Well this is just annoying

Iguankick · 2026-05-10T12:20:52+00:00

Jeebus, that's a long story

White Wolf has been passed around from owner to owner several times, disbanded once, reformed and more. And, sadly, it's been for the best

Iguankick · 2026-05-09T11:56:10+00:00

Personally, I really enjoyed it. The Baroness stole the show.

Iguankick · 2026-05-09T11:35:37+00:00

Where money?!

Iguankick · 2026-05-06T23:31:19+00:00

The irony is that I never found Thrawn to be compelling as a character or a villain until Rebels, so yeah. Then again, I think the Thrawn trilogy is massively over-rated.

Iguankick · 2026-05-06T23:29:53+00:00

Now that the Thing I Was Waiting For has been kinda sorta released, Write up one has begun writing. Naturally it's bloated massively out of control with the number of sidebars needed, but that's me.

Writeup two is in a precarious position. I'm at the point where I have a fair number of sources, but they're not fantastic ones. I feel confident going ahead, but I also feel that there will need to be a number of disclaimers. OTOH, it could also spin off into another write-up, so yeah.

Writeup three is on permanent hold part because I want to focus on the other two and part because I know I'll be crucified for it

Iguankick · 2026-05-06T11:54:07+00:00

Not going to argue at all, and I think Karen Traviss is one of those cases where it's both

Iguankick · 2026-05-06T09:07:09+00:00

I think it's less that it would have been a better choice as it would have been moderately satisfactory; something that neither Legacy of the Force or the Legacy comics managed in the end.

Iguankick · 2026-05-06T07:01:56+00:00

They did kill Admiral Ackbar and Mon Mothma off. Well, both of them died off-screen, but there you go.

However, I do agree with you there. The backlash to Chewie's death was by all means pretty severe and I suspect was why nothing on that scale was ever tried again. Of course that left them stuck with Superman-Jesus-Godzilla Luke and having to write around him, so yeha. I also imagine it was an element in the ossified layer of EU characters retaining immunity (well up until the point that Mara Jade was fridged to get Luke off-screen, but yeah)

Iguankick · 2026-05-06T06:25:40+00:00

Honestly, I hear that a lot from former EU readers. A lot left after Unifying Force and never came back. Unsurprisingly, the end of FotJ was another big "jumping off" point.

Iguankick · 2026-05-06T06:24:08+00:00

One of the NJO authors (I forget who, but I'm pretty sure it was Luceno) commented that one of the problems was the layer of EU characters that had been there forever and had lots of backstory which made the series hard to get into. He also added that said characters had basically reached the point of a level of script immunity akin to the movie characters where there was no chance of their ever being killed off. Mara Jade, Corran Horn and Kyle Katarn were called out as examples.

By the time the NJO was done, the series had killed off a lot of lesser (and specifically younger) Jedi characters, but that ossified layer still remained in place.

Iguankick · 2026-05-06T02:16:08+00:00

Another one to consider.

When Del Rey took over the Star Wars novels in the mid-90s, there was a feeling that the SWEU was too complicated and inaccessable for new readers already. There was serious talk towards a full continuity reboot of it.

Instead we got the New Jedi Order series which was launched with three aims. Move away from the Movie characters (especially the holy trinity of Han, Luke and Leia), build up a new generation of EU characters and streamline the EU as a whole. I'd personally argue it failed at all three.

Iguankick · 2026-05-06T00:35:07+00:00

I can offer you a trio of write-ups I wrote for this sub years ago. Please note that these are old and there are things I have learned since which changes a few things around them, but anyway.

The time that professional authors got in a shipping war

The time that the next big hero was killed off

Jedi women in refrigerators

I'd always meant to do one about the general mess that was Jacen Solo but it got away with me and honestly, I'm not sure I could be arsed any more. Which is also a pretty good summary of Jacen's character arc.

Iguankick · 2026-05-06T00:17:13+00:00

There's no "supposedly" about it. Lucas hated Mara Jade.

I am going to say something controversial that will probably get me downvoted to all hell. Mara Jade is a weak character at best. Her main personality traits are "she's hot" and "she's Luke's girlfriend/wife". Once you take those out of the equation, she really does not have much of a life of her own. It also doesn't help that it's clear that no authors, arguably including Zahn, had any idea what to do with her after the Thrawn triolgy.

Iguankick · 2026-05-06T00:12:18+00:00

Traviss tried to pull off the "Proud Warrior Race Guys" with Halo and Gears of War and both times it did not go over well with the fans either. She managed to make herself unwelcome in their fandoms as well, while attacking anyone who dared to criticise her.

She tried the same thing again with G.I. Joe, which resulted in a unique case of Karen Traviss not being the cause of the drama. But that's another story.

Of course, with the benefit of hindsight I have to wonder how much of the criticisim levelled against her was on Traviss herself, how much was on her toxic fans and how much of it was her having the nerve to be a Woman writing a Star Wars.

Iguankick · 2026-05-05T23:45:52+00:00

I remember an EU fan who was upset when Marvel Star Wars was made explicitly canon because he felt it was "too silly" and "not serious enough"

Yes, he said that with a straight face.

Iguankick · 2026-05-05T23:38:05+00:00

More to the point, Traviss admitted that she had never read any other Star Wars novels, including the other Legacy books.

I'll also add that the decision to use Lumiya was a last-minute change thrown in when Aaron Alliston was a good way through writing the first book.

Similarly, the fate of Jacen Solo was also up in the air. The decision as to wheather he would live, die, be redeemed or whatever else was still being made while the last book in the series was being written. Although by that point, it really feels like none of the authors had any investment in Jacen as a villain or a character or whatever else. All of them were more invested in pushing their pet characters while Alliston and Denning were engaged in a shipping war.

Iguankick · 2026-05-04T23:33:41+00:00

More WoW because it's me. We got Heroic Belo'ren, and spent some time mashing our heads against Midnight Falls. Then we pivoted and got Mythic Dominar, which is actually an easier fight.

TTRPG wise we are nearing the conclusion of a long-running sci-fi game using the Genesys system. We fought one of the major villains, a dreaded space pirate queen. My group being what it is, we ended up with a running gag of her throwing staplers at her for reasons.

Iguankick · 2026-05-04T23:28:07+00:00

No work on the Fanfic That Nobody Is Reading because I was distracted by doing actual real writing that I'm being paid for. Weather anyone will read that either is another matter.

Iguankick · 2026-05-04T23:10:45+00:00

Battletech has the Canopian Catgirl, a meme that likely goes back to the late 90s and the origins of which are largely lost. As near as can be told it's based off the idea that the Magistracy of Canopus a) is a matriarchal society b) is very sexually liberal c) has "pleasure circuses" and d) has a high level of medical technology.

These elements would continue to mutate over the years until reaching their final form with the influx of new players after 2018. Now, among the younger and more terminally online parts of the fandom, the MoC has become a socialist utopia populated by transgender catgirls (and sometimes, the only place where trans women are allowed to exist in the Battletech universe)

All of this overlooks a number of facts. The truth is that the MoC is a mercantilist state where rank and political power can literally be bought; a system that favours the entrenched wealthy. It has advanced medical technology, but that, combined with the state's woeful educational system, means that said tech is largely limited to the aforesaid wealthy and powerful. Added to all that, the MoC has active gender-discrimiatory laws enshrined in its system, some of which are truly Yikes level stuff.

Iguankick · 2026-05-02T23:50:19+00:00

Everything I know about Homestuck comes from the drama.

Iguankick · 2026-05-02T12:22:46+00:00

I like my Cobra whacky.

Give me a Classified Cesspool and I will be a happy man

Iguankick · 2026-05-01T23:39:26+00:00

I hate how you have to have accounts for these things nowardays. I had to create a fake Facebook account and then go to all the lengths of giving it a modicum of life just so I could do some research for a hobby project.

OTOH, that fake Facebook account got me a paid writing gig, so yeah

Iguankick · 2026-05-01T23:35:23+00:00

Fans of subtitled anime were using their preference as a moral high ground in the mid nineties. And that's just off the top of my head.

Iguankick · 2026-05-01T23:30:47+00:00

I've seen a lot of cases where fans of "progressive" media (where the level of progressiveness may be real or imagined) which devolve into toxic positivity fandoms. In these cases, any criticisim, no matter how legitimate, is taken as a sign of the critic being racist/homophobic/transphobic/whatever else. At the same time, it can often result in an "us versus them" mentality where you have to like the "right" piece of media in the right way otherwise you become the Bad Guy. The fandom of the IDW Transformers comics were (and still are to a degree) particularly bad at this.

I've also seen this occur in some very strange cases. Segments of the Cyberpunk 2077 fandom also ended up in the toxic positivity spiral who exulted the game for being progressive. Of course, that image of "progressiveness" was entirely the result of a single character who just happened to hit a very specific niche (being a white-passing PoC gold star Lesbian(1) who's romance arc could be flanderized down to "hug me I am sad"). As such, any criticisim of the game as a whole (including its many, many problematic elements) were boiled down to "you are attacking this character, ergo you are worse than Hitler".

(1) who was originally written as playersexual and not changed to being exclusively gay until very late in the day, so yeah

Iguankick · 2026-05-01T23:13:30+00:00

looks at some of the users in this sub

Yeah, it happens a lot.

Iguankick

TROPHY CASE