I’m quite glad that I didn’t press the button.<\/p>\n
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.\u00c2\u00a0 Why? Because of the moments like the Wedge one I mentioned above.\u00c2\u00a0 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<\/em>, 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.\u00c2\u00a0 Chewbacca’s death at the hands of a freaking moon<\/em>.\u00c2\u00a0 The entirety of Rogue Squadron resigning their commissions to pursue a private vendetta.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 Kind of like comics.<\/p>\nIt also flirts with breaking the 4th wall in the most entertaining ways, from the Imperial head of state vowing that the Empire will always<\/em> strike back to in-character discussions that seem to secretly castigate forum trolls\u00c2\u00a0 (it’s no shock that a majority of the EU authors are also active posters on TheForce.net).\u00c2\u00a0 In that sense, the metacommentary and the string of callbacks and payoffs create an appealing and comfortable sense of momentism – writing toward iconography.\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\nI’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.\u00c2\u00a0 In a very real sense, it is my mythology more than any Greek or Roman myth is.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m not obsessed with it, but I know<\/em> it.\u00c2\u00a0 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<\/em>.<\/p>\nIf you like Star Wars, there’s a good deal of EU stuff that you’ll like.\u00c2\u00a0 While there is a canon, it’s not vital to read the whole thing.\u00c2\u00a0 Just read the stuff that’s good – good not on a ‘licensed fiction’ level, but on a ‘that was actually pretty good’ level.\u00c2\u00a0 At least, I think they’re good.\u00c2\u00a0 Books like:<\/p>\n
The Thrawn Trilogy by Timothy Zahn
\nRogue Squadron by Michael Stackpole
\nShatterpoint by Matt Stover
\nDark Rendezvous by Sean Williams
\nI, Jedi by Michael Stackpole
\nVector Prime by RA Salvatore
\nTraitor by Matt Stover
\nThe Unifying Force by James Luceno
\nThe Legacy of the Force series by Aaron Allston, Troy Denning and Karen Traviss<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In 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.\u00c2\u00a0 It maybe needs some fleshing out, but it’s practically […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,69],"tags":[414,164,45],"class_list":["post-1948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-fandom","tag-books","tag-expanded-universe","tag-star-wars"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1948\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}