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May. 28th, 2025 06:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thedarlingoneI appear to be alive. The Rogue Squadron discord (Star Wars rebel pilots fandom, approximately) has been really hopping lately, as much as a fandom that's never gone over a dozen active members in my memory can hop; I've written and published several fics, so many that I'm not sure I've even crossposted them all to here. (I may have, but I'm too tired to check.) Somebody asked about "necroposting" on discussions from a few hours ago -- we're in favor, approximately half the chatter right now is from old LJ-era fans, one of whom recently found where everyone else had gone to (via me, I'm smug) -- and someone else pointed out that the whole fandom is basically necroposting, as the vast majority of our Rebel pilot canon was published 1996–1999 and the final piece of what this group usually works off of is from 2012.
Being the extrovert I am, I've also drawn enough energy and enthusiasm from the chatter to do most of the necessary line edits on the first 136k of a monster fic Leia and I have been trying to finish up. It's a fusion between the relevant tie-in novels from 1996–1999 and the recent (by my standards) Star Wars sequel trilogy, leaning heavily towards the novels and mainly carving the new movies for slow-roasted juicy bits, but centering on one of the new starring characters, Poe Dameron, the pilot played by Oscar Isaac.
It was originally just going to be a fairly slim AU where this character gets captured and brainwashed by the movies' Empire 2.0 group, the "First Order", then rescued and helped through recovery by a couple of characters from the novels (well, technically they're *from* the original trilogy, but when your blorbo had ten seconds of screentime in the backseat of a snowspeeder and then second billing in four very good novels and third billing in a run of variable-quality comics, "from" gets dubious).
Unfortunately, I can't leave a structural inconsistency alone and Leia likes plot, so we've wound up doing an entire alternate backstory about the founding of the new movies' Resistance, and we're now facing the run-up to a complete AU retelling of the climax of the first sequel movie as well. Which has currently stalled out on "I haven't actually rewatched that movie since the one after it came out, and I don't remember how the climax went quite well enough to incorporate all our added Resistance characters in a sensible manner". (We've incorporated Poe's father, who only exists in the new-canon comics I haven't read, for one, and he's not a pilot so the logistics of getting him into position to do anything helpful are delicate.)
(Since I haven't read most of new canon and don't intend to, and Leia reports that most of the parental figures there have the fairly standard problem in any sequel of being either dead, bad parents for drama reasons, or both, we're pretty much making up Poe's father's characterization out of roughly whole cloth, as well as drastically retconning the backstory of Vader 2.0, who is -- spoilers -- the son of Han and Leia, obsessed with his grandfather's legacy, which is a fine villain backstory on its own (we're keeping that part) without needing neglectful parents thrown in along with it.
(If neglectful parents made you a dark lord of the Sith, Leia and I are both way overdue on our Force powers. *Judge Judy gif*)
...where was I? Right. We're also picking up some renewed enthusiasm for the rest of the WIPs we dropped when the fandom died out the last time, but who knows how far we'll get in any of those since we are trying to finish a couple of the current ones first.
I've also been working sporadically on more of that Close Readings meta-analysis piece I think I did crosspost to here semi-recently, but because the author (GNU) had binge-read everything else that was published at the time before writing the books I'm analyzing, they're full of references I keep missing. So I'm genuinely pondering whether to go and read all of the old EU (I actually prefer the current brand name, "Legends") in publication order and make extensive notes. If I do, I'll likely livechat them on the discord because we have a book club channel, then archive somewhat modified versions of the notes here so I can reference them later.
(I happen to have zipfiles containing epubs of all the Star Wars books that were published before the Disney takeover, sent to me by a friend years ago. I kept wanting to be able to search them easily during conversations in the discord, so I recently unzipped them all and found that the entire pile only comes to 0.3GB, so now they're on my phone. So sourcing them to read would not be the problem. I think we forget just how big a gigabyte is sometimes: I learned very young that one letter is one byte in a .txt file. I assume epubs have some extra bytes for the cover art and whatnot, but at a straight conversion to letters, 0.3GB is roughly 322 million letters. At a standard typing WPM conversion estimate, this comes out around 50 million words.)
(Am I daunted by the prospect of reading 50 million words? Not particularly. I mean, I do assume the actual number is rather less, and also that I'm going to start skipping things once I hit the prequels era, which conveniently was right after the main rebel pilot era, by publication order.)
(If you are the sort of person who likes to have 0.3GB of "what the fuck is JT on about now" locally stored, well, I made a Gdrive folder for that. Zipfiles and also unzipped versions so you can browse.)
Being the extrovert I am, I've also drawn enough energy and enthusiasm from the chatter to do most of the necessary line edits on the first 136k of a monster fic Leia and I have been trying to finish up. It's a fusion between the relevant tie-in novels from 1996–1999 and the recent (by my standards) Star Wars sequel trilogy, leaning heavily towards the novels and mainly carving the new movies for slow-roasted juicy bits, but centering on one of the new starring characters, Poe Dameron, the pilot played by Oscar Isaac.
It was originally just going to be a fairly slim AU where this character gets captured and brainwashed by the movies' Empire 2.0 group, the "First Order", then rescued and helped through recovery by a couple of characters from the novels (well, technically they're *from* the original trilogy, but when your blorbo had ten seconds of screentime in the backseat of a snowspeeder and then second billing in four very good novels and third billing in a run of variable-quality comics, "from" gets dubious).
Unfortunately, I can't leave a structural inconsistency alone and Leia likes plot, so we've wound up doing an entire alternate backstory about the founding of the new movies' Resistance, and we're now facing the run-up to a complete AU retelling of the climax of the first sequel movie as well. Which has currently stalled out on "I haven't actually rewatched that movie since the one after it came out, and I don't remember how the climax went quite well enough to incorporate all our added Resistance characters in a sensible manner". (We've incorporated Poe's father, who only exists in the new-canon comics I haven't read, for one, and he's not a pilot so the logistics of getting him into position to do anything helpful are delicate.)
(Since I haven't read most of new canon and don't intend to, and Leia reports that most of the parental figures there have the fairly standard problem in any sequel of being either dead, bad parents for drama reasons, or both, we're pretty much making up Poe's father's characterization out of roughly whole cloth, as well as drastically retconning the backstory of Vader 2.0, who is -- spoilers -- the son of Han and Leia, obsessed with his grandfather's legacy, which is a fine villain backstory on its own (we're keeping that part) without needing neglectful parents thrown in along with it.
(If neglectful parents made you a dark lord of the Sith, Leia and I are both way overdue on our Force powers. *Judge Judy gif*)
...where was I? Right. We're also picking up some renewed enthusiasm for the rest of the WIPs we dropped when the fandom died out the last time, but who knows how far we'll get in any of those since we are trying to finish a couple of the current ones first.
I've also been working sporadically on more of that Close Readings meta-analysis piece I think I did crosspost to here semi-recently, but because the author (GNU) had binge-read everything else that was published at the time before writing the books I'm analyzing, they're full of references I keep missing. So I'm genuinely pondering whether to go and read all of the old EU (I actually prefer the current brand name, "Legends") in publication order and make extensive notes. If I do, I'll likely livechat them on the discord because we have a book club channel, then archive somewhat modified versions of the notes here so I can reference them later.
(I happen to have zipfiles containing epubs of all the Star Wars books that were published before the Disney takeover, sent to me by a friend years ago. I kept wanting to be able to search them easily during conversations in the discord, so I recently unzipped them all and found that the entire pile only comes to 0.3GB, so now they're on my phone. So sourcing them to read would not be the problem. I think we forget just how big a gigabyte is sometimes: I learned very young that one letter is one byte in a .txt file. I assume epubs have some extra bytes for the cover art and whatnot, but at a straight conversion to letters, 0.3GB is roughly 322 million letters. At a standard typing WPM conversion estimate, this comes out around 50 million words.)
(Am I daunted by the prospect of reading 50 million words? Not particularly. I mean, I do assume the actual number is rather less, and also that I'm going to start skipping things once I hit the prequels era, which conveniently was right after the main rebel pilot era, by publication order.)
(If you are the sort of person who likes to have 0.3GB of "what the fuck is JT on about now" locally stored, well, I made a Gdrive folder for that. Zipfiles and also unzipped versions so you can browse.)
